Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (30 page)

The city was a war zone and the war had spilled into The Bagdad. Graffiti tags, obscene writings, fecal matter, a broken place outside and in. The windows boarded up and many panes of glass long gone. He entered the darkened foyer and at once felt metal pressed to the side of his head and heard a high, wired voice threatening death, this house be
occupy,
muthafucka, open your shirt, open your goddam shirt, he had to show them he wasn’t wearing a grenade belt, he wasn’t a bomb somebody told to walk in here and spring-clean the building, who sent you, muthafucka, who you
from
. It was interesting, he thought, that he was moving at his normal leisurely rate but everything around him could be slowed right down, the voice of the man with the gun could be stretched out, becoming slo-mo-low, and he could slow things down further just by wanting to, just like
this,
and now the tough guys in the dark of the foyer were like statues, and he could reach up to the muzzle of the gun and pinch it,
so,
and squash it shut like a Plasticine toy, this was almost fun. He could do
this,
and now all the weapons in the possession of the occupiers had been turned into carrots and cucumbers. Oh, and he could do
this,
and now they were all naked. He allowed them to speed up—or himself to decelerate—and had the satisfaction of watching another transformation, from gang lords into frightened kids, who the what the let’s get outta here. As they backed away from him clutching at their manhood, he had a question for them: Sister Allbee, Blue Yasmeen, those names mean anything to you? And the man who had held a gun to his head now delivered a dagger to his heart. Those be the floatin’ bitches? The
balloons
? He removed his hands from his private parts and made a spreading gesture. Kapow, man. It was a mess. What do you mean, Mr. Geronimo asked, even though he knew what the man meant. Like a fuckin’ piñata, the naked man said.
Boom.
Dat some wack shit.

That was not how this part of the story was supposed to go. He was supposed to come home from Fairyland with superpowers and rescue Yasmeen and Sister. He was supposed to use his newly harnessed skills and bring them gently back to earth, hear their complaints, accept the blame, apologize, hug them, give them back the dailiness of their lives, save them from the madness and celebrate their salvation, like friends. It was supposed to be the moment when good sense began to return to the world and he, along with the others, was to be the bringer of that sense. The madness that had gotten into the world had had its way long enough. It was time for sanity to return and this was where he had wanted the process to begin. Them being dead—did they starve to death or were they killed, shot at for sport by the madness, maybe by those naked kids when the madness took them, and then their bodies left floating in the stairwell, filling up with the gases of death, until the explosion, until their insides like sticky rain—that wasn’t it at all.

He searched the house, which was now close to dereliction. There was blood on the walls. Maybe some of it had come from the exploding bodies of Sister and Yasmeen. In one room a naked wire sparked, which could start a fire at any time. Almost all the toilets were clogged. Almost all the chairs were broken and there were ripped mattresses on the floors of several units. In his own apartment there had been extensive looting. He owned nothing now except the clothes he was wearing. Outside, he did not expect to find his truck where he had left it, and so it was no surprise to find it gone. None of this mattered to him. He left The Bagdad in the grip of a new force, a rage that allowed him to understand Dunia’s blazing wrath after her father’s murder. The war had just become personal.

The phrase
to the death
formed in his thoughts and he realized, with some surprise, that he meant it.

The Lady Philosopher and Oliver Oldcastle were nowhere to be seen. Maybe they were still alive. Maybe they had found their way back home. He had to go to La Incoerenza at once. That, before anything else. He didn’t need the green pickup truck. He had a new way to get around.

He was only slowly grasping what his life had become. That he had risen, he well knew. He had faced that and accepted it. The descent had been involuntary, as unexpected as the rising, and it was, he understood, the consequence of an opening within himself of a secret self whose existence he had not previously suspected. But perhaps there was also a human dimension to his descending, his overcoming of what he had often thought of as a fault, his fault. In those lonely pendant hours he had faced the darkest things in his life, the pain of separation from what that life had once been, the agony of the rejected path, the path that rejected him. By embracing his grave wound, showing it to himself, he became stronger than his affliction. He had earned his gravity, and came down to earth. Thus Patient Zero became a source not only of the disease but of the cure.

