Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (13 page)

They had so much to learn. They had to learn to stop saying
genie
and associating the word with pantomime, or with Barbara Eden in pink harem pants on TV, blonde “Jeannie” in love with Larry Hagman, an astronaut who became her “master.” It was extremely unwise to believe that such potent, slippery beings could have masters. The name of the immense force that had entered the world was
jinn.

She, Dunia, had also loved a mortal man—never her “master”—and many lobeless children were the consequence of that love. Dunia searched out her earmarked descendants wherever they were. Teresa Saca, Jinendra Kapoor, Baby Storm, Hugo Casterbridge, many more. All she could do was plant in their minds the knowledge of who they were and of their scattered tribe. All she could do was awaken the bright jinn within them and guide them towards the light. Not all of them were good people. In many of them human weakness proved more potent than jinni strength. This was a problem. As the slits between the worlds broke open the mischief of the dark jinn began to spread. At first, before they began to dream of conquest, the jinn had no grand design. They created havoc because it was in their nature. Mischief and its senior sibling, real harm, they foisted without compunction upon the world; for just as the jinn were not real to most human beings, so also human beings were not real to the jinn, who cared nothing for their pain, any more than a child cares for the pain of a stuffed animal she bangs against a wall.

The influence of the jinn was everywhere, but in those early days, before they fully revealed themselves, many of our ancestors did not see their hidden hands at work, in the collapse of a nuclear reactor, the gang rape of a young woman, or an avalanche. In a Romanian village a woman began laying eggs. In a French town the citizenry began turning into rhinoceroses. Old Irish people took to living in trash cans. A Belgian man looked into a mirror and saw the back of his head reflected in it. A Russian official lost his nose and then saw it walking around St. Petersburg by itself. A narrow cloud sliced across a full moon and a Spanish lady gazing up at it felt a sharp pain as a razor blade cut her eyeball in half and the vitreous humor, the gelatinous matter filling the space between the lens and the retina, flowed out. Ants crawled out of a hole in a man’s palm.

How were such things to be understood? It was easier to believe that Chance, always the hidden principle of the universe, was joining forces with allegory, symbolism, surrealism and chaos, and taking charge of human affairs, than it was to accept the truth, namely the growing interference of the jinn in the daily life of the world.

When the rake, restaurateur and man-about-town Giacomo Donizetti first left his hometown of Venice, Italy, as a young fellow of thirteen and set out on his travels, his mother, a Black Jew of Cochin who had married his Italian Catholic father at the Sri Aurobindo ashram in Pondicherry when they were both spiritual and young—with the Mother herself, Mirra Alfassa, performing the ceremony at the age of ninety-three!—gave him a parting gift: a square of chamois leather folded into the shape of an envelope and tied with a scarlet bow. “Here is your city,” she told him. “Never open this package. Your home will always be with you, safe inside, wherever you may roam.” So he carried Venice with him across the world until news reached him of his mother’s death. That night he got the folded leather down from its place of safekeeping and undid the scarlet bow, which fell to pieces in his fingers. He opened the chamois envelope and found nothing inside, because love has no visible form. At that moment love, shapeless invisible love, fluttered up and away from him and he couldn’t have it anymore. The idea of home too, of feeling at home in the world wherever he was, that illusion vanished as well. After that he seemed to live as other men did but he could not fall in love or settle down and in the end he began to think of those losses as advantages, because in their stead came the conquest of many women in many places.

He developed a specialty: the love of unhappily married ladies. Almost every married woman he met was to some degree unhappy in her marriage, though the majority of them were unprepared to end it. For his own part, he was determined never to be caught in any woman’s matrimonial web. So they had the right things in common, Signor Donizetti and the
Malmaritate,
as he privately called them, the borderless nation of the gloomily espoused. The ladies felt gratitude for his attentions and he in his turn was unfailingly grateful to them. “Gratitude is the secret of success with women,” he wrote in his secret journal. He kept a record of his conquests in this oddly ledger-like book, and if his claims were to be believed they numbered many thousands. Then one day his luck changed.

