Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Zumurrud the Great and His Three Companions

The Grand Ifrit Zumurrud Shah, on whose head was a golden crown taken from the head of a prince he had accidentally or not so accidentally decapitated once upon a time, had at a certain point in history become the philosopher Ghazali’s personal jinni: a terrifying entity whose name even Dunia the jinnia had been afraid to utter. Ghazali was not, however, the jinni’s master. The words master and servant are inappropriate when applied to the relationship between human beings and the jinn, for any service a jinni may perform for a human being is a boon rather than evidence of enslavement, an act of generosity, or, in the case of a jinni liberated from some sort of trap, a lamp, for example, a gesture of gratitude. The story goes that Ghazali had in fact freed Zumurrud Shah from just such a trap, a blue bottle in which a forgotten sorcerer had trapped him. Long, long ago, wandering in the streets of his native Tus, Ghazali had spotted the opaque bottle lying abandoned in the heaps of trash which unfortunately disfigured that old town of salmon minarets and enigmatic walls, and had intuited at once, as philosophers with the proper training are able to intuit, the presence of a captive spirit therein. He scooped up the bottle casually, but with the guilty expression of a novice burglar, and pressing his lips against the royal blue glass whispered a little too loudly the occult incantation that is the required opening for all dialogues with captured jinn:

Jinni great and jinni grand,

Now I hold you in my hand.

Tell me ere I set you free

What reward you’ll offer me.

A miniaturized jinni speaking through glass sounds like a talking mouse in a cartoon. Many human beings have been deceived by this feeble squeakety-squeak into swallowing the poisoned pill the captured jinni will invariably offer them. Ghazali was made of sterner stuff. He heard the jinni out:

Never bargain. Let me go.

Weak men bargain. Strong men know

Those who freely set me free

Evermore will blessed be.

Ghazali knew the proper retort to this childish deception.

Well I know your tribe and kin!

Make your promise while you’re in!

Without a sacred vow to keep

Only fool lets jinni leap.

Zumurrud Shah, knowing he had little choice, offered the usual three-wishes formula. Ghazali replied, sealing the contract, accepting in words that deviated somewhat from the usual formula.

Any time, neath any moon,

I may ask you for a boon.

Any time, these one two three

Swiftly will fulfillèd be.

Released, expanding at once to his full immensity, the jinni was struck by two things that marked out Ghazali as a most unusual mortal. Firstly, he did not quail. Quailing — as young Jimmy Kapoor was to discover centuries later — was not only de rigueur, it was also, in most cases, the instinctive reaction to the sight of Zumurrud in his dark glory. However, “this mortal,” the Grand Ifrit noted with some perplexity, “quaileth not.” That was firstly. And secondly, he didn’t ask for something right away! That was unprecedented. Infinite wealth, a bigger sexual organ, unlimited power … these wishes were at the top of any jinni’s list of the top demands of the human male. The human male wishing mind was surprisingly unimaginative. But no wish? The deferral of all three wishes? That was almost indecent. “You ask for nothing?” Zumurrud Shah roared. “Nothing is a thing I cannot give.” Ghazali inclined his philosopher’s head and put a hand around his chin. “I see that you give to nothing the quality of a thing. Nothing is the thing that cannot be given precisely because it is not a thing, yet in your view it’s not-thingness is itself a form of thingness. This, perhaps, we may discuss. Understand, jinni, that I am a man of few personal needs. I need neither infinite wealth, nor a bigger sexual organ, nor unlimited power. However, the time may come when I ask for some larger service. I’ll let you know. In the meantime, be off. You’re free to go.”

“When will this time come?” Zumurrud Shah demanded. “I’m going to be busy, you know. After being stuck in that bottle for so long there are many things to be done.”

