Shiva and Other Stories (11 page)
Read Shiva and Other Stories Online
Authors: Barry N. Malzberg,Catska Ench,Cory Ench
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Anthologies, #Short Stories, #Anthologies & Short Stories, #Time Travel
In the corner—
On the Heath
I
N A SMALL CLEARING, ALADDIN STUMBLES TO A HALT,
then stops, squatting on the sand. Around him the wind stirs, silt coming into his face, but it is at least bearable here, the storm is not as fierce, he seems to have found a little haven, although, of course, one cannot be sure of this. Everything is treacherous: the weather, his abominable daughters, the exile, the footing on the sand. “Hand me the lamp now,” he says to his Fool.
His Fool—the only member of Aladdin’s court who has stayed with him through all of this exile, who has continued on with him against all reason—shrugs and produces the magic ornament which Kent had passed on to them before he had deserted. “I can’t take any more of this, Aladdin,” Kent had said. “But I can at least give you a magic lamp. Call on it when you have nowhere else to turn.” Well, that was Kent, never reliable but full of promises. The Fool had taken the lamp when Aladdin had refused, putting it under his cloak. “You never know,” the Fool had said. “It might just come in useful.” Now was the time to find out. Aladdin had run out of ideas, not a new condition for him in this period of exile, but at last he was willing to admit it.
“The lamp,” he says to the Fool. “Give it here.”
The little man shrugs, holding out the contrivance to him. It glows mysteriously in the moonlight, although this may merely be a condition of Aladdin’s failing vision. First, the humiliation. Then, the exile. Then, too, the rationalizations with which the harpies had sent him out into this miserable storm. “You’re unreasonable,” Regan had said. “You’re a sad, cruel old man,” Goneril had added. “Be gone from our sight,” Goneril had said. “That goes for me, too,” Regan had said. Who would have judged such an outcome? It came from first giving your kingdom away, then putting yourself at the mercy of faithless daughters. He had certainly never envisioned such a situation in old Arabia. Well, that was a long time ago and before he had accumulated all of that corrupting wealth. Which he had shortsightedly given away.
“I warned you about that, sire,” the Fool says. “I told you you should have held onto it, at least some. For a disbursement, that is to say. You should never have given it to all of them and those ungrateful sons-in-law.”
Aladdin realizes that he has once again been muttering his thoughts. Privacy and dignity seem to be going although continence, at least so far, has remained. It is truly abominable, all of this, and yet who is to blame for the situation? “Give it here,” he says. He takes the lamp roughly from the Fool’s embrace, stares at its ruddy surfaces, the smooth wick, the little island of wax in which the wick has been embedded. The wind kicks and tosses a little sand into his face. “Now what?” Aladdin grumbles. “I mean, do I light it or what?”
“You don’t light it, sire,” the Fool says. “Remember what the Lord told you? You
rub
it, back and forth on the bottom, several times. I remember that the touch is very important. It must be light yet firm.”
“And then what?” Aladdin says. He had never trusted that Goneril. He had had a bad feeling about that one from the earliest years. But Regan, Regan had
his
hair, his eyes, his talent for a bargain, and a merchant’s shrewdness. Who would have thought that she would have proven as cruel as her sister? Well, there was nothing to be done about any of this now; it was too late to withdraw that foolish, grandiose moment when he had with a flourish given them his riches. “All right,” Aladdin says, “I’m rubbing. I’m rubbing the thing.” The surfaces feel peculiarly warm under his fingers but then again what can you expect in this desert country? Perhaps Aladdin himself has a fever. “Now what?” Aladdin says.
“Well, I don’t know,” the Fool says. “I guess we wait a bit.”
They wait a bit, barely shielded by the small wall of stones behind which they have clambered. A thin golden haze steams from the lamp, shimmers before them; from the haze Aladdin then thinks that he sees a shape become manifest. It is difficult to tell in the moonlight and his eyes, along with the rest of him, are rapidly going bad. But the shape resolves itself and stands before him, looking very much like Gloucester, reminding Aladdin of that wretched old Earl just before he was taken away in chains. “Yes?” the shape says, in an inquisitive tone. “I was summoned? I am desired?”
