Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Dunia in Love, Again

When Dunia first saw Geronimo Manezes he was floating on his side in his bedroom in the almost-dark, wearing a sleep mask, in the exhausted, heavily drowsy condition that was as close to sleep as he got these days, with the light from a single still-illuminated lamp on a nightstand flowing up towards him, casting horror-movie shadows across his long, bony face. A blanket hung down from both sides of his body, making him look like a magician’s assistant, levitated while hypnotized by some top-hatted trickster, and about to be sawn in half. Where have I seen that face before, she thought, and immediately answered herself, even though the memory was more than eight hundred years old. The face of her one true human love, even though there was no cloth wound around his head, and the gray beard was less carefully managed, rougher, wilder than in her remembering of it, not the beard of a man who has chosen to have a beard, but the unkempt growth on the face of one who has simply given up shaving. Eight centuries and more since she had seen that face, yet here it was, as if it were yesterday, as if he had not abandoned her, as if he were not reduced to dust, dust to which she had spoken, animate dust, but dust nevertheless, disembodied, dead. As if he had been waiting for her here all this time, in the dark, for eight hundred years and more, waiting for her to find him and renew their ancient love.

The floating was not a puzzle to a jinnia princess. This had to be the work of Zabardast the sorcerer jinni. Zabardast had slipped through the first slits to reopen and cursed Geronimo Manezes: but why? That was a mystery. Was this random malice, or had Zabardast somehow intuited the existence of the Duniazát and understood that if properly marshaled they might prove to be an obstacle to the power of the dark jinn, a resistance, a counterforce? Dunia did not believe in chance. The jinn believe in the purposive nature of the universe, in which even the random has a goal. She needed to answer the question of Zabardast’s motives, and in time she found what she needed, she learned about Zabardast’s plan to spread the dual diseases of rising and crushing which would, once and for all, remove humanity from the surface of the earth. In the meanwhile, however, she was impressed by Geronimo Manezes’s resistance to the spell. Ordinary men would simply have floated off into the sky to die, suffocated for lack of oxygen, frozen by the low temperature, attacked by territorial birds incensed by a land creature’s elevation into the air. But here was Geronimo, after quite a while, still only a relatively small distance off the ground, still able to occupy interiors and perform his natural functions without leaving a humiliating mess. This was an individual to admire, she thought. A tough customer. But mostly she was distracted by that face. She had not thought to see that face again.

Ibn Rushd caressing her body had often praised its beauty to the point at which she grew irritated and said, You do not think my thoughts worth praising, then. He replied that the mind and body were one, the mind was the form of the human body, and as such was responsible for all the actions of the body, one of which was thought. To praise the body was to praise the mind that ruled it. Aristotle had said this and he agreed, and because of this it was hard for him, he whispered blasphemously in her ear, to believe that consciousness survived the body, for the mind was of the body and had no meaning without it. She did not want to argue with Aristotle and said nothing. Plato was different, he conceded. Plato thought the mind was trapped in the body like a bird and only when it could shed that cage would it soar and be free.

She wanted to say, I am made of smoke. My mind is smoke, my thoughts are smoke, I am all smoke and only smoke. This body is a garment I put on, which by my magic art I have made capable of functioning as a human body functions, it’s so biologically perfect that it can conceive children and pop them out in threes, fours and fives. Yet I am not of this body and could, if I chose, inhabit another woman, or an antelope, or a gnat. Aristotle was wrong, for I have lived for aeons, and altered my body when I chose, like a garment of which I had grown tired. The mind and body are two, she wanted to say, but she knew it would disappoint him to be disagreed with, so she held her tongue.

Now in Geronimo Manezes she saw Ibn Rushd reborn and wanted to murmur, You see, you have entered a new body as well. You have moved through time, down the dark corridor that some say the soul travels between lives, shedding its old consciousness as it goes, relieving itself of its selfhood, until finally it is pure essence, the pure light of being, ready to enter another living thing; and nobody can deny that here you are again, different, yet the same. Imagine that you came into the world blindfolded, in the dark, and floating in the air, just as you are now. You would not even know you had a body and yet you would know that you were you. Your selfhood, your mind, that would be there as soon as you were conscious. It is a separate thing.

But, she thought, arguing with herself, maybe it’s not so. Maybe it is different with human beings, who cannot change their form, and this sleeping figure’s echo of a man long dead can be ascribed to a freak of biology and nothing more. Maybe in the case of true humans, their mind, their soul, their consciousness flows through their bodies like blood, inhabiting every cell of their physical being, and so Aristotle was right, in humans the mind and body are one and cannot be separated, the self is both with the body and perishes with it too. She imagined that union with a thrill. How lucky human beings were if that was the case, she wanted to tell Geronimo who was and was not Ibn Rushd: lucky and doomed. When their hearts pounded with excitement their soul pounded too, when their pulses raced their spirits were aroused, when their eyes moistened with tears of happiness it was their mind that felt the joy. Their minds touched the people their fingers touched, and when they in turn were touched by others it was as if two consciousnesses were briefly joined. The mind gave the body sensuality, it allowed the body to taste delight and to smell love in their lover’s sweet perfume; not only their bodies but their minds, too, made love. And at the end the soul, as mortal as the body, learned the last great lesson of life, which was the body’s death.

A jinnia took human form but the form was not the jinnia and so it could not taste or smell or feel, and her body was not made for love because it was not the symbiotic partner and possessor of the mind. When the philosopher touched her intimately it was as though someone were fondling her while she was dressed in heavy winter garments, many-layered, so that she felt no sensation except a distant susurration, as if of a hand brushing an overcoat. But she had loved her philosopher so strongly that she had made him believe that her body was aroused and ecstatic. Ibn Rushd had been fooled. Men were easily deceived in such matters because they wanted to believe they had the power to arouse. She wanted to make him believe he pleased her. But the truth was that she could give physical pleasure to a man but not receive it, she could only imagine what such pleasure might be like, she could watch and learn, and offer up to her lover the outward signs of it, while trying to fool herself, as well as him, that yes, she was being pleasured too, which made her an actress, a phony, and a self-deceiving fool. Yet she had loved a man, had loved him for his mind and put on a body so that he could love her back, she had borne his children, and carried the memory of that love down eight centuries and more, and now, to her surprise and excitement, here he was, reborn, given new flesh, new bones, and if this floating Geronimo was old, what of it? Ibn Rushd too had been “old.” Human beings, brief candles that they were, had no idea what the word meant. She was older than both these men, so much older that it would horrify them if she aged as humans do.

She remembered the dinosaurs. She was older than the human race.

The jinn rarely admitted to one another how interested they were in human beings, how fascinating the human race actually was to those who were not human. Yet in the time before Man, in the age of the first single-cell organisms, the fishes, the amphibians, the first walking creatures, the first flying things, the first things that slithered, and then the ages of the larger beasts, the jinn rarely ventured forth from Fairyland. The earthly jungle, the desert, the mountaintop, these savage things were of no concern. Peristan revealed the obsession of the jinn with the patterning of things which only civilization provides; it was a place of formal gardens, elegantly terraced, with cascading streams of water, neatly channeled. Flowers grew in flower beds, trees were planted symmetrically to create pleasing avenues and clusters, to provide easeful shade and a sense of gracious amplitude. There were pavilions of red stone in Fairyland, many-cupolaed, with silken walls within which could be found the carpeted boudoirs, with bolsters to lie against and handy samovars of wine, where the jinn retired for pleasure. They were made of smoke and fire, yet they preferred shapely things to the formlessness of their natures. This led them frequently to take human form. This fact alone revealed the degree of — yes! — their indebtedness to poor, mortal humanity, which provided them with a template, helping them to impose physical, horticultural, architectural order upon their essentially chaotic selves. Only in the act of sex — the major activity of Fairyland — did the jinn, male and female, abandon their bodies and fall into one another as essences, smoke entwining fire, fire billowing smoke, in long ferocious union. Otherwise, they had actually come to prefer to use their “bodies,” the shells in which they cased their wildness. These “bodies” formalized them, much as the formal garden formalized the wilderness. “Bodies,” the jinn agreed, were good.