After a night of strenuous lovemaking, Donizetti liked to seek out a well-run Turkish bathhouse, or
hammam,
and allow himself to be heated, steamed and scrubbed. It is probable that it was in one such establishment in Nolita that a jinn whispered to him.

The dark jinn were whisperers. Becoming invisible, they placed their lips against the chests of human beings and murmured softly into their hearts, overpowering their victims’ will. On occasion the act of possession was so profound that the individual self dissolved and the jinn actually inhabited the body of his victim. But even in cases of less-than-full possession, good people, when whispered to, became capable of bad deeds, bad folk of worse. The bright jinn whispered too, steering humanity towards acts of nobility, generosity, humility, kindness and grace, but their whispers were less effective, which may suggest that the human race falls more naturally towards the dark, or, alternatively, that the dark jinn, especially the handful of Grand Ifrits, are the most powerful of all the members of the jinn world. That is a matter for philosophers to argue about. We can only record what happened when the jinn, after a long absence, returned to the lower of the Two Worlds—our world—and declared war upon it, or rather
within
it. The so-called War of the Worlds which wrought such havoc upon the earth was not only a battle between the jinn world and our own but became, in addition, a civil war among the jinn fought out on our territory, not theirs. The human race became the battleground for the struggle between the bright and the dark. And, it must be said, on account of the essentially anarchic nature of the jinn, between brightness and brightness, and the dark and the dark.

Our ancestors learned, during those two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights, to be constantly on their guard against the dangers of the jinn. The safety of their children became a deep concern. They began to leave lights on in their children’s bedrooms and locked their windows even if the boys and girls complained that the rooms were airless and stuffy. Some of the jinn were child snatchers and no one could say what became of the children they seized. Also: it was a good idea, when entering an empty room, to go in right foot first while muttering
excuse me
under one’s breath. And above all: it was wise not to bathe in the dark because the jinn were attracted to darkness and moisture. The
hammam,
with its low light levels and high humidity, was a place of considerable danger. All this our ancestors came to know gradually during those years. But when Giacomo Donizetti entered the well-appointed Turkish baths on Elizabeth Street, he did not know the risk he was taking. A mischievous jinn must have been waiting for him, because when he left the
hammam
he was a changed man.

In short: women no longer fell in love with him, no matter how gratefully he wooed them; whereas he had only to glance at a woman to tumble helplessly, hopelessly into a horrible puppyish love. Wherever he went, at work or play or in the street, he dressed with his familiar sharpness, in a three-thousand-dollar bespoke suit, Charvet shirt and Hermès tie, yet no woman swooned, while every female who crossed his path set his heart pounding, turned his legs to jelly and inspired in him an overwhelming desire to send her a large bouquet of pink roses. He wept in the street as three-hundred-pound pedicurists and ninety-pound anorexics rushed past him ignoring his protestations as if he were a drunk or panhandler and not one of the most sought-after bachelors on at least four continents. His business colleagues asked him to stay away from work because he was embarrassing the hatcheck girls, waitresses and maîtresses d’ at his various nightlife hotspots. Within a few days his life became a torment to him. He sought medical help, willing to be declared a sex addict if necessary, though fearing the cure. However, in the doctor’s waiting room he felt obliged to fall to one knee and ask the homely Korean American receptionist if she would consider doing him the honor of becoming his wife. She showed him her wedding band and pointed to the photograph of her children on her desk and he burst into tears and had to be asked to leave.

He began to fear both the randomness of the sidewalk and the erotic thrum of enclosed spaces. In the city streets the overload of women to fall in love with was so great that he genuinely feared a heart seizure. All interiors were dangerous because so few of them were single-sex. Elevators were particularly humiliating because he was trapped with ladies who spurned him with expressions of faint, or not so faint, disgust. He sought out all-male clubs where he could sleep fitfully in a leather armchair, and he seriously considered the monastic life. Alcohol and narcotics offered an easier and less taxing escape, and he spiraled downwards towards self-destruction.