He felt as if he had entered another skin. Or as if he, who was another, had become the new occupant of his body, which was other to him. Age had slipped from his thoughts and a great field of possibility stood before his inner eye, filled with white flowers, each one the enabler of a miracle. The white asphodel was the flower of the afterlife but he had never felt more alive. It also occurred to him that the curse of rising had this in common with his present condition: that its local effects transcended the laws of nature. For example, this ability to move very rapidly while the world seemed to stand still, a power over relative motion which he did not begin to understand but which was surprisingly easy to use. One does not have to know the secrets of the internal combustion engine, he reminded himself, to be able to drive a car. This kind of local sorcery, he understood, was the essence of the jinn. He was still flesh and blood, and that slowed him down somewhat—he could not move at anything like the speed of the Lightning Princess—but she had released into his body the secrets of smoke and fire and they carried him pretty swiftly along.

And so after a brief moment of blurred space and altered time he stood once again on the ravaged lawns of La Incoerenza and the gardener in him knew that there was one small victory, at least, that was within his reach. If there was one story of the jinn that everyone knew it was the tale of the jinni of the lamp who built Aladdin a palace with beautiful grounds fit for him to live in with his love the beautiful princess Badralbudur, and even though the story was probably a French fake the fact was that any jinni worth his salt could rustle up a decent palace and grounds in less time than it took to snap your fingers or clap your hands. Mr. Geronimo closed his eyes and there before him was the field of white asphodel. As he leaned down to smell their enchanted aroma the whole of the La Incoerenza estate appeared before him in miniature, perfect in every detail as it had been before the great storm, and he was a giant kneeling down to blow into it the breath of renewed life while the white flowers, also gigantic in comparison to the tiny house and grounds, waved gently all around.

When he opened his eyes the spell had done its work. There was La Incoerenza restored to its former glory, no trace anymore of the mud and detritus deposited there by the river, the indestructible shit of the past was gone and the great uprooted trees stood again as if their roots had never clawed at air, coated in black mud, and all his work of so many years was remade, the stone spirals, the Sunken Garden, the analemma sundial, the rhododendron forest, the Minoan labyrinth, the secret hedge-hidden nooks, and from the golden wood he heard a great cry of happiness, which told him that the Lady Philosopher was alive, and was discovering that pessimism was not the only way of looking at the world, that things could change for the better as as well as the worse, and that miracles did happen.

They had been living like birds, Alexandra and her Oldcastle, fluttering at first in empty rooms but then as they rose higher they were obliged to leave the house and float under cover of foliage. But they were birds with money: Alexandra Fariña had continued her father’s practice of keeping an absurd amount of cash locked up in the vault behind the Florentine painting, and that money had enabled her and her estate manager to survive. Cash money had provided a measure of security, though there had been burglaries, much had been taken, perhaps by the security personnel themselves, but at least there had been no physical or sexual violence in those lawless months, the perimeter had been more or less guarded and only occasionally breached, and after all they had only been robbed, not killed or raped. Cash money had paid the emergency services to visit regularly to bring fresh food and drink and whatever other supplies they needed. They had risen, now, to a height of about a dozen feet, and kept what they needed in an elaborate network of boxes and baskets slung from broad branches in the wood, built by local workmen and paid for, of course, in cash. The wood allowed them to perform their toilettes unobserved and without shame and there were moments when it was almost enjoyable.

But the sadness grew, and as the months passed Alexandra Bliss Fariña found herself hoping for an ending, wishing for it to come soon, and painlessly, if possible. She had not yet used any of her cash supply to purchase the substances that could make her wish come true, but she thought about it often. And then here instead of death was Mr. Geronimo and the lost world miraculously restored, time turned back, and hope given—lost hope, improbably rediscovered, like a precious ring, mislaid for eighteen months, found in a long-unopened drawer—that perhaps all could be as it had been. Hope. She cried out to him with improbable hope in her voice.
We’re here. Over here. Here we are.
And then, almost pleading, fearing a negative answer that would burst this tiny balloon of optimism,
Can you get us down?

