Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

In Which the Tide Begins to Turn

A few words about ourselves. It is hard for us as we look back to put ourselves in the shoes of our ancestors, for whom the arrival in the midst of their everyday life of the implacable forces of the metamorphic, the descending avatars of transformation, represented a shocking disruption in the fabric of the real; whereas in our own time such activity is the commonplace norm. Our mastery of the human genome allows us chameleon powers unknown to our predecessors. If we wish to change sex, well then, we straightforwardly do so by a simple process of gene manipulation. If we are in danger of losing our tempers, we can use the touch pads embedded in our forearms to adjust our serotonin levels, and we cheer up. Nor is our skin color fixed at birth. We adopt our hue of choice. If, as passionate football fans, we decide to acquire the pigmentation of our favorite team, the Albiceleste or the Rossonero, then hey presto! we colorize our bodies in blue and white stripes, or dramatic red and black. A woman artist in Brazil long ago asked her countryfolk to name their own skin colors and produced tubes of paint to represent each shade, each pigment named as the possessors of the color wished, Big Black Dude, Light Bulb, and so on. Today she would run out of tubes before she ran out of color variations; and it is widely believed and generally accepted by all of us that this is an excellent thing.

This is a story from our past, from a time so remote that we argue, sometimes, about whether we should call it history or mythology. Some of us call it a fairy tale. But on this we agree: that to tell a story about the past is to tell a story about the present. To recount a fantasy, a story of the imaginary, is also a way of recounting a tale about the actual. If this were not true then the deed would be pointless, and we try in our daily lives to eschew pointlessness whenever possible.

This is the question we ask ourselves as we explore and narrate our history: how did we get here from there?

A few words, too, on the subject of lightning. Being a form of celestial fire, the thunderbolt was considered historically to be the weapon of powerful male deities: Indra, Zeus, Thor. One of the few female deities to wield this mighty weapon was the Yoruba goddess Oya, a grand sorceress who, when in a bad mood, which she often was, could unleash both the whirlwind and the sky-fire, and who was believed to be the goddess of change, called upon in times of great alteration, of the rapid metamorphosis of the world from one state to the next. She was a river goddess too. The name of the river Niger in Yoruba is Odo-Oya.

It may be, and it seems to us probable, that the story of Oya had its origin in an earlier intervention into human affairs — perhaps several millennia ago — of the jinnia Skyfairy, in the present narrative known mostly by her later name of Dunia. In those ancient times Oya was believed to have had a husband, Shango the Storm King, but eventually he disappeared from view. If Dunia had once had a husband, and if he had been killed in some previous, unrecorded battle of the jinn, that may account for her fondness for the similarly bereaved Geronimo. That is one hypothesis.

As to Dunia’s power over water as well as fire, it may well have existed, but it is not a part of our present narrative and we have no information about it. As for the reason why she was partly responsible for just about everything that happened to people on earth during the time of the strangenesses, the tyranny of the jinn and the War of the Worlds, however, that will be made plain before we’re done.

When African traditions made their way into the New World on the slave ships, Oya came along for the ride. In the Brazilian rites of Candomblé she became Yansa. In syncretic Caribbean Santería her image was merged with that of the Christian Black Madonna, the Virgin of Candelaria.

However, Dunia, like any jinnia, was far from virginal. She was the fecund matriarch of the Duniazát. And as we well know by now, her descendants too had the gift of lightning in their hands, although almost none of them knew it until the strangenesses began and such things became thinkable. In the battle against the dark jinn, this lightning became a crucial weapon. And so it was that lightning freaks, a group accused during the mighty paranoia of those days of being behind the disruptions that became known as the strangenesses, in fact became the prominent and eventually legendary front line of the resistance to the Zumurrud gang of dark jinn as it set out to colonize, even to enslave, the peoples of the earth.

And just a very few words about the Zumurrud project. Conquest was something entirely new for the jinn, to whom empire does not come naturally. The jinn are meddlesome; they like to interfere, to lift this one up, to cast that one down, to plunder a treasure cave or throw a magic spanner in a rich man’s works. They like the making of mischief, mayhem, anarchy. They have traditionally lacked management skills. But a reign of terror cannot be effective through terror alone. The most effective tyrannies are characterized by their excellent powers of organization. Efficiency had never been Zumurrud the Great’s long suit; scaring people was his game. Zabardast the sorcerer jinni, however, turned out to be an excellent nuts-and-bolts person. But he wasn’t perfect, and nor were his lesser cohorts, and so the new scheme of things was (fortunately) full of holes.

Before they returned to the lower world Dunia opened the secret doors in Mr. Geronimo’s head that led to the jinn nature hidden within him. If you could cure yourself of the weightlessness plague and bring yourself back to earth without even knowing who you were, she told him, then imagine what you’ll be able to do now. Then she put her lips to his temples, first the left one, then the right, and whispered, “Open.” Immediately it was as if the universe itself opened and spatial dimensions whose existence he had never known about became visible and usable, as if the frontiers of the possible had been pushed outwards and much became feasible that had been unfeasible before.

He felt as a child must feel as it masters language, as the first words form and are spoken, as phrases come, then sentences. The gift of language, as it arrives, allows one not only to express thoughts but to form them, it makes the act of thinking possible, and so it was that the language which Dunia opened to him and in him allowed him forms of expression he had never before been able to rescue from the cloud of unknowing in which they had been hidden from his sight. He saw how easy it was to have influence over the natural world, to move objects, or change their direction, or accelerate them, or arrest their movement. If he blinked quickly three times the extraordinary communications systems of the jinn unfurled before his mind’s eye, as complex as the synaptic circuits of the human brain, as easy to operate as a megaphone. To travel almost instantly between anywhere and anywhere he had only to clap his hands together, and to bring objects into being — platters of food, weapons, motor vehicles, cigarettes — a simple twitch of the nose would suffice. He began to understand time in a new way, and here his human self, urgent, transient, watching the sand run out of the hourglass, was at odds with his new jinn self, which shrugged at time, which saw chronology as a disease of tiny minds. He understood the laws of transformation, both of the external world and of himself. He felt increasing within him the love of all shining things, the stars and precious metals and gemstones of all kinds. He began to understand the allure of harem pants. And he knew he was just at the borderland of the jinn reality, and that he might, as the days progressed, be shown marvels for the comprehension and articulation of which the language had not yet been granted him. “The universe has ten dimensions,” he said, gravely. Dunia grinned as a parent does at a child who is quick to learn. “That’s one way of looking at it,” she replied.

But for Dunia herself existence was narrowing. The jinn have multitrack minds and are the best of multitaskers but all of Dunia’s consciousnesses were fixed on a single goal: the annihilation of those who had destroyed her father. And it was on account of the death of her father that she succumbed to an extreme version of the antinomian heresy, according herself powers of grace and exculpation normally reserved for deities, and claiming that nothing she commanded her tribe to do in the war against the dark jinn could be considered wrong or immoral because she had given her blessings to those actions. Geronimo Manezes, whom she had appointed her lieutenant in the struggle, was increasingly obliged to be her cautionary spirit, the cricket on her shoulder questioning her headlong certainties, worrying about the absolutism that gripped her as, driven by unspeakable grief, she unleashed her immense force.

“Come on,” she ordered Mr. Geronimo. “The meeting is about to begin.”