Princess Dunia — or, to be precise, the princess who had adopted the name “Dunia,” the world, on her visits to the world of men — had gone further than most of her kind. So deep had her fascination with human beings become that she had found a way to discover human emotion in herself. She was a jinnia who could fall in love. Who had fallen in love once, and was now on the verge of doing so again, with the same man, reincarnated in a different time. What was more, if he had asked her, she would have told him that she loved him for his mind, not his body. He himself was the proof that the mind and body were two, not one: the extraordinary mind in, frankly, an unexceptional casing. Nobody could truly love Ibn Rushd for his physique, in which there were, to be blunt, elements of flabbiness, and, by the time she met him, other signs of the decrepitude of old age. She noted with some satisfaction that the body of this sleeping man, Geronimo Manezes, the reincarnation of the beloved, was a considerable improvement on the original. This body was strong and firm, even if it was also “old.” It was Ibn Rushd’s face placed in a better setting. Yes, she would love him, and maybe this time she could work some extra magic upon herself and acquire sensation. Maybe this time she would be able to receive as well as give. But what if his mind was idiotic? What if it was not the mind she had fallen in love with? Could she settle for the face and the body alone? Maybe, she thought. Nobody was perfect, and reincarnation was an inexact procedure. Maybe she could settle for less than everything. He looked right. That might well be enough.

One thing did not cross her mind. Geronimo Manezes was of the tribe of the Duniazát, which made him her descendant, very possibly his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, give or take a great or two. Technically, sex with Mr. Geronimo would be an incestuous union. But the jinn do not recognize an incest taboo. Childbearing is so rare in the jinn universe that it never seemed necessary to place descendants off-limits, so to speak. There were almost no descendants to speak of. But Dunia had descendants; many of them. However, in the matter of incest she followed the example of the camel. The camel will gladly have sex with its mother, daughter, brother, sister, father, uncle, or what you will. The camel observes no decencies and never thinks of propriety. He, or she, is motivated solely by desire. Dunia, like all her people, was of the same persuasion. What she wanted, she would have. And to her surprise she had found what she wanted here in this narrow house, in this narrow basement, where this sleeping man floated several inches above his bed.

She watched him sleeping, this mortal for whom his body was not a choice, who belonged to it and it to him, and she hesitated to wake him. After her awkwardly embarrassing intrusion into the apartment upstairs and the alarm of its occupant Blue Yasmeen, Dunia had made herself invisible, preferring, this time, to see before being seen. She moved slowly towards the recumbent form. He was sleeping poorly, on the edge of wakefulness, mumbling in his sleep. She would need to be careful. She needed him to stay asleep so that she could listen to his heart.

Something has already been said about the skill of the jinn at whispering, overpowering and controlling the will of human beings by murmuring words of power against their chests. Dunia was a consummate whisperer, but she possessed, additionally, a rarer skill: the gift of listening, of approaching a sleeping man and placing her ear very gently against his chest and, by deciphering the secret language that the self speaks only to itself, discovering his heart’s desire. As she listened to Geronimo Manezes, she heard first his most predictable wishes, please let me sink down towards the earth so that my feet touch solid ground again, and beneath that the sadder unfulfillable wishes of old age, let me be young again, give me back the strength of youth and the confidence that life is long, and beneath that the dreams of the displaced, let me belong again to that faraway place I left so long ago, from which I am alienated, and which has forgotten me, in which I am an alien now even though it was the place where I began, let me belong again, walk those streets knowing they are mine, knowing that my story is a part of the story of those streets, even though it isn’t, it hasn’t been for most of a lifetime, let it be so, let it be so, let me see French cricket being played and listen to music at the bandstand and hear once more the children’s back-street rhymes. Still she listened and then she heard it, below everything else, the deepest note of his heart’s music, and she knew what she must do.

Mr. Geronimo awoke at dawn feeling the daily dull bone-ache that he was learning to think of as his new normal condition, the consequence of his body’s involuntary struggle against gravity. Gravity was still there, he could not at this point muster sufficient egotism to believe it had somehow diminished in his immediate vicinity. Gravity was gravity. But his body in the grip of an inexplicable and very slightly stronger counterforce was tugging against it, moving him slowly upwards, and it was exhausting. He thought of himself as a tough man, hardened by work, grief and time, a man not easily dismayed, but these days when he woke from his uneasy half-rest the first thoughts in his head were worn down worn out and not long to go. If he died before his condition subsided could he be buried, or would his corpse refuse the grave, push earth aside and, rising slowly, burst through the surface to hover above his final plot of ground while he decayed? If he was cremated would he be a small cloud of ash clustering obstinately in the air, ascending gravely like a swarm of indolent insects, until at some point it was dispersed by the winds or lost among the clouds? These were his morning concerns. But on this particular morning sleep’s heaviness was quickly dispelled because something felt wrong. The room was in darkness. He did not remember turning off the table lamp by his bed. He had always liked a dark room to sleep in but in these strange times he had started leaving a small light on. His blanket often fell off him while he slept and he needed to reach several inches down to find it and he hated groping for it in the dark. So, usually, a light, but this morning he woke in shadow. And as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark he realized that he was not alone in the room. A woman was slowly materializing, his mind formed that impossible word, materializing in the darkness as he watched; a woman who was recognizable, even in the deep shadows where she was manifesting herself, as his dead wife.

Ella Elfenbein in the years since lightning took her from him at the old Bliss place, La Incoerenza, had not ceased to come to him in dreams, forever optimistic, forever gorgeous, forever young. In this time of his fear and melancholy she, who had gone before him into the great incoherence, came back to comfort and reassure. Awake, he had never been in any doubt that life was followed by nothingness. If pressed, he would have said that, in fact, life was a coming-into-being out of the great sea of nothingness from which we briefly emerged at birth and to which we must all return. His dreaming self, however, wanted nothing to do with such doctrinaire finality. His sleep was troubled and unsettled, but still she came, in all her loving physicality, her body swarming around his to enfold him in its warmth, her nose nuzzling into his neck, his arm encircling her head, his hand resting on her hair. She talked too much, as she always had, your nonstop chat-a-tat, he had called it in the good old days, Radio Ella, and there had been times when, laughing but just a little irritated, he had asked her to try being silent for sixty seconds, and she hadn’t been able to do it, not even once. She advised him on healthy eating, admonished him about drinking too much alcohol, worried that in his increasingly confined condition he was not getting the exercise to which he was accustomed, discussed the latest skin-friendly cosmetics (dreaming, he didn’t ask how she kept abreast of such matters), pontificated about politics, and, of course, had much to say about landscape gardening; talked about nothing, and everything, and nothing again, at length.

He thought of her monologues the way music lovers thought of beloved songs. They had provided their own kind of musical accompaniment to his life. His days had fallen silent now but his nights, some of them at least, still bulged with her words. But now he was awake and there was a woman standing over him and here was another impossible thing to set alongside the impossible thing his life had become, maybe this was an even more impossible impossibility, but he could recognize her body anywhere, even in the dark. He must have entered some sort of delirium, he thought, maybe he was at the end of his life and in the chaos of his last moments he had been granted this vision.

