by Doctor MC
“No problem, Mr. Harper,” she said.
I couldn’t shake the weird feeling that this boring conversation was being staged for my benefit. That feeling got stronger when Nurse Nguyen glanced at me and said, “By the way, Mr. Harper, who’s your visitor?”
“This is Marvin Harper, a great-grandson of my brother Herbert,” Uncle Warren replied.
“Marvin Harper, I’m glad to meet you,” she said. And oddly, I believed her—she was smiling the way I would if I were holding a winning scratch-off ticket.
****
Nurse Nguyen left, and Sherry took up a position standing by Uncle Warren’s head. Sherry reached into his pajama top and started rubbing his shoulder. She began biting her lip, and I thought, My god, is this blonde stripper actually getting herself hot, rubbing an old man’s shoulder?
Perhaps noticing where my eyes had gone, Uncle Warren said, “You remember how my leg and arm got injured in the war?”
Where was Uncle Warren going with this? Aloud I said, “Yeah?”
Uncle Warren’s eyes bored into mine, as if he was trying to tell me something important. “I got hurt because I didn’t think something through. I bet my ration, Jackson, about that.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t. Not now. But by next Sunday, I think you’ll understand. And then you’ll want to talk with me.”
“Uncle Warren? No offense, but you and I aren’t close. I can’t imagine me having a heart-to-heart with you.”
Uncle Warren wheezed a raspy laugh. “Not close? We aren’t, boy, not even slightly. Not today. But I have a feeling we both are going to have an eventful week.”
A minute later, I had said my goodbyes to Uncle Warren and nodded to Sherry (who gave me a distracted smile in reply). I was just turning to leave when Uncle Warren rasped, “Marvin.”
“Yes?”
“I told my lawyer to read my will right after my funeral. But I also told him not to file my will till a week after I die. I bet my ration, Jackson, that you’ll find this is useful information.”
****
I thought that Uncle Warren would outlive Aunt Claire by weeks. But nope, he died just four days after our strange conversation.
He died Friday morning. Friday afternoon, as soon as school ended, Uncle Warren’s probate lawyer called me.
Chapter 3
I Inherit—Sort Of
Uncle Warren’s probate attorney, a Mr. Dodd, had asked me to come straight to his law firm. He had something to give me, he said. No, he couldn’t tell me over the phone what it was.
The “something” turned out to be a 1940s-era Army footlocker with “Harper, W G” stencilled on it. It was padlocked shut. Mr. Dodd handed me a little brown envelope, saying, “That’s the key to the padlock.”
“Why all the secrecy for a footlocker?” I asked.
“I truly do not know,” he said. “Nor can I tell you what’s inside. In fact, Mr. Harper went to great pains to keep the existence of this box a secret.”
“Oh?”
Mr. Dodd handed me a piece of paper. Though the paper had been notarized with three witness signatures, the words themselves were handwritten—
To David Dodd:
If I am hospitalized before I die, I wish it reliably reported when/if any of my relatives visit.
If at least one relative visits me in the hospital, then upon my death, this box is to be given to the relative who visited me most.
If none of my relatives visit, then Mr. Dodd, upon my death take this box to a garbage landfill a) without opening the box yourself, b) without letting anyone else in your law firm see you remove the box from the building, and c) without letting my relatives know that you possessed this box but gave it to none of them.
That chunk of text was followed by some lawyer language, and then came Uncle Warren’s signature and a February 2010 date (meaning, three months ago).
Then Mr. Dodd handed me a notarized piece of paper, in which Sherry Benson and Marie Nguyen both swore that last Monday, Warren G. Harper had been visited by “one of his brother Herbert’s great-grandsons, Marvin Harper.”
I tapped the sworn-statements paper. “How did you get these two to ‘reliably report’ about me?”
Dodd replied, “I visited the hospital during every shift and promised the nurses there that if one of them found Mr. Harper with a relative, and that relative could be named in a sworn statement, then I’d pay the nurse a thousand dollars.”
