It is I, she cried, who have spent long ages laboring on the construction of a machine without a purpose, or a purpose so farfetched, like glory, that the attempt to achieve it is self-defeating, and the machine is my life and the purpose which no machine could ever fulfill was the glory of capturing my father’s love. It is I, not a blacksmith or a teacher or a philosopher, who have failed to learn the difference between sickness and health, between pestilence and cure. In my unhappiness I persuaded myself that my father’s disdain for his daughter was the natural state of affairs, the healthy state, and my female nature was the plague. But here we are at the truth, and it is he who is sick and I who am well. What is the poison in his body? Maybe it’s himself.
She was sobbing by this time, and Geronimo the gardener was holding her, offering what puny human comfort he could to his nonhuman lover, caught up himself in profound existential confusion. What did it mean that he had ascended into the air and then softly descended as he had, beyond his own volition—that the earth had rejected him and then as mysteriously accepted him again—and that he found himself here in a world that had no meaning for him, meaning being a thing human beings constructed out of familiarity, out of what scraps they possessed of the known, like a jigsaw puzzle with many pieces missing. Meaning was the frame human beings placed around the chaos of being to give it shape; and here he was in a world no frame could contain, clinging to a supernatural stranger who had for a time posed as his departed wife, holding to her as desperately as she, now, held to him, drawn to him because he looked like a long-dead philosopher, each hoping that an alien surrogate could, by embracing them, allow them to believe that the world was good, this world or that world or simply the world in which two living things held one another and said the magic words.
I love you, said Mr. Geronimo.
I love you too, the Lightning Princess replied,
—and inside her distress about her father who was impossible to please, the king wearing the Simurgh Crown who was so invested in his kingship that his daughter had to call him Your Majesty, the king who had forgotten how to love, lay the memories of her own first loves, or at least of the first boys who loved her, and who were not, at that time, the feared dark jinn and her father’s deadly foes. In those days Zabardast had the sweet seriousness of the child magician, pulling with the gravest of faces the most improbable rabbits—insane chimera-rabbits and gryphon-rabbits that had never existed in nature—out of one of his wide selection of absurd fools’ caps. Zabardast with his nonstop patter, his jokes, his easy grin, was the one she liked best. Zumurrud Shah, always Zabardast’s muscle-bound opposite, tongue-tied, mumbling, made permanently bad-tempered by his own inarticulacy, was the more beautiful of the two, no doubt about that, a gorgeous dumb giant possessed of a sort of surly innocence, if that was the sort of thing you liked.
They were both crazy about her, of course, which was less of a problem in the jinn world than it would have been on earth, because of the jinn’s contempt for monogamy, but they competed for her favors just the same, Zumurrud brought her giant jewels from the giants’ jewelry hoards (he came from the wealthiest of the jinn dynasties, the builders of the palaces and aqueducts, the gazebos and terraced gardens that made Peristan what it was), while Zabardast the technician of magic, the artist of the occult, was also clownish by temperament and made her laugh, and she couldn’t remember, she probably had sex with them both, but if she did it didn’t leave much of an impression, and she began to turn her attention from these inadequate Fairyland suitors to the more tragic figures of men. When she abandoned them and broke the triangle of their infatuations, leaving them to their own devices, both Zumurrud and Zabardast began to change. Zabardast slowly became a darker, colder personality. He had loved her the most, she supposed, and so felt her loss most keenly. Something vengeful crept into his nature, to her surprise, something bitter and thwarted. Zumurrud, by contrast, moved on, away from love and towards manly things. As his beard grew longer he grew less interested in women and jewels and became obsessed with power. He became the leader and Zabardast the follower, though Zabardast continued to be the deeper thinker, in part because it would have been hard to be shallower. And so they remained friends until, during the War of the Worlds, they fell out once again.
