L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future 34

by L. Ron Hubbard

“I was educated in England,” she said with bashful pride.

  She glanced behind me and lost her smile. I turned to my “wife,” who had a bruised cheek and black eye. Jenny cringed when I faced her.

  After a moment of open-mouth surprise followed by shame then anger, I pulled out a limp ten-dirham bill and asked the British-educated clerk, “Is this the right amount to give to a beggar woman?”

  Jenny bumped past me to the counter and clutched the sympathetic clerk’s slim brown hand. She exploded into explanation. My spotty Arabic picked up “marriage” and “not leave me here.”

  I said, “I’m a Christian. She couldn’t marry me.”

  Jenny said something, and the young woman snarled in my face. “Can you prove this? That you are a Christian?”

  I wasn’t carrying a Bible or crucifix or anything. Bringing those into a Muslim country, even one as secular as Morocco, was like bringing whiskey to an AA meeting. Instead I had an incriminating Koran tucked in my backpack.

  I told the hostile clerk, “Sorry, I left my priest outfit at home.”

  Sarcasm stoked her righteous anger. “Two tickets then.” She gave me a calculating look. “Now I must see your passport.”

  “No you don’t,” I said.

  I didn’t want to whip out my blue American passport. Most of these people considered the United States a terrorist nation. So I usually pretended to be a laid-back Canadian. Nobody hated Canadians or teddy bears.

  Two policemen in desert camouflage sauntered over to us, casually carrying lethal M16 rifles, and silently bullied me into handing over my terrorist passport.

  The spiteful clerk riffled through it, turned to the information page, frowned, and asked if this really was my passport. I tapped the picture. My hair was longer, and I looked dead, but it was definitely my corpse.

  Ms. Spiteful still had her doubts. So the soldiers herded me into a bare room with a concrete floor and single window, its iron bars rusty, its wavy glass smoky from grease. It had no curtain, so I was thankful no one had cleaned the glass when I stripped down to my red briefs. They pawed my clothes, and coins fell out of my cargo pants, dinging on the rough floor. My backpack was ransacked. I got zero points for the Koran.

  They were pleased to find the ancient brass urn, a Moroccan cultural artifact. The truth, that I had found it, sounded like a common lie. I didn’t tell them a vicious jinni lived in it.

  One of the men grinned and pantomimed chopping off my hand for stealing. In the end, though, they decided just to take it away from me. I tried to look angry, to not smile at the prospect of them dealing with the malicious cobra.

  Back in the main lobby, I told Ms. Spiteful, “Forget the ticket. I’d rather hitchhike to Tangier than ride in your vermin-infested bus.”

  She adjusted her flowery scarf over her luxuriant hair, then issued me two tickets. “I do this not for you. For her.” She pointed at my cowering “wife,” who looked as if she wanted to ask for permission to go to the toilet. Jenny’s performance merited an Emmy Award.

  “She’s not downtrodden,” I told the young woman. “You are. Educated in England and happy to be a bus station clerk here.” I waved my hand at the marble tiles behind her, brown-stained by water that had leaked from the ceiling. “May you become the third wife of a toothless old man.”

  Fear flared in her dark Muslim eyes. Could that happen?

  I knew I was being the hateful American, but I didn’t care. I was stereotyping her and her whole culture, but I didn’t care. She deserved my anger. I had walked into this bus station as a simple tourist, wanting to buy a ticket to Tangier, and been strip-searched. What right did she have to punish me? I wasn’t some stray mutt anybody could kick.

  I left the tickets on the counter, picked up my backpack, and started to walk away. Ms. Spiteful called out that I was to pay for them.

  “No,” I told her. “I never asked for two tickets.”

  One of the bored policemen nonchalantly pointed his M16 at my belly button. I spread my arms. “Go ahead, Rambo, shoot me.”

  He glanced at the clerk, his eyebrows lifted. She compressed her lips and huffed through her nose and picked up the tickets.

  Did Jenny know I no longer had the brass urn? Since we were playing roles, I ordered my “wife” to carry my backpack. To my amazement, Jenny picked it up … then let it slip off her shoulder and slam down on the tile floor. It was my turn to cringe. Had she just rearranged the guts of my iPad?