“I don’t know,” Aladdin says. Truly, the situation seems to be overtaking him rapidly. Kent had given no instructions beyond rubbing. Still, there is no question but that Aladdin is in extremity and having gone this far, he can only go ahead. “Yes,” he says, “I summoned you.”
“And he, too?” the shape says, pointing toward the Fool. “What is his mission?”
“He is my Fool,” Aladdin says.
“Your Fool? What does he do?”
“Well, sire,” the Fool says, after a pause. “I am here to amuse him and make him laugh. As much as the situation will permit, that is.”
“Oh,” says the shape. “I don’t see much laughter.”
“There is nothing to laugh about,” Aladdin says. The dialogue seems baroque, pointless, as elaborate and yet meaningless as the fine curvature of the shape in the mist which has now congealed into something very much like the appearance of boy slaves in old Arabia, long before he had met the mother of Regan and Goneril and eased himself toward this terrible situation. “There is only pain and darkness.”
“That is surely distressing,” the now-Arabian shape says. “But you are not being specific. My instructions, according to the old agreement, are to grant you three wishes upon the emergence of the charm. I suggest that you make those wishes rapidly; I can remain only for a little while in this state. Then I will evanesce.”
“You will what?”
“He said ‘evanesce,’ ” the Fool says, “Evanesce we talk, he will in the wind and the rain.”
Aladdin says nothing. Really, what is there to say? “
Three
wishes,” he says, “and quickly?”
“I hate puns,” the Arabian boy says. He has now assumed a credible shape and posture and Aladdin can see old memories cast in that fiery mist. “I don’t magic either, or troth. I suggest that you make these wishes very quickly. I cannot be held much longer, nor do I appreciate this discussion.”
“Very well,” Aladdin says. He realizes that he must think quickly, three wishes at once or nothing at all, but it has been so long since he has felt fully in control of himself or free of the storm that his internal logic seems to be blocked, as thick and congealed as the mist which had sprung from the lamp. “I wish for the restoration of my riches. I wish for a daughter who was not an ungrateful harpie, who loved me as I deserve to be loved. I wish pain upon Regan and Goneril who have done this terrible thing to me. I wish comfort for the Fool, my Fool who has so loyally stayed—”
“Sorry,” the Arabian boy says, “Only three wishes, not four. The daughter who loves you I can take care of. The restoration of the riches is a little bit of a problem but might be managed. The pain on Regan and Goneril is a state of mind and that is notoriously difficult.”
“All right,” Aladdin says, “Forget that part. Give my Fool comfort.”
“Sorry,” the Arabian says. “The first three are what count. I will do what I can.” The boy shakes a remonstrative finger at Aladdin. “I do want to tell you, however, that you are a vain, foolish old man and you have brought this trouble upon yourself. Nor are you likely to avoid repeating it. Wishes to the contrary, we make our own fate.”
“That is true,” the Fool says. “That is spoken very truly.”
“Nonetheless,” the boy says, “I will spring beyond judgment; I will do what I can.” The form trembles, then begins to decompose. “You will sleep,” he says to Aladdin, “and then you will awaken. Unconsciousness is part of the passage here.”
“But wait!” says Aladdin, already seeing the boy begin to slide from his sight. “How will I know? I mean, how will I know that this is real, that it is indeed something which has happened, that it is a real thing which you have done?”
“You will know that,” a voice says faintly from the now unidentifiable mist, “because you will carry the word ‘real’ within you, as part of you, as a badge and emblem of shame and reminiscence forever. Your
name
will be real—” the mist says faintly and departs, leaving Aladdin and the Fool alone again on the heath, with the bare and broken lamp lying by Aladdin’s foot. In the air is incense and then nothing at all.
“Real,” Aladdin says. “It cannot be real.” He stares at the Fool for a while.
“And I,” the Fool says at length, “I will go to bed then at noon.”
And the darkness closes upon them. For a while and as if spewed from the lamp.