Zumurrud, Zabardast and Aasmaan Peri the Lightning Princess: how long had their dalliance lasted? The jinn are poor judges of duration. In the jinn world time does not so much pass as remain. It is human beings who are the prisoners of clocks, their time being painfully short. Human beings are cloud-shadows, moving rapidly, gone with the wind, which was why Zabardast and Zumurrud were filled with disbelief when Dunia first took the name Dunia and adopted, along with the name, a human lover, and not a young one either: the philosopher Ibn Rushd. They approached her together, one last time, for her own sake. “If it’s intellect that excites you,” said Zabardast, “then I must remind you that in all of Peristan there is no greater scholar of the arts of sorcery than I.” “Is sorcery a branch of ethics?” she replied. “Are magic tricks related to reason?” “Right and wrong, and an interest in the rational, are human afflictions, like fleas on dogs,” said Zabardast. “The jinn act as they choose and do not bother with the banalities of good and evil. And the universe is irrational, as every jinn knows.” She turned her back on him then and forever and the bitterness which had been growing within him possessed him like a flood. “Your human, your philosopher, your wise fool,” Zumurrud scoffed. “You realize that he will die very soon, whereas I will live, if not forever, then for the next best length of time.” “You say that as if it’s a good thing,” she answered him. “But a year of Ibn Rushd is worth more to me than an eternity of you.”
After that they were her enemies, and, because of the humiliation of being rejected in favor of a human being who, like a mayfly, lived for a day and was then snuffed out forever, they had new reasons for hating the human race,
—and while she was remembering her youth, Mr. Geronimo found his way within the story of her youthful flirtations into the memory of his one true love, Ella Elfenbein his beautiful chatterbox, kind to all comers, proud of her body, and more in love with her father Bento than with him, he sometimes thought. She called Bento Elfenbein five times an hour every day until his last day, and in every call she used the words I love you as a way of saying hello and goodbye to him. After Bento died and not until then she started doing the same when she called Geronimo, you’re my everything, she said, then and not until then. It was ridiculous to be jealous of a daughter’s love for her brilliant, rakish, slightly crooked father with his joker’s smile like a happy fiend constantly finding a way to outsmart the Batman, but sometimes I couldn’t help it, Mr. Geronimo admitted to himself, even now he couldn’t help it, she even found a way to die just as Bento had died, she found her way to a lightning bolt just like his.
And what am I doing now, he asked himself, I’m holding in my arms a supernatural creature who is the fairy queen of the thunderbolt, the possessor and incarnation of the power that murdered my beloved, and I’m murmuring words of love into her ear, as if I’m allowing myself to love what killed my wife, to whisper I love you as hello and goodbye into the queen of what destroyed Ella, and what does that say about me, what does that mean, who am I. Her ear by the way as lacking in lobe as my own. An ancient creature out of fantasy who says she’s my distant ancestor, get a grip, he told himself, you’re lost in illusion, your feet may be back on the ground but now your head’s far, far up in the clouds. But even as he admonished himself he felt Ella fading, felt her slipping towards nothingness, while the warm body in his arms became more solidly real, even if he knew it was made of smoke.
He realized that he did not feel well. His heart pounded in his chest and the rarefied air of Mount Qâf made him light-headed; he was nursing what felt like an altitude headache. His thoughts turned to his lost trade, which felt more and more like a lost self, and to La Incoerenza, so beautiful until the storm came, he remembered the dig
ging, the weeding, the planting of seeds, the trimming of hedgerows, the battle against the groundhogs who ate the rhododendrons, the victory over the tree parasites, the building of the labyrinth, stone on stone, the thick sweat on his brow, the happy ache in his muscles, the days of good work in sun and rain and frost, summer and winter, heat on heat, snow on snow, the thousand acres and one acre, the drowned river, the hill where his wife lay under the rippling grass. He wanted to turn back the clock to that time of innocence, before thunderbolts and strangenesses broke the world, and he understood that what ailed him was homesickness.