One night as he staggered towards his Ferrari he understood with the true clarity of the drunk that he was friendless, that nobody loved him, that everything on which he had based his life was tawdry and as cheap as fool’s gold, and that he almost certainly ought not to be driving a motor vehicle. He remembered being taken by one of his amours, back in the day when he was the one in the driving seat, to see the only Bollywood movie of his life, in which a man and a woman contemplating suicide on the Brooklyn Bridge see each other, like what they see, decide not to jump, and go to Las Vegas instead. He wondered if he should drive to the bridge and prepare to jump and hope to be rescued by a beautiful movie star who would love him forever as deeply as he loved her. But then he remembered that thanks to the occult consequences of the new strangeness that gripped him, he would continue to fall in love with every woman who crossed his path on the bridge or in Vegas or wherever they ended up, so that the movie goddess would undoubtedly dump him and he would be even more miserable than before.

He was no longer a man. He had become a beast in the thrall of the monster Love,
la belle dame sans merci
herself, multiplying herself and inhabiting the bodies of all the world’s
dames
whether
belles
or not, and he needed to go home and lock the door and hope that he was suffering from a curable illness that would eventually run its course and allow him to resume his normal life, although at that moment the word
normal
seemed to have lost its meaning. Yes, home, he urged himself, accelerating towards his Lower Manhattan penthouse, the Ferrari adding its own dose of recklessness to the driver’s, and at a certain moment on a certain intersection in the least fashionable part of the island there was a pickup truck with on its sides the words
Mr. Geronimo Gardener
and a phone number and website URL blocked out in yellow and drop-shadowed in scarlet and the Ferrari jumping the light was clearly in the wrong and then there were frantic turnings of driving wheels and screechings of brakes and it was okay, nobody died, the Ferrari took some heavy damage to a fender and there was gardening equipment spilling onto the roadway from the back of the pickup, but both drivers were ambulatory, they got out without assistance to examine the damage, and that was when Giacomo Donizetti, dizzy and trembling, finally knew he had lost his mind, and fainted right there in the street, because the physically imposing older man coming towards him was walking on air, several inches off the ground.

More than a year had passed since Mr. Geronimo lost contact with the earth. During that time the gap between the soles of his feet and solid horizontal surfaces had increased and was now three and a half, perhaps even four inches wide. In spite of the obviously alarming aspects of his condition, as he had begun to call it, he found it impossible to think of it as permanent. He envisaged his condition as an illness, the product of a previously unknown virus: a gravity bug. The infection would pass, he told himself. Something inexplicable had happened to him, whose effects would surely fade. Normality would reassert itself. The laws of nature could not be defied for long, even by a sickness unknown to the Centers for Disease Control. In the end he would certainly descend. This was how he sought to reassure himself every day. Consequently the inescapable signs of the worsening of his condition hit him hard and it took much of his remaining willpower to suppress feelings of panic. Frequently, without any warning, his thoughts began to swim wildly about, even though he prided himself on being for the most part a stoical individual. What was happening to him was impossible, but it was happening, so it was possible. The meanings of words—
possible, impossible—
were changing. Could science explain it to him? Could religion? The idea that there might be no explanation and no cure was a notion he was not willing to entertain. He began to delve into the literature. Gravitons were elementary particles with no mass that somewhere transmitted gravitational pull. Maybe they could be created or destroyed and if so that could account for an increase or decrease in gravitational force. That was the news according to quantum physics. But, PS, there was no proof that gravitons actually existed. Quantum physics, thanks a lot, he thought. You’ve been a great help.

Like many older persons, Mr. Geronimo led a relatively isolated life. There were no children or grandchildren to fret about his condition. This was a relief to him. He felt relieved also that he had not remarried, so that there was no woman to whom he was a cause of grief or concern. Over the long years of his widowerhood his few friends had responded to his taciturn ways by withdrawing from him, becoming mere acquaintances. After his wife died he sold their home and moved into modest rental accommodation in Kips Bay, the last forgotten neighborhood in Manhattan, whose anonymity suited him perfectly. Once he had had a friendly relationship with his barber on Second Avenue but nowadays he cut his hair himself, becoming, as he preferred to put it, the gardener of his own head.