Ella? he asked. Yes, came the answer. Yes and no.

He turned on the light and jumped, if not out of his skin, then at least out of bed. Out of his supine position four inches above his mattress. His blanket fell away. And, facing mutated Dunia, now the spit and image of Ella Elfenbein Manezes, he trembled with true fear and the birth of an impossible joy.

They couldn’t stop looking at each other. They were both looking at reincarnations, both falling in love with surrogates. They were not originals but copies, each an echo of the other’s loss. From the beginning each knew the other to be a counterfeit, and from the beginning each was willing to suppress the knowledge; for a while, at least. We live in the age of coming after, and think of ourselves not as prime movers, but consequences.

“My wife is dead,” said Mr. Geronimo, “and there are no ghosts, so either I am in the grip of a hallucination or this is a cruel prank.”

“The dead don’t walk, that’s true,” Dunia replied, “but the miraculous exists.”

“First levitation,” he said, “and now resurrection?”

“As to levitation,” Dunia coquettishly answered, rising to his level, and inducing, in Mr. Geronimo, a loud, old-fashioned gasp, “two can play at that game. And as to resurrection, no, not exactly.”

He had been trying hard to cling to his belief in the reality of the real, to treat his own condition as exceptional, and not a sign of a more general breakdown. The magic baby on television, whose existence had at first comforted him, had soon begun to worsen the disturbance in his spirit, and he tried to force her out of his thoughts. He had stopped listening to the news. If there were more surreal manifestations being reported, he didn’t want to know about them. Solitude, uniqueness, these things had come to feel more desirable than the alternatives. If he could accept that he alone was or had become an aberration, a freak, then he could also still define the rest of the known world, the city, the country, the planet, by the known or credibly hypothesized principles of post-Einsteinian science, and could therefore dream of his own return to that lost, that yearned-for state. Aberrations occurred even in perfect systems. Such phenomena need not indicate the total failure of the system. Glitches could be unglitched, rebooted, fixed.

Now, confronted by Ella risen from the dead, he had to let go of that last scrap of hope, of what he had thought of as sanity, for here was Ella revealing herself as Dunia, princess of the jinn, who had adopted his wife’s appearance to please him, or so she said; but perhaps it was to deceive him, to seduce and destroy him as the sirens destroyed mariners, or as Circe did, or some other fictional enchantress. Here was Elladunia, Duniella, in his beautiful wife’s beautiful voice telling him wonder tales of the existence of the jinn, bright and dark, fairies and Ifrits, and of Fairyland, where the sex was incredible, and of metamorphs and whisperers; and of the breaking of the seals, the opening of the slits in reality; the first wormhole in Queens (there were more now, all over the place), the coming of the dark jinn and the consequences of their arrival. He was a skeptical and godless man and this kind of story unleashed a churning in his stomach and a sort of babbling in his brain. I’m losing my mind, he told himself. He no longer knew what to think, nor how to think it.

“The fairy world is real,” she said soothingly, listening to his inner confusion, “but it does not follow that God exists. On that subject I am as skeptical as you.”

She was still in the room, going nowhere, floating in the air just as he was, allowing him to touch her. He touched her first to see if he could touch her, because there was a part of his brain that believed his hand would pass right through. She was wearing a black tank top he actually remembered, a black tank over cargo pants like a photographer in a combat zone, her hair pulled back in a high ponytail, and there were her lean muscular bare arms, olive-skinned. People had often asked Ella if she was Lebanese. His fingertips touched her arms and felt warm skin, familiar to his touch, Ella’s skin. She moved towards him and then it was impossible for him to resist her. He became aware that there were tears streaming down his face. He held her and she allowed herself to be held. His hands cradled her face, and suddenly, unbearably, it felt wrong. Her chin: an unexpected lengthening. You’re not her, he said, whoever or whatever you are, you’re not her. She listened beneath his words and made an alteration. Try again, she said. Yes, he said, his palm curved tenderly under her jaw. Yes, that feels good.

At the beginning of all love there is a private treaty each of the lovers makes with himself or herself, an agreement to set aside what is wrong with the other for the sake of what is right. Love is spring after winter. It comes to heal life’s wounds, inflicted by the unloving cold. When that warmth is born in the heart the imperfections of the beloved are as nothing, less than nothing, and the secret treaty with oneself is easy to sign. The voice of doubt is stilled. Later, when love fades, the secret treaty looks like folly, but if so, it’s a necessary folly, born of lovers’ belief in beauty, which is to say, in the possibility of the impossible thing, true love.

This man in his sixties, detached from the earth from which he had made his living, torn away by a lightning bolt from the only woman he had ever loved, and this princess of the otherworld, nursing in her bosom the memory of a centuries-old loss, across an ocean, far away, were both in pain, the unique anguish born of lost or broken love. Here, in a darkened basement bedroom in a house called The Bagdad, they agreed with themselves and with each other to renew two loves destroyed long ago by Death. She took on the clothing of his beloved wife’s body, and he chose not to notice that Dunia’s voice was not Ella’s, that her manner was not his wife’s, and that the shared memories that unite a loving couple were largely missing from her thoughts. She was a magnificent listener and had set herself the task of being the woman he wanted her to be, but, in the first place, listening takes time and care and, in the second place, a jinnia princess wants to be loved for herself, and so the desire to be loved as Dunia fought with her attempt to impersonate a dead woman and made the simulacrum less perfect than it might have been. And as for Geronimo Manezes, yes, she admired his strong, lean, old man’s physique, but the man she had loved had been all mind.

“What do you know,” she finally asked him, “about philosophy?”

He told her about the Lady Philosopher and her Nietzschean, Schopenhauerian pessimism. When he mentioned that the name of Alexandra Bliss Fariña’s home was La Incoerenza, Dunia drew in her breath sharply, thinking of the battle of the books that had taken place long ago between Ghazali and Ibn Rushd, The Incoherence of the Philosophers versus The Incoherence of the Incoherence. Here was a third incoherence. Dunia saw, in coincidence, the hidden hand of kismet, which was also karma. Destiny was in that name. In names are concealed our fates.

Geronimo Manezes also told her Blue Yasmeen’s fable about the pessimism of the Unyaza. “At this point, and in my present condition,” he said, surprising himself by finding a version of one of Alexandra Fariña’s mottoes issuing from his lips, “to say nothing of the state of the planet in general, it is difficult not to have a tragic view of life.” It wasn’t a bad answer, Dunia thought. It was the answer of a thinking man. She could work with that. “I understand,” she replied, “but that attitude comes from the days before you met a fairy princess.”

Time stopped. Mr. Geronimo was in a highly charged, enchanted place which was both his basement room and that room transformed into a jinni’s smoke-scented love-lair, a place where no clock ticked, no second hand moved, no digital number changed. He could not have said if minutes passed during the timeless time of their lovemaking, or weeks, or months. Already, ever since his detachment from the earth, he had been obliged to set aside most of what he believed he knew about the nature of things. Now he was coming loose from the few fragments of his old beliefs that still remained. Here after a long interval was a woman’s body which was and was not his wife’s. It had been so long that his sense memory of Ella’s flesh had weakened and though he was ashamed to admit it his more recent recollections of Alexandra Fariña were jumbled up with what he remembered about making love to his wife. And now this entirely new feeling was supplanting it, was becoming what he agreed with himself to think of as the feeling of Ella Elfenbein moving beneath him like a sweet warm tide, he, who had never believed in reincarnation or any such mumbo jumbo, was helpless, in the grip of the fairy princess’s enchantments, and plunged into the sea of love, where everything was true if you said so, everything was true if the enchantress whispered it in his ear, and he could even accept in his confusion that his wife had been a fairy princess all along, that even during Ella’s lifetime, my first lifetime, the jinnia whispered, and this is my second, yes, even in her first lifetime she had been a jinnia in disguise, so that the fairy princess was neither a counterfeit nor an imitation, it had always been her, even though he had not known it until now, and if this was delirium, he was okay with that, it was a delirium he chose and wanted, because all of us want love, eternal love, love returning beyond death to be reborn, love to nourish and enfold us until we die.