Yes, he could, he could close his eyes and imagine their tiny figures descending onto the restored lawns of the repaired property, and then there she was, running towards him, embracing him, and Oliver Oldcastle who had once threatened his life now standing hat in hand with head bowed in gratitude and not protesting at all as the Lady Philosopher covered Mr. Geronimo’s face in kisses. Much obliged, Oldcastle mumbled. Damned if I know how you did it, but still. Very much obliged.

And this, all of this, Alexandra cried, whirling about and about. You’re a wonder worker, Geronimo Manezes, that’s what you are.

If he had given in to his jinn self he would have made love to her on the spot, right there on the magically renewed grass with Oliver Oldcastle watching, and yes, the desire was in him all right, but he had sworn himself to a cause, he was in the service of Dunia the new jinnia Queen of the Mountain and his human part insisted he remember his oath; before life, his life, human life, could be properly renewed, her banner had to be planted in triumph on the battlefield.

I have to go, he said, and Alexandra Bliss Fariña’s disappointed pout was the perfect opposite of Oliver Oldcastle’s grumpy grin of joy.

In the faraway country of A. there once lived a gentle king known to all his subjects as the Father of the Nation. He was progressively inclined, so he helped to bring his country into the modern age, introducing free elections, defending women’s rights, and building a university. He was not a rich king, and made ends meet by allowing half his palace to be used as a hotel, where he often took tea with the guests. He endeared himself to the young people of his own country and of the West by permitting the legal manufacture and sale of hashish, quality controlled and stamped with government seals of approval, gold, silver and bronze, denoting grades of purity and price. Those were good years, the years of the king, innocent years, perhaps, but sadly his health was poor; his back hurt and his eyes were weak. He traveled to Italy to undergo surgery but while he was away his former prime minister performed some surgery of his own, cut the king away from the state and took over the kingdom himself. In the next three decades while the king was in exile, contenting himself, as was his way, with the quiet pursuits of chess, golf and gardening, all hell broke loose in his former kingdom. The prime minister didn’t last long, and a period of tribal faction fighting followed, which made at least one of A.’s powerful neighbors think the country was ripe for the picking.

So there was a foreign invasion. This was a mistake foreigners repeatedly made—the attempted conquest of the land of A.—but they invariably left with their tails between their legs, or just lay dead on the battlefield for the benefit of scavenging wild dogs, who weren’t choosy about what they ate and were willing to digest even this type of horrible foreign food. But when the foreign invasion was repelled what replaced it was even worse, a murderous gang of ignoramuses who called themselves the Swots, as if the mere word would earn them the status of true scholars. What the Swots had studied deeply was the art of forbidding things, and in a very short time they had forbidden painting, sculpture, music, theater, film, journalism, hashish, voting, elections, individualism, disagreement, pleasure, happiness, pool tables, clean-shaven chins (on men), women’s faces, women’s bodies, women’s education, women’s sports, women’s rights. They would have liked to have forbidden women altogether but even they could see that that was not entirely feasible, so they contented themselves with making women’s lives as unpleasant as possible. When Zumurrud the Great visited the land of A. in the early days of the War of the Worlds, he saw at once that it was an ideal place to set up a base. It is an interesting and little-known detail that Zumurrud the Great was an aficionado of golden-age science fiction, and could have discussed with friends, if he had had any friends, the work of such masters of the genre as Simak, Blish, Henderson, Van Vogt, Pohl and Kornbluth, Lem, Bester, Zelazny, Clarke, and L. Sprague de Camp. Among his favorites was Isaac Asimov’s classic novel of the 1950s,
Foundation,
and he decided to name his operation in A. after that novel. “The Foundation” he set up and ran—originally with the assistance of Zabardast the Sorcerer, but, after their quarrel, by himself—quickly acquired a foothold in A. by the simple procedure of purchasing the country’s new rulers.