“And how much for Uncle Warren’s stripper girlfriend? I’ll bet she was expensive.”
“No, Miss Benson did it for free. Mr. Harper told her to come to my office and sign the paper in my presence, and that’s what she did, though she told me afterward that she was missing work.”
“He told her to miss work to sign a paper and, bada-bing, she went?”
“Yes, it does seem odd, doesn’t it?”
I dug out my car keys from my pocket, threw them on top of the footlocker, and was just about to pick everything up, when a thought occurred to me. “So we relatives of Uncle Warren, none of us is getting any of his fortune? Not a dime?”
Mr. Dodd gave me a “What can I do?” shrug. “That’s correct. Everything of his that’s worth having, except for that box, is going to the Eisenhower Library.”
****
Twenty minutes later, I arrived home, without mentioning to my parents my detour to Mr. Dodd’s office. Then I let the footlocker sit in the trunk of my car for several hours, until my parents left to see a movie. (It was something about a shipful of Caribbean pirates battling a killer robot from the future. Sounded hokey.)
It was dark twilight when I brought the footlocker from my car to my bedroom. I keyed the padlock open, and opened the lid.
Inside were two old photo albums, and a brass oil lamp.
If you’ve read any “Aladdin” story, you know what the lamp’s shape was. But the oil lamp had nothing special about its metalwork, and its finish was mottled and lusterless.
In short, I was unimpressed with that oil lamp.
But hey, I figured I might be able to sell it for a few bucks on eBay, or use it as a prop for Halloween parties.
I set the lamp aside.
I started leafing through the photo albums, and figured out quickly that they were the reason that Uncle Warren had wanted the footlocker kept secret from his relatives.
The pictures in the first album started in 1942. There were yellowed black-and-white photos of Uncle Warren in uniform, and photos of young uniformed men who had to be his war buddies. There were photos of palm-tree’d Tunisia, the Pyramids, and the Sphinx, and of lions and hippopotamuses. All G-rated stuff, right? But there were also photos of naked young women, black- and brown-skinned, and photos of young Warren getting blowjobs from young women.
Actually, there were lots and lots of photos of Warren getting blowjobs from women.
About three quarters of the way through the older photo album, I turned the page and—I freaked out.
****
On the left-side page were two photos of a serious young woman who was looking at the camera. She was fully dressed (unlike many of the women in the album), wearing Middle Eastern clothing. Oddly, while her hips and everything above them were in focus, her legs were out of focus. Uncle Warren had captioned her photos with the puzzling words, “Fatima, who changed my life. June 3, 1943.”
Immediately below these photos, and their strange caption, were these words that had been written in 1943: “I will die on May 7, 2010, a Friday.”
What the hell is going on? I wondered.
The rest of that first photo album, and all of the second, were naked women posing for the camera, and Uncle Warren getting sex.
But now the women were gorgeous (by Forties and Fifties standards), and the sex was outrageous. Uncle Warren was getting plenty of blowjobs now, from breathtaking beauties, but now he also was involved in bunches of threesomes.
Uncle Warren had a photo o
f himself in 1944, appearing onstage at a Victory Bond rally in Hollywood with a blonde actress (whose name you might know), and appearing with a line of brunette chorus girls; Uncle Warren’s next photo showed this same blonde naked, cocksucking my uncle, while a brunette dancer ate the blonde out.
I looked at every photo in both albums. It didn’t help; I couldn’t figure out how what I was seeing in the photos, had happened. How had Uncle Warren suddenly become a sex god? Who was this Fatima, and what had happened between her and Uncle Warren? I couldn’t begin to guess.
****
So this was my “inheritance”: two pornographic yet puzzling photo albums, and a souvenir-stall “Aladdin’s lamp.” I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to buy pornographic 1940s photos, so...
My only hope of gaining any money from my “windfall” was through the lamp. Which in turn meant: I needed to polish this sorry excuse for a lamp before I could hope to sell it.
