The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories

by Mahvesh Murad

  Because I’m me. I’m drinking, and I’m smoking. And he says, Those things will rot your guts, your liver, your lungs. You’ll die a vegetable.

  What do you know of death? I have asked him.

  I’ve lived it, he says. He’s incoherent, babbling at times. Like it gets to him. Like he can’t quite control what he’s remembering.

  Denny used to say he was schizophrenic. He calls me by names I’ve never heard.

  Not Denny, though. He always got Denny’s name right.

  Lock the door, he says to me. I get a glimpse into the vault, as his fingers – long fingers, like twigs from some gnarled, ruined-up old tree, frazzled by the sun that tweaked its branches – wrap around the door. The door is iron. The room is dark, cold. Empty, like some safe. Just, in the middle, this box. The smell of familiar old afterburn.

  The door shuts of its own accord, and I stand there. I can see a light flash as it shuts. I lean in, to lock it.

  Hello, old friend, my father says. This is the last time?

  I think: Are you sure you don’t want to change, this time?

  But I don’t know where that thought comes from; and when I stop thinking it, I am pressed to the door, desperate to get inside, and Joe Strummer is singing in my ears about how we’re all lost, we’re all lost; and I shut my eyes.

  YOU HAVE LEFT me, as of course you were always going to. I cannot pretend that I will not miss the occasional companionship you provided, nor that I won’t miss seeing Denny in those infrequent visits that he was allowed; but he and I will endure, by letter, if need be. You said, in your last missive, that we should all be together. That my pursuit of this folly – and oh, how that dismissive word stings! – was the thing that would ruin me.

  I want you to understand: this is important. If I should get this right, then we will have this time again, only better. I will be assured. I have been making notes, mental notes. Remembering everything. Trying to assess the chaos that can be caused by getting this wrong, but equally weighing up the good I will create should I get it right.

  That good, of course, will benefit you; and it will benefit our son. I am sad that he will never know – or, at least, will not know in this life – his father as the man I know I am, I can be, but I will change that. In the next.

  You say I talk in riddles, but I have found the answer to the world’s greatest riddle. What do you ask for that cannot be twisted? That cannot be a trick? That leaves you in control? I have spent years wondering. I have my answer. And when this is done, when this is over, I will make it so.

  MR BOND IS the hardest man I have ever worked for. I’ve tried to make it easy for him, but he doesn’t make it easy on himself. Everything in his whole life has been some insane quest. I’ve read his journals. He was obsessed with a woman, back when he was twenty or something. This was, I don’t know, fifty years ago? Some woman called Delia. He was in love with her, totally nuts about her. But you read it, and it’s like he’s a stalker. There’s actual madness there. I wondered if it was fiction, for a while? But he picked out this woman, and he said to her – actually said to her – We’re going to get married, we’re going to have a son called Dennis, we’re going to X and Y and Z and money and fame and wars and blah blah blah. Some stuff in there that’s terrifying. So he told her this, and she wanted nothing to do with him. He was locked up, for a while. Sent him to Douglas, and this was in the ’60s, so they were still, you know. Ice pick through the eye. Wiped him out. So then his books – he kept writing them – they’re, like, gibberish. These bits sewn together. Don’t make sense.

  He asked me, a few weeks ago, in that slow, lingering way he asks things, if I would take him on holiday. Where? I asked. He told me, and I laughed. You don’t have the money for that, I said to him. But he did, full credit. He had a bank account, few thousand in there. Marcus G, he said I should take it. Nobody would know. Guy’s crazy in the coconut. But, you know, I think my mum would be disappointed in me. That’s as good a motivation as any. And he said I’d get to go, and I’d never even left the country. Not gone anywhere. Scared of flying, but we had enough for first class. Thought it was as good a time as any to start.

