Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

  “When will this time come?” Zumurrud Shah demanded. “I’m going to be busy, you know. After being stuck in that bottle for so long there are many things to be done.”

  “The time will come when it’s time,” Ghazali said, infuriatingly, and turned away to his book. “I spit upon all philosophers,” Zumurrud Shah told him, “also artists, and the rest of humanity as well,” and he whirled himself into a funnel of rage, and was gone. And then time passed, years passed, decades passed, and Ghazali was dead, and with him died the contract, or so the jinni believed. And the slits between the world silted up, and closed, and Zumurrud in Peristan which is Fairyland forgot for a time all about the world of men, all about the man who refused to make a wish; and centuries passed, and a new millennium began, and the seals which separated the worlds began to break, and then boom! Here he was again in the world of these feeble beings, and suddenly there was a voice in his head commanding his presence, the voice of a dead man, the voice of dust, of less than dust, the voice of the void where the dust of the dead man had been, a void that was somehow animated, somehow possessed of the sensibility of the dead man, a void that was ordering him to present himself to be told its first great wish. And he, having no option, being bound by the contract, even though he intended to argue that the contract did not apply posthumously, he remembered Ghazali’s unusual language, any time, neath any moon, any time these one two three, and he knew that as he had forgotten to insert a death clause (a detail he should make it a point to remember if at any point in the future he needed to grant the three-wishes contract again!), the obligation still lay upon him like a shroud, and he had to do whatever the void desired.

  He remembered and summoned up in a rush all his unassuaged rage, the wrath of a Grand Ifrit who has spent half an eternity bottled up in blue, and conceived the desire to be avenged against the entire species from which his captor came. He would rid himself of this puny obligation to a dead man, and then it would be time for vengeance. This, he swore.

  Regarding the rage of Zumurrud Shah: in the sixteenth century a group of brilliant Indian court artists in the employ of the Grand Mughal, Akbar the Great, had belittled and offended him. Four hundred and forty years ago, give or take, he appeared several times in the Hamzanama sequence of paintings depicting the adventures of the hero Hamza. Here Zumurrud is—here in this picture!—with his cronies, Ra’im Blood-Drinker and Shining Ruby, plotting their next evil move. Whisper whisper cackle hiss. An orange and white canopy above them, and behind them a mountain made of puffy boulders like stone clouds. Men with long-horned bullocks kneel, swearing fealty, or maybe just swearing, because Zumurrud Shah in person is a sight scary enough to make good men use bad language. He is a monster, is a terror, is a giant, ten times bigger than anyone else and twenty times nastier. Light skin, long black beard, ear-to-ear grin. A mouthful of man-eater teeth, mordant as Goya’s Saturn. And yet the painting slights him. Why? Because it depicts him as a mortal. A giant, certainly, but no jinni. Blood and flesh, not smokeless fire. Quite an insult to hand a Grand Ifrit.

  (And, as events would show, he was not the Grand Ifrit with a taste for human flesh.)

  In the paintings made by the brilliant artists assembled at Akbar’s jeweled court, there are several images of horrible Zumurrud Shah, but few that show him triumphant. Most often he is the defeated opponent of Hamza, the semi-mythical hero. Here he is along with his soldiers fleeing from Hamza’s army on his famous flying urns. Here, ignominiously, he has fallen into a hole dug by some gardeners to catch people who have been robbing their fruit groves, and is being badly beaten by the angry horticulturists. In their eagerness to glorify Hamza the warrior—and, through his fictional figure, the real-life emperor-hero who commissioned the pictures—the artists give Zumurrud Shah a hard time. He’s big, but a boob. Even the magic of the airborne urns is not his; they are sent to fly him to safety from Hamza’s attacks by his friend the sorcerer Zabardast. This Zabardast, which is to say “Awesome,” is and was like Zumurrud Shah one of the mightiest members of the tribe of the dark jinn; a sorcerer, yes, but one with special gifts regarding levitation. (And snakes.) And had their true nature been revealed by the Mughal court artists, they would have given Hamza a far tougher fight than he actually got.

