Shiva and Other Stories (12 page)

“How do I know that?” Stanford says. The djinn and Stanford are no longer in his apartment; they have adjourned to the riverfront walk, where for the past quarter of an hour they have been pacing in the odors of the late evening, the trash and oil slick of the harbor coming over them, and have been discussing issues such as this toward, at last, a definite outcome. The djinn has assumed for the purpose of this public appearance, the form of an adolescent girl, about five feet two, punk jewelry, punk hairdo and a slight nasality of address which reminds Stanford of his own daughter some years ago but in no pleasantly nostalgic fashion. The djinn can, of course, assume many forms or postures (not an unlimited number, however) in addition to the normal green dwarfism, but Stanford and he have both decided that a punk hairdo and tiny, suggested breasts under a T-shirt saying
GRATEFUL DEAD TOUR 1992
is best. “I mean, I don’t feel any different than I did two minutes or twenty days ago. The whole thing could be some kind of cosmic joke, some cheap scam worked out by the fates, not that I doubt that there is something substantial going on here because the shapechanging is very convincing. Also the effects with the smoke.”

“You’ll have to take it on faith,” the djinn says. “What otherwise could I tell you? Your era is an expression of faith: turn on the switch for the electricity, eat the frozen food trusting that it is not poisonous, accept the pledges of politicians that they will not kill you or level your possessions for the sheer sport of it. Go with strange women to their place or yours in the faith that they will not kill you or communicate a dreadful disease, act with the clients downtown as if their work and yours were not absurd and pointless. Accept the irrelevance of all Biblical prophecy to the coming closure of the millennium. Why should this be any different, then, why this expression of faith any more dramatic—or less dramatic—than the others? There comes a time when you must come free of all history, make that sheer leap into possibility. Or is this too complex for you, Dads; is this as evasive as acid rock or like what your middle-aged jollies are?” The djinn, noting fellow strollers and passersby taking some interest in this couple, has deliberately broadened and extended his speech patterns, has become more purely punk and filial in his appearance as he and Stanford have come close to those sightseers, then relaxes his grip and modifies his rhetoric as they pass on. “Anyway, that’s what the situation is.”

“I suppose so,” Stanford says. His cells do not seem to be bubbling and expanding with changed or charged health but then again, as has been pointed out, how would he know? Immortality cannot be proven other than by the absence of death
ever
and Stanford does not seem to be dying now. Except internally, but that is the same old story. “All right,” he says. “I’ll accept that I’m immortal, at least until I turn seventy and inch by inch feel it all sliding away. There’s no way to prove a negative, right? Now, how long do I have for the other two wishes?”

“Not too long, Dads,” the djinn says, squeezing Stanford’s arm again as two youths in motorcycle dress squeeze by on the narrow walkway, look at the couple with vagrant interest modulated only by their own abstract and imponderable concerns. “Maybe an afternoon and an evening. You wait and wait and wait in a bottle but eventually, when it comes, commission has to be real fast, like you understand? Sort of like sex where you can spend a week or a lifetime plotting, but when you pound toward the ultimate it takes maybe three or four seconds. But
what
a three or four seconds, right, Pops?” the punk-haired djinn says enthusiastically, making quite a convincing case of their huddled companionship although after all these centuries in old Persia or the dank spaces of the bottle, you wouldn’t put it past the djinn to be hopelessly out of date. It is one of the small surprises—oh, there have been many for Stanford in this voluble and disconcerting thirty-six hours—with which this relationship, this strange collision, have been filled.

Next slide, please

Here is Stanford entering the actress Lilly von Nabokov in her elegant, great bed in the elegant, grand house in Bel Aire where she has lived for these seven years, just about the same span since she legally changed her name to this expressive and resonant pseudonym and assumed full responsibility for her career. Stanford is ecstatic, he is incoherent, he cannot believe that this is happening while at the same time—at the precise and simultaneous moment of his connection—he
knows
that this is going on and that it is happening at a level of conviction and force which has characterized no other part of his life.

Here is Stanford expending his second wish, the frivolous wish, the wish that he knows is for pointless pleasure and with which he will indulge himself before embarking upon the serious and irrevocable business of the third wish. He has always wanted to have congress with a famous actress, to be actually entering the woman on the screen in ways which will enable him to feel, as he has never before been able to feel, that he is living his life.