  So we land, and it’s sand for days, sand and sun and not a beach in fucking sight. I lead him, and he says, We have to find some people to do a job. What sort of job? He wants – no fucking joke – he wants a hole blown in the side of a fucking mountain. There’s a tomb in there, he says. His mouth drools. There’s a tomb, and there’s a box inside it. I want the box. He says, Don’t worry about having money left over. I can spend it all. This is a man who I’ve wiped his face, I’ve wiped his arse. He’s gone weeks where he barely says a word to me, and then now he’s here, and he says all this stuff. Lucid, like. Like he’s suddenly back in his own brain, where he hasn’t been for years.

  Come on, he says, we don’t have all day.

  I take his money and I find some people. They laugh when I tell them what I want to do. I say, there’s something buried out there, all that, and they say, There’s nothing in the desert. The old man, he insists. He’s got a shopping list, as well. Expensive stuff. Dynamite, and I’ve never seen a stick of it. It’s like in a cartoon: like a big red candle. Costs so much, and it’s hard to handle. Got to be careful, and that means he has to pay the men he’s hired even more.

  His money. His to waste.

  We get out there. There are no markers, no idea where to go. He struggles. Says, get my notebooks, and he’s had them packed, and he gives them to me. There’s a bit in them, from when he was young, where he talks about how there’s this place, all this jazz. Stuff about a genie. And I read them and thought he was being a kid, writing this shit down, but it’s here, where he’s describing is right here, right now. This place is, like, exactly it.

  So we travel across the desert – he says it was on horses, in the notebooks, but we’re in jeeps. And he leans in to me, and he says: I will pay you so much money, everything I own. I have more than you know. You just need to do one thing for me.

  He tells me about a lamp. I say: like in Aladdin?

  Nothing like Aladdin, he says. Nothing like it. You imbecile.

  I can go home, I say.

  No! No, no. He begs me. Just: wish for me to be as I was. Before this.

  It isn’t real, I say. The company isn’t paying me enough to wipe his arse and pretend that magic is real.

  You don’t understand, he says to me. I have been here before. I have lived this before. Three times. I found the perfect phrase, the way he couldn’t trick me. But he tricked me.

  Don’t –

  Do not interrupt me. Please. I beg of you. This one thing, for me. I will leave everything to you, give you everything.

  This isn’t right, I say. I feel like I’m taking advantage.

  Marcus G, he would say, Fuck it. Take advantage. Like that’s his motto.

  All you need to do is this: pick up the box we will find, and we will find a box, and say, Put Simon Bond back the way he was before he found you. Say that. That’s it. Say that, and this will all be over. You’ll be rich. I swear it.

  He looks into my eyes. His body is rotting, and there’s this smell to him. Somewhere between piss and fire.

  I don’t know, I kind of think, Whatever. This is bullshit. Might as well benefit from it. He’ll do it without me.

  So the men blow the hole in the rock. He tells them where. He’s got notes, and it takes a few tries, but we’ve got enough dynamite.

  Boom, and we’re in. It’s like a burial chamber or some shit like that. All this collapsing rock and inscriptions on the walls.

  The old man says, I never came here in this life. I was always meant to find it; nobody else. And so it was never found.

  There’s a stink in here, of something nasty. Like the old man, weirdly. Like he’s been here before, waiting this out for centuries.

  There, he says. His eyes can’t see for shit in the darkness. He points to something, this little black box. Pick it up, rub it. Say w
hat I told you to say. You know what to say?

  Put him –

  Say my name.

  Put Simon Bond back to the way he was before he found you.

  The old man nods.

  Go on, he says. Just rub it.

  Under his breath, he says the same name, over and over. Denny, over and over.

  I pick up the box, rub it. Say the thing, just like he said.

  The stink is ridiculous.

  I HAVE LEFT a will. I have told everybody what I am to do. This life was never about this life. It was about the next, and the next. I am prepared.

  I remember the day that I found the jinn. The hole, in the cave. I felt like a boy adventurer, like in the stories. In my mid-twenties, and I remember telling myself: I will find this faster, next time. No sense in hesitating.

  Now, my grandson leads me to him. I have kept him safe enough, I think. Out of reach. Next time, I will build a vault.

  My grandson pushes my hand to the lamp’s side, and I rub it, and the jinn appears.