There continues to be much dispute among scholars of the subject concerning the total size of the jinn (male) and jinnia (female) populations of Peristan. On one side of the debate are those eminences who still contend, in the first place, that the number of jinn and jinnia is a constant, and, in the second place, that the species is sterile and cannot reproduce, and, in the third place, that both males and females are blessed with immortality and cannot die. Across the debating chamber are those who, like ourselves, accept the information that has come down to us concerning the ability of jinnias like the Lightning Princess not only to reproduce but to do so in quantity, and also regarding the mortality (albeit only in extreme circumstances) of the jinn. The history of the War of the Worlds is itself our best evidence in this regard; as will be seen, as will very soon be seen. Consequently we cannot accept that the total numbers of jinnia and jinn are immutably fixed for all time.

The traditionalists insist that that number itself must be the number of magic, which is to say, one thousand and one; or one thousand and one male, one thousand and one female. That is how it should be, they reason, and therefore it must be so. We, for our part, accept that the population is not large, and that the numbers proposed by the traditionalists are probably close to the truth, but we are willing to admit that there is no way for us to know the precise jinn population at any given point in time, and so to fix the numbers arbitrarily based on some sort of theory of appropriateness is little more than mere superstition. And in any case, as well as the jinn, there were and probably still are lower forms of life in Fairyland, the most numerous of which were the devs, though there were also bhoots. In the War of the Worlds both bhoots and devs were pressed into service in the lower world and marched in the armies of the four Grand Ifrits.

As to the jiniri: the historic jinnia gathering convened by the orphaned Lightning Princess in the great hall of Qâf included almost all the female spirits that existed and so ranks as the largest such assembly on record. The horrifying news of the murder of the King of Qâf Mountain had spread rapidly throughout Fairyland, generating outrage and sympathy in almost every breast, and when the orphaned Lightning Princess sent word there were very few who failed to heed the call.

When Dunia addressed the gathering and called for an immediate and comprehensive sex boycott to punish the dark jinn for Shahpal’s murder and force them to end their improper campaign of conquest on the earth below, however, her audience’s sympathy for her loss was not sufficient to prevent many of the gathered jinnia from expressing their shocked disapproval. Her childhood friend Sila, the Princess of the Plain, articulated the general feeling of horror. “If we can’t have sex at least a dozen times a day, darling,” she cried, “we might as well be nuns. You always were the bookish one,” she added, “and quite frankly a leetle too much like humans, I love you darling but it’s true, so maybe you can do without sex more easily than the rest of us and just read a book instead, but we, darling, most of us, it’s what we do.”

There was a mutinous murmur of assent. A second princess, Laylah of the Night, brought up the old rumor that if jinn and jinnias stopped having sexual relations for any length of time then the entire jinn world would crumble and fall and all its inhabitants perish. “There’s no smoke without fire, and no fire without smoke,” she said, quoting the old jinn proverb, “so if the two are not conjoined, then the flame will surely die.” At which her cousin Vetala, Princess of the Flame, unleashed a frightening, and frightened, ululation. But Dunia would not be denied. “Zumurrud and his gang have lost their heads and betrayed all the rules of right behavior, not only between the jinn and human beings, but also between jinn and jinn,” she replied. “My father is already dead. Why do you imagine your kingdoms — your fathers, your husbands, your sons, and you yourselves — are safe?” At which the gathered queens and princesses, of the Plain, the Water, the Cloud, the Gardens, the Night, and the Flame, stopped complaining about feeling horny, and paid attention; and their entourages too.

However, as we know, the sexual rejection of the dark jinn by the entire female population of Fairyland, designed to bring Zumurrud the Great and his followers to heel, proved strangely counterproductive — strange, that is, to the jinnia ladies who enforced it, who abstained and refrained, even though it was as hard for them as for any addict, and there were withdrawal symptoms, irritability and trembling and insomnia, because the union of smoke and fire was an ontological requirement of both genders of the jinn. “If this goes on for long,” the desperate Sila told Dunia, “the whole of Fairyland will come crashing down about our ears.”

We, looking back on these events, see them through the perspective of our hard-won knowledge, and understand that the practice of extreme violence, known by the catch-all and often inexact term terrorism, was always of particular attraction to male individuals who were either virgins or unable to find sexual partners. Mind-altering frustration, and the damage to the male ego which accompanied it, found its release in rage and assaults. When lonely, hopeless young men were provided with loving, or at least desirous, or at the very least willing sexual partners, they lost interest in suicide belts, bombs, and the virgins of heaven, and preferred to live. In the absence of the favorite pastime of every jinni, human males turned their thoughts to orgasmic endings. Death, being readily available everywhere, was often an alternative pursuit to unavailable sex.

So it was with human beings. The dark jinn, however, did not consider self-immolation. Their response to the sex boycott was not surrender to the wishes of their erstwhile jinnia partners, but rather an increase in violent activity of the nonsexual kind. Ra’im Blood-Drinker and Shining Ruby, inflamed by the denial of physical pleasure, embarked in the lower world on a savage rampage of subjugation by force, displaying an intemperate abandon which at first alarmed even Zumurrud and Zabardast; then, after a time, the same red mist rose in the eyes of the two senior jinn, and the human race paid the penalty for the jinnias’ punishment of the Grand Ifrits. The war entered a new phase. It was time for Dunia and Geronimo Manezes to return to earth.

She made him swear a solemn oath, the mirror of her own. “Now that I have opened your eyes to your true nature and given you power over it, you must promise to fight at my side until what has to be done is done, or we perish in the attempt.” Her eyes blazed. Her will was too great to be resisted. “Yes,” he said. “I swear.”

She kissed his cheek to show him her approval. “There’s a boy you need to meet,” she told him. “Jimmy Kapoor, who also goes by the name of Natraj Hero. A brave boy, and your cousin. Speaking of cousins, there’s also a bad girl.”

Her name, Teresa Saca, was unusable. She had killed a man, and that used up all the credit in her name. She cut it in half like dead plastic and tossed it in the trash, she spat it out like gum. Fuck her name. She was on the run and went now by many names, the names on stolen debit cards and fake IDs bought from street corner hustlers, the names in the smudged registers of one-night cheap hotels. She was not good at this, the low life. She needed service industries. In the good times a day away from the wellness spa or yoga shala was a day wasted. But those days were gone and she had to live by her wits, fuck that, Jack, and her a college dropout. Luckily for her everything was in a mess, law enforcement wasn’t what it used to be, and the chaos of the times allowed her to slip through the cracks. So far, anyway. Or maybe she had been forgotten. The people’s attention was elsewhere and she was yesterday’s news.

So Teresa or Mercedes or Silvia or Patrizia or whatever she went by that evening: sitting solo in a sports bar in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, spurning the advances of well-muscled men with military haircuts, doing tequila shots, watching the latest school killings on outsize flat-screen HDTV. Ag god, she mumbled in a voice made imprecise by alcohol, it is an age of killing and you know what that’s all right with me. It’s slaughterhouse time out there and you look to be getting in on the act yourself god whatever your name is you got more aliases than me. Yeah you god I’m talking to you. You with this name that name in that country this country, always big on the killing thing, you okay with people getting killed for a Facebook post, or not being circumcised, or fucking the wrong guy. I have no problem with that because guess what god I’m a killer too. Little me. I got me some action too.