“The time will come when it’s time,” Ghazali said, infuriatingly, and turned away to his book. “I spit upon all philosophers,” Zumurrud Shah told him, “also artists, and the rest of humanity as well,” and he whirled himself into a funnel of rage, and was gone. And then time passed, years passed, decades passed, and Ghazali was dead, and with him died the contract, or so the jinni believed. And the slits between the world silted up, and closed, and Zumurrud in Peristan which is Fairyland forgot for a time all about the world of men, all about the man who refused to make a wish; and centuries passed, and a new millennium began, and the seals which separated the worlds began to break, and then boom! Here he was again in the world of these feeble beings, and suddenly there was a voice in his head commanding his presence, the voice of a dead man, the voice of dust, of less than dust, the voice of the void where the dust of the dead man had been, a void that was somehow animated, somehow possessed of the sensibility of the dead man, a void that was ordering him to present himself to be told its first great wish. And he, having no option, being bound by the contract, even though he intended to argue that the contract did not apply posthumously, he remembered Ghazali’s unusual language, any time, neath any moon, any time these one two three, and he knew that as he had forgotten to insert a death clause (a detail he should make it a point to remember if at any point in the future he needed to grant the three-wishes contract again!), the obligation still lay upon him like a shroud, and he had to do whatever the void desired.

He remembered and summoned up in a rush all his unassuaged rage, the wrath of a Grand Ifrit who has spent half an eternity bottled up in blue, and conceived the desire to be avenged against the entire species from which his captor came. He would rid himself of this puny obligation to a dead man, and then it would be time for vengeance. This, he swore.

Regarding the rage of Zumurrud Shah: in the sixteenth century a group of brilliant Indian court artists in the employ of the Grand Mughal, Akbar the Great, had belittled and offended him. Four hundred and forty years ago, give or take, he appeared several times in the Hamzanama sequence of paintings depicting the adventures of the hero Hamza. Here Zumurrud is — here in this picture! — with his cronies, Ra’im Blood-Drinker and Shining Ruby, plotting their next evil move. Whisper whisper cackle hiss. An orange and white canopy above them, and behind them a mountain made of puffy boulders like stone clouds. Men with long-horned bullocks kneel, swearing fealty, or maybe just swearing, because Zumurrud Shah in person is a sight scary enough to make good men use bad language. He is a monster, is a terror, is a giant, ten times bigger than anyone else and twenty times nastier. Light skin, long black beard, ear-to-ear grin. A mouthful of man-eater teeth, mordant as Goya’s Saturn. And yet the painting slights him. Why? Because it depicts him as a mortal. A giant, certainly, but no jinni. Blood and flesh, not smokeless fire. Quite an insult to hand a Grand Ifrit.

(And, as events would show, he was not the Grand Ifrit with a taste for human flesh.)

In the paintings made by the brilliant artists assembled at Akbar’s jeweled court, there are several images of horrible Zumurrud Shah, but few that show him triumphant. Most often he is the defeated opponent of Hamza, the semi-mythical hero. Here he is along with his soldiers fleeing from Hamza’s army on his famous flying urns. Here, ignominiously, he has fallen into a hole dug by some gardeners to catch people who have been robbing their fruit groves, and is being badly beaten by the angry horticulturists. In their eagerness to glorify Hamza the warrior — and, through his fictional figure, the real-life emperor-hero who commissioned the pictures — the artists give Zumurrud Shah a hard time. He’s big, but a boob. Even the magic of the airborne urns is not his; they are sent to fly him to safety from Hamza’s attacks by his friend the sorcerer Zabardast. This Zabardast, which is to say “Awesome,” is and was like Zumurrud Shah one of the mightiest members of the tribe of the dark jinn; a sorcerer, yes, but one with special gifts regarding levitation. (And snakes.) And had their true nature been revealed by the Mughal court artists, they would have given Hamza a far tougher fight than he actually got.

That was one thing. But even if the Mughal painters had not misrepresented him Zumurrud Shah would still have been the enemy of the human race because of his contempt for human character. It was as if he took the complexity of human beings as a personal affront, the maddening inconsistency of human beings, their contradictions which they made no attempt to wipe out or reconcile, their mixture of idealism and concupiscence, grandeur and pettiness, truth and lies. They were not to be taken seriously any more than a cockroach deserves serious consideration. At best they were toys; and he was as close as any of them would ever get to a wanton god, and he would, if he so chose, kill them for his sport. In other words, even if the philosopher Ghazali had not unleashed him upon the unsuspecting world, he would have unleashed himself upon it. His inclination was in accordance with his instructions. But the instructions from the dead philosopher were clear.

“Instill fear,” Ghazali told him. “Only fear will move sinful Man towards God. Fear is a part of God, in the sense that it is that feeble creature Man’s appropriate response to the infinite power and punitive nature of the Almighty. One may say that fear is the echo of God, and wherever that echo is heard men fall to their knees and cry mercy. In some parts of the earth, God is already feared. Don’t bother about those regions. Go where Man’s pride is swollen, where Man believes himself to be godlike, lay waste his arsenals and fleshpots, his temples of technology, knowledge and wealth. Go also to those sentimental locations where it is said that God is love. Go and show them the truth.”