  That was one thing. But even if the Mughal painters had not misrepresented him Zumurrud Shah would still have been the enemy of the human race because of his contempt for human character. It was as if he took the complexity of human beings as a personal affront, the maddening inconsistency of human beings, their contradictions which they made no attempt to wipe out or reconcile, their mixture of idealism and concupiscence, grandeur and pettiness, truth and lies. They were not to be taken seriously any more than a cockroach deserves serious consideration. At best they were toys; and he was as close as any of them would ever get to a wanton god, and he would, if he so chose, kill them for his sport. In other words, even if the philosopher Ghazali had not unleashed him upon the unsuspecting world, he would have unleashed himself upon it. His inclination was in accordance with his instructions. But the instructions from the dead philosopher were clear.

  “Instill fear,” Ghazali told him. “Only fear will move sinful Man towards God. Fear is a part of God, in the sense that it is that feeble creature Man’s appropriate response to the infinite power and punitive nature of the Almighty. One may say that fear is the echo of God, and wherever that echo is heard men fall to their knees and cry mercy. In some parts of the earth, God is already feared. Don’t bother about those regions. Go where Man’s pride is swollen, where Man believes himself to be godlike, lay waste his arsenals and fleshpots, his temples of technology, knowledge and wealth. Go also to those sentimental locations where it is said that God is love. Go and show them the truth.”

  “I don’t have to agree with you about God,” replied Zumurrud Shah, “about his nature or even his existence. That is not and never will be my business. In Fairyland we do not speak of religion, and our daily life there is utterly alien to life on earth, and, if I may say so, far superior. I can tell that even in death you are a censorious prude, so I will not go into details, though they are juicy. At any rate, philosophy is a subject of no interest except to bores, and theology is philosophy’s more tedious cousin. I’ll leave such soporific matters to you in your dusty grave. But as to your wish, I not only accept it as my command. It will be my pleasure to comply. With the proviso that, as you are in fact asking for a series of acts, this will redeem the entirety of my three-wishes pledge.”

  “Agreed,” the void that was Ghazali replied. If the dead could giggle with delight then the dead philosopher would have chortled with glee. The jinni perceived this. (Jinn can be perceptive at times.) “Why so mirthful?” he inquired. “Unleashing chaos upon the unsuspecting world is not, or is it, a joke.”

  Ghazali was thinking of Ibn Rushd. “My adversary in thought,” he told Zumurrud Shah, “is a poor fool who is convinced that with the passage of time human beings will turn from faith to reason, in spite of all the inadequacies of the rational mind. I, obviously, am of a different mind. I have triumphed over him many times, yet our argument continues. And it is a fine thing in a battle of wits to be in possession of a secret weapon to fire, an ace in the hole to play, a trump card to use at an opportune time. In this particular case, mighty Zumurrud, you are that trump. I relish the fool’s imminent discomfiture and his further, inevitable defeat.”

  “Philosophers are children,” the jinni said. “And I’ve never liked children myself.”

  He departed in scorn. But the time would come when he returned to Ghazali, to listen to what the dead man’s dust had to say. The time would come when he was less contemptuous of religion, and of God.

  A note regarding Zabardast. He too had once been captured by a mortal sorceress, which was even more humiliating to him than imprisonment by a male wizard would have been. It is said by those who study such matters that this may have been the same witch spoken of in the Matter of Brita
in, the vile Morgana le Fay, who lay with her brother between incestuous sheets and seized, also, the wizard Merlin, sealing him in a crystal cave. It’s a story we have heard from certain storytellers. We cannot say if it’s true. Nor is it recorded how he escaped. However, what is known is that Zabardast carried in his heart a fury towards the human race at least the equal of Zumurrud’s. But Zumurrud’s was a hot anger. Zabardast’s ire was cold as polar ice.

  In those days, the days of the strangenesses and the War of the Worlds that followed them, the president of the United States was an unusually intelligent man, eloquent, thoughtful, subtle, measured in word and deed, a good dancer (though not as good as his wife), slow to anger, quick to smile, a religious man who also thought of himself as a man of reasoned action, handsome (if a little jug-eared), at ease in his own body like a reborn Sinatra (though reluctant to croon), and color-blind. He was practical, pragmatic, and had his feet firmly planted on the ground. Consequently he was utterly incapable of responding appropriately to the challenge flung down by Zumurrud the Great, which was surreal, whimsical and monstrous. As has already been mentioned, Zumurrud did not attack alone, but came in force, accompanied by Zabardast the Sorcerer, Shining Ruby the Possessor of Souls, and Ra’im the Blood-Drinker, he of the sharply serrated tongue.