In those times when suspicion fell on lightning-strike survivors some of them gathered furtively here and there to bemoan their fate. She sought them out wanting to listen to their tales, in case any of them turned out to be like her, masters of the thunderbolt and not just victims. When you’re a freak it’s good to know you’re not alone. But here in the Center of Fun in the Smoky Mountains the survivors’ gathering was a cluster of sad sacks. They huddled in a small room behind the sports bar, a poorly lit room situated in a small street off the main drag where tourists formerly did what tourists liked to do, eating tourist food and driving tourist bumper cars and posing for tourist pictures with a picture of Dolly Parton and mining in a tourist mine for tourist gold. For those with more ghoulish tastes, there had been a Titanic Museum Attraction where you could see the violin that had belonged to the ship’s bandleader, Wallace Hartley, and enjoy the tributes to the 133 children who went down with the ship, the “littlest heroes.” All that was shut down now that the world had changed, now that everywhere was the Titanic and everyone was going down. The sports bar stayed in business because men will drink in hard times, that doesn’t change, only the games on the screens were reruns, all the famous initials had shut down operations, MLB NBA NFL, all gone. Their ghosts moved on the big screens between the occasional news broadcasts when such items were flickeringly able to come online thanks to those brave journalists in the field who knew how to uplink to the satellites.

The survivors of thunderbolt attacks were of two types. The first type had a lot to say. This one had been hit by lightning four times, but that one held the record with seven strikes. Many said they felt confused, they had headaches and panic attacks. They sweated too much, they couldn’t sleep, one leg mysteriously began to shrink. They wept when there was nothing to cry about, they walked into doors and bumped into furniture. They remembered that the strike had literally blown them out of their shoes and their clothes had exploded off their bodies, leaving them naked as well as stunned. The absence of burn marks meant that people accused them of protesting too much, or for too long. They spoke with awe of the bolts from the blue. Many of them called it a religious experience. They had witnessed, at first hand, the devil’s work.

The second type was silent. These survivors sat alone in corners, locked into their secret worlds. The lightning had sent them somewhere far away and they either could not or chose not to share their own mysteries. When Teresa or Mercedes or whoever she was now tried to talk to them, they looked frightened and moved away or responded with sudden, extreme hostility, baring their teeth and clawing at their questioner.

This was of no use to her. These people were weak and broken. She left the gathering and hit the tequila and near the bottom of the bottle a voice spoke to her inside her head, and she thought she should probably stop doing shots. It was a woman’s voice, quiet and measured, and she could hear it very clearly, even though nobody was talking to her. I’m your mother, the voice said, and before she could open her mouth to say No you’re not because my mother never calls me not even on my fuckin’ birthday not unless she gets cancer, then I probably get a fuckin’ text asking for help with medical expenses, before she could say any of that, the voice said, No, not that mother, your mother from nine hundred years ago, give or take, the mother who put the magic in your body, and now you’re going to put it to good use. That was good tequila, she said aloud admiringly, but the so-called mother in her head was undeterred, I’ll show myself to you when I’m ready, she said, but if it helps to establish my credibility I can tell you the name and number on your stolen card and the location and combination number of the pathetic deposit box where you stored your so-called valuables. If you want me to do it I can tell the story of what your dad said when you told him you wanted to study English, what are you going to do with that, he said, be a paralegal or a secretary, or maybe you want to hear how you took that old used red convertible you stole when you were seventeen and drove it as fast as you could west and south from Aventura to Flamingo not caring if you lived or died. You have no secrets from me but fortunately I love you as a daughter whatever you did, even though you killed that gentleman, that doesn’t matter now because now there’s a war and I want you as a soldier and you already showed me you’re good at what I need you to do.

You mean you don’t care if I kill people, Teresa Saca said without speaking. What am I doing, she asked herself, I’m talking to a voice in my head, I’m hearing voices now? What am I, Joan of Arc? I saw the TV show. They burned her.

No, said the voice in her head. You’re no saint and neither am I.

You want me to kill people, she asked again, silently, inside her head, knowing it was beyond drunk, it was insane.

Not people, the voice said. We’re hunting bigger game.

When Mr. Geronimo found himself standing once again at the entrance to The Bagdad, he was armed with the new knowledge that until that day he had known nothing, not only about the world but about himself, and his place in it. But now he knew something; not everything, but it was a start. He had to begin again and he knew where he wanted to do it, and had asked Dunia to return him to this place, to attempt his first cure. She left him there and went about her own business, but he had access, now, to the communications system of the jinn, and could locate her precisely at any moment on that extraordinary internal positioning system, so her physical absence was a mere detail. He rang the doorbell and waited. Then he remembered that he still had the key. It still worked, turning in the lock as if nothing had happened, as if he hadn’t been expelled from this place for being the bringer of a terrifying disease.

How long had he spent in Peristan? A day, a day and a half? But here in the lower world eighteen months had passed, or perhaps more. Much changes in eighteen months on earth, in the age of acceleration that began around the turn of the millennium and still continues to this day. All our stories are told more quickly now, we are addicted to the acceleration, we have forgotten the pleasures of the old slownesses, of the dawdles, the browses, the three-volume novels, the four-hour motion pictures, the thirteen-episode drama series, the pleasures of duration, of lingering. Do what you have to do, tell your story, live your life, get out quickly, spit spot. Standing on the doorstep of The Bagdad, he seemed to see a year and a half of his hometown rush before his eyes, the screaming terror as the risings multiplied, and alongside their opposites, the crushings, people squashed flat by a local increase in gravitational force, just like the story in the Chinese box, Mr. Geronimo thought, and there were swooping random attacks on groups of citizens by the Grand Ifrits astride their flying urns, the Grand Ifrits offering rewards, great chests of jewels, to anyone who could point at a finger at men or women without earlobes. Martial law had been declared and the emergency services had done an astonishing job, the fire department ladder crews ministering to the floating people, the police keeping some semblance of order in the streets, helped by the National Guard.

Religious gangs had been roaming the city, looking for people to blame. Some of these mobs had targeted the mayor, whose adopted child Storm, the miraculous arbiter of honesty, was slandered as demon seed. A crowd of the faithful, for whom hostility seemed to be the necessary sidekick of fidelity, Hardy to its Laurel, gathered around the mayoral residence — converging on it from three directions, the ferry terminal, East End Avenue and the FDR — and then, shockingly, succeeded in storming the historic building and setting it ablaze. The successful attack on Gracie Mansion was news even in those disorderly times, because the frontline group of assailants, faced with troopers firing heavy-duty assault weapons, did not fall even when shot multiple times, in the head as well as the torso, or so the story went, and in spite of the decay of communications it was a story that spread rapidly. An unusual detail of some accounts added that several vehicles were assaulted, among them a fishmonger’s van, and when its back doors were pulled open and the dead fish on ice — albacore, sockeye, chinook, coho and pink salmon, pollock, haddock, sole, whiting — were able to stare glassily at the bloodied demonstrators, several of the fish commenced, in spite of being dead, to laugh uproariously. The story of the parasite fanatics immediately reminded Mr. Geronimo of Blue Yasmeen’s folktale of a laughing fish and he understood once again that many things formerly believed to be fantastic were now commonplace.

He had not known about the parasite-jinn until Dunia whispered to him and opened his eyes to the reality of his jinn inheritance. One of the Grand Ifrits, Shining Ruby, was the lord of the parasite-jinn, a master of possessing bodies for a time and then releasing them alive, as he had shown by his sensational occupation of the financial titan Daniel Aroni, and all the lesser parasites were foot soldiers serving under General Ruby’s command. But whereas Shining Ruby was able to function without a living being to occupy, his parasite followers were both less potent and clumsier. When on earth they needed hosts — dogs, snakes, vampire bats, human beings — and destroyed their temporary homes when they moved on.

The Zumurrud gang was evidently waging war on many fronts, Mr. Geronimo thought. It would not be easy to defeat.

