Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

  Through the howling of the wind and the pounding of the rain Mr. Geronimo heard a woman’s voice shrieking abuse at the jinni entourage, How would you like it if your world was devastated the way you have ruined ours?—that was the question this voice asked over and over again, punctuated by much bad language. Mr. Geronimo realized that the screaming woman was Teresa Saca, whom Dunia had summoned to fight at their side. She seemed more than a little deranged to Geronimo Manezes. It was also unclear if her wrath was aimed only at the Grand Ifrit and his followers. It was an anger that seemed to spread like a plague, infecting everything it touched, and maybe, Mr. Geronimo thought, a part of this anger was directed at Dunia as well. It was a hate-filled shriek that if aimed at any human group of people, tarring them all with the same brush, would have been called—yes—racially prejudiced. Teresa Saca, it seemed to him, listening to her shriek into the raging elements, matching their fury with her own, crackling with electricity around the edges of her body, was bigoted against all the descended creatures of the upper world, and therefore, of course, against the jinnia within herself as well. Her hatred of the other was also a hatred of the self. She was a dangerous ally.

  Meanwhile, like a cornerman at a title bout, Mr. Geronimo was becoming worried about Dunia’s approach to the fight. She seemed content to react rather than take the initiative, which felt like a mistake to him. He tried to tell her, wordlessly, but she was listening to nobody now, all her effort bent on the battle. Zumurrud was changing form, unleashing the worst of all the monsters within him: the creature with iron teeth and a thousand heads with a thousand tongues, once known as the Blatant Beast. With the thousand tongues he could not only bark like a dog, snarl like a tiger, growl like a bear, yowl like a dragon, and seek to bite his adversary with many three-pronged serpent stings; he could also hurl literally hundreds of hexes, spells and enchantments at Dunia simultaneously, paralyzing spells, weakening spells, killing spells. And there were many tongues to spare for abuse, abuse in many languages, the languages of men and jinn, which revealed in Zumurrud a level of moral degradation that shocked all who heard it.

  And as he watched Zumurrud in the form of the Blatant Beast assault Dunia in many hundreds of different ways, and saw her whirl and spin and deflect and defend like a great Valkyrie, or a goddess of Olympus or Kailash, and as he wondered how long even she could withstand so ferocious an assault, and as he listened to Teresa Saca’s screams, How would you feel if it happened to you, Mr. Geronimo experienced a sort of inner vision or epiphany. The doors of perception opened and he saw that what was evil and monstrous about the jinn was a mirror of the monstrous and evil part of human beings, that human nature too contained the same irrationality, wanton, willful, malevolent, and cruel, and that the battle against the jinn was a portrait of the battle within the human heart, which meant that the jinn were somehow abstractions as well as realities, and that their descent to the lower world served to show that world what had to be eradicated within itself, which was unreason itself, unreason which was the name of the dark jinn within people, and as he understood this, he also understood Teresa Saca’s self-hatred, and knew, as she knew, that the jinn self within them both needed to be expunged, the irrational in man as well as jinn had to be defeated, so that an age of reason could begin.

  We listened to what he told us. We are still listening, after a thousand years. This is Mr. Geronimo the Gardener, after all. We all know what he understood that night, the Thousandth Night, when Dunia, the Lightning Queen Aasmaan Peri, which is to say Skyfairy, fought against Zumurrud the Great.

  She was tiring. Zumurrud could see that. This was the moment he had waited for, as a matador waits to see the acceptance of defeat in the eyes of the bull. This was the moment when he abandoned the persona of the Beast, resumed his own form, produced the blue bottle from a fold in his red shirt, removed the cork, and cried out with all his force:

  Jinnia foolish, jinnia blind,

  Now I hold you in my mind!

  In this place confinèd be,

  Ever more belong to me.

  This was said in the Secret Language of the jinn, in which the most potent of spells are written, and which demands an immense expenditure of power on the part of the speaker. The humans watching the scene did not understand the words but they saw their effect, saw Dunia stagger and fall, saw her being dragged feet first along the grass towards the little bottle which gaped at her like the devil’s mouth.

  What did he say? the Lady Philosopher screamed at Omar the Ayyar, but Omar was watching wide-eyed as Dunia was pulled towards the bottle. Tell me, Alexandra cried, and so Omar absently did, repeating the words of power in a whisper and offering a rough translation. Then Zumurrud in triumph spoke again.

  Jinnia fierce and jinnia grand,

  Now I hold you in my hand.

  In this place confinèd be,

  Ever more belong to me.

  What? Alexandra demanded, and Omar told her. It’s over, he said. She has lost.

  Then Dunia screamed. It was the scream of power Mr. Geronimo had heard when her father died. It knocked humans and jinn flat on their backs and it broke Zumurrud’s hold over the spell. He staggered backwards clutching at his ears and the little blue bottle spiraled through the air and landed in Dunia’s right hand, and the cork in her left. Now she drew herself to her feet and reversed the spell.

  Mighty, proud and strong Ifrit,

  Come and sit thou at my feet.

  In this place confinèd be,

  Ever more belong to me.