“I don’t have to agree with you about God,” replied Zumurrud Shah, “about his nature or even his existence. That is not and never will be my business. In Fairyland we do not speak of religion, and our daily life there is utterly alien to life on earth, and, if I may say so, far superior. I can tell that even in death you are a censorious prude, so I will not go into details, though they are juicy. At any rate, philosophy is a subject of no interest except to bores, and theology is philosophy’s more tedious cousin. I’ll leave such soporific matters to you in your dusty grave. But as to your wish, I not only accept it as my command. It will be my pleasure to comply. With the proviso that, as you are in fact asking for a series of acts, this will redeem the entirety of my three-wishes pledge.”

“Agreed,” the void that was Ghazali replied. If the dead could giggle with delight then the dead philosopher would have chortled with glee. The jinni perceived this. (Jinn can be perceptive at times.) “Why so mirthful?” he inquired. “Unleashing chaos upon the unsuspecting world is not, or is it, a joke.”

Ghazali was thinking of Ibn Rushd. “My adversary in thought,” he told Zumurrud Shah, “is a poor fool who is convinced that with the passage of time human beings will turn from faith to reason, in spite of all the inadequacies of the rational mind. I, obviously, am of a different mind. I have triumphed over him many times, yet our argument continues. And it is a fine thing in a battle of wits to be in possession of a secret weapon to fire, an ace in the hole to play, a trump card to use at an opportune time. In this particular case, mighty Zumurrud, you are that trump. I relish the fool’s imminent discomfiture and his further, inevitable defeat.”

“Philosophers are children,” the jinni said. “And I’ve never liked children myself.”

He departed in scorn. But the time would come when he returned to Ghazali, to listen to what the dead man’s dust had to say. The time would come when he was less contemptuous of religion, and of God.

A note regarding Zabardast. He too had once been captured by a mortal sorceress, which was even more humiliating to him than imprisonment by a male wizard would have been. It is said by those who study such matters that this may have been the same witch spoken of in the Matter of Britain, the vile Morgana le Fay, who lay with her brother between incestuous sheets and seized, also, the wizard Merlin, sealing him in a crystal cave. It’s a story we have heard from certain storytellers. We cannot say if it’s true. Nor is it recorded how he escaped. However, what is known is that Zabardast carried in his heart a fury towards the human race at least the equal of Zumurrud’s. But Zumurrud’s was a hot anger. Zabardast’s ire was cold as polar ice.

In those days, the days of the strangenesses and the War of the Worlds that followed them, the president of the United States was an unusually intelligent man, eloquent, thoughtful, subtle, measured in word and deed, a good dancer (though not as good as his wife), slow to anger, quick to smile, a religious man who also thought of himself as a man of reasoned action, handsome (if a little jug-eared), at ease in his own body like a reborn Sinatra (though reluctant to croon), and color-blind. He was practical, pragmatic, and had his feet firmly planted on the ground. Consequently he was utterly incapable of responding appropriately to the challenge flung down by Zumurrud the Great, which was surreal, whimsical and monstrous. As has already been mentioned, Zumurrud did not attack alone, but came in force, accompanied by Zabardast the Sorcerer, Shining Ruby the Possessor of Souls, and Ra’im the Blood-Drinker, he of the sharply serrated tongue.