The mayor and her little daughter Storm had fled the burning building unharmed. Again, the stories that circulated about their escape preferred a supernatural explanation. According to this version (and there is no other, more plausible account that has come down to us) the unknown mother of the storm baby was a jinnia who, unwilling to raise her half-human love child, had abandoned her at the mayor’s door, but had kept a watchful eye on her child from a distance, and, seeing that child’s life threatened, had entered the burning mansion and thrown a protective shield around Rosa Fast and young Storm and given them safe passage out of the house. Faute de mieux, this is the story we have.

How treacherous history is! Half-truths, ignorance, deceptions, false trails, errors, and lies, and buried somewhere in between all of that, the truth, in which it is easy to lose faith, of which it is consequently easy to say, it’s a chimera, there’s no such thing, everything is relative, one man’s absolute belief is another man’s fairy tale; but about which we insist, we insist most emphatically, that it is too important an idea to give up to the relativity merchants. Truth exists, and Toddler Storm’s magic powers provided, in those days, the visible proof of it. In her illustrious memory we refuse to allow truth to become “truth.” We may not know what it is, but it’s out there. We can’t be sure how Rosa Fast and Storm escaped the burning mayoral mansion, but we can accept our zone of unknowing and hold fast to what is known: they did escape. And after that the mayor, accepting the recommendation of the security services, went into a secret facility and governed the city from an undisclosed location. That location is unknown; her heroic governance is known. She marshaled the fight against the chaos inflicted by the Grand Ifrits; she made broadcasts to the citizenry to reassure them that everything possible was being done to help them and more would be done soon. She became the face and voice of the resistance and kept her invisible finger on the city’s pulse. This is known, and what is not known does not undermine it. This is the scientific way. To be open about the limits of one’s knowledge increases public confidence in what one says is known.

The city was a war zone and the war had spilled into The Bagdad. Graffiti tags, obscene writings, fecal matter, a broken place outside and in. The windows boarded up and many panes of glass long gone. He entered the darkened foyer and at once felt metal pressed to the side of his head and heard a high, wired voice threatening death, this house be occupy, muthafucka, open your shirt, open your goddam shirt, he had to show them he wasn’t wearing a grenade belt, he wasn’t a bomb somebody told to walk in here and spring-clean the building, who sent you, muthafucka, who you from. It was interesting, he thought, that he was moving at his normal leisurely rate but everything around him could be slowed right down, the voice of the man with the gun could be stretched out, becoming slo-mo-low, and he could slow things down further just by wanting to, just like this, and now the tough guys in the dark of the foyer were like statues, and he could reach up to the muzzle of the gun and pinch it, so, and squash it shut like a Plasticine toy, this was almost fun. He could do this, and now all the weapons in the possession of the occupiers had been turned into carrots and cucumbers. Oh, and he could do this, and now they were all naked. He allowed them to speed up — or himself to decelerate — and had the satisfaction of watching another transformation, from gang lords into frightened kids, who the what the let’s get outta here. As they backed away from him clutching at their manhood, he had a question for them: Sister Allbee, Blue Yasmeen, those names mean anything to you? And the man who had held a gun to his head now delivered a dagger to his heart. Those be the floatin’ bitches? The balloons? He removed his hands from his private parts and made a spreading gesture. Kapow, man. It was a mess. What do you mean, Mr. Geronimo asked, even though he knew what the man meant. Like a fuckin’ piñata, the naked man said. Boom. Dat some wack shit.

That was not how this part of the story was supposed to go. He was supposed to come home from Fairyland with superpowers and rescue Yasmeen and Sister. He was supposed to use his newly harnessed skills and bring them gently back to earth, hear their complaints, accept the blame, apologize, hug them, give them back the dailiness of their lives, save them from the madness and celebrate their salvation, like friends. It was supposed to be the moment when good sense began to return to the world and he, along with the others, was to be the bringer of that sense. The madness that had gotten into the world had had its way long enough. It was time for sanity to return and this was where he had wanted the process to begin. Them being dead — did they starve to death or were they killed, shot at for sport by the madness, maybe by those naked kids when the madness took them, and then their bodies left floating in the stairwell, filling up with the gases of death, until the explosion, until their insides like sticky rain — that wasn’t it at all.

He searched the house, which was now close to dereliction. There was blood on the walls. Maybe some of it had come from the exploding bodies of Sister and Yasmeen. In one room a naked wire sparked, which could start a fire at any time. Almost all the toilets were clogged. Almost all the chairs were broken and there were ripped mattresses on the floors of several units. In his own apartment there had been extensive looting. He owned nothing now except the clothes he was wearing. Outside, he did not expect to find his truck where he had left it, and so it was no surprise to find it gone. None of this mattered to him. He left The Bagdad in the grip of a new force, a rage that allowed him to understand Dunia’s blazing wrath after her father’s murder. The war had just become personal.

The phrase to the death formed in his thoughts and he realized, with some surprise, that he meant it.

The Lady Philosopher and Oliver Oldcastle were nowhere to be seen. Maybe they were still alive. Maybe they had found their way back home. He had to go to La Incoerenza at once. That, before anything else. He didn’t need the green pickup truck. He had a new way to get around.

He was only slowly grasping what his life had become. That he had risen, he well knew. He had faced that and accepted it. The descent had been involuntary, as unexpected as the rising, and it was, he understood, the consequence of an opening within himself of a secret self whose existence he had not previously suspected. But perhaps there was also a human dimension to his descending, his overcoming of what he had often thought of as a fault, his fault. In those lonely pendant hours he had faced the darkest things in his life, the pain of separation from what that life had once been, the agony of the rejected path, the path that rejected him. By embracing his grave wound, showing it to himself, he became stronger than his affliction. He had earned his gravity, and came down to earth. Thus Patient Zero became a source not only of the disease but of the cure.

He felt as if he had entered another skin. Or as if he, who was another, had become the new occupant of his body, which was other to him. Age had slipped from his thoughts and a great field of possibility stood before his inner eye, filled with white flowers, each one the enabler of a miracle. The white asphodel was the flower of the afterlife but he had never felt more alive. It also occurred to him that the curse of rising had this in common with his present condition: that its local effects transcended the laws of nature. For example, this ability to move very rapidly while the world seemed to stand still, a power over relative motion which he did not begin to understand but which was surprisingly easy to use. One does not have to know the secrets of the internal combustion engine, he reminded himself, to be able to drive a car. This kind of local sorcery, he understood, was the essence of the jinn. He was still flesh and blood, and that slowed him down somewhat — he could not move at anything like the speed of the Lightning Princess — but she had released into his body the secrets of smoke and fire and they carried him pretty swiftly along.

And so after a brief moment of blurred space and altered time he stood once again on the ravaged lawns of La Incoerenza and the gardener in him knew that there was one small victory, at least, that was within his reach. If there was one story of the jinn that everyone knew it was the tale of the jinni of the lamp who built Aladdin a palace with beautiful grounds fit for him to live in with his love the beautiful princess Badralbudur, and even though the story was probably a French fake the fact was that any jinni worth his salt could rustle up a decent palace and grounds in less time than it took to snap your fingers or clap your hands. Mr. Geronimo closed his eyes and there before him was the field of white asphodel. As he leaned down to smell their enchanted aroma the whole of the La Incoerenza estate appeared before him in miniature, perfect in every detail as it had been before the great storm, and he was a giant kneeling down to blow into it the breath of renewed life while the white flowers, also gigantic in comparison to the tiny house and grounds, waved gently all around.