  What did she say? cried Alexandra, and Omar told her. Now it was Zumurrud being pulled towards the bottle, headfirst, his beard stretched out before him as if an invisible hand had grabbed it and was pulling it, and its owner, into the prison of the blue bottle. And Dunia cried out once again, with her last strength:

  Feared and powerful Ifrit,

  Today your mistress you must meet.

  In this place confinèd be,

  Ever more belong to me.

  She knew at once, everyone knew, that she had overdone it. Her strength failed her. She fell into a deep swoon. The spell broke. Zumurrud began to rise in all his gigantic puissance. And the bottle,

  to everyone’s surprise,

  chose to spiral almost lazily through the air,

  and came to rest in the outstretched right hand of Alexandra Bliss Fariña the Lady Philosopher,

  and the cork in her left hand,

  and to the consternation of all, and the joy of her allies, she repeated, word perfect, the first entrapment spell cast by the Lightning Queen, and Zumurrud crashed again to the ground, exhausted as he had exhausted Dunia, and was drawn relentlessly forward, until his whole huge spent body had squeezed into the tiny blue bottle, whereupon Alexandra pushed the cork into the neck, and he was caught, and it was over, and his flunkeys fled. They would be found afterwards and dealt with, but let that pass.

  Mr. Geronimo and Omar the Ayyar and Jimmy Kapoor crowded around Alexandra and asked, How? How on earth? How in the name of? How by all that’s? How, how, how?

  I was always quick with languages, she said deliriously, giggling lightly, as if she were flirting with young bucks at a summer garden party. Ask anyone at Harvard, she tittered. I picked them up in no time, like shiny pebbles on a beach.

  Then she fainted away entirely, and Mr. Geronimo caught her, and Jimmy Kapoor snatched up the bottle before it hit the ground.

  And that might have been an end to it all, except that Geronimo Manezes noticed that one of them was missing, and Where’s Teresa Saca? he cried out, and then they saw that she had taken the last of the flying urns, Zumurrud’s own urn, and was riding it up into the sky, into the wormhole that joined the upper world to the lower, and if they had been able to look upon her face they would have seen that in her eyes there rose an awful tide of blood.

  If your world was devastated the way you have ruined ours, Mr. Geronimo remembered.

  She has gone to attack Fairyland, he said aloud, an
d to destroy it if she can.

  There are many kinds of casualty in battle, the invisible ones, the injuries to the mind, rivaling in number the fatalities and the physical wounds. As we look back at these events we remember Teresa Saca Cuartos as one of the heroes of that war, the electricity in her fingers responsible for many successes against the jinn armies; but also as a tragic victim of the conflict, her mind broken not only by the calamity she saw around her but also by the violence with which she had been bidden by the Lightning Queen to respond to the disaster of war. In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. Just as we are created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate. At the end of the climactic battle of the War of the Worlds, with Zumurrud the Great in his bottle prison, held tightly in Jimmy Kapoor’s fist, and Dunia slowly emerging from unconsciousness, it was Teresa who cracked and headed for the hole in the sky.

  She must have known it was a suicide mission. What did she expect? That she would pass unchallenged into the upper world and that those perfumed gardens, those cloud-capp’d towers and gorgeous palaces, would dissolve before her wrath and leave not a rack behind? That all that was solid there would melt into air, into thin air, before her avenging fury? And then what? That she would return to earth an even greater hero for having brought about the ruin of the fairy world?

  We don’t know, and perhaps should not speculate. Let us simply remember with grief the madness of Teresa Saca, and the inevitability of her last moment. For of course she did not make it into Peristan. The giant urn was not an easy vehicle, as hard to ride as an untamed stallion, obedient only to its fallen jinn master. As Mr. Geronimo and the others watched her rocket into the air—the wind had died down, and the rain also, and a full moon brightly lit her ascent, or so the story goes—they saw that she was having trouble keeping her seat. And as she approached the stormy edges of the wormhole, the slit between the worlds, the air became more turbulent, and then even more turbulent, and she lost her grip on her enchanted steed, and those below watched in horror and she slid first this way and then that; and fell. To land like a broken wing on La Incoerenza’s sodden lawn.

  We worry, sometimes, about the idea of heroism, especially after the passage of such a long time. If the protagonists of this account had been asked who they considered to be heroes from a thousand years earlier, who would they have chosen? Charlemagne? The unknown author or authors of the Arabian Nights? The Lady Murasaki? A millennium is a long time for a reputation to survive. Writing this chronicle, (we repeat) we are keenly aware that much of it has degenerated from the status of a factual account towards the condition of legend, speculation or fiction. Yet we have persisted, because the figures in our story are among the very few to whom the idea of heroism still attaches itself, a millennium after they lived and died, even though we know that the gaps in the record are immense, that there were undoubtedly others who resisted the attack of the dark jinn as worthily as those we have named: that the names we hold in such reverence have been randomly selected by the broken record, and that maybe others unknown to us would have more richly deserved our awe had history troubled to remember them.