Observe Stanford moan and dive! Observe—without erotic or prurient entanglement of any kind because this is research and anatomization, not pornography, not the recycling of helpless and self-limited fantasy—the true and solemn nature of his performance as again and again with closed eyes and open, torment and release, possibility and impossibility, he pays homage and adoration to Lilly von Nabokov in the only way he could have imagined at fourteen, in the only way he can imagine now. Dispense with the details which in any case would be predictable and unflattering to any sense of the true religiosity of this occasion, dispense with those graphics of form or motion which could only congeal the pure and terrible flight of sensibility in which Stanford, now coupled, would like to feel himself engaged. Upon the copious and accepting form of Lilly von Nabokov, Stanford pays what tribute he can, the full extent of his expenditure seemingly inadequate to the opportunity and surface presented, but still, considering his age and the endless disappointment which he feels has up to this point been his lot, a praiseworthy exercise of the flesh and spirit. Moving in and out of conjunction with the lovers, just as Stanford himself moves in and out of his own busy necessity, we can catch odd angles and strange perspectives, can perhaps understand the nature of life in the movies as nonobservers never could. The movies are both more and less than Stanford’s own experience over these years, his own perceptions of Lilly von Nabokov both greater and smaller than those with which he has indulged himself during those occasions of his maturity when for the most part he has liked to think of himself as a responsible adult.

The wish does not in any way blanket Lilly von Nabokov’s response, her own feelings on the situation. In his haste and desire Stanford did not specify other than to make sure that in no way could the act be regarded as rape . . . but I am pleased to say that the actress responds with some enthusiasm and utter concentration to Stanford’s not entirely clumsy flounderings, and is able in her own engaged fashion to approximate a climax no less satisfactory (in fact, truthfully,
more
satisfactory) than that which has already seized the enthralled Stanford and cast him away. Actresses are, after all, capable of this, their very happiness and occupation is concerned with the conversion of the imagined to the real. Also, they are easily persuaded and amenable in the way actors must be, in order to enact their ancient and honorable craft.

See Stanford sprawled upon her now, note the tangle or disentanglement of limbs! Stanford sings and mumbles into Lilly von Nabokov’s shell-pink and tenderly accommodating ear. The actress, reciprocally, suggests that they move apart because his weight, so pleasant in the moment, is oppressive in the aftermath. Stanford cooperates, turning slowly to one side, then when the actress gasps, to the other, rescuing his weight with an elbow and then dropping fully into the sheets. It is a splendid, grandiose bed, a dappled and accommodating room of which Stanford has seen all too little, so hasty was his departure to these quarters, so rapid was his entrance into Lilly von Nabokov’s diamond mine. Omitting specifics, the wish left the devices of fulfillment more or less to the djinn, and djinns are accommodating but unimaginative creatures, sometimes all too direct as a result of their lack of imagination. Stanford, however, can have few complaints; he surely cannot regret this second wish, the directness and force of his accommodation serving for him as refreshing contrast to the unknowable and imperceivable first wish, the results of which he will not be able to judge for a long time.

We leave Stanford to his post-coital mutterings and his discussions with Lilly von Nabokov. Perhaps they will couple again and perhaps they will not. Perhaps this momentary assignation will lead to further relationship and then again it may be otherwise. Stanford is strictly on his own here and although all of the usual limitations apply, the djinn has, in the most gentlemanly fashion, given him some options, some open space. Nothing less would show the proper consideration.

Life in a bottle

Life in a bottle—since the djinn is asked, he would be discourteous not to respond—is very much like death in a bottle; there is this limitless grayness, this oblivious press of time, the centuries grind by like moments, the moments are centuries, all is strange and inseparable as a kind of imagic association for an imponderable period. It is compressed and encroaching, but it is not humiliating; humiliation is—as Stanford himself has learned through Irene and his children—more a state of mind than an absolute. At last the decanting, the infusion of air, the sudden and vaulting rush toward the light! And then in the midst of various astounding effects which are attention-getting in the extreme, the djinn stands revealed to the fortunate agent of decanting, ready to do service for the usual price and conditions which, like so much else, need not be discussed here.