I drove to the store, bought some brass polish, came home, and reassigned my rattiest pair of briefs to brass-polish duty. I dipped the cloth in the brass polish, and rubbed everything against the right side of the lamp. The result?
The lamp shook in my hand as if a frantic rat were trapped inside of it. Then green smoke came out of the lamp’s spout—lots and lots of green smoke.
Chapter 4
Fatima The Genie
In my bedroom was Fatima, looking exactly the same as in 1943. (Except that her clothing was green now, not gray.)
One minor mystery got cleared up immediately. Her legs weren’t blurry in Uncle Warren’s photos because they were out of focus, but because they were smoke. She had green-silk-covered hips, and greenish sorta-thighs, and below that, green smoke. But somehow her upper body remained motionless, as if it had legs holding it up.
Have I described that motionless upper body? She had shiny black hair, which was tied by a braided green ribbon into a waist-length ponytail. She had tan skin, a nice chest (large tits but smaller than porn-sized), and electric-green eyes. At the moment, those eyes were searching my soul.
“Fatima?” I said.
Her eyebrows shot up, and she spoke to me in what I’m guessing was Arabic.
“Hold on,” I said.
I grabbed the older photo album, and flipped through the first few pages. I pointed to a photo of Uncle Warren holding a rifle (a photo that showed his face clearly) and said in English, “You knew him.”
“How are you connected to him?” she asked. Now she had a Chicago accent exactly like Uncle Warren’s.
I said, “I’m his great-nephew. He just died. So you’re a genie, and you granted Uncle Warren three wishes?”
“He died on Friday, the seventh of May, 2010?”
“Right, this morning. What’s that got to do...?”
My words sputtered to a halt when I realized: That was the date of his death that was written in the old photo album. Which meant that Uncle Warren knew beforehand that he could safely play War Hero in the 1940s; but it also meant that when he was lying in his hospital bed, talking to me, Uncle Warren knew that he was doomed within days.
Fatima said, “That was his first wish, to know the day he was fated to die.”
“What else did he wish for? Can you tell me?”
Fatima gave me a piercing look. “You are my Master now; I must answer any question of yours. But are you sure that you want this question answered, O great-nephew of my last master?”
“Yes. I need to know.”
She started speaking then, but her voice sounded like a young version of Uncle Warren’s—
“My second wish, Fatima, is I want a magic power over any cutie I get the hots for. If I touch a woman on the back of her hand, from that moment on, she becomes my blowjob-horny complete slave. And by ‘slave,’ I mean she’ll do anything I tell her, won’t refuse me a damned thing. Oh yeah, you better make the power one I can turn on and off whenever I want—I don’t wanna be like Midas, y’know? And when I say to her, ‘Rumpelstiltskin says you’re free to go,’ then she won’t crave sucking my cock anymore. So she won’t be a slave anymore. One more thing, in 2010 when I die? Whatever slaves I’ve got, will stop being my blowjob-horny slaves.
“My third wish? A knack with money. I wish that in any situation, I have an infallible instinct how to make money, ditto how to keep from losing money. Whether it’s poker with my buddies, or a goddamned horse race, or the New York fucking Stock Exchange, I want to always know in my gut who to give money to, and when, and when to cash out or fold.”
I sighed. “Well, you tried to warn me. My uncle was a real lowlife with his wishes, you know?”
Then I looked at her and said, “Which brings me to my own wishes. What are the rules?”
“You don’t want to go ahead and wish, and I tell you if a wish is out of bounds?”
“No.” I wasn’t going to anger the genie by pointing out that in lots of stories, genies were as sly and wily and crafty as lawyers.
Fatima shrugged. “The rules are that all the wishes must be made the same day—”
“Does that have to be today? Or can I think about it?”
She looked surprised. “I’ve had only one master who delayed making wishes. He waited a day.”
“Was he happy with how his wishes came out, after taking a day to word them?”
“I cannot say with certainty, because I was sent back to my lamp after he made his wishes.”