In that darkened room, no news reached them of the mayhem being wrought on the city outside. The city was screaming with fear but they could not hear it, boats were refusing to venture onto the water of the harbor, people were afraid to come out of their homes and go to work, and the panic was showing up in the money, stocks were crashing, banks were shuttered, supermarket shelves were empty and deliveries of fresh produce were not being made, the paralysis of terror held the city in its grip and catastrophe was in the air. But in the darkness of the narrow bedroom in the basement of The Bagdad the television was off and the crackle of the calamity could not be heard.

There was only the act of love, and lovemaking had a surprise in store for them both. “Your body smells of smoke,” she said. “And look at you. When you’re aroused you become blurred, smudged, there’s smoke at the edges of you, didn’t your human lovers ever tell you that?” No, he lied, remembering Ella telling him exactly that, but concealing the memory, correctly intuiting that Dunia would not like to know the truth. No, he said, they did not. This pleased her, as he had suspected it would. “That’s because you never made love to a jinnia before,” she told him. “It’s a different level of arousal.” Yes, he said, it was. But she was thinking, with mounting excitement, that it was his jinn self revealing itself, the jinn self that had come to him, down the centuries, from her. This was the sulfurous smokiness of the jinn when they made love. And if she could release the jinn with him then many things became possible. “Geronimo, Geronimo,” she murmured in his smoky ear, “it looks like you are a fairy too.”

Something unexpected happened to Dunia in their lovemaking: she enjoyed it, not as much as the bodiless sex of Fairyland, that ecstatic union of smoke and fire, but there was (as she had hoped there might be) a definite — no, a strong! — sensation of pleasure. This showed her not only that she was becoming more human but that her new lover might contain more of the jinn than she first suspected. So it was that their mimic love, their love born of the memory of others, their post-love that came after, became true, authentic, a thing in and of itself, in which she almost stopped thinking about the dead philosopher, and his dead wife whose copy she had allowed herself to be was slowly replaced in his fantasy by the unknown magical creature who had come to him so improbably in his hour of need. The time might even come, she allowed herself to think, when she could show herself to him as she truly was — neither the sixteen-year-old waif who had materialized at Ibn Rushd’s door, nor this replicant of a lost love, but her royal self in all its glory. In the grip of that unexpected hope she began to tell Geronimo Manezes things she had never told Ibn Rushd.

“Around the borders of Fairyland,” she said, “there stands the circular mountain of Qâf, where, according to legend, a bird-god once lived, the Simurgh, a relative of the Rukh of Sindbad. But that’s just a story. We, the jinn and jiniri, we who are not legend, know that bird, but it does not rule over us. There is, however, a ruler on Qâf Mountain, not a thing of beak, feather and claw but a great fairy emperor, Shahpal son of Shahrukh, and his daughter, most powerful of the jinnias, Aasmaan Peri, which is to say, “Skyfairy,” known as the Lightning Princess. Shahpal is the Simurgh King and that bird sits on his shoulder and serves him.

“Between the emperor and the Grand Ifrits there is no affection. Mount Qâf is the most desirable location in all of Fairyland and the Ifrits would dearly love to possess it but the thunderbolt magic of the emperor’s daughter, a great jinnia sorceress, is equal to that of Zabardast and Zumurrud Shah, and it maintains a wall of sheet lightning that surrounds Qâf and protects the circular mountain against their greed. However, they are always on the lookout for an opportunity, fomenting trouble among the devs, or lesser spirits who populate the lower slopes of Qâf, trying to persuade them to rebel against their rulers. At this moment there is a hiatus in the endless struggle between the emperor and the Ifrits, which, to tell the truth, has been in a condition of stalemate for many millennia, because the storms, earthquakes and other phenomena that broke the long-closed seals between Peristan and the world of men have permitted the Ifrits to make their mischief here, which has the attraction for them of a novelty, or at least a thing long denied. They haven’t been able to do this for a long time, and they believe there is no magic on earth capable of resisting them, and, being bullies, they like the idea of destroying an overmatched opponent. So while they think of conquest my father and I get a little respite.”

“You?” Mr. Geronimo asked. “It’s you, the princess of Qâf?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” she said. “The battle beginning here on earth is a mirror of the battle that has been going on in Fairyland for all time.”

Now that she had learned the trick of pleasure, she was indefatigable in its pursuit. One of the reasons she preferred an “older” human lover, she murmured to Geronimo Manezes, was that they found it easier to control themselves. With young men it was over in a flash. He told her he was glad that age had a few advantages. She wasn’t listening. She was discovering the joys of climax. And for the most part he was lost in a sweet confusion, hardly knowing to which of three women, two human, one not, he was making love, and as a result neither of them noticed at first what was happening to him, until at a certain moment when he was beneath and she above he felt something unexpected, something almost forgotten, under his head and back.

Pillows. Sheets.

The bed took his weight, the pocketed springs of the mattress sighing a little beneath him like a second lover, and then he felt her weight come down on him too, as the law of gravity reasserted itself. When he understood what had happened he began to weep, though he was not a man who found it easy to cry. She came off him and held him but he was unable to stay lying down. He climbed out of bed, gingerly, still half in disbelief, and allowed his feet to move towards the bedroom floor. When they touched it he cried out. Then stood, almost falling at first. His legs were weak, the muscles softened by lack of use. She stood beside him and he put an arm around her shoulder. Then he steadied, and released her, and was standing by himself. The room, the world, fell back into its familiar and long-lost shape. He felt the weights of things, of his body, his emotions, his hopes. “It seems I must believe you,” he marveled, “and that you are who you say you are, and Fairyland exists, and you are its most powerful sorceress, for you have broken the curse that was laid upon me and rejoined me to the earth.”

“What is more extraordinary than that,” she rejoined, “is that, although I am indeed who I say I am, not only Dunia mother of the Duniazát but also the Princess Skyfairy of Qâf Mountain, I am not responsible for what has happened here, except that in our lovemaking I helped to unleash a power in you which neither of us suspected you possessed. I didn’t bring you back down to earth. You did it by yourself. And if the jinni spirit in your body is capable of overcoming the sorcery of Zabardast, then the dark jinn have an enemy to reckon with in this world as well as the other one, and the War of the Worlds can perhaps be won instead of ending, as Zumurrud and his gang believe, in the inevitable victory of the dark jinn, and the establishment of their tyranny over all the peoples of the earth.”

“Don’t get carried away,” he said. “I’m just a gardener. I shovel and plant and weed. I don’t go to war.”

“You don’t have to go anywhere, my dearest,” she said. “This war is coming to you.”