When he opened his eyes the spell had done its work. There was La Incoerenza restored to its former glory, no trace anymore of the mud and detritus deposited there by the river, the indestructible shit of the past was gone and the great uprooted trees stood again as if their roots had never clawed at air, coated in black mud, and all his work of so many years was remade, the stone spirals, the Sunken Garden, the analemma sundial, the rhododendron forest, the Minoan labyrinth, the secret hedge-hidden nooks, and from the golden wood he heard a great cry of happiness, which told him that the Lady Philosopher was alive, and was discovering that pessimism was not the only way of looking at the world, that things could change for the better as as well as the worse, and that miracles did happen.

They had been living like birds, Alexandra and her Oldcastle, fluttering at first in empty rooms but then as they rose higher they were obliged to leave the house and float under cover of foliage. But they were birds with money: Alexandra Fariña had continued her father’s practice of keeping an absurd amount of cash locked up in the vault behind the Florentine painting, and that money had enabled her and her estate manager to survive. Cash money had provided a measure of security, though there had been burglaries, much had been taken, perhaps by the security personnel themselves, but at least there had been no physical or sexual violence in those lawless months, the perimeter had been more or less guarded and only occasionally breached, and after all they had only been robbed, not killed or raped. Cash money had paid the emergency services to visit regularly to bring fresh food and drink and whatever other supplies they needed. They had risen, now, to a height of about a dozen feet, and kept what they needed in an elaborate network of boxes and baskets slung from broad branches in the wood, built by local workmen and paid for, of course, in cash. The wood allowed them to perform their toilettes unobserved and without shame and there were moments when it was almost enjoyable.

But the sadness grew, and as the months passed Alexandra Bliss Fariña found herself hoping for an ending, wishing for it to come soon, and painlessly, if possible. She had not yet used any of her cash supply to purchase the substances that could make her wish come true, but she thought about it often. And then here instead of death was Mr. Geronimo and the lost world miraculously restored, time turned back, and hope given — lost hope, improbably rediscovered, like a precious ring, mislaid for eighteen months, found in a long-unopened drawer — that perhaps all could be as it had been. Hope. She cried out to him with improbable hope in her voice. We’re here. Over here. Here we are. And then, almost pleading, fearing a negative answer that would burst this tiny balloon of optimism, Can you get us down?

Yes, he could, he could close his eyes and imagine their tiny figures descending onto the restored lawns of the repaired property, and then there she was, running towards him, embracing him, and Oliver Oldcastle who had once threatened his life now standing hat in hand with head bowed in gratitude and not protesting at all as the Lady Philosopher covered Mr. Geronimo’s face in kisses. Much obliged, Oldcastle mumbled. Damned if I know how you did it, but still. Very much obliged.

And this, all of this, Alexandra cried, whirling about and about. You’re a wonder worker, Geronimo Manezes, that’s what you are.

If he had given in to his jinn self he would have made love to her on the spot, right there on the magically renewed grass with Oliver Oldcastle watching, and yes, the desire was in him all right, but he had sworn himself to a cause, he was in the service of Dunia the new jinnia Queen of the Mountain and his human part insisted he remember his oath; before life, his life, human life, could be properly renewed, her banner had to be planted in triumph on the battlefield.

I have to go, he said, and Alexandra Bliss Fariña’s disappointed pout was the perfect opposite of Oliver Oldcastle’s grumpy grin of joy.

In the faraway country of A. there once lived a gentle king known to all his subjects as the Father of the Nation. He was progressively inclined, so he helped to bring his country into the modern age, introducing free elections, defending women’s rights, and building a university. He was not a rich king, and made ends meet by allowing half his palace to be used as a hotel, where he often took tea with the guests. He endeared himself to the young people of his own country and of the West by permitting the legal manufacture and sale of hashish, quality controlled and stamped with government seals of approval, gold, silver and bronze, denoting grades of purity and price. Those were good years, the years of the king, innocent years, perhaps, but sadly his health was poor; his back hurt and his eyes were weak. He traveled to Italy to undergo surgery but while he was away his former prime minister performed some surgery of his own, cut the king away from the state and took over the kingdom himself. In the next three decades while the king was in exile, contenting himself, as was his way, with the quiet pursuits of chess, golf and gardening, all hell broke loose in his former kingdom. The prime minister didn’t last long, and a period of tribal faction fighting followed, which made at least one of A.’s powerful neighbors think the country was ripe for the picking.

So there was a foreign invasion. This was a mistake foreigners repeatedly made — the attempted conquest of the land of A. — but they invariably left with their tails between their legs, or just lay dead on the battlefield for the benefit of scavenging wild dogs, who weren’t choosy about what they ate and were willing to digest even this type of horrible foreign food. But when the foreign invasion was repelled what replaced it was even worse, a murderous gang of ignoramuses who called themselves the Swots, as if the mere word would earn them the status of true scholars. What the Swots had studied deeply was the art of forbidding things, and in a very short time they had forbidden painting, sculpture, music, theater, film, journalism, hashish, voting, elections, individualism, disagreement, pleasure, happiness, pool tables, clean-shaven chins (on men), women’s faces, women’s bodies, women’s education, women’s sports, women’s rights. They would have liked to have forbidden women altogether but even they could see that that was not entirely feasible, so they contented themselves with making women’s lives as unpleasant as possible. When Zumurrud the Great visited the land of A. in the early days of the War of the Worlds, he saw at once that it was an ideal place to set up a base. It is an interesting and little-known detail that Zumurrud the Great was an aficionado of golden-age science fiction, and could have discussed with friends, if he had had any friends, the work of such masters of the genre as Simak, Blish, Henderson, Van Vogt, Pohl and Kornbluth, Lem, Bester, Zelazny, Clarke, and L. Sprague de Camp. Among his favorites was Isaac Asimov’s classic novel of the 1950s, Foundation, and he decided to name his operation in A. after that novel. “The Foundation” he set up and ran — originally with the assistance of Zabardast the Sorcerer, but, after their quarrel, by himself — quickly acquired a foothold in A. by the simple procedure of purchasing the country’s new rulers.

“I bought the country,” he boasted to his followers. “It’s ours now.”

It didn’t take much. The underground jewel caves of Zumurrud the Great are celebrated in the lore of the jinn. Perhaps, and we believe this to be probable, at least one of these caverns was situated in the harsh mountainous eastern borderlands of A., deep below the mountains, hidden from human eyes by gates of stone. When Zumurrud presented himself to the leadership of the Swots they were overawed by his gigantic size, made witless with fear by being in the presence of a fire-born jinni — but they were also driven mad with desire by the golden bowls of diamonds and emeralds he bore, casually, as if they were nothing, one bowl in each immense hand. Diamonds larger than the Kohinoor fell from the bowls and rolled along the floor, coming to rest at the Swots’ trembling feet. “You can have as many of these little trinkets as you want,” said Zumurrud in his giant’s voice, “and you can do what you like with this godforsaken land, you can ban the wind, for all I care, you can forbid the clouds to rain or the sun to shine, go right ahead. But from now on the Foundation owns you, Swots, so you had better swot up how to keep me happy. If not, then bad things can happen, such as this.” He snapped his fingers and one of the Swots, a skinny, bent fellow with rotten teeth and a deep hatred of dance music, was transformed instantly into a pile of smoldering ash. “Just a demonstration,” murmured Zumurrud the Great, setting down the bowls of jewels. And that was that.