  You’re new, he says. When he speaks, the room filled with the reek of his fire. What do you want?

  And I say to him, I want to live my life over again. Knowing what I know now. The perfect phrase, untrickable. Unflawed.

  He nods, and it is done.

  SAM, RUB IT, she says to me. She’s so bossy. She says, like in the films. You’ve seen that Disney. With Mork. She makes a face, like, aaah, Mork is so sad. To remember a man like that. I look over at my own grandfather: his sunken eyes, and the doctors tell us, Well, in a younger man, maybe we could have done something. But they won’t do anything, will they? No incentive to, not when you’re that old, that broken. Everything in the family falls to me, now. Since my father died. Only person who was as ruined by it was my grandfather, and now I don’t even know if he remembers. He doesn’t visit the grave. No more mourning for Denny Bond.

  Instead, he stares at the lamp.

  I’ve read his notes. Found it when he was in his mid-twenties. Obsessed with it. He was lucky, I think, because nobody found it before him. If it does anything. Ellie’s a nightmare, telling me to rub it myself. She acts like she’s Marlene Dietrich, and I hate this. This melodramatic bullshittery.

  It’s not mine, I tell her. It’s his. I pick it up. I don’t rub it. Hold it firmly, not too firmly, but make sure my fingers don’t rub it. He’s been waiting his whole life to do this.

  I carry it to him, and I take his hand – the veins on the back like grey trenches – and I push it to the side of the box. Go on, I say. Go on.

  I watch as the thing appears. Bigger than the room. Bigger than I imagined. The smell of something awful, something I’ve smelled on my grandfather for years and never understood, a smell of rot and death and eternities of trickery and torment.

  I can’t contemplate the creature’s eyes. My grandfather looks up at it, and there’s a sadness there; a realisation, I think. That’s the only way I can describe it.

  Hello, old friend, the thing says.

  The stink fills the room to choking.

  I MISS HIM. I miss the sounds that my boy made; the way he screamed. He cried a lot, which I didn’t... I assumed he wanted the breast. The doctor said that it can start young. The sickness. Were he older, there might well have been help he could have found. But no remedy for an infant. He never crawled. Didn’t want to. Barely walked. We tried, with the doctors. Urged him. Nanny tried, and Mama. But no avail. They said that he was wrong.

  He drew me a picture, the day of... Denny, he wrote. Denny, across the top. And a picture of a boy, about his age. He was good at art. Preternaturally.

  Old enough to open the window. We never assumed he would...

  I will have no more children. His smell, so exact; I could not bear to smell it on another, not as long as I live.

  Reap

  Sami Shah

  MAYBE IF KARRY had agreed to live on the base, things would be better, easier. But he doubted it. I’ll go bugfuck crazy, she’d said. I’m not gonna be one of those dumb bitches who keep the house clean until their man comes home, then fucks them and goes to sleep. I need civilian friends.

  So they lived in Alamogordo and she worked as a nurse, and they barely saw each other because their shifts never quite aligned.

  The drive to Holloman Air Force Base took fifteen minutes, the city ending abruptly as the New Mexico desert opened around him. The light from the city was swallowed by the emptiness before the light from the airbase appeared. At night it was like driving along a thin sandbar surrounded by ocean.

  Security at the airbase did their required checks, then waved Grant through. He sped past the suburban grid housing most of the base staff. He wondered if Karry had found those civilian friends she was after. She hadn’t mentioned any.

  Grant parked in the lot, jogged across to the command building, changed into his flight suit, then made his way to the glorified shipping container he would sit in for the next twelve hours. He rapped on the door. Locks clicked and slid, then Chuck was letting him in.

  Mornin’, Chuck said, Briefing notes on your seat. Ess Ess Dee Dee.

  Copy that, Grant said, saluting him.