Genies are like lawyers. I asked her, “And you can tell me nothing about his life after he made his wishes?”
She admitted, “I can sense the death of my master while within the lamp, and he lived six years after making his wishes.”
“And how old was he when he made his wishes?”
“Seventeen. He was just starting to grow a beard.”
“After making his wishes, he lived only to be twenty-three? Huh,” I said. Then I changed topics: “You said earlier that you must answer your master’s every question. Can you lie to me?”
“I say no, but perhaps this answer is a lie.”
“If I ask you a question in English, can you answer in Arabic?”
She looked at me in puzzlement. “No, I must answer in English.”
“Which means that you may not give me an ‘answer’ that holds no useful information for me. Which would be the case if I knew that you were permitted to lie to me. So I conclude, you cannot lie to me. Is my logic faulty?”
“Perhaps so.”
“How is my logic faulty? Under what circumstances can you lie to me?”
Fatima looked very uncomfortable. She sighed. “I cannot lie to you.”
“So if I ask you a question, Fatima, you will tell me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, always?”
She looked like she wanted to dive back into the lamp. At last she said, “No.”
“Tell me how you can avoid telling me the truth, if you cannot lie to me.”
“By not volunteering information that you did not ask for. By answering your question as narrowly as possible. By suggesting possibilities that I know are not true.”
“So how can I find out whether you’re deliberately making me think, or you’re allowing me to think, something other than the whole truth?”
Her shoulders slumped. “By asking me directly whether I’m intending to evade telling you what I think you want to know.”
“And if you have been evasive, how do I find out what the whole truth is?”
“By asking me what the whole truth is, or by asking me what I don’t want to tell you.”
“I see. What do you not want to tell me now?”
She looked at the floor. “Among we of the djinn who have been bound by Solomon, it is humiliating to fail to trick one’s master during his Wishing Time. I fear that this might happen to me.”
“And how did you trick my Uncle Warren?”
“When he learned that he would live another sixty-seven years, he said words meaning that no harm would come to him in his war. I
let him think that.”
And now I understood what Uncle Warren had been trying to tell me in the hospital: that his arm and leg were wounded because he “didn’t think something through.” He was warning me: Don’t shoot your mouth off when you make your wishes.
I looked at Fatima and said, “So back to my original question: What are the rules?”
In a sing-song, I’ve-said-this-a-million-times voice, she answered, “All three wishes must be made the same day.
“You may not wish for a throne, nor may you wish to cloud men’s minds to grant you a throne, nor may you wish to cloud men’s minds so that they will fight war for you. If you wish one of these three forbidden wishes, you forfeit that wish and all remaining wishes. You may not wish that anyone die, or be made so sick or so injured that death comes soon. If you wish one of these three forbidden wishes, you forfeit that wish and all remaining wishes. You may not wish for immortality, your own or anyone else’s. If you make a wish like this, you forfeit that wish and all remaining wishes. You may not wish to delay your own or anyone else’s fated death by more than 120 lunar cycles—”
“Say what? You mean a ‘month,’ 120 ‘months,’ or ten years?”
“No. There are twelve calendar months in a year, but thirteen lunar cycles. May I finish, O Master?”
Just marvelous, a sarcastic genie, I thought. Aloud I said, “Please do.”
“If you wish to delay your own or someone else’s fated death by more than 120 lunar cycles, you forfeit that wish. These are all the rules but one, which I may not tell you until after you’ve spoken all three wishes.”
“Huh,” I said. “Now back up to the ‘120 lunar cycles’ rule. If I wish to postpone someone’s fated death by 120 lunar cycles or less, you’ll grant the wish—no forfeiture, no penalty?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me the whole truth.”
“If you do not say otherwise in your wish, the person’s health gets worse till he is on the verge of death, then remains at that state for 120 lunar cycles.”
“My god, that’s horrible! Imagine, nine-years-plus of almost-death!”
Fatima shrugged. Then she asked, “Are you ready to tell me your wishes now?”