Oliver Oldcastle the estate manager of La Incoerenza heard a scream of terror coming from his mistress’s bedroom and immediately understood that what had happened to him must also have happened to her. “Now I really will kill that bastard hedge clipper,” he roared and ran barefoot to help the Lady Philosopher. His hair was loose and wild and his shirt hung out of his worn cord trousers and with his arms windmilling as he ran he was more ungainly Bluto or Obélix moving at speed than leonine latter-day Marx. He passed the boot room with its faint ineradicable odor of horseshit, galloping along old wooden floors that on another day would have delivered splinters into his pounding feet, watched by the angry tapestries of imaginary ancestors, narrowly avoiding the Sèvres porcelain vases uneasy on their alabaster tables, running with his head down like a bull, ignoring the disapproving whispers of the supercilious shelves of books, and burst into Alexandra’s private wing. At the door of her bedroom he gathered himself, smacked uselessly at his tangled hair, tugged his beard into shape, and stuffed his shirt into his trousers like a schoolboy asking for an audience with the head teacher, and “May I enter now, milady,” he cried, the volume of his voice betraying his fear. Her loud answering wail was all the invitation he needed and then they stood facing each other, mistress and servant, she in a long archaic nightdress and he in shambles, with the same horror in their eyes, which turned slowly towards the floor, and saw that not one of their four bare feet, his sprouting hair at the ankle and from each toe, hers tiny and well formed, was in contact with the floor. A good inch of air stood between them and the ground.

“It’s a bastard disease,” Oldcastle bellowed. “That superfluous growth of a person, that fungus, that weed, came into your home bearing this blighty infection, and he has transmitted it to us.”

“What kind of infection could possibly produce such a result?” she wept.

“This sodding kind, milady,” cried Oldcastle, clenching his fists. “This turfing variety, pardon my French. This Dutch elm beetle you took into your private flower bed. This fatal oak killer Phytophthora. He’s left us bloomin’ diseased.”

“He’s not answering his phone,” she said, waving her instrument uselessly in his face.

“He’ll answer to me,” said Oliver Oldcastle monumentally. “Or I’ll landscape his ill-formed rump. I’ll horticulture his savage bastard skull. He’ll answer to me all right.”

Separations of all sorts were being reported in those incomprehensible nights. The separation of human beings from the earth was bad enough. However, in certain parts of the world it had not begun or ended there. In the world of literature there was a noticeable separation of writers from their subjects. Scientists reported the separation of causes and effects. It became impossible to compile new editions of dictionaries on account of the separation of words and meanings. Economists noted the growing separation of the rich from the poor. The divorce courts experienced a sharp increase in business owing to a spate of marital separations. Old friendships came abruptly to an end. The separation plague spread rapidly across the world.

The detachment from the ground of a growing number of men, women and their pets — chocolate Labradors, bunny rabbits, Persian cats, hamsters, ferrets, and a monkey named E.T. — caused global panic. The fabric of human life was beginning to unravel. In the Menil Collection gallery in Houston, Texas, a shrewd curator named Christof Pantokrator suddenly understood for the first time the prophetic nature of René Magritte’s masterwork Golconda, in which men in overcoats, wearing bowler hats, hang in the air against a background of low buildings and cloudless sky. It had always been believed that the men in the picture were slowly falling, like well-dressed rain. But Pantokrator perceived that Magritte had not painted human raindrops. “They are human balloons,” he cried. “They rise! They rise!” Foolishly he made his discovery public and after that the Menil buildings had to be protected by armed guards against local people incensed by the great work of the prophet of antigravity. Some of the guards began to rise, which was alarming, and so did several of the protesters, the would-be vandals.

“The places of worship are full of terrified men and women seeking the protection of the Almighty,” Ghazali’s dust said to the dust of Ibn Rushd. “Just as I expected. Fear drives men to God.”

There was no response.

“What’s the matter?” Ghazali scoffed. “You finally ran out of hollow arguments?”

At length Ibn Rushd answered in a voice full of masculine complication. “It’s hard enough to discover that the woman who bore your children is a supernatural being,” he said, “without also having to bear the knowledge that she is lying with another man.” He knew this because she had told him. In her jinnia way she thought he would take it as a compliment that she had fallen for his copy, his echo, his face on another body, revealing that in spite of her love for human beings there were things about them she absolutely didn’t understand.

Ghazali laughed as only dust can laugh. “You’re dead, you fool,” she said. “Dead for eight centuries and more. This is no time for jealousy.”

“That is the kind of inane remark,” Ibn Rushd snapped back from his grave, “which shows me that you have never been in love; from which it follows that even when you were alive you never truly lived.”

“Only with God,” Ghazali replied. “That was and is my only lover, and he is and was more than enough.”

When Sister Allbee discovered that her feet were an inch and a half off the ground she was angrier than at any point in her life since her father ran off with a gravel-voiced Louisiana chanteuse the week before he was supposed to take his daughter to the new Disney park in Florida. On that occasion she had gone through the second-floor apartment in the Harlem River Houses destroying all trace of her delinquent parent, tearing up photographs, shredding his hat, and making a bonfire of his abandoned clothes in the play space outside, watched silently by her mother flapping her arms and silently opening and shutting her mouth but making no attempt to dial back her daughter’s rage. After that her father no longer existed and young C. C. Allbee gained a reputation as a girl never to be crossed.

Her favorite tenant, Blue Yasmeen, had taken off too, and was found sobbing uncontrollably in the hallway a full two inches up in the air. “I always defended him,” she wailed. “Whenever you said something against him, I stuck up for the guy, because he was kind of a silver fox and he reminded me of my dad. Then a female on a flying rug shows up and I’m like am I going crazy and now this. I stuck up for the dude. How did I know he would pass his fuckin’ sickness on to me?”

That made two betrayals by father figures to be mad about, and a few minutes later Sister Allbee used her master key to enter Mr. Geronimo’s apartment with a loaded shotgun in her hand, with Blue Yasmeen fretful close behind her. “You’re out of here,” she bellowed. “Walk out by nightfall or be carried out feet first before dawn.”

“He’s standing on the floor!” Blue Yasmeen screamed. “He’s cured, but he’s left us sick.”

Fear changed the fearful, thought Mr. Geronimo looking down the barrel of the gun. Fear was a man running from his shadow. It was a woman wearing headphones and the only sound she could hear in them was her own terror. Fear was a solipsist, a narcissist, blind to everything except itself. Fear was stronger than ethics, stronger than judgment, stronger than responsibility, stronger than civilization. Fear was a bolting animal trampling children underfoot as it fled from itself. Fear was a bigot, a tyrant, a coward, a red mist, a whore. Fear was a bullet pointed at his heart.

“I’m an innocent man,” he said, “but your gun makes an excellent argument.”

“You are the spreader of the plague,” said Sister Allbee. “Patient Zero! Typhoid Mary! Your body should be wrapped in plastic and buried a mile underground so you can’t ruin any more lives.”

Fear had Blue Yasmeen by the throat as well. “My father betrayed me by dying and abandoning me to the world, when he knew how much I needed him. You betrayed me by ripping the world away from beneath my feet. He was my father, so I love him anyway. You? You should just go.”

The fairy princess had disappeared. When she heard the key turning in the lock she had turned sideways and disappeared through a slit in the air. Maybe she would help him, maybe not. He had heard all about the whimsical untrustworthiness of the jinn. Maybe she had just used him to feed her sexual hunger, for it was said that the jinn are insatiable in that department, and now that she was done he would never see her again. She had brought him down to earth and that was his reward, and all the rest, about his own jinn powers, was nonsense. Maybe he was alone, about to be homeless, faced with the unarguable truth of a shotgun in the hands of a woman enraged by her fear.

“I’ll go,” he said.

“One hour,” said Sister.