  Ernesto and Sian sat towards the far end, facing a column of screens. Ernesto was the pilot, his shift beginning same time as his. In a few seconds Grant would take Sian’s place as the sensor, swapping in. Sitting behind Ernesto was Anna the Analyst, and oh, boy, did she hate being called that. Squeezed in next to her was where Chuck would sit, once he came back inside. He’d taken the opportunity afforded by Grant’s arrival to step outside for a smoke. No one begrudged him the cigarette; the tobacco stink was actually a relief from the miasma of flatulence, B.O., and minty-vomit air freshener that clouded the container. The rest of the container was filled with shale formations of humming servers.

  Relief on deck, Grant said, snapping off another salute for Anna the Analyst.

  God bless you, Sian said, pulling off her headset and standing up. She stretched her back, wincing as it cracked, and said, I left a welcome fart for you to warm up in. Hope you’re grateful.

  She’s a real lady, said Ernesto, never taking his eyes off the monitors. He made an incremental adjustment to the joystick, and two seconds later the footage in the monitors shifted slightly.

  For seven weeks they’d been surveilling a cluster of houses in a village in Pakistan’s north-west region. They were keeping track of the number of inhabitants of each, and the patterns of behavior the residents exhibited when visible. They used a MQ-9 Reaper Drone, serviced and housed in an airbase a few hundred kilometers away from the village being observed, just across the Pak-Afghan border. Ernesto’s job was to keep the drone aloft and out of visibility. Grant analyzed the footage being beamed back to them, studying the distant lives of heat signatures.

  How’re things? Grant asked, fitting the headset in place and settling in to take control of his displays.

  Reap’s good for another 10 hours, Ernesto said, Weather’s clear too, so it’s a good day for sightseeing.

  Sian gave Grant a more detailed briefing. In the months since first being assigned the observation, the two of them had developed an intimate understanding of the lives of those being watched. They knew how many people lived in each household, what their routines were, and what motivated deviations from those routines.

  They knew an old couple lived in House 2, the ones they’d nicknamed Grandpa Joe and Grandma Josephine. Grandpa Joe would go for a walk every evening after dinner, picking his way across rocky desert for an hour until he reached a stream a few miles away. He’d sit beside it for a few minutes staring up at the darkening sky, then walk back.

  Grandpa needs his exercise, Sian had said the first time they followed his trek.

  More likely, he just needs to be away from Grandma for a little while, Grant had thought. Running out the clock on his life. He’d seen his own father do the same thing. Just walk out every evening to the edge of the garden and stand there staring at the place where t
he grass ended and pavement began. When asked about it, the old man had said he was just clearing his head. It gets full up, y’know, he’d said. I like to let all the stuff inside evaporate, so there’s space for tomorrow.

  They knew that eleven children lived in House 4, each a year apart. They’d given them all names as well, and could tell them apart just by how they moved. Grant took attendance whenever they left for school in the mornings; Mickey, Mikey, Molly, Marty, Mel, Micah, Marcus, Mario, Milo, Miriam, and Ray. He hoped they’d be at school on the day he was asked to laser-light one of the houses, targeting it for a Hellfire missile.

  He and Sian knew which houses would be the cause of an attack, if one was called. House 1 was where the local Taliban commander lived, with his family of two wives and four children. It was where he held meetings of the local Taliban shura every fortnight. House 3 was different; a single man lived there, young and alone. He kept to himself and didn’t interact with his neighbors very much. Given that the local Taliban were notoriously paranoid, that he had not been killed on suspicion of spying meant a great deal to Anna the Analyst.

  He’s either under their protection, she’d said, or he’s come to an arrangement of some kind. Either way, that puts him on our shitlist.

  They’d named him Jeffrey, as in Dahmer, because he was a creepy loner.

  Jeffrey’s been gone a few hours now, Sian briefed Grant. Left after first prayer on his bike and hasn’t been back since. He’s on priority watch for return. Tommy the Talib is taking a sick day. He’s been shitting himself since dinner yesterday. Runs to the outhouse on the hour. Surprised the heat signature off that place isn’t brighter than the sun. And the eleven dwarves are due back from school in about fifteen minutes. Say hi to Mario, Milo and Miriam for me.

  No love for Ray? Grant asked.

  Ray’s a monstrous shit who broke Miriam’s bike this morning. She got smacked for chasing him.