Ra’im was prominently involved in the first assaults. He was a nocturnal metamorph, in his normal daytime state a small, nondescript, dark-complexioned, fat-assed jinni, but able, when he could be persuaded to rouse himself from his habitual arrack-induced torpor, to mutate under cover of darkness into enormous, long-fanged beasts of land, sea and air, female as well as male, all thirsting for human or animal blood. It is probable that this Jekyll-and-Hyde jinni, one of the first of such spirits to show up in the historical record, and the cause of much terror wherever he appeared, was the single entity responsible for all the vampire stories in the world, the legend of the Gaki of Japan, a blood-drinking corpse that could take the shape of living men and women, and animals too, the Aswang of the Philippines with its long tubular tongue, who often took female form and preferred to suck the blood of children, the Irish Dearg-Due, the German Alp, the Polish Upier with its tongue of barbs, a vile creature who sleeps in a blood-bath, and, of course, the Transylvanian vampire Vlad Dracul, which is to say “dragon,” about whom most readers and filmgoers are already somewhat (albeit mostly inaccurately) informed. At the beginning of the War of the Worlds, Ra’im took to the water, and one lightless afternoon he arose as a giant sea-monster from the winter harbor and swallowed the Staten Island Ferry. A tide of horror spread across the city and beyond and the president went on TV to calm the nation’s fears. That night even this most articulate of chief executives looked ashen and at a loss; his familiar nostrums, we will not sleep until, those responsible will be, you harm the United States of America at your peril, make no mistake, my fellow Americans, this crime will be avenged, sounded hollow and impotent. The president had no weapons that could deal with this attacker. He had become a president of empty words. As many of them are, as they all have been, for so very, very long. But we had expected better of him.

As for Shining Ruby, the second of Zumurrud’s three mighty cohorts, he was, in his own opinion, the greatest of the whispering jinn (although it must be said that the sorcerer Zabardast considered himself to be far superior; the egotism and competitiveness of the great jinn cannot be overemphasized). Shining Ruby’s forte was to make trouble by first whispering against a man’s heart and then entering his body, subduing his will, and forcing him into acts either dreadful or humiliating or revelatory or all of those at once. At first, when Daniel Aroni, the über-boss of the world’s most powerful nongovernmental financial institution, began to talk like a crazy man, we did not guess at the presence of Shining Ruby inside him, did not grasp that he was quite literally behaving like a man possessed. It was only when Ruby released “Mac” Aroni’s body after four days of possession, leaving him a poor husk of a man sprawled like a broken puppet on the finely carpeted floor of the great lobby in the sky of his corporate headquarters, that we understood. The jinni, a long skinny fellow so slender that he disappeared when he turned sideways, pranced and capered around the fallen financial titan. “All the money in the world,” cried the jinni, “will not be too much. All the gold, men, in your sacks will not save you from my clutch.” Traders on the six immense trading floors of the world’s most powerful nongovernmental financial organization wept copiously and shivered with fear as the image of their unconscious leader shimmered like an intimation of doom on hundreds of giant high-definition flat-screen monitors. Tasked with helping Zumurrud Shah to grant the wishes of the dead philosopher, Shining Ruby had done an excellent job.

Ever since the death of his friend Seth Oldville at the hands of the still-missing Teresa Saca Cuartos, Daniel “Mac” Aroni had entered a dark place. Life was hard and dealt men many blows and a strong man could take those eventualities on the chin and move on. He thought of himself as a strong man, a man with two fists, who could punch his weight, and there were seven thousand five hundred people in a glass tower who needed him to be that guy, the enforcer, the creator and defender of the world as his employees wanted it to be. He made the picture of the world and the world lived in it. That was his job. Along the way there were bumps in the road. The infidelity of women on the hustle, the promiscuous nature of powerful men exposed in the public prints, revelations of corrupt business dealings by close associates, cancer, car crashes at speed, skiing deaths on off-piste black slopes, coronaries, suicides, the aggression of rivals and underlings on the make, the excessive manipulation of public servants for personal gain. He shrugged at these things. They went with the territory. If somebody had to take the fall, somebody took the fall. Even taking the fall could be a scam. Kim Novak in Vertigo, she took the fall twice, the second time for real. This crap happened. Happened all the time.

He was aware that the way things really were was far different than most people believed. The world a wilder, more feral, more abnormal environment than ordinary civilians were able to accept. Ordinary civilians lived in a state of innocence, veiling their eyes against the truth. The world unveiled would scare them, destroy their moral certainties, lead to losses of nerve or retreats into religion or drink. The world not just as it was but as he had made it. He lived in that picture of the world and could handle it, knew the levers and engines of it, the strings and keys, the buttons to push and the ones to avoid pushing. The real world which he created and controlled. If it was a rough ride, that was okay. He was a rough rider among and above seven and a half thousand of the same. Many, maybe most of the rough riders in his employ liked to live large, they went for the Casa Dragones tequila, the high-end girls, the ostentation. He did not live in that way but he stayed in shape, on the judo mat he was as feared as he was in the boardroom, and he could bench-press more weight than guys half his age, the guys who didn’t have windows yet, who worked in the interior space of the tower like members of an A-list typing pool, the guys in the belly of his beast. Youth was not the exclusive preserve of the young anymore. “Mac” Aroni did golf, tennis, the old guy things, but then, just to throw in a curve ball, he had made himself a beach boy, a surfing master, he had gone in search of the Yodas of the big wave and learned their ways and he got his kicks, now, gleaming the cube. He had no need to beat his chest like Weissmuller’s Tarzan. He could handle whatever came his way. He was the big ape. He was the king of the apes.