  Ra’im was prominently involved in the first assaults. He was a nocturnal metamorph, in his normal daytime state a small, nondescript, dark-complexioned, fat-assed jinni, but able, when he could be persuaded to rouse himself from his habitual arrack-induced torpor, to mutate under cover of darkness into enormous, long-fanged beasts of land, sea and air, female as well as male, all thirsting for human or animal blood. It is probable that this Jekyll-and-Hyde jinni, one of the first of such spirits to show up in the historical record, and the cause of much terror wherever he appeared, was the single entity responsible for all the vampire stories in the world, the legend of the Gaki of Japan, a blood-drinking corpse that could take the shape of living men and women, and animals too, the Aswang of the Philippines with its long tubular tongue, who often took female form and preferred to suck the blood of children, the Irish Dearg-Due, the German Alp, the Polish Upier with its tongue of barbs, a vile creature who sleeps in a blood-bath, and, of course, the Transylvanian vampire Vlad Dracul, which is to say “dragon,” about whom most readers and filmgoers are already somewhat (albeit mostly inaccurately) informed. At the beginning of the War of the Worlds, Ra’im took to the water, and one lightless afternoon he arose as a giant sea-monster from the winter harbor and swallowed the Staten Island Ferry. A tide of horror spread across the city and beyond and the president went on TV to calm the nation’s fears. That night even this most articulate of chief executives looked ashen and at a loss; his familiar nostrums, we will not sleep until, those responsible will be, you harm the United States of America at your peril, make no mistake, my fellow Americans, this crime will be avenged, sounded hollow and impotent. The president had no weapons that could deal with this attacker. He had become a president of empty words. As many of them are, as they all have been, for so very, very long. But we had expected better of him.

  As for Shining Ruby, the second of Zumurrud’s three mighty cohorts, he was, in his own opinion, the greatest of the whispering jinn (although it must be said that the sorcerer Zabardast considered himself to be far superior; the egotism and competitiveness of the great jinn cannot be overemphasized). Shining Ruby’s forte was to make trouble by first whispering against a man’s heart and then entering his body, subduing his will, and forcing him into acts either dreadful or humiliating or revelatory or all of those at once. At first, when Daniel Aroni, the über-boss of the world’s most powerful nongovernmental financial institution, began to talk like a crazy man, we did not guess at the presence of Shining Ruby inside him, did not grasp that he was quite literally behaving like a man possessed. It was only when Ruby released “Mac” Aroni’s body after four days of possession, leaving him a poor husk of a man sprawled like a broken puppet on the finely carpeted floor of the great lobby in the sky of his corporate headquarters, that we understood. The jinni, a long skinny fellow so slender that he disappeared when he turned sideways, pranced and capered around the fallen financial titan. “All the money in the world,” cried the jinni, “will not be too much. All the gold, men, in your sacks will not save you from my clutch.” Traders on the six immense trading floors of the world’s most powerful nongovernmental financial organization wept copiously and shivered with fear as the image of their unconscious leader shimmered like an intimation of doom on hundreds of giant high-definition flat-screen monitors. Tasked with helping Zumurrud Shah to grant the wishes of the dead philosopher, Shining Ruby had done an excellent job.

  Ever since the death of his friend Seth Oldville at the hands of the still-missing Teresa Saca Cuartos, Daniel “Mac” Aroni had entered a dark place. Life was hard and dealt men many blows and a strong man could take those eventualities on the chin and move on. He thought of himself as a strong man, a man with two fists, who could punch his weight, and there were seven thousand five hundred people in a glass tower who needed him to be that guy, the enforcer, the creator and defender of the world as his employees wanted it to be. He made the picture of the world and the world lived in it. That was his job. Along the way there were bumps in the road. The infidelity of women on the hustle, the promiscuous nature of powerful men exposed in the public prints, revelations of corrupt business dealings by close associates, cancer, car crashes at speed, skiing deaths on off-piste black slopes, coronaries, suicides, the aggression of rivals and underlings on the make, the excessive manipulation of public servants for personal gain. He shrugged at these things. They went with the territory. If somebody had to take the fall, somebody took the fall. Even taking the fall could be a scam. Kim Novak in Vertigo, she took the fall twice, the second time for real. This crap happened. Happened all the time.