While Dunia and Mr. Geronimo were away in Fairyland the Zumurrud group launched a series of such “demonstrations,” albeit on a larger scale, designed to cow the human race and bring it meekly to heel. We say “the Zumurrud group” because, as has previously been mentioned, the Grand Ifrit himself was a person of considerable natural indolence, who preferred to let others do the dirty work while he reclined in an arbor, drinking, eating grapes, watching pornography on TV, and being serviced by his personal cohort of jinnia females. He had brought down a small army of lesser jinn from the upper world and mostly pointed them in the directions he desired, and off they went, assassinating prominent individuals, sinking ships, bringing down airliners, interfering with the computer operations of the stock markets, cursing some people with the rising curse, others with the crushing curse, and using the jewels he had in such quantities to bribe governments and bring other countries into his sphere of influence. However, the total number of fully fledged dark jinn who descended to the lower world almost certainly never exceeded one hundred individuals, to which the lesser species of parasite-jinni must be added. So, perhaps two or three hundred conquerors, on a planet of seven billion souls. At the height of the British Empire in India, there were no more than twenty thousand Britishers in that vast land, ruling successfully over three hundred million Indians, but even that impressive achievement was as nothing when compared with the rise of the dark jinn. The Grand Ifrits were in no doubt that the jinn were superior to the human race in every way, that human beings for all their pretensions of civilization and advancement were little better than bow-and-arrow primitives, and that the best thing that could happen to these lowlifes would be to spend a millennium or two in thrall to, and learning from, a superior race. This, Zabardast went so far as to say, was the burden the dark jinn had taken upon themselves, a duty which they were determined to discharge.

The Grand Ifrits’ contempt for their subjects was only increased by the ease with which they recruited human beings to assist them in the maintenance of their new empire. “Greed and fear,” Zumurrud told his three fellow leaders, who met, as was their custom, on a dark cloud circling the earth at the Equator, from which they watched and judged the mere mortals below them, “fear and greed, are the tools by which these insects can be controlled with almost comical ease,” a remark which made Zabardast the Sorcerer laugh loudly, because Zumurrud was well known not to possess anything that even slightly resembled a sense of humor. Zumurrud glared at him with open hostility. The gulf between the two senior Ifrits was growing wider every day. They had patched up their quarrel, made a truce and joined forces again, but trouble continued to rumble between them. They had known one another too long, and their friendship was nearing its end.

Lightning crackled in the heart of the cloud. Ra’im Blood-Drinker and Shining Ruby did their best to change the subject. “What about religion?” asked Blood-Drinker. “What should we do about that? The believers are multiplying down there even faster than before.” Shining Ruby, the self-styled Possessor of Souls, had never had any time for God or heaven. Fairyland was paradise enough and there was no reason to suppose the existence of a higher and better-perfumed garden. Showing a somewhat student-like fondness for proscription, he said, “We should ban it immediately. It’s a circus.”

This remark caused Zumurrud the Great and Zabardast the Sorcerer actually to sizzle with wrath. They crackled at the edges like a hundred eggs frying in a pan, and Shining Ruby and Ra’im Blood-Drinker understood that something had changed in the two senior Ifrits. “What’s the matter with you two?” Blood-Drinker wanted to know. “Since when did you join the halo brigade?”

“Don’t be a fool,” Zabardast told him slyly. “We are in the process of instituting a reign of terror on earth, and there’s only one word that justifies that as far as these savages are concerned: the word of this or that god. In name of a divine entity we can do whatever the hell we like and most of those fools down there will swallow it like a bitter pill.”

“So it’s a strategy, a ruse,” said Shining Ruby. “That, I can understand.”

But now Zumurrud the Great rose up in wrath, and the rage of the huge giant was a little frightening even to his fellow jinn. “There will be no more blasphemy,” he said. “Fear God’s word, or you too will be numbered among its enemies.”

This came as a shock to the other three. “Well, you’re singing a new song,” Blood-Drinker said, refusing to sound impressed. “Who taught you that one?”

“You’ve spent your whole life carousing, killing, gambling, fucking, and then sleeping it off,” added Shining Ruby, “so sainthood sits as uncomfortably on you as that golden crown, which, by the way, is far too small, having been made for a human head which, if you recall, you quite unnecessarily severed from its body.”

“I’ve been studying philosophy,” muttered the giant, reddening, more than a little embarrassed by his admission. “It’s never too late to learn.”

The transformation of the skeptical giant Zumurrud into a soldier for a higher power was the last achievement of the dead philosopher of Tus. Ghazali was dust and the jinni was fire but the thinker in his grave still knew a trick or two. Or, to put it another way: when a being who, all his life, has defined himself by deeds finally opens his ears to words, it isn’t hard to make him accept whichever words you pour into them. Zumurrud had come to him. He was ready to receive what the dead man had to say.

“Every being which begins has a cause for its beginning,” said Ghazali, “and the world is a being which begins; therefore, it possesses a cause for its beginning.”

“That doesn’t include the jinn,” Zumurrud said. “We don’t need a cause.”

“You have mothers and fathers,” said Ghazali. “Therefore you began. Therefore you also are beings who begin. Therefore you must have a cause. It’s a question of language. When the language insists, we can only follow.”

“Language,” Zumurrud repeated slowly.

“Everything boils down to words,” Ghazali said.

“What about God?” Zumurrud, genuinely puzzled, asked at their next encounter. “Didn’t he have a beginning too? If not, where did he spring from? If so, who or what was his cause? Wouldn’t God have to have a God and so on backwards forever?”

“You’re not as stupid as you look,” Ghazali conceded, “but you must understand that your confusion arises, again, out of a problem of language. The term begins supposes the existence of linear time. Both human beings and the jinn live in that time, we have births, lives and deaths, beginnings, middles and endings. God, however, lives in a different kind of time.”

“There’s more than one kind?”

“We live in what can be called Becoming-Time. We are born, we become ourselves, and then, when the Destroyer of Days comes to call, we unbecome, and what’s left is dust. Talkative dust, in my case, but dust nonetheless. God’s time, however, is eternal: it’s just Being-Time. Past, present and future all exist together for him, and so those words, past, present, future, cease to have meaning. Eternal time has neither beginning nor end. It does not move. Nothing begins. Nothing finishes. God, in his time, has neither a dusty end, nor a fat, bright middle, nor a mewling beginning. He just is.”

“Just is,” Zumurrud repeated doubtfully.

“Yes,” Ghazali confirmed.

“So God is a sort of time traveler,” Zumurrud proposed. “He moves from his kind of time to ours, and by doing so becomes infinitely powerful.”

“If you like,” Ghazali agreed. “Except that he doesn’t become. He still just is. You have to be careful how you use words.”

“Okay,” Zumurrud said, confused again.

“Think about it,” Ghazali urged him.

“This god, Just-Is,” Zumurrud said on a third occasion, after thinking about it, “he doesn’t like being argued with, right?”

“He is essential, that is to say, pure essence, and as such, he is also inarguable,” Ghazali told him. “The second proposition unavoidably follows the first. To deny his essence would be to call him inessential, which would be to argue with him, who is, by definition, inarguable. Thus to argue with his inarguability is self-evidently to misuse language, and, as I told you, you have to be careful what words you use and how you use them. Bad language can blow up in your face.”

“Like explosives,” Zumurrud said.

“Worse,” Ghazali said. “This is why wrong words are not to be tolerated.”

“I have the feeling,” Zumurrud mused, “that these wretched mortals of the lower world are even more confused about language than I was.”

“Teach them,” Ghazali said. “Teach them the tongue of the divine Just-Is. The instruction should be intensive, severe, even, one could say, fearsome. Remember what I told you about fear. Fear is man’s fate. Man is born afraid, of the dark, of the unknown, of strangers, of failure, and of women. Fear leads him towards faith, not as a cure for fear, but as an acceptance that the fear of God is the natural and proper condition of man’s lot. Teach them to fear the improper use of words. There is no crime the Almighty finds more unforgivable.”