But what happened to Seth Oldville was different. That eventuality had crossed a line. Lightning from a woman’s fingertips. That did not accord with the rules of his universe; and if somebody else was redrawing the picture of how things were, then he needed to have a word with that person, to reason with that person, to make that person understand that it was not for others to alter the laws of possibility. This was at first offensive to him, an angering thing, and then as the phenomena multiplied he sank into a thunderous silence, his neck withdrawing into his collar so that his bull head sat right on his shoulders like a toad’s. In the tower overlooking the river, men looked out at the Statue of Liberty and the empty harbor, the harbor all boats had fled since the eating of the ferryboat and its passengers, and listening to the unnatural silence of the water they understood that it echoed Aroni’s equally unaccustomed muteness. Something bad was bubbling to the surface, and then Aroni began to speak, and the bad thing was out in the open, and it was worse than the seven and a half thousand could have imagined.

This was what Daniel “Mac” Aroni said and did under the power of the dark jinn. On the first day of his possession he informed the Wall Street Journal that he and his corporation were involved in a global conspiracy, and that their partners were the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve. On the second day, with the media furore boiling up around him, he was on Bloomberg giving details of the first prong of the conspirators’ strategy, which was “the destruction of America’s domestic economy through the introduction of derivative debt which is sixteen times greater than the world’s GDP. This I can say we already accomplished,” he said proudly, “proved by the fact that America now has more workers on welfare, 101 million, as opposed to actual full-time workers—97 million.” On day three, with demands for his resignation or summary dismissal being made on every side, he appeared on the liberally inclined MSNBC network to speak of “setting the chessboard in such a fashion that World War III becomes a one hundred percent sure thing.” Gasps were audible in the studio as he added, “This we have near completion. The U.S. and Israel we got cranking up to go to war with China and Russia for two reasons, apparent and actual, numero uno, the apparent cause, that’s Syria and Iran, and numero two, the actual, being the preservation of the value of the petrodollar.” On day four, he addressed his own staff, looking unshaven and wild-haired and very much like a man who hadn’t slept in a bed for several nights, and with his eyes lolling lazily from side to side asked for their support, whispering madly into his handheld microphone, “Soon we will initiate a false-flag event which will culminate in the abolition of the presidency, the imposition of martial law and the elimination of all opposition to the coming apocalypse. What you get in the endgame is a strongman world government accompanied by a one-world economic system. This is the outcome we all want, am I correct? I say, do I have this right?”

He was frightening his audience. His employees began drifting away from him, mushroom clouds in their eyes, mourning the destruction of their hopes of country club memberships and good marriages. They were seeing the deaths of their children and the annihilation of their homes, and even before any of that came to pass, the collapse of this great institution as the inevitable hurricane of umbrage burst upon it, and the consequent termination of their wealth. But before they could leave the scene of Daniel Aroni’s meltdown they saw the dark jinni Shining Ruby emerge from his crumpling body crowing in triumph as the kingpin fell. The sight of a supernatural being stopped many of them in their tracks while others ran screaming for the stairs. Shining Ruby laughing in their faces induced seizures in some traders and there were two terminal heart failures and for all who survived it was a sign — just as Seth Oldville’s death had been for his friend “Mac” Aroni — that everything they had worked for had just come to an end and they were living, now, on somebody else’s dread unspeakable terms. And had Aroni been uttering the devil-words this possessor-devil had put in his mouth, or did the real devilry of the creature lie in the fact that he had made the great man reveal his insane secrets? In which case … was the end of the world actually nigh? Shining Ruby certainly wanted them to think so. “Ba-boom ka-boom!” he cried joyfully, turning sideways and vanishing. “Prepare to meet thy doom doo-doom!”