And in the city of London, far from Mr. Geronimo’s bedroom, a mob had gathered outside the home of the composer Hugo Casterbridge in Well Walk, in the sylvan borough of Hampstead. He was surprised to see it, because he had of late become a laughingstock, and public anger seemed an inappropriate response to his new reputation. It had become conventional to ridicule Casterbridge ever since his ill-advised television appearance in which he threatened the world with plagues sent down upon humanity by a god in whom he did not believe, the classic idiocy of the artist, everyone said, he should have stayed home and tinkled and tootled and clanked and banged and kept his mouth shut. Casterbridge was a man shored up by an immense, solid and hitherto impermeable self-belief but he had been unnerved by the ease with which his previous eminence had been obliterated by what he thought of as the new philistinism. There was apparently no room for the idea that the metaphorical sphere could be so potent that it affected the actual world. So he was a joke now, the atheist who believed in divine retribution.

Very well. He would indeed stay home with his strange Schoenbergian music which few people understood and even fewer enjoyed. He would think about hexachordal inversional combinatoriality and multidimensional set presentations, he would brood on the properties of the referential set, and let the rotting world go hang. He was more and more of a recluse anyway these days. The doorbell of the Well Walk mansion had gone wrong and he saw no need to have it fixed. The Post-Atheist group he had briefly assembled had melted away under the heat of public obloquy but he stuck, silently, angrily, with gritted teeth, to his guns. He was accustomed to being thought incomprehensible. Laugh! he mutely instructed his critics. He would see who had the last laugh of all.

But apparently there was a new preacher in town. There was a wildness in the city, fires on council estates in the poor boroughs to the north, looting of high-street stores in the usually conservative regions south of the river, and mutinous crowds in the main square that didn’t know what to demand. Out of the flames came the turbaned firebrand, a small man with Yosemite Sam saffron beard and eyebrows, wrapped in a strong smell of smoke; he appeared from nowhere one day as if he stepped through a slit in the sky, Yusuf Ifrit was his name, and suddenly he was everywhere, a leader, a spokesman, he was on government committees, there was talk of a knighthood. There is indeed a plague spreading, he thundered, and if we do not defend ourselves against it we will all be infected for sure, it’s infecting us already, the impurity of the disease has touched the blood of many of our weaker children, but we are ready to defend ourselves, we will fight the plague at its roots. The plague had many roots, Yusuf said, it was carried by books, films, dances, paintings, but music was what he feared and hated most, because music slid beneath the thinking mind to seize the heart; and of all music makers, one, the worst of them all, the plague personified as cacophony, evil transmuted into sound. And so here was a police officer visiting the composer Casterbridge, I’m afraid you’ll have to move out, sir, until things cool off, we can’t guarantee your safety at this location, and there are your neighbors to consider, sir, innocent bystanders could be hurt in an affray, and he bridled at that, Let me understand you, he said, let me be perfectly clear what you’re telling me here, what you’re saying to me now is that if I get hurt in this putative affray of yours, if the injury is to me, then I’m not an innocent bystander, is that your fucking point? There’s no need for that kind of language, sir, I won’t stand for it, you need to take on the situation as it is, I won’t endanger my officers by reason of your egotistical intransigence.

Go away, he said. This is my home. This is my castle. I’ll defend myself with cannons and boiling oil.

Is that a threat of violence, sir?

It’s a fucking figure of speech.

Then, a mystery. The gathering mob, words of hate, aggression disguised as defensiveness, the threatening claiming to be under threat, the knife pretending to be in danger of being stabbed, the fist accusing the chin of attacking it, all that was familiar, the loud malevolent hypocrisy of the age. Even the preacher from nowhere wasn’t much of a puzzlement. Such unholy holy men cropped up all the time, created by some form of sociological parthenogenesis, some weird bootstrap operation that made authorities out of nonentities. That was stuff to shrug at. Then on the night of the mystery there were reports of a woman seen with the composer, silhouetted against the living room window, an unknown woman who appeared as if from nowhere and then disappeared, leaving the composer alone at the night window, opening it in defiance of the gathered mob, his painful dissonant music clanging behind him like an alarm system, his arms outstretched as if crucified, what was he doing, was he inviting death into his home, and why was the crowd suddenly hushed, as if some giant invisible cat had got its tongue, why wasn’t it moving, it looked like a waxwork tableau of itself, and where were those clouds coming from, the weather in London was clear and mild, but not in Hampstead, in Hampstead that night all of a sudden there was rolling thunder, and then bolts of lightning, wham, crash, and the mob didn’t wait around for another strike, the lightning broke the spell and the mob ran screaming for its life, down Well Walk and on to the Heath, nobody killed thank goodness, except for the idiot who decided the best place to shelter from thunderbolts was under a tree, he got fried. The next day the mob didn’t come back, or the next, or the next.

Quite a coincidence, sir, that oddly localized storm, almost as if you brought it on, you wouldn’t have an interest in meteorology, would you, sir? There wouldn’t be some weather-altering contraption in your attic, now would there? You’ll excuse us if we just take a look?

Inspector, be my guest.

On the way back to Mr. Geronimo from Hugo Casterbridge, flying east not west, for the jinn move so swiftly that there’s no need to take the shortest route, Dunia flew over ruins, hysteria, chaos. Mountains had begun to crumble, snows to melt and oceans to rise, and the dark jinn were everywhere — Zumurrud the Great, Shining Ruby, Ra’im Blood-Drinker, and Zumurrud’s old ally, increasingly his rival for jinn supremacy, the sorcerer-jinni Zabardast. Water reservoirs turned to urine and a baby-faced tyrant, after Zabardast whispered in his ear, ordered all his subjects to have the same ridiculous haircut as himself. Human beings did not know how to handle the irruption of the supranormal into their lives, Dunia thought, most of them simply fell apart or had the haircuts and wept with love for the baby-faced tyrant, or under Zumurrud’s spell they prostrated themselves before false gods who asked them to murder the devotees of other false gods, and that too was being done, statues of These gods destroyed by followers of Those gods, lovers of Those gods castrated stoned to death hanged sliced in half by the lovers of These. Human sanity was a poor, fragile thing at best, she thought. Hatred stupidity devotion greed the four horsemen of the new apocalypse. Yet she loved these wrecked people and wanted to save them from the dark jinn who fed, watered and made manifest the darkness within themselves. To love one human being was to begin to love them all. To love two was to be hooked forever, helpless in the grip of love.

Where did you go, he said. You disappeared just when I needed you.

I went to see someone who also needed me. I had to show him what he was capable of.

Another man.

Another man.

Did you look like Ella when you were with him. Are you making my dead wife fuck men she never met is that it.

That isn’t it.

I have my feet on the ground again so you’re done with me this was some sort of jinn therapy is that it.

That isn’t it.

What do you really look like. Show me what you really look like. Ella is dead. She’s dead. She was a beautiful optimist and believed in an afterlife but this wasn’t it, this zombie of my darling wife inhabited by you. Stop. Please stop. I’m being thrown out of this apartment. I’m losing my mind.

I know where you need to go.

It is dangerous for human beings to enter Peristan. Very few have ever done so. Until the War of the Worlds only one man, as far as we know, ever stayed there for any length of time, and married a fairy princess, and when he returned to the world of men he discovered that eighteen years had passed even though he believed himself to have been away for a much shorter period. A day in the jinn world is like a month of human time. Nor is that the only danger. To look upon the beauty of a jinnia princess in her true uncloaked aspect is to be dazzled beyond the capacity of many human eyes to see, minds to grasp or hearts to bear. An ordinary man might be blinded or driven insane or killed as his heart burst with love. In the old days, a thousand years ago, a few adventurers managed to enter the jinn world, mostly with the assistance of well- or evil-intentioned jinn. To repeat: only one human being ever returned in good shape, the hero Hamza, and the suspicion remains that he may have been part jinni himself. So when Dunia the jinnia, aka Aasmaan Peri the Lightning Princess of Qâf Mountain, suggested to Mr. Geronimo that he return with her to her father’s kingdom, suspicious minds might have concluded that she was luring him to his doom like the sirenuse singing on the rocks near Positano or Lilith the night monster who was Adam’s wife before Eve, or John Keats’s merciless beauty.