“I can do that,” said Zumurrud the Great. “They’ll be speaking my way soon enough.”

“Not yours,” Ghazali corrected him, but only mildly. When one was dealing with a Grand Ifrit one had to make certain allowances for his vast egotism.

“I understand,” said Zumurrud the Great. “Rest now. No more words are necessary.”

There ended the lesson. As Ghazali would soon discover, sending the most potent of the dark jinn down the path of extreme violence could have results that alarmed the sender. The student soon surpassed the master.

Dunia awakened Ibn Rushd in his grave for the last time. I’ve come to say goodbye, she told him. I won’t be back to see you after today.

What has taken my place in your affections? he asked, his voice heavy with sarcasm. A pile of dust knows its limitations.

She told him about the war. The enemy is strong, she said.

The enemy is stupid, he replied. That is ground for hope. There is no originality in tyrants, and they learn nothing from the demise of their precursors. They will be brutal and stifling and engender hatred and destroy what men love and that will defeat them. All important battles are, in the end, conflicts between hatred and love, and we must hold to the idea that love is stronger than hate.

I don’t know if I can do that, she said, for now I too am full of hatred. I look at the jinn world and see my dead father there, yes, but beyond that I see its shallowness: its obsession with shiny baubles, its amorality, its widespread contempt for human beings, which I must call by its true name, racism. I see the narcissistic malice of the Ifrits and I know that a little of that is in me too, there is always darkness as well as light. I don’t see any light in the dark jinn now but I sense the darkness in myself. It’s the place from which the hate comes. So I question myself as well as my world but I also know that this is no time for discussions. This is war. In wartime one must not ask, but do. So our discussions too must end, and what has to be done must be done.

That is a sad speech, he said. Reconsider. You need my guidance now.

Goodbye, she answered.

You’re abandoning me.

You abandoned me once.

Then this is your revenge. To leave me conscious and impotent in my grave for all eternity.

No, she said, kindly. No revenge. Only farewell. Sleep.

Natraj Hero dancing the destruction dance. Find the jinni within yourself, the hot girl told him, the skinny little chick who said she was his great-great-great-great-and-more-greats-granny. His home was gone his mother didn’t last much longer his mother who so far in life was the only woman he had truly loved. The shock of the night of the giant and the burning house did her in. He buried her and then was stuck on his cousin Normal’s couch missing her more every minute of every day. His cousin who he fuckin’ hated more every minute of every day. When I get in charge of my inner goblin, Normal, you jus might be the first a-hole I blast. Jus waitonly, waitansee.

The whole world gone to hell in a handcart and he, Jimmy Kapoor, spending his nights hittin’ the graveyards with, because he’s a funny guy, a lightning bolt painted on his matha like Harry P. He uses St. Michael’s mostly, cradled in the outstretched arms of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway or the way he really thinks of it the fuck-you V-sign of the BQE, all those headstones with lady angels perched on top looking down sad-faced at the stiffs. He’s different now, ever since his hot granny whispered against his body, first his temples then his heart, bleeve it bruh she put her lips against my chest and worked her Hogwarts magic. Bam his head blew open like in that Kubrick flick like a rushing towards somewhere very cool and he’s seeing shit he never dreamed, the grid of jinn knowledge and capability. It’s actually mind-blowing, fuck, his mind is literally blown, but hey, interestingly, it hasn’t made him crazy. Guess why. Guess that inner goblin is awake inside him and can handle this stuff. This must be what it feels like when people say, I feel like another person, or, I feel like a new man.

So now he’s another person who has no other name, just his own. And that other person is him.

First there was the wormhole and the giant pretending to be his cartoon character just to fuck with his head but now his hot granny really fucked with his head and whaddya know it’s like he’s the superhero. The magic dancing king. Having the time of your life.

And oh yeah he’s getting it. He can move really fast, slow the world down and speed himself up, that is sick. He can turn this into that. A handful of pebbles, hey presto, jewelry. A fallen branch when he squeezes it becomes a block of gold, who needs you Normal with your lousy couch I’m rich. But then Dunia’s voice in his head, as if she hears every thought, if you don’t concentrate on the fighting you’ll be dead sooner than you think. He thinks about his mother and that gives him the anger. That puts the rage in him. Dunia says she’s putting together an army. In different cities different Jimmys. He looks into his new brain and sees the network spreading. He reaches out his arm and the juice flows down it and wham, the thunderbolt, and one less sad-face angel. This he can’t believe. It’s his dream.

Somebody left pumpkins over there at that last resting place, well, thas jus askin’ for it dude I’m sorry. Boom. Pumpkin soup.

When he got into it, it wasn’t lightning with him. It was metamorphosis. Sure he blew the heads off a few stone angels, that was fun, he was exercising his Second Amendment right to bear arms, though probably the Founding Fathers didn’t mean actual arms—but he discovered soon enough that he was better at the transformation thing. It didn’t have to be jewelry, that was the key. Not just pebble into ruby. It has to be admitted that he tried his powers out on living things. Birds. Stray cats. Mangy curs. Rats. Well, nobody minds if you turn rats into rat turds or rat sausages, but birds, cats, dogs, there are people who care about those entities, starting with his late mother the bird-keeper, so, sorry, people, sorry, Mom.

The best bit was when he found out he could turn his targets into, for example, sounds. Whoa. He could turn a bird into birdsong, no bird, just the song hanging there, he could turn a cat into a meow. Once he got the hang of that he started getting playful, he zapped a headstone and then there was just a kind of sobbing sound hanging in that space, yeah, he was discovering kind of a sick streak, maybe inside every tax accountant there was a sicko superhero trying to get out, and hey, he thought, what about colors, can I turn roaches or flags or cheeseburgers into just colors hanging in space and then, yeah, dissipating. He needed to practice on larger animals. Any sheep around here? Nobody’s gonna miss a few sheep, right? Maybe the metamorphoses were reversible, in which case, hey, no sheep were harmed in the making of this superpower. But the sheep were upstate on farms, unless the farms had broken down and the animals were just wandering about loose up there, who could he get to bring him where he needed to be, Asia had a car, she probably even knew where to get gas, gorgeous Ah-see-ah not Ay-sha, Italian signorina, not a brown girl, a dancer, no, bitch, not a stripper, she was pure class, ballet; probably had a line of men a mile long waiting for her with full gas cans in each hand. Now if he only had the really useful superpower of talking slick to girls.

Turned out he had the chops after all. He made the call, found a few words and told ballet girl what had happened to him, all of it, the hot granny, the whispering, bam, Stanley Kubrick space-odyssey FX, the works, and she didn’t believe-believe him but believed him enough to go to the graveyard with him and, man, he showed her. Having her to perform for, he was, truth, amazing. The sound transformations the color changes the lightning.

And right there in St. Michael’s after he performed for her she danced for him. Oh yes. So guess what. He didn’t just have a driver to go up the Hudson in search of sheep. He had a girlfriend, girlfriend. Oh yes.