For a long time the sorcerer Zabardast had looked the way a sorcerer should look: the long beard, the high hat, the staff. The sorcerer to whom Mickey Mouse was apprenticed, Gandalf the Grey, and Zabardast would all have recognized kindred spirits in one another. However, Zabardast was conscious of his image and, now that the seals were broken and the slits between the worlds had reopened, now that the jump gate to a wormhole to Peristan stood open day and night in Jackson Heights, he studied films and magazines to keep his look relevant. Above all others he liked the edginess of Jet Li falling in love with a thousand-year-old white snake. He wished briefly that he looked like Jet Li, and for a time he considered a radical modernization of his look, and putting on the Buddhist monk’s white robe and necklace of beads and shaving his head like a chopsocky movie hero. In the end he rejected this change. Act your age, he told himself. He didn’t want to look like a kung fu star after all. He wanted to look like a god.

Levitation — antigravity — was Zabardast’s specialty. The creator of the famous flying urns which served many jinn as their personal private aircraft, he had also provided enchanted brooms, magicked slippers, and even self-raising hats to witches who wanted to fly, and had amassed a considerable fortune in gold and jewels by providing these services. The well-known and much-documented fascination of the jinn for rare metals and precious stones has its origins, according to the greatest scholars, in the wild and incessant orgies conducted in Fairyland, and the love of many jinnias for all that glitters and gleams. Lying on beds of gold, heavily ornamented, their hair, ankles, necks and waists bedecked with gemstones, the jinnia voluptuaries saw no need for other clothing, and gratified their jinni counterparts with an inexhaustible will. Zabardast, one of the wealthiest of the jinn, was also one of the most sexually active. His flying magic funded his often extreme needs.

In that first phase of the War of the Worlds, Zabardast set out to spread fear by a spate of poltergeist activity, sending sectional settees flying across the chic, fragile interiors of high-design showrooms, encouraging yellow taxis to fly over the roofs of other vehicles instead of swerving dangerously into their paths, lifting up manhole covers and sending them skidding at head height along the city’s sidewalks, turning them into flying giant discuses looking to decapitate the ungodly. It was the ungodly who had been specified as the targets but, Zabardast complained to Zumurrud, this place was not at all ungodly. In point of fact it was excessively godly. Atheists were few and far between and gods of all types were being adored and worshipped constantly in every neck of the woods. “Never mind,” Zumurrud retorted. “They come from this benighted place or have chosen to live here. That will suffice.”

In between his feats of levitation, just for pleasure, the sorcerer Zabardast liked to watch the effect of releasing large numbers of venomous serpents upon an unsuspecting public. The snakes were jinn too, but jinn of a lower order; more like his servants, or even his pets. The sorcerer Zabardast’s love of the snakes he unleashed was genuine, but superficial. He was not a jinni of profound emotions. Profound emotions do not interest the jinn. In this, as in so much else, the jinnia Dunia was an exception.

One of Zabardast’s snakes coiled itself around the Chrysler building from top to bottom like a helter-skelter slide. One distraught or possibly drug-addled and certainly bespectacled office worker was seen leaping from a window on the sixty-seventh floor, the middle floor of the three occupied by the reborn Cloud Club. Round and round the snake he slid until he hit the back of its head and fell to the sidewalk, in excellent physical condition, with his spectacles, if not his dignity, intact. He fled towards the railway station and was lost to history. His descent was filmed by at least seven different camera phones but it proved impossible to identify him. We are happy to leave him to his privacy. We have what we need of him, the digital images, much enhanced, on which, for ever and a day, he reenacts, a thousand and one times, whenever we desire him to do so, his great helix of a slide.

The snake’s flickering tongue was twenty feet long and whipped at the ankles of fleeing pedestrians, causing falls and injuries. Another great worm, patterned in diamond-shaped lozenges colored yellow black and green like the Jamaican flag come to life, was simultaneously seen in Union Square, dancing on its tail, scattering the chess players and skateboarders, the dealers and the protesters, the teenagers in their new sneakers, the mothers and children heading down to the chocolate store. Three oldsters fled slowly uptown on Segways, past the second and third locations of the Warhol Factory, and in quavering voices they wondered what Andy would have made of the dancing snake, a silver silkscreen Double Ouroboros, perhaps, or a twelve-hour film. It had been a hard winter and there was still snow piled at the edges of the square but when the snake danced people forgot about the weather and ran. The people of the city did a lot of running that winter, but whatever horror they fled from, they were also fleeing towards a different terror, rushing from frying pan to fire.