He sickened for his home lost both in space and time. Home too was now estranged, and needed to be fixed. Blue Yasmeen and Sister Allbee, Oliver Oldcastle and the Lady Philosopher, had been left hanging in a stairwell at The Bagdad-without-an-h, in suspended animation, and that picture needed to start moving again. Two of those four he cared about and two were foes but all four deserved a cure, deserved to be unstranged, as did the city, the country and the whole world of men. This Fairyland of curved palaces defended by sheets of lightning, this fable of love-sick jinn, dying kings and magic boxes unspooling their stories in the tricky hands of spies, this was not for him. He was a denizen of the lower world and had had enough of fabulous heights.
As for us, looking back at him, seeing him as if from a great distance, held there in a motionless tableau of three figures, lost in fantasy: it is hard for us too to see him clearly there amidst the cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces. We too need him back on earth, himself and his new beloved, fairy though she be. Their love story, and this was, even if only briefly, their love story, only makes sense to us here below. There, above, it’s an airiness, as insubstantial as a dream. Their true love story, the one that has meaning for us and weight, comes wrapped up in a war. For our future places too, in that past time, had been made strange, and we know, we who come after and reflect, that we could not be who we are or lead the lives we live had these two not fallen back to earth to make things right, or as right as things can ever be, if indeed our time is right, as we say it is, if it be not simply a different kind of wrong.
And by this time the Chinese box was peeling crazily, and as each layer fell away a new voice told a new tale, none of the tales finished because the box inevitably found a new story inside each unfinished one, until it seemed that digression was the true principle of the universe, that the only real subject was the way the subject kept changing, and how could anyone live in a crazy situation in which nothing remained the same for five minutes and no narrative was ever driven through to its conclusion, there could be no meaning in such an environment, only absurdity, the unmeaningness that was the only sort of meaning anyone could hold on to. So here at one moment was the tale of the city whose people stopped believing in money, they went right on believing in God and country because those stories made sense but these scraps of paper and plastic cards were obviously valueless; and at the next moment inside that story there began (but did not end) the story of Mr. X who woke up one day and began, for no reason at all, to speak a new language that nobody understood, and the language began to change his character, he had always been a sullen fellow but the less comprehensible his words were, the more voluble he became, gesticulating and laughing, so that people liked him a lot better than they did when they had followed what he was saying; and just as that was getting interesting another layer peeled off and the story changed again,
and we, remembering, see in our minds’ eyes the tableau unfreeze, a starburst of parrots exploding from the palace balcony at the marble courtyard’s edge, the scent of white lilies on the breeze rippling the princess’s garments, and somewhere in the distance the sweet mourning of a wooden flute. We see her jerk away from Mr. Geronimo while pointing at the Chinese box unspooling on its table, and then fall to the floor with her hands over her ears and Omar the spy, too, falling, his body jerked by strong spasms, while Geronimo Manezes hears nothing, feels nothing, sees only the jinn and the jinnia in convulsions on the palace floor, and this is where, according to our histories, he showed the presence of mind on which the future hinged, our future as well as his own, snatching up the Chinese box and running with it to the balcony overlooking the slopes of Qâf and throwing the lethal object with all his strength into the high empty air.
After a moment Dunia and Omar recovered and rose from the floor. Thank you, she said to Mr. Geronimo. You saved our lives and we are in your debt.
The jinn can be formal at such moments. It is their way. Do a service for a jinni or jinnia and he or she owes you service in return. In these matters, even with lovers, the behavior of the jinn is scrupulously correct. Dunia and Omar may even have bowed to Geronimo Manezes, for that would be the correct ritualistic gesture, but on this subject the records are silent. If they had, he, being the strong silent type, would have been embarrassed by their display.
I know what the spell is now, she said. Let’s go quickly to my father and I will try to undo it.
No sooner had the words left her lips than they heard the loud noise.