  Jenny gaped at me in fear, picked it up again, staggered three steps, and dropped it a second time. I rushed forward to grab it away from her. Cowering, she held her hands up to protect her bruised face.

  Game, set, and match to the jinni.

  Tangier is a rowdy, car-honking seaport where you expect to meet disgruntled prostitutes and old French spies. I haggled with a man wearing an eye patch for a room in a side-street hotel. Cost me a hundred sixty dirhams or sixteen dollars a night, breakfast included.

  When I woke the next morning, I was disgusted, but not overly surprised, to find the nomadic urn on the mahogany table beside my bed. It stuck to me like a bad reputation.

  I dressed and hurried to a raggedy souk where I dickered for super glue and green duct tape. Back in my room, I glued the domed lid to the urn’s mouth and wrapped the entire roll of tape around it.

  When I came out of the shower, duct tape covered my backpack like frog skin, and the urn’s lid leaned against its brass body with an insolent slant. Jenny had pulled a Houdini on me. I was relieved she hadn’t glued my pack’s zippers shut.

  I wanted to play tourist in gaudy Tangier for a few days but felt like a fugitive. Cobra woman might call in a police raid on my room or do something even worse. So I peeled the tape off my backpack, crammed my stuff into it, locked the urn inside the room, checked out of the hotel, and bought a ferry ticket for Spain. Maybe jinns couldn’t harass travelers in El Cid’s Europe.

  At the seaport, I checked my battered backpack to make sure Jenny hadn’t slipped a homemade bomb or packets of heroin inside it. I found the lidded urn in a zippered side pocket. So much for leaving it behind in a cheap hotel room.

  I checked my passport to make sure the photo was of me, not some Moroccan criminal or a monkey. I also kept it in my hand so it didn’t disappear. I could imagine myself shuttling back and forth between Spain and Morocco because neither country was willing to let me in without a passport.

  After we set sail, I stayed outside on a narrow deck to let the breeze cool away my seasickness. My folks were Texas oil people, not sailors. I had to dose myself with Dramamine to go fishing on a lake.

  I took the urn out of my backpack and considered tossing it into the heaving sea, but instead shoved it in a pocket of my canvas travel jacket.

  An hour later, I leaned against the railing and squinted at the approaching Spanish coastline a few miles away. What adventures waited for me there? I felt movement behind me. Before I could turn, someone grabbed my ankles and hoisted me over the steel railing.

  I fell at least two stories, wide-eyed and shrieking the whole way. I hit the water feet first, my legs instinctively together so I didn’t drive my testicles into my belly. Clawing the water to stop my descent into liquid darkness, I sank deep. Water burned my sinuses. Finally, I reversed direction and moved upward toward the wavering mirage of light.

  As soon as my face broke the surface, I flailed away from the ship so the propellers wouldn’t suck me into them. The ferry lumbered away, and I bobbed in its wake. I felt desperate but not panicked … not yet. Surely whatever being or force had caused me to find the urn wasn’t just going to let me drown.

  Wobbling at water level, I couldn’t see the Spanish coast, but I knew its direction because the ferry sailed toward it. My backpack lay on its deck. Could I swim to Spain before I drowned? Would some power save me?

  Water kept slapping my face … irri
tating as hell. What had gone wrong? The jinni wasn’t allowed to kill me. Had she found a loophole in the fossilized laws she followed?

  Thinking of a demon calls it to you, I discovered, when a bobbing black sea snake appeared a yard from my dripping nose.

  “You can’t kill me,” I shouted. “You can’t.” I didn’t know a snake could look so amused. “I’m just trying to free you.”

  Jenny swayed her head in rhythm with the waves as though she wanted to snake-charm me.

  “Look,” I spluttered, “as long as I don’t make a wish, you’re free to do whatever you please. Don’t you understand? Once I make a wish, you’re back in the same relentless cycle. You’re just a piston pumping to keep the machine moving. If we can’t change the ritual, we can at least delay it while I live.” I emphasized the word “live.”