Emergency supplies were running out. Bug Out Bags, also known as GOODbags or INCHbags — acronyms for Get Out of Dodge bags and I’m Never Coming Home bags — became de rigueur that season. There was much argument about what your go-bag needed. Did it, for example, need a gun to repel crackheads who didn’t have go-bags? The exits to the city were jammed with honking cars full of INCHbag-bearing adults and children, heading for the hills. Lane closures were ignored and this led to accidents and even longer traffic jams. Panic was the order of the day.

As for Zumurrud the Great himself, if the truth be told, he was feeling a little upstaged by his illustrious companions. He did his best, appearing in full panoply in the plaza at Lincoln Center bellowing You are all my slaves but even in those days of hysteria there were some innocents who thought he was promoting a new opera at the Met. He flew one night to the top of One World Trade Center and balanced on one foot on its high pinnacle, unleashing his finest ear-splitting yodel; but in spite of the horror that filled many New Yorkers’ hearts there were still puzzled citizens down below by the sad rectangular waterfalls who assumed his lofty presence was an advertising stunt for a bad-taste remake of the famous old gorilla movie. He smashed a hole in the celebrated façade of the old post office building but such destruction could be seen every summer in the movie theaters, and lost its effect by being portrayed too frequently. So it was also with extreme weather conditions: snow, ice and so on. This was a species with an exceptional ability to ignore its approaching doom. If one sought to be the embodiment of the doom that was approaching, this was a little frustrating. All the more so when the jinn he had brought along as his supporting cast seemed to have cast themselves, somewhat ungratefully, in leading roles. It was enough to make the great Zumurrud wonder if he might be losing his touch.

If the dark jinn have a fault, it is — but no! One should rather, less sloppily, more accurately, say Among the many faults of the dark jinn is—well then, a certain purposelessness about their behavior. They live in the moment, have no grand designs, and are easily distracted. Do not go to a jinni for strategy, for there are no jinni Clausewitzes, no Sun Tzu jinn among their ranks. Genghis Khan, conquering all he saw, based his strategy on maintaining herds of horses that accompanied his army. His archers on horseback were a dreaded cavalry. His soldiers lived on a diet of horse milk, blood and meat, so that even a dead horse was useful. The jinn do not think in this way, are not accustomed to collective action, being arch individualists. Zumurrud Shah, who enjoyed mayhem as much as any jinni, was, to be absolutely frank, disenchanted. How many cars could one transform into giant porcupines prickling down the West Side Highway, how much real estate could one damage with the swipe of an arm, before one’s thoughts turned to the superior delights of the infinitely extended sexual activity plentifully awaiting one back in Fairyland? In the absence of a worthy adversary, was the game worth the candle?

Humanity had never been an enemy worth fighting for long, Zumurrud Shah grumbled to himself. It was enjoyable to mess around with these puny entities for a while — so pompous they were! So self-important! So unwilling to recognize their irrelevance to the universe! — and to upset their much-prized applecarts, but after a while, three-wish promise to a dead philosopher or not, prolonged engagement was unappealing. The opening of the wormhole which linked his world to theirs had been his most impressive feat, and to underline its significance he appeared on the jumbotron in Times Square to reveal himself as the leader of a mighty invasion which would shortly subjugate the entire human race, You are all my slaves now, he cried again, forget your history, a new time begins today. But a true student of the jinn would have noted that even though the wormhole in Queens stood scarily open, there was no invading army pouring through it. The jinn in Peristan were just too busy having sex.

It is necessary to speak briefly of the extreme laziness of the great jinn. If you wish to understand how it can be that so many of these extremely powerful spirits have been so frequently captured in bottles, lamps and so on, the answer lies in the immense indolence that comes over a jinni after he has performed more or less any action. Their periods of sleep greatly exceed their waking hours and, during these times, so deeply do they slumber that they can be shoved and pushed into any enchanted receptacle without waking them up. So, for example, after the great feat of swallowing and digesting the ferry, Ra’im Blood-Drinker, still in the guise of a mighty sea-dragon, fell asleep on the harbor bed and did not awaken for several weeks; and the possession and manipulation of the financial titan Daniel Aroni similarly exhausted Shining Ruby for a couple of months. Zabardast and Zumurrud were less easily exhausted but after a while they too were ready to doze. A sleepy jinni is an irritable spirit and it was in this condition that Zumurrud and Zabardast, sitting on clouds over Manhattan, quarreled about who had done what to whom, who had been the standout performer and who the also-ran, which of them should henceforth defer to which, and who had come closest to fulfilling the promise made by Zumurrud the Great to the philosopher Ghazali centuries ago. When Zumurrud bombastically claimed responsibility for the cruel winter that had the city in its grip, Zabardast issued a peal of malicious laughter. “The fact that you take credit for bad weather,” he said, “only serves to show how desperate you are to prove your potency. I myself argue only from cause and effect. I do this, the result is that. Perhaps tomorrow you will take responsibility for the sunset, and claim to have plunged the world into darkness.”