* * *
Later, much later, understanding all of it at last but too late and with the Fool departed, Lear clutches Cordelia in her despair, lifts her dead light swaying toward the Moon, cries, “Break, heart, break!”—but all the curses and powers of Araby itself will not permit this. Cordelia lies spent in his embrace. He has done such things, has the old King now, as would be the terror of the earth.
Grand Tour
First slide, please
H
ERE’S STANFORD. FORTY-FIVE, FORTY-SIX,
definitely past his prime but still in the game, still pitching. In the depths of the night, touching the abyss of sleep, he thinks or dreams: I’d like to give this up, it’s all too much, there’s too little left for me to justify this endless, shriveled
hoping
. . . but daylight casts such thoughts to the west wind. Stanford hobbles to the shower, his head full of plans, possibilities, detached from all of this post-adolescent
tritesse
, or so he calls it. Five foot eleven, two hundred and seven pounds (this bothers him quite a bit, but he tells himself that it is not grossly excess, most of it is in his upper body and he will begin an exercise program very soon anyway), light beard, haunted eyes, fifty-seven thousand dollars in a money market account, eighty-six thousand in stocks and treasury accounts and (his ex-wife Irene knows nothing of this) four thousand dollars in silver quarters and dimes, smuggled away during that period when the pre-1965 coins were soaring on the collector’s or meltdown market. The separation agreement provided considerable alimony and child support, making such a joke of his income that it seemed ridiculous not to just keep the hundred and a half in easy reach since it was going out to Irene anyway almost as fast as he could shovel it in, but the four thousand dollars was his, his little sinking fund, Stanford liked to think, to hold out against eternity. Stunned eyes, sardonic face, hollow, interesting features, the face of a twentieth century man (
late
century, late millennium, on the cusp of grand and inexpressible change, except he could not quite say what) possessed of the paradigmatic American middle class plight but still trying to come to grips with it, that is Stanford’s self-conception. Middle age, isolation, divorce, alimony, disengaged cautious relations with a late-adolescent son and daughter who in those strange moments on the cusp of sleep Stanford cannot quite apprehend, cannot
see,
is not even sure of their names.
Observe Stanford then, doing the best that he can (or so he insists) in this difficult and perilous city on the trembling verge of great changes in the chronology and the millennium, all of the Biblical changes, the signs and portents with which to contend, and Irene’s rages when now and then the grief and sheer inequity of her condition overwhelms his forty-three-year-old ex-wife and she will call him (usually after another staggeringly absurd relationship has ended or has just barely begun) to berate him for the attrition of her own possibility and the extent of her philosophy. Stanford does something vague and (he himself calls it this) subterranean in the advertising business, not quite copywriting, not quite supervision, used to be copy chief, now is in charge of account relations, trying to salvage the state of collapsing relationships, keep the copy chief and subordinates happy in the face of collapsing client confidence, heavy contact work with the external departments of automobile or electronics companies, many expense account lunches, too many expense account dinners, troubles. Troubles of all kinds are not foreign to Stanford, who only wants to try to hold things together yet has begun to understand as he paces the spaces of his divorced man’s apartment, a three-room enjambed set of boxes on the riverfront on a high floor, that he had better moderate his posture and ambitions, just trust that it does not collapse spontaneously and wholly atop him. He dates women from the corporate offices, usually secretaries, promises them little, makes assertions that he will not fall in love with these glistening, nervous, preoccupied women of the telephone, yet often enough does, finds himself crying out in vague and desperate phrases at the peak or depths of his necessity. All of these relationships end badly, some quite early, some in the middle; very few have a decent and protracted end. Stanford could sue for marriage, could look for something more permanent. In this age of plague the concept of a bachelor’s existence seems as pitiable and archaic as the expeditions he used to take with the children, fifteen years ago, to the last of the amusement parks in this area: spin the wheels, eat the plaster of cotton candy, stumble through the funhouse, listening to the wind machine and attending to the rattle of tape-recorded chains in the background, but Stanford sees no alternative, sees no real prospects. Women over forty bore or terrify him with their refraction of his own coming collapse; younger women want to nest and procreate, Stanford is convinced, regardless of what lies of adventure they utter. One hundred and forty thousand dollars is not enough between him and the abyss, not when he has to cough up six hundred and ten to Irene every blasted week, regardless of his opinions on the matter, not when he takes home fourteen hundred and change out of which he has to finance his declining health, his declining years, diminished sense of possibility.