  Yet we have to say it: these are our heroes, for by winning the War of the Worlds they set in motion the process by which our new and, we believe, better time came into being. That was the hinge moment, when the door from the past, where lay what we used to be, swung shut once and for all, and the door to the present, leading to what we have become, opened like the stone gateway to a treasure cave, perhaps even Sesame itself.

  So we mourn Teresa Saca Cuartos, in spite of all her faults, for she had what it took when it was needed, she was as flamboyantly tough and brave as she had to be, and a breeze of fearless glamour wafts around her memory. And we celebrate Storm Fast, the baby of truth, who grew up to be the most feared and fair of judges, in whose court no falsehood could be uttered, no matter how minor. And Jimmy Kapoor—well, everyone knows his name, it’s one of the few whose popularity has survived an entire millennium, because not only did he get his Bat-Signal after all, the image of the dancing multi-limbed god projected on the sky stabbing the hearts of evildoers with fear, but long after he grew old and gray and then departed this life he was the hero of a myriad entertainments, a multi-platform hero of screen and game, of song and dance, and even of that ancient and stubbornly persistent form, hard-copy books. The failed graphic novelist became the hero of one of the longest-running series of graphic novels, and novels made of words as well, a corpus which we now number among the great classics, the mythos from which our present pleasures derive, our “Iliad,” let us say, using an antique comparison, or our “Odyssey.” Present-day visitors to the Library look wide-eyed at these relics as once their ancestors would have gawped at a Gutenberg Bible or First Folio. “Natraj Hero,” a.k.a. Jimmy Kapoor, is one of our true legends, and only one man from the time of the strangenesses is held in higher regard than he.

  The figure of Geronimo Manezes, Mr. Geronimo the Gardener, has come to mean most of all to us—the man who came unstuck from the world, then returned to it to rescue so many of his contemporaries suffering from the dual curses of the rising and the crushing, of frightening and potentially fatal detachment from, or oppressively excessive attachment to, our enigmatic earth. We are happy that he and his Lady Philosopher, Alexandra Bliss Fariña, found a happy ending in each other’s arms, watched over by the protective eye of Oliver Oldcastle; we walk with them in the grounds of La Incoerenza, sit silently with them as they hold hands in the sunset and watch the great river flow forward and back beneath a gibbous moon, bow our heads as they do when they stand on the estate’s hill by the grave of Mr. Geronimo’s lost wife, silently asking her permission for their love, silently receiving it; and we hover above the partners’ desk at which, seated on opposite sides, they wrote the book—in their own language, in spite of Alexandra’s suggestion that it might sound better in Esperanto—which has become our most admired text from antiquity, In Coherence, a plea for a world ruled by reason, tolerance, magnanimity, knowledge, and restraint.

  That is the world in which we now live, in which we have disproved the assertion made by Ghazali to Zumurrud the Great. Fear did not, finally, drive people into the arms of God. Instead, fear was overcome, and with its defeat men and women were able to set God aside, as boys and girls put down their childhood toys, or as young men and women leave their parents’ home to make new homes for themselves, elsewhere, in the sun. For hundreds of years now, this has been our good fortune, to inhabit the possibility for which Mr. Geronimo and Miss Alexandra yearned: a peaceful, civilized world, of hard work and respect for the land. A gardener’s world, in which we all must cultivate our garden, understanding that to do so is not a defeat, as it was for foolish Dr. Pangloss, but the victory of our better natures over the darkness within.

  We know—or we “know,” because we cannot be certain if the story is true—that this happy state of affairs could not have come to pass were it not for the great sacrifice of Dunia the Lightning Queen, at the very end of the story here retold. When she came to her senses after her duel with Zumurrud she knew that there were two things she must do. She took the blue bottle from Jimmy Kapoor. Such bottles have a magic of their own, she said. You can hide them, but they choose when to reappear. This time, this bottle must not appear again anywhere on earth, so I will hide it in an impossible place. And she went away for what remained of the night and when she returned she said only, It is done. Since that day a thousand years have passed and the bottle has not come to light. It may lie beneath the roots of Mount Everest or under the bed of the Mariana Trench or deep within the core of the moon. But Zumurrud the Great has troubled us no more.

  When she returned, that last morning, after concealing the blue bottle in the heart of darkness or the fire of the sun, she told her allies gathered at La Incoerenza, It is clear that the two worlds must be separated again. When one drips into the other, chaos ensues. And there is only one
way to close the slits so tightly that they will remain closed, if not forever, then for some approximation of eternity.

  A jinnia, remember, is made of fireless smoke. If she chooses to shed her female form she can move through the two worlds like smoke, pass through any door into any chamber, through any aperture into any crevice, filling the spaces she enters as thoroughly as smoke fills a room; and then, if she so chooses, she can solidify again, taking on the character of the spaces she has entered, becoming brick among bricks, or stone amongst stones, and those spaces will be spaces no more, it will be as if they never existed, or never will exist again. But the jinnia, when she is so dispersed, so scattered, so multiply mutated and transformed … even a jinnia queen … loses the strength, or, even worse than the strength, the will, the consciousness, that would enable her to gather herself once more and resume her unitary form.