Come with me, she said. I will reveal myself to you when you’re ready to see me.

Then,

just as the inhabitants of the city were discovering the true meaning of being without shelter, even though they had always believed themselves to be experts in shelterlessness, because the city they hated and loved had always been bad at providing its inhabitants with protection against the storms of life, and had inculcated in its citizens a certain fierce loving-hating pride at their own habits of survival in spite of everything, in spite of the not-enough-money issue and the not-enough-space issue and the dog-eat-dog issue and so on;

just as they were being forced to face the fact that the city or some force within the city or some force arriving in the city from outside the city might be about to expel them from its territory forever, not horizontally but vertically, into the sky, into the freezing air and the murderous airlessness above the air;

just as they began to imagine their lifeless bodies floating out beyond the solar system, so that whatever alien intelligences might be out there would meet dead human beings long before living ones and wonder what stupidity or horror had pushed these entities out into space without so much as protective clothing;

just as the screams and weeping of the citizens began to rise above the noise of such traffic as continued to ply the streets, because the plague of rising had broken out in many neighborhoods, and those individuals who believed in such things began to shout in the frightened streets that the Rapture had begun, as foretold in Paul’s first epistle to the Thessalonians, when the living and the dead would be caught up in the clouds and meet the Lord in the air, it was the end of days, they cried, and as people began to float upwards away from the metropolis it was getting to be hard even for the most diehard skeptic to disagree;

just as all this was going on, Oliver Oldcastle and the Lady Philosopher arrived at The Bagdad with murder in his eyes and terror in hers, having had to struggle into the city without the benefit of a car or bus or train, it was, Oldcastle told Alexandra, just about the distance traveled by Pheidippides from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens, at the end of which, by the way, he dropped dead, and they too were exhausted, at the end of their strength, and irrationally believing that a confrontation with Geronimo Manezes could resolve everything, that if they could just frighten him enough or seduce him enough he would he able to reverse what he had set in motion;

just at that precise moment a great light flooded outwards and upwards from the basement bedroom in which the greatest of the jinnia princesses was revealing herself in her true glory for the first time ever in the human world, and the revelation opened the royal gate into Fairyland, and Mr. Geronimo and the Lightning Princess were gone, and the gate closed and the light went out and the city was left to face its fate, C. C. Allbee and Blue Yasmeen floating balloon-fashion in the stairwell of The Bagdad, and Manager Oldcastle in his great wrath and the chatelaine of La Incoerenza who had left her estate for the first time in many years standing impotent in the street, already a foot or so off the ground, without any hope of redress.

There was too much light and when it diminished so that he could see again, Mr. Geronimo to his consternation found himself a child in a long-forgotten but familiar street playing French cricket with chanting boys, Raffy ’Ronnimus once more, and all of a sudden and quite inexplicably and there winking at him looking like any other Sandra from Bandra was a young girl in whose wicked delighted eyes he saw the jinnia princess. And his mother Magda Manezes and Father Jerry himself also watching him at play, hand in hand and happy, as they never did and rarely were in life. And a warm evening, but not too hot, and the shadows lengthening away from the cricketing boys, showing them in silhouette pictures of the men they might grow up to be. His heart filled with something that might have been happiness, but poured out of his eyes as grief. The tears were uncontrollable and his whole body shook with the sadness of what was, there are tears in things, said pious Aeneas in Virgil’s words long ago, and mortal things touch the mind. His feet were on the ground now but where was this ground, in Fairyland or Bombay or an illusion, it was just another way of being adrift, or in the clutches of the jinnia princess. As he looked around at the dream of an old street scene, this occult hologram, he was in the grip of everything sad that ever happened to him, he wished he had never become detached from the place he was born, wished his feet had remained planted on that beloved ground, wished he could have been happy all his life in those childhood streets, and grown into an old man there and known every paving stone, every betel-nut vendor’s story, every boy selling pirated novels at traffic lights, every rich man’s car rudely parked up on the sidewalk, every girl at the bandstand aging into a grandmother and remembering when they kissed furtively at night in the churchyard, he wished he could have roots spreading under every inch of his lost soil, his beloved lost home, that he could have been a part of something, that he could have been himself, walking down the road not taken, living a life in context and not the migrant’s hollow journey that had been his fate; ah, but then he would never have met his wife, he argued with himself, and that deepened his grief, how could he bear the idea that by remaining joined to the line of the past he might never had his one true passage of joy, maybe he could dream her into his Indian life, maybe she would have loved him there as well, she would have walked down this street and found him here and loved him just the same, even though he would have been the self he never became, maybe she would have loved that self too, Raphael Hieronymus Manezes, that lost boy, that boy which the man had lost.

I thought you’d like it, said the little girl with the jinnia’s eyes, puzzled. I listened to your heart and heard your sorrow at what you had left behind and I thought this would be a welcome gift.

Take it away, he said, choking on his tears.

Bombay vanished and Peristan appeared, or rather Mount Qâf the circular mountain that encloses the fairy world. He was in a white marble courtyard of the curved palace of the Lightning Princess, its red stone walls and marble cupolas around and above, its soft tapestries rippled by a breeze, and the curtain of sheet lightning that guarded it hanging like the aurora in the sky. He did not want to be here. Anger replaced grief in him. Until a few hundred days ago, he reminded himself, he had had no interest whatsoever in the supranormal or fabulous. Chimeras or angels, heaven or hell, metamorphoses or transfigurations, a pox on them all, he had always thought. Solid ground beneath his feet, dirt under his fingernails, the husbandry of growing things, bulbs and roots, seeds and shoots, this had been his world. Then all of a sudden, levitation, the arrival of an absurd universe, strangenesses, cataclysm. And just as mysteriously as he rose, so he had descended, and all he wanted now was to resume. He didn’t want to know what it meant. He wanted not to be a part of the place, the thing, he didn’t have the word for it, in which all that existed, he wanted to re-create the real world around himself, even if the real world was an illusion and this continuum of the irrational was the truth, he wanted the fiction of the real back. To walk, jog, run and jump, to dig and grow. To be earth’s creature and not, like some devil, a creature of the powers of the air. That was his only desire. Yet here was Fairyland. And a goddess of smoke before him who was obviously not his dead wife exhumed from the grave by his memory of her. Comprehension failed him. He had no more tears to cry.

Why have you brought me here, he asked. Couldn’t you have just left me alone.

She dissolved into a whirl of white with a shining light at its heart. Then she took shape again, no longer skinny Dunia the love of Ibn Rushd but Aasmaan Peri, Skyfairy, splendid with lightning crackling like a victor’s wreath at her brow, adorned with jewels and gold and clad in wisps of smoke with a gaggle of handmaidens behind her in half-moon formation, awaiting her command. Don’t ask a jinnia princess for reasons, she said, her turn to be angry now, maybe I brought you here to be my slave, to pour my wine or oil my feet, or perhaps even, if I so please, you could be my lunch, fricasseed on a platter with a little wilted kale, these ladies will cook you if I decide to crook my little finger against you, do not imagine they won’t. You fail to praise a princess’s beauty and then ask her for reasons! Reasons are human follies. We have only pleasures and what we will.