  The sea snake wriggled closer, turned, and fluttered its red tail at me. It took me half a minute to realize Jenny wasn’t mocking me. She had come within my reach so I could grab her, and she could tow me to Spain. I remembered the fable of the trusting frog that agreed to ride a water snake across a river and became lunch.

  So instead, I wiggled out of my coat, saw that it floated, and balled it under my chin and chest to buoy me up. I untied my boots, fumbled my credit card and money out of them, and let the sea have my footwear. I didn’t need anchors on my feet. Then I began churning the surface toward Spain.

  Halfway to the coast, my muscles turned into useless putty, and I had to float in place with my chin on my buoyant coat. Jenny wriggled up beside me and waited for me to grab her muscular body around the middle, which I did. It was like holding a squirming cable. I wasn’t exactly waterskiing toward Spain, but my head stayed above water, and we left a wake.

  Two fishermen in orange waterproof suits found me, beached and barefoot and mumbling, too far gone to know my own name. Besides money and a credit card, I had my sopping passport and a Moroccan urn in a jacket pocket.

  They hauled me to an inn where Spanish women dropped me in a hot bath and force-fed me scalding chicken soup. Everyone seemed pleased to rescue me, as if doing so would bring them good karma.

  I figured the opposite was true, that if you saved someone you became responsible for them. It could be gut-busting work. I was “saving” a cantankerous jinni, and that was like trying to stay eight seconds on a Brahma bull. I wasn’t a burden anyone should take on lightly, especially now that I kept company with a perverse jinni.

  Speaking of which, why had she rescued me? Did she feel responsible for me? I felt surprised she hadn’t asked if I “wished” to be saved.

  Despite the fact that she had thrown me into the sea and despite my not wanting to feel beholden, I felt teary-eyed gratitude to her. It wasn’t rational. Anyway, I was now more determined than ever to withhold my wish and give her limited freedom. I would set aside my comfort and grant this genie a wish. How ironic was that?

  I supplied the wine and tapas for my goodbye fiesta and rode the 8:15 bus the morning after to Seville. Yenifer, as she called herself now, joined me in a black hoodie, jeans, and sandals that showed off her lurid red toenails. She smelled of cloves, and her slim brown hands were decorated with henna curlicues.

  Even though I had her urn, I hadn’t seen her for over a month while I recovered from a respiratory illness. She kept her bony elbow on the armrest between us so I couldn’t use it.

  “You’re not allowed to kill me,” I whispered. “You were bluffing.”

  The tip of her tongue flicked out for a microsecond. “I do not intend to be pleasant company for you, man of clay.”

  “Well, you’re a success at that.” I jerked a thumb at the sea behind us, which I had thought she might not be able to cross. “So leaving Morocco is no problem for you?”

  “You go to Seville. Why?”

  “I want to improve my Spanish. What will you do there?”

  She shrugged a shoulder sinuously. “We will see what I shall do.” She gave me a musing look. “Your girlfriend has moved to Ecuador?”

  How did she know that? “Yeah, she teaches English in Quito.” Steph had begun politely answering my emails. “She liked your lapis lazuli pendant, by the way.”

  “So you will learn Spanish to impress her.”

  “Can’t hurt, can it?”

  “I think you have an addiction for this woman.”

  “Do you like hibernating inside the urn?”

  “It is the way things must be for me.”

  “So what’s the problem with my not making a wish, with my letting you live outside your cage for a while?”

  “You do not do this for me, man of clay. You do this because to oppose the way of things amuses you.”

  Before the ferry ride, she was right … but not anymore. She had kept breath in my body. “Let’s not argue.”

  In Seville, Yenifer slept in her impossible prison every night, walked me to Spanish school every morning, and met me when I came out of class. She expected something to happen and wanted to be in my company when it did. Though Yenifer seemed less hostile now, I avoided walking near curbs so she couldn’t shove me in front of a bus.

  My Spanish teacher was a white-haired Andalusian with a face rough as basalt and the crusty manner to match. I was scared not to do my homework. The school, a few blocks from the cathedral, had boarded me with a local family in the Triana district, a blue-collar area famous for producing ceramic tiles, matadors, and flamenco dancers.