Stanford does not feel pity for himself, not even pathos, nor any grandiose sense as well; Stanford has been (he feels) in and out of too much trouble and limitation since the mid-nineteen forties to take anything except the end of the millennium seriously, but surging in or out of sleep, caught at that part of his life where he can neither construct defenses nor strip them but must simply confront (without the intervening walls of consciousness, of judgment), Stanford screams with regret, shrivels with fury, comes to shuddering and tendentious interface with the gasp and clutter of his life, the fullness of its insufficiency, the slivers which its furious power drill of decline sends straight to his foolish and shuddering heart. “Oh, love me!” he will cry to the secretaries or (occasional) junior account executives, caught in their random clutch, history battering at the door he has tried so determinedly to close, “Love me, love me true!” and so in and out to that source of all nakedness while he tries to avoid that more desperate knowledge conveyed by sleep.
The Album, page by page
Thus Stanford’s djinn, his familiar, his ornament of all desire. This intrusion of fantasy into Stanford’s life is neither calculated nor surreal; it simply occurs, as most of his life (he can now see in retrospect) has arrived without portent, as a juxtaposition that flowered into consequences.
“You have three wishes,” the djinn says to Stanford. “You may take them in the usual way, or you may combine them for a grand sequence of events; you may try small changes or you may try one great, transmogrifying lunge. The choice is yours,” the djinn says casually, glad at last to have someone sensible with whom to share his magic. It has, after all, been a long time since the djinn has been able to engage in conversation; there are whole annals of buried time here, and they are hardly to be annealed by Stanford’s fortuitous discovery of the bottle. Of which more may never be said, all of this being part of the jumbled artifact and casual detritus which Stanford thinks of as the sum of his life.
“That’s astonishing,” Stanford says. “I’ve never imagined anything like this. I can’t believe that this is happening. It must
not
be happening, I’ve gone over the edge. I didn’t think the partitions would stand for the rest of my life. I saw this all coming,” Stanford adds. “I knew I was heading for a total, a real crack-up. That Irene, she warned me. She wasn’t wrong—”
“Enough of this,” the djinn says. “You can go on this disbelieving way or you can come to grasp your opportunities. You were always sincerely interested in opportunities, Stanford; it led you straight to the ad racket instead of graduate study in Chaucer, which you felt was an alternative back there in 1971 when alternatives seemed to count. I advise you not to delay too much of this, however; the situation is fluid and I am apt to pass on or to decompose now into thin, thin air. So you had best assume your choices, seize the possibility so to speak.” The djinn, who has been sealed away too long to really be effective in social situations, fixes Stanford with intense, Middle Eastern eyes and says, “Disbelief of itself is not going to resolve the situation here.”