Return me to my ordinary life, he said. I’m not a dreamer and am out of place in castles in the air. I have a gardening business to run.

Because you are my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson, give or take a great or two, she said, I forgive you. But, in the first place, mind your manners, especially if my father enters the room, he may be less generous than I. And in the second place, stop being a fool. Your ordinary life no longer exists.

What did you say? I’m your what?

She had so much to teach him. He didn’t even know how lucky he was. She was Skyfairy the Beautiful and could have had anyone in the Two Worlds and she had chosen him because his face was the echo of a great man she once loved. He didn’t understand that he was standing on Mount Qâf as if it was the most normal thing in the world, even though just setting foot in Peristan would drive many mortal men out of their minds. He didn’t know himself, the great jinni spirit he bore in his blood, because of her. He should be thanking her for this gift and instead he looked disgusted.

How old are you, anyway? he asked.

Be careful, she said, or I will send a thunderbolt to melt your heart so that it runs down your body inside your clothes and fills your foolish human shoes with goo.

She snapped her fingers and Father Jerry materialized beside her, and scolded Geronimo Manezes as he always did. I told you so, he wagged a finger at Mr. Geronimo. You heard this from me first, and you wouldn’t believe it. The Duniazát, the brood of Averroës. Turns out I was spot-on. What do you have to say to me now?

You’re not real, said Mr. Geronimo. Go away.

I was thinking more along the lines of an apology, but never mind, said Father Jerry, and vanished in a puff of smoke.

The seals between the Two Worlds are broken and the dark jinn ride, she said. Your world is in danger and because my children are everywhere I am protecting it. I’m bringing them together, and together we will fight back.

I’m not a fighter, he told her. I’m not a hero. I’m a gardener.

That is a pity, she said, a little scornfully, because right now, as it happens, heroes are what we need.

It was their first lovers’ quarrel, and who knows where it might have ended up, for it destroyed the last vestiges of the illusions which had brought them together, she was no longer the avatar of his lost wife and he was plainly an inadequate substitute for the great Aristotelian, the father of her clan. She was smoke made flesh and he was a disintegrating clod of earth. Maybe she would have dismissed him then and there; but then calamity came to Mount Qâf too, and a new phase of the War of the Worlds began.

A cry went up in a distant chamber, and then came a relay of louder and louder cries, the shrieks being passed from mouth to mouth like dark kisses, until the running figure of the royal household’s chief spy, Omar the Ayyar, could be seen approaching at speed along the curved length of the great court where Mr. Geronimo stood with the jinnia princess, to tell her, in a voice bursting with horror, that her father, the fairy emperor, mighty Shahpal the son of Shahrukh, had been poisoned. He was the Simurgh King, and the holy bird of Qâf, the Simurgh, stood guard over him on his bedpost, sunk in its own enigmatic form of sadness; and after a reign lasting many thousands of years Shahpal found himself approaching lands to which few of the jinn ever traveled, lands ruled over by an even mightier king than himself, who stood waiting for the mountain emperor at the gates of his own twin kingdoms, with two giant four-eyed dogs at his side: Yama, the lord of death, the guardian of heaven and hell.

When he fell it was as if the mountain itself had fallen, and, in fact, cracks were reported to have appeared in the perfect circle of Qâf, trees split down the middle, birds fell from the sky, the lowest devs on the lowest slopes felt the tremors, and even his most disloyal subjects were shaken, even the devs most ready to be seduced by the blandishments of the dark jinn, the Ifrits, the immediate prime suspects in the matter of his poisoning, because the question on everyone’s lips was, how can a king of the jinn be poisoned, the jinn are creatures of smokeless fire, and how do you poison a fire, are there occult extinguishers of some kind that can be fed to a jinni, anti-inflammatory agents created by the black arts that will kill him, or magic spells that suck the air out of his immediate vicinity so that the fire cannot burn, everyone was clutching at straws as he lay dying, because all explanations sounded absurd, but good answers were nowhere to be had. There are no doctors among the jinn because sickness is unknown to them and deaths are extremely rare. Only a jinni can kill a jinni is a truism among the jinn and so when King Shahpal clutched at himself and cried Poison everyone’s first thought was that there had to be a traitor in their midst.

Omar the Ayyar—ayyar means “spy”—had come a long way in the royal service from humble beginnings. He was a good-looking fellow, full-lipped, large-eyed, a little effeminate in fact, and a long time ago he had been obliged to wear women’s clothing and take up residence in the harems of earthly princes so that he could smooth the path for his jinn master to visit the ladies at night, when the princes’ attention was elsewhere. On one occasion, the Prince of O. unexpectedly showed up while King Shahpal was dallying with the bored O. wives, for whom a jinni lover made a spirited and welcome change. Omar unfortunately misheard his master’s command, Away with us at once, as, Do away with him at once, and so alas and alack he cut off the royal head of the Prince of O. After that in Peristan the ayyar was known as Omar the Cloth-Eared and it had taken him two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights in earth time to live down that mistake. Since then he had risen to the top, trusted above all others both by Shahpal and by his daughter Skyfairy known as Dunia, becoming the unofficial head of the intelligence services of Qâf. But he had been the first to find the fallen monarch and so the cold fingertip of suspicion naturally came to rest upon his brow. When he came running to the princess he was not only bringing the news. He was also fleeing a mob of angry palace servitors, and carrying a Chinese box.

She was the princess of Qâf and the heir apparent, so of course she could quell the misdirected wrath of her angry people, she raised a palm and they froze like children playing grandmother’s footsteps, she waved her hand and they scattered like crows, all that was straightforward, her faith in Omar the no-longer-cloth-eared was complete, and what was that in his hand, maybe an answer, he was trying to tell her something. Your father is a strong man, he said, he’s not dead yet, he’s fighting with all his power and maybe his magic will be stronger than the dark magic attacking him. She understood all of this very well but what caught her off guard and was harder for her to grasp was that when the dreadful news reached her ears, poison, the king, your father, she neither reacted with majestic restraint as she had been bred to do, nor did she fall weeping into the arms of her handmaidens, who had gathered behind her clucking their unease, no, she had turned to him, Geronimo Manezes, the ungrateful gardener, the human being, and needed his embrace. And as for him, as he held in his arms the loveliest female entity he had ever seen, and felt simultaneously drawn to this fairy princess and disloyal to his dead wife, simultaneously intoxicated by Fairyland and even less grounded than when his feet left the ground of his own city in his own world, an existential bewilderment, as if he were being asked to speak a language without knowing any of its words or syntax, what was right action, what was wrong action, he no longer had any idea, but here she was nestling sadly into his chest, and that, he could not deny it, felt good. And behind her and beyond her he saw a cockroach scuttle under a chaise-longue and a butterfly hover in the air, and the thought occurred to him that these were memories, that he had seen this specific cockroach and this particular butterfly before, elsewhere, in his lost country, and that the ability of Peristan to read his mind and bring his deepest memories to life was in danger of driving him insane. Turn away from yourself, he said, look outwards through your eyes and let your interior world take care of itself. There’s a poisoned king here, and a frightened spy, and a shocked and saddened princess, and a Chinese box.

What’s in the box, he asked the spy.

It dropped from the king’s hands when he fell, Omar said. I believe the poison is inside.

What sort of poison, said Mr. Geronimo.

Verbal, said Omar. A fairy king can only be poisoned by the most dreadful and powerful of words.

Open the box, Dunia said.