At the last moment of his life the lord of Qâf opened his eyes and in his final delirium demanded to see a book that had never been written, and after that immediately began to recite its invisible contents as if he were reading it aloud. It was an account of the posthumous quarrel between the philosophers Ghazali and Ibn Rushd, reignited long after their deaths by the revivifying actions of the jinn Zumurrud and Shahpal’s own daughter, the Princess Aasmaan Peri, a.k.a. Skyfairy, Dunia, and the Lightning Princess. Zumurrud the powerful giant who had awakened Ghazali in his grave was Shahpal’s enemy and far beyond his reach, but the knowledge that his daughter too had meddled with matters of life and death, which he acquired from the words magically emanating from his own mouth, caused the old monarch in his terminal moments to utter a roar of disapproval so magnificent that the tapestries in his bedchamber fell from the walls and a crack appeared in the marble floor that ran like a wriggling snake all the way from his bedside to the princess’s feet and told her that the end had come. She flew to her father along the length of the crack as fast as she could go, leaving Geronimo Manezes far behind, and by the time he reached the royal bedchamber she was screaming the counter-spell as loudly as she could into her father’s ear, but it was too late.
The master of Mount Qâf had left Peristan forever. The Simurgh rose up from its place on the king’s bedpost and burst into flames. The courtiers in the chamber of death, not one of whom had ever seen the death of any jinn before, let alone the passing of their king, fell into attitudes of mourning, and there was undoubtedly much rending of garments and tearing of hair, but in spite of their careful attention to their dutiful ululations and chest beatings they did not fail to mention to their new queen that it was Shahpal’s discovery of her misdeed that had finally broken his heart. She had raised a spirit from the grave, an action far beyond the permitted boundaries of jinn activity, and while it proved her to be a jinnia of rare and formidable power it was also profoundly sinful, and the knowledge of her grievous sin had been the last straw that ended Shahpal’s life. So his death was somewhat her fault, the courtiers obsequiously wanted her to know, while of course bowing, genuflecting, pressing their foreheads to the floor, and giving her all the honor due to their new monarch, yes, they murmured, and the proof of her responsibility was the crack in the floor which had sped without pause for reflection towards her guilty feet.
Omar the Ayyar defended her and pointed to her risking of her own life to discover the nature of the poisonous spell embedded in the Chinese box and her rush to the king’s bedside to save his life, and of course everyone agreed that yes, that had been heroic, but their eyes were shifty and the awkwardness of their bodies showed their lack of conviction, because after all, the king was dead, so she had failed, that was the bottom line, she had failed in this as well. And as the word of the king’s death rustled outwards from the deathbed into the avenues and gullies of Qâf, as it was bruited up and down
the slopes of the mountain kingdom, the whisper of her guilt attached itself to the news, never, of course, causing any to express the slightest doubt regarding her claim to the succession, but the whispers tarnished her nonetheless, the whispers like vocal mud, and the mud sticking, as mud always does; and as the crowds of her subjects who had loved her father almost as much as she had gathered outside the palace walls, she could hear with her powerful jinnia hearing the sound, mixed up in the keening sobs of her people, of a small but significant number, we must regretfully admit, of boos.
She was calm. She neither weakened nor wept. What she felt about her father’s last moments she kept to herself and showed to no one. From a balcony of the palace she addressed the people of Qâf. In her cupped palms were the gathered ashes of the Simurgh and as she blew them out into the crowd they gathered themselves into the shape of the mighty bird and burst back into squawking magnificent life. With the magic bird on her shoulder and the Simurgh Crown on her head, she commanded their respect and the whispers ceased. She made her vow to her people. Death had entered Peristan, and death would have death. She would not rest until her father’s killers were no more. Zumurrud Shah and his cohorts, Zabardast, Ra’im Blood-Drinker and Shining Ruby, would be removed forever from the Two Worlds. Thus the War of the Worlds would end and peace return above and below.
This, she swore. Then she screamed.
Geronimo Manezes felt the scream as a hammer blow to the head and passed out cold. It had been many millennia since anyone in either of the Two Worlds had heard the scream of the Skyfairy. It was so loud that it filled the entire jinn world with sound and penetrated also into the world below where Zumurrud and his three cohorts heard it and understood that it was a declaration of war. Death had come into the jinn world and before the war was over more of the jinn would die.