  He was aware that the way things really were was far different than most people believed. The world a wilder, more feral, more abnormal environment than ordinary civilians were able to accept. Ordinary civilians lived in a state of innocence, veiling their eyes against the truth. The world unveiled would scare them, destroy their moral certainties, lead to losses of nerve or retreats into religion or drink. The world not just as it was but as he had made it. He lived in that picture of the world and could handle it, knew the levers and engines of it, the strings and keys, the buttons to push and the ones to avoid pushing. The real world which he created and controlled. If it was a rough ride, that was okay. He was a rough rider among and above seven and a half thousand of the same. Many, maybe most of the rough riders in his employ liked to live large, they went for the Casa Dragones tequila, the high-end girls, the ostentation. He did not live in that way but he stayed in shape, on the judo mat he was as feared as he was in the boardroom, and he could bench-press more weight than guys half his age, the guys who didn’t have windows yet, who worked in the interior space of the tower like members of an A-list typing pool, the guys in the belly of his beast. Youth was not the exclusive preserve of the young anymore. “Mac” Aroni did golf, tennis, the old guy things, but then, just to throw in a curve ball, he had made himself a beach boy, a surfing master, he had gone in search of the Yodas of the big wave and learned their ways and he got his kicks, now, gleaming the cube. He had no need to beat his chest like Weissmuller’s Tarzan. He could handle whatever came his way. He was the big ape. He was the king of the apes.

  But what happened to Seth Oldville was different. That eventuality had crossed a line. Lightning from a woman’s fingertips. That did not accord with the rules of his universe; and if somebody else was redrawing the picture of how things were, then he needed to have a word with that person, to reason with that person, to make that person understand that it was not for others to alter the laws of possibility. This was at first offensive to him, an angering thing, and then as the phenomena multiplied he sank into a thunderous silence, his neck withdrawing into his coll
ar so that his bull head sat right on his shoulders like a toad’s. In the tower overlooking the river, men looked out at the Statue of Liberty and the empty harbor, the harbor all boats had fled since the eating of the ferryboat and its passengers, and listening to the unnatural silence of the water they understood that it echoed Aroni’s equally unaccustomed muteness. Something bad was bubbling to the surface, and then Aroni began to speak, and the bad thing was out in the open, and it was worse than the seven and a half thousand could have imagined.

  This was what Daniel “Mac” Aroni said and did under the power of the dark jinn. On the first day of his possession he informed the Wall Street Journal that he and his corporation were involved in a global conspiracy, and that their partners were the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve. On the second day, with the media furore boiling up around him, he was on Bloomberg giving details of the first prong of the conspirators’ strategy, which was “the destruction of America’s domestic economy through the introduction of derivative debt which is sixteen times greater than the world’s GDP. This I can say we already accomplished,” he said proudly, “proved by the fact that America now has more workers on welfare, 101 million, as opposed to actual full-time workers—97 million.” On day three, with demands for his resignation or summary dismissal being made on every side, he appeared on the liberally inclined MSNBC network to speak of “setting the chessboard in such a fashion that World War III becomes a one hundred percent sure thing.” Gasps were audible in the studio as he added, “This we have near completion. The U.S. and Israel we got cranking up to go to war with China and Russia for two reasons, apparent and actual, numero uno, the apparent cause, that’s Syria and Iran, and numero two, the actual, being the preservation of the value of the petrodollar.” On day four, he addressed his own staff, looking unshaven and wild-haired and very much like a man who hadn’t slept in a bed for several nights, and with his eyes lolling lazily from side to side asked for their support, whispering madly into his handheld microphone, “Soon we will initiate a false-flag event which will culminate in the abolition of the presidency, the imposition of martial law and the elimination of all opposition to the coming apocalypse. What you get in the endgame is a strongman world government accompanied by a one-world economic system. This is the outcome we all want, am I correct? I say, do I have this right?”