  One Tuesday after Spanish class, Yenifer and I walked onto a bridge, its wrought-iron railings studded with hundreds of padlocks, each engraved with a name or names. Some had hearts painted on them in red nail polish. Halfway across the bridge, Yenifer stopped to chat with a Gypsy woman begging for coins. The woman looked weathered by the ill winds of life, a pitiful puddle of need, her dark, watery eyes pleading for relief.

  “Hola, abuela,” Yenifer said to her.

  I assumed they weren’t kin, and Yenifer used the term “grandmother” to show respect. The woman nodded to Yenifer, then straightened out of her cringing crouch and scanned me with the predatory arrogance of a pimp. I frowned down at her.

  She kinked one eyebrow and gave me a mocking smile as she raised an open, gnarled hand toward my thigh. I dropped a couple of euros on her palm. She shook her fist beside her ear, clinking the two coins, then opened her hand to show me the writer Miguel de Cervantes stamped on them.

  “You, I think,” she said in English, “are like his Don Quixote. You think yourself more important than you are.”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  She turned her head and spat in disgust. “Like the foolish knight you believe a woman of flesh and sweat is made of lace and rosewater.”

  Was she talking about Steph? I certainly didn’t believe this haughty beggar woman, who smelled of garlic, was made of rosewater. “And you, I think are more than you seem,” I told her.

  Yenifer hissed laughter. “His Dulcinea lives in Ecuador.”

  The Gypsy sneered at me. “Like Don Quixote, you fool yourself, man of clay. The Spanish tongue will bring you no comfort.” She lifted her chin to indicate Yenifer. “And this one does not ride a donkey behind you. She only serves you one wish.”

  I hadn’t given her the coins to have my fortune told, but I kept quiet. Yenifer treated this Gypsy jinni with respect. I didn’t need to rouse a second, more powerful enemy.

  She locked eyes with Yenifer then twitched her head toward the Triana side of the river. “Go two blocks and turn left. You will find a shop selling flamenco dresses. I will come clap when you dance.”

  “Sancho doesn’t dance.”

  Both of them ignored my little joke, and Yenifer walked away after a quick, respectful nod.

  Yenifer took the imperious Gypsy’s advice. She bought provocative dresses and danced raw, relentless flamenco most nights in a private club, a peña. Th
e joy in her dance was contagious. The heartbeats of her aroused audiences fell into step with her Moorish rhythms, with her heel tap-tap-tappings. Every man was a sultan with her in his harem, and every woman saw her own face on the erotic dancer. Yenifer took them from tears to ecstasy and back again, as she willed.

  She rented a rose-colored villa with a tile roof. It faced the river. When I visited her, I saw the brass urn on a bookshelf touching a leather-covered copy of Rihla, The Journey, a famous if untrue book by medieval traveler Muhammad Ibn Battuta.

  My recent adventures would fit his tales. A genie had tried to trick, embarrass, and terrorize me into making a wish … not your usual humdrum tourist experiences. I took some satisfaction in the fact that I had slipped some joy into Yenifer’s life.

  Still, each night I curled up on my cot and slept easier for knowing that now no urn with a fuming jinni inside it haunted my room.

  Steph sent me a message in Spanish, the language that would bring me no comfort. My Dulcinea was getting married.

  I walked down to the wide Guadalquivir River and sat on a slat bench, the Spanish sunshine like a hot towel slapped across the back of my neck. Palm trees lined the river, just beyond the pedestrian and bike paths. Bitter orange trees formed a row behind me, the ground under them littered with bright rotting fruit orbited by pesky bees.

  I drifted through maudlin memories of Steph. Would she wear my lapis lazuli pendant on her honeymoon?

  Someone said something and broke into my sorrowing. Yenifer sat beside me, her sinewy presence a warm comfort.

  “What will you do?” she repeated.

  “Good question. I’ve lost my zeal for Spanish lessons. But I don’t feel like doing much else.”

  “You wish to travel?”

  Movement would distract me, but there would be little joy in it now. “I think I might settle down for awhile. What do you want to do?”

  She smiled, a rare act when in my company. “You will grant me a wish, Layton?”

  “I live to serve. A Don Quixote can do no less. But I won’t force this wish on you.” I smiled to show I was teasing her.