This must be said again: the competitiveness of even the mightiest of the jinn is often petty and childish, and leads to childish feuds. These are usually, as is the way with childishness, quarrels of short duration, but they can be bitter and spiteful while they last. When the jinn fight the results can be spectacular to the human eye. They throw things which are not things as we understand them, but the products of enchantment. Looking up at the sky from the earth, human beings would read these enchanted not-things as comets, meteors, shooting stars. The more powerful the jinni, the hotter and more fearsome the “meteor.” Zabardast and Zumurrud were the strongest of all the dark jinn, so their magic fire was dangerous, even to each other. And the slaying of the jinn by the jinn is a crucial part of our story.

At the height of the quarrel, up there in the white clouds over the city, Zabardast pummeled his old friend in Zumurrud’s weakest spot: his immense amour propre, his pride. “If I so chose,” Zabardast cried, “I could make myself a larger giant than you, but I am unimpressed by size. If I so chose, I could be a more dazzling metamorph than Ra’im Blood-Drinker, but I prefer to retain my own shape. When I want, I am a more potent whisperer than Shining Ruby, and my whispering has more lasting and dramatic results.” Zumurrud, never the most verbal of the jinn, roared his anger and hurled a large fireball, which Zabardast turned into a harmless snowball and threw back at his rival like a boy in a winter park. “What’s more,” Zabardast shouted, “let me tell you, who are so puffed up about the creation of your wormhole, that after the long separation of the worlds, when the first seals broke and the first slits reopened, I came back to earth long before you dreamed of doing so. And what I did then sowed a seed that will soon bear fruit and inflict a wound upon humanity deeper than any injury you could manage. You hate the human race because it is not like us. I hate it for its possession of the earth, the beautiful, damaged earth. I have gone far beyond the tiny fanatical vengeance of your dead philosopher. There is a gardener from whom a whole garden of horrors will grow. What I have begun with a whisper will become a roar that will expel the human race from the planet forever. Then Fairyland will seem dull and plain, and the whole blessed earth, purified of Man, will be the province of the jinn. This is what I can do. I am Awesome. I am Zabardast.”

“Unreason defeats itself,” Ibn Rushd said to Ghazali, dust to dust, “by reason of its unreasonableness. Reason may catnap for a time, but the irrational is more often comatose. In the end it will be the irrational that is forever caged in dreams, while reason gains the day.”

“The world men dream of,” replied Ghazali, “is the world they try to make.”

There followed a period of calm, during which Zabardast, Shining Ruby and Ra’im Blood-Drinker returned to Fairyland. The jumpgate to the wormhole in Queens closed and only the ruined house remained. Our ancestors allowed themselves to believe the worst was over. The clocks went forward. Spring sprang. Everywhere men went they stood in the shadow of young girls in flower, and they were glad. We were in those days a people with no memory, especially the young, and there was so much to divert the young. They permitted themselves to be happily diverted.

Zumurrud the Great did not return to Peristan. He went to sit at the feet of Ghazali’s grave, to ask questions. After all his protests against philosophy and theology, he decided to listen. Maybe he was sick of jinn chatter and malice. Perhaps the purposeless anarchy of jinn behavior, the making of mayhem for its own sake, was finally too empty and he understood that he needed a flag to fight under. Maybe, in the end, he grew, not physically but inwardly; and, having grown, felt that for him to respect a cause, it had to be bigger than himself, and he was a giant, so it would have to be very large indeed; and the only outsize cause on the market was the one Ghazali was trying to sell him. At this distance in time, we cannot fully know his mind. We only know that he bought it.

Beware the man (or jinni) of action when he finally seeks to better himself with thought. A little thinking is a dangerous thing.