I should point out—evoking without further delay the first person which is crucial to any understanding of my functions—that
I
am the djinn at issue, that the events of this narrative, from the start, and will throughout, have been refracted through my own perspective. I cannot claim full access to Stanford’s consciousness, much of what I infer or state has come from his own confessions, my imperfect knowledge, and yet I can assume for the sake of this recollection a kind of omnipotence which, no less than Stanford’s reiterated hopes and platitudes, can be seen as central. Of my background, of my presence in the bottle, the difficult, riotous journey from the refinery to Stanford’s possession, and of the unstoppering of the bottle resulting in this collision . . . of all of this, perhaps, the less given, the better it will be, although Stanford himself has expressed at times a great interest in my background. Like any devoted member of the middle class, Stanford is fascinated by mysticism, seeks signs and wonders, is enthralled by portents; it is this and only this (he has felt) which could possibly change his life, his life otherwise being wholly and ruinously carved out by circumstance. But I am not interested in exploring a personal history here; I come to the situation with a good deal more chronology and experience than Stanford or anyone presently in his circle of experience and what good has it done me? What good has any of this done me? My circumstances have been pitiably limited for centuries and now, as the outcome of my own curse, my own assignation, I have been given the idiot task of proffering and executing wishes for a man too stunned or disbelieving to utter them. It is idiot’s work, after all, it is work as mindless as Stanford’s own duties which are to quell the apprehension of one client after the next that the work done by Stanford’s firm is utterly specious. The fulfillment of wishes! But what, after all, is left for Stanford and djinn alike as circumstances crawl to their unmerited but long-foreshadowed apocalypse, an apocalypse so soon to come, so needlessly spectacular in its essence. In that thunderous set of moments so long ago when I was created and sent out on the first of these silly and florid errands, I was given no more understanding of the situation than I have at present; the important thing is to entice Stanford into living out his fate so that I may move on. Or not move on as the case may be. It is difficult to apprehend or find some final posture for any of this, as one might well have inferred by this time. Inch by inch, episode by episode, I have crawled my way through the centuries and what, for all of these florid gifts so extravagantly given, have I been able to gain? Most of those centuries a neonate clutched in a bottle and then dialogues or disasters visited upon the Stanfords of their time. It would all be too much to grasp if I had a visionary intellect, but I do not. Djinns have no taste for metaphor, djinns merely execute as I have pointed out to Stanford already, without particular success or communion.
“Or so it might be said,” I offer.
“I don’t know,” Stanford says. “I have to think about all of this. I have to give it some thought. I mean, it is too much for me, being faced with decisions like this, and I a man not given to wishes, fantasies, or fairy tales of any sort. Do I have some time to decide? Or do I have to decide right now? This is very difficult for me,” Stanford says. “It is all I can do to handle the realistic details, and then you confront me with stuff like this. Well, I didn’t ask to be a loss leader,” he says pointlessly, and looks at the bare walls of his apartment. Maybe there is some clue flickering on those walls, handwriting or something like that. But there does not seem to be.
“A little time,” the djinn says. “We can understand that. My Masters and those who convey me, I mean. You can have a little time to work this out. But not much. Events pass on, there are priorities and mysteries beyond your own divining and if you do not express a wish, I’m going to be forced to express one
for you
. . . there is very little slippage or leakage in this practice, and we cannot allow the circumstances to pass.”
“I understand that,” Stanford says, with what he takes to be a hollow laugh but which—to the djinn whose experience with inference is far greater than Stanford’s, and who knows every crevice of the man’s despair and regret, pinned by this grim, unwanted apprehension—is allied to a sob. “I think I am coming to some profound understanding.” But of course he is not. What must be understood about Stanford and all his companions and compatriots in this time of diminution and loss, is that he understands nothing, he proceeds through his life and toward his end with the stunned and incipient dismay of a farm animal; he has the illusion of understanding, but the farm animal has the illusion of the farm. When, of course, it is only the plow, the barn, the whisk of the slaughterhouse ax which that animal can properly assess.
The first wish
Stanford’s first wish, as is so common among those of his age and condition, is for immortality, for the contemplation of an unending lifespan through which, he feels, he can pick the best, the finest and most apt of possibilities for his second and third wishes. Why someone in Stanford’s circumstances would opt for eternal life is beyond me, beyond the djinn, beyond the prophets, sages, visionaries or martyrs who look dimly upon this adventure from a grave and mourning distance, but that is of course irrelevant. The djinn nods assent, lifts a taloned hand, emits a theatrical puff of blue smoke, divided into the horns of Satan which is a bit of stage business which is always effective, never ignored. “You are now, for all intents and purposes, immortal,” the djinn says. “I would not recommend leaping from your patio here or going through the cities deliberately seeking deadly diseases, but within the expected limits of a life conventionally lived, you will stay in this condition forever or at least a reasonable simulacrum of forever. Stanford transmogrified! Stanford triumphant! Stanford eternal! as you might say. The usual conditions apply, of course, but they would have applied in any case, and there is no need whatsoever to discuss them.”