Life in a bottle is neither pleasant nor unpleasant; it is pointless and absurd in the way that twentieth century life for Stanford and so many of his tribesmen must be seen as pointless and absurd . . . but it is not more so. There are ancient and terrible oaths, huge, layered slabs of conviction, comparison, and mystery which overlay the occupant, that tend to reduce complaint to the level of acceptance. A djinn does not ask to be a djinn, this is so . . . but he does not ask for the reverse, either; this is all part of the levels of accommodation imposed. Did Stanford ask to be Stanford? But woke up once, undeterminable years ago to find that he
was
and the bottle of his containment no less real than that which entrapped the djinn. As has been noted before, we have no taste for metaphor; we are a concrete and settled race.

The excursion fare covers all charges

On the banks of the Seine, having for his third wish elected unlimited travel and displacement, Stanford allows himself small, greedy peeks at the river, so much the focus of artists in the last three centuries, looks covertly at women with parasols he would love to know but whose absence from his life he can now accept. Lilly von Nabokov may work out for him, then again she may not, it is all unsure. She has asked him to call her up when she has finished shooting her present project; a romantic adventure comedy, it is meant to wrap in three weeks. In Poland, Stanford has looked upon the rolling landscape, has admired the hearty Polish workers so earnest in their efforts and hopeful in their possibilities, he has mourned at the concentration camp memorials and has sought the comfort of simple Polish secretaries who in this country seem less technologized and not susceptible to his blandishments. In Seville, Stanford had gasped at the advent of machinery into that once-gentle landscape. In Peking, astonished by the sheer density of the bicycle and pedestrian traffic, he had tried to fathom the nature of cultural revolution. But now, in France, enacting as per the terms of his wish the instantaneous satisfactions and blurred transfers of a perpetual excursion rate, Stanford allows himself to settle against the high parapet, glances upon the river with longing and remorse, thinks of Seurat and Monet busily converting their own impressions so long ago. It is an experience both astonishing and humbling to Stanford, who in all these years until the decanting had traveled very little, had had little concourse with the world, had been compelled—as in the bed with the actress—to enact the most splendid or treacherous of his desires within a compass narrower than that of any seventh century saint.

Stanford closes his eyes, dreams of the compression and flurry of events in these few weeks since the miraculous shift of his life, opens his eyes as if expecting to see all of it taken from him: no Seine here, but his own riverfront in front of him, no memories of Lilly von Nabokov but only Irene’s shrieking and tumultuous telephoned complaints, no immortal life but only the first intimations of metastases in his lungs which will slowly strangle all memory, all possibility. But no, none of this happens: as he stares into the panorama before him it is still the Seine which he sees and the memories of his connection are full and rich within him, entirely too convincing to be other than real. He feels himself inflated with potential, remembers a sunrise in Acapulco two days ago which struck him as an experience close to metaphysical, remembers riotous events in a Tijuana cantina which fortunately he had been able to disengage from before the girl on the bartop had seen him or the active and curious donkey had poked a nose into Stanford’s gin. It has been very different, very different indeed for Stanford over these recent weeks and yet—the glassy and implacable sheen of the river would drive this insight into him most convincingly—he is still the man he has always known. Immortal, perhaps, consort of the world’s most famous and beautiful actress for certain, a perpetual wishful tourist now with his own travel agent and instant transfer . . . with all of this, he is the same old Stanford, the wistful and regretful guy he has come to know so well over these decades and he suspects that he always will be. Perhaps this is part of the paradigm of knowledge which these conditions have been created to place upon him: that three wishes or ten, that all fates or no fates will nonetheless cast Stanford always back upon himself. As if all signs and wonders, all meaning and portents, must eventually lead to this simple acceptance of the irretrievability of his life, the enormity of his regret. Stanford shrugs and turns from the river, trudges toward the hotel. Such thoughts are too weighty to have carried all this distance, although he was afflicted in Peking and Seville by epiphanies no less predictable and humiliating. He tries to think of this as little as possible, tries to ignore the women with parasols whom he dare not desire, since his three wishes thoughtlessly have included none of this.