And so it went on for maybe a year and a half. During the long months of self-rediscovery, of learning to walk as a jinni before he could run as a jinni and then fly, during the time of accelerated second childhood which Geronimo Manezes had also experienced, Jimmy Kapoor realized that some part of him had been waiting for this, that there were people, of whom he was one, who yearned for the world of dreams and imagination to become a part of their waking lives, who hoped for themselves and believed of themselves that they were capable of becoming a part of the wonderful, of kicking away the dust of banality and rising, reborn, into their true miraculous natures. Secretly he had always known that his creation, Natraj Hero, wasn’t up to the mark, wouldn’t lift him out of the rut of nothingness, which increased his delight at discovering that he could step into the light not through the medium of a fiction but as himself; himself made fictional, he thought, or better than fictional — actual, but finally, against all hope, extraordinary. Maybe this was why he took so easily, so naturally, to his newly revealed jinn self. Its existence in him was a thing he had always known, but he had not trusted the knowledge; not until Dunia whispered to his heart.

He was waiting for the word from the Lightning Princess. Sometimes for a change he headed south to Calvary or Mount Zion cemeteries and blew the heads off stone lions in those locations also, and performed new changes, he could turn solid objects into smells now, one minute it was a bench, the next it was a fart, it was the accumulation of all the farts farted by old farts male and female sitting on that bench thinking about other old farts, now deceased, Macfart shall fart no more.

He thought about his collection of vintage comic books, gone now in the fireball of his old home, and remembered in those old DC issues the real-life Superman, Mr. Charles Atlas in his leopard-skin briefs with his Dynamic Tension technique that transformed him into The World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man. Weren’t no girls snickering behind his back now. This wasn’t Old Jimmy anymore, meaning ninety-seven-pound-weakling Young Jimmy. This was a real He-Man, as Mr. Atlas would say. He-Me, with long tall Ah-see-ah on his arm. Nobody was kicking sand in his face now.

Here, finally, came Dunia, between the headstones of St. Michael’s, looking for him: not the princess anymore but the queen. In the graveyard at midnight she commiserated with him for the loss of his mother. She lost a father too. Are you ready, she asked. Oh, was he ready.

She murmured in his ear, giving him some bad guys to kill.

The parasite-jinn, as they manifested themselves here on earth during the War of the Worlds, were unimpressive creatures, their capacity for thought extremely limited. When pointed by their jinn overlords they went in the direction indicated to wreak stipulated havoc, as in the attack on the mayor’s residence. Afterwards, they spent their time seeking bodies to inhabit, for without human hosts they could not survive in the lower world. Once they latched on to a man or woman they sucked the body dry of life until it was an empty husk, and then they had only a short time in which to find a new host. Some now say that these creatures should not be numbered among the true jinn because they were barely sentient, a slave class, or a lower form of life. That argument has much merit, but still our tradition accords them a place in the taxonomy of the jinn, if only because, as the story has come down to us, they were the first of the jinn ever to be slain by a human being: or, to be precise, by a hybrid being — mostly human, with a strong dash of jinni in him, which had been set free by the fairy queen.

Certain images that have reached us from the conflicts of the past, both still and moving, now seem pornographic. We keep these images in sealed containers in restricted rooms for the consideration of genuine scholars: historians, students of defunct technologies (photography, film), psychologists. We see no need to distress ourselves unduly by putting such objects on public display.

We have not in these pages lingered unduly, and we will continue not to dwell, on the details of killings. We pride ourselves that we have evolved since those distant times; and that violence, which for so long lay upon humanity like a jinni’s curse, has become a thing of the past. Sometimes, like any addict, we still feel it in our blood, we become aware of its scent in our nostrils; some of us go so far as to clench our fists, curl our upper lips into aggressive sneers, and even, for a brief instant, raise our voices. But we resist, we uncurl, lower our lips, lower our voices. We do not succumb. We are aware, however, that any account of our past, and in particular the time of the strangenesses and the Two Worlds’ War, would be sorely lacking if it turned its face entirely away from unappetizing matters of injury and death.

The parasite-jinn came and went from city to city, country to country, continent to continent. They had more than one place, one people to scare, and utilized the high-speed jinn transportation systems — the wormholes, the slow-them-down-speed-me-up time-shifts, even, at times, the flying urns — to move hither and yon. In the sealed containers in our restricted rooms we have preserved disturbing images of cannibal jinn parasites eating people’s faces in Miami, Florida; and executioner jinn parasites stoning women to death in desert places; and suicide bomber jinn parasites allowing their host bodies to explode on army bases and then immediately possessing the nearest soldier and murdering more of his fellows in what was called an insider attack, which it was, but not in the conventional sense of the term; and crazed paramilitary jinn parasites in charge of tanks in eastern Europe, shooting passenger aircraft out of the sky — but let these few images suffice. There is no need to make a comprehensive catalogue of horrors. Let us say: they hunted in packs, like feral dogs, and were wilder than anything on four legs. And it was Jimmy Kapoor’s appointed task, given him by the newly crowned Lightning Queen, to hunt down the hunters.

The men and women occupied by the parasite-jinn were beyond saving, dead the moment the parasites entered their bodies. But how to attack the parasites, who were disembodied until they seized (which is to say, killed) a living person, in such a way that they ceased to be able to do it? It was Jimmy Kapoor who solved the riddle: if solid objects could be turned into colors or smells or sounds, then perhaps, by reversing the technique, vaporous entities could be solidified. Thus began the Medusa operation, so called because the cloudy parasites, when Jimmy made them visible permanences, looked like stone monsters that people inaccurately called gorgons, even though of course, according to the ancient Greeks, Medusa the Gorgon was the petrifier, not the petrified — it was her gaze that turned living men to stone. (So it was also with Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. It is the nameless golem, the artificial man, that has come to be known by its creator’s name.)

It is also perhaps inaccurate to call these petrified things “monsters.” They were non-anthropomorphic, sinuous, complex shapes, twisting in and out of themselves, sometimes forming thickets of spikes, at other times extruding hinged “arms” that ended in blades. They could be many faceted, like crystals, or as fluid as fountains. Jimmy fought them wherever he found them, wherever his newly accessible jinn information system sent him in pursuit of these lesser demons, on the banks of the Tiber in Rome or on the shining metal heights of a Manhattan skyscraper, and he left them where he changed them, their dead bodies decorating the world’s cities like new works of art, sculptural and, yes, it has to be said, beautiful. This was a thing men and women discussed even then, at the height of the war. The beauty of the gorgons gave pause, even in those distracted times, and the link between art and death, the fact that by dying the parasite-jinn had metamorphosed from lethal adversaries into aesthetically pleasing objects of contemplation, gave rise to a kind of relieved surprise. The making of solidity out of evanescence: that was one of the newest arts of war, and one that had the greatest claim, of all such arts, to be included in the catalogue of Art itself, high art, in which beauty and meaning combined in revelatory forms.

Their pursuer and nemesis did not see himself as an artist. He was Jimmy Natraj, god of destruction, dancing his destruction dance.

Zumurrud the Great declared that his Foundation was only the first step towards the creation of the global jinn sultanate, whose worldwide authority he now proclaimed, and also his own anointment, by his own hand, as the first sultan. At once, however, the other three Grand Ifrits expressed their displeasure at his self-declared primacy, and he was obliged to backtrack a little. Because he could not vent his annoyance on the other three members of the ruling quadrumvirate, Zumurrud embarked on a wild international spree of decapitations, crucifixions and stonings that created, in the very first days of the sultanate, a groundswell of hatred that would, in short order, fuel the counterrevolution. His alliance with the vicious and illiterate Swots of A. gave him what passed for a program of governance, and he set about enthusiastically proscribing things just the way they did, poetry, bicycles, toilet paper, fireworks, love stories, political parties, French fries, eyeglasses, root canal dentistry, encyclopedias, condoms, and chocolate, and burning anyone who raised an objection at the stake, or chopping them in half, or, as he gained enthusiasm for the work, hanging, drawing and quartering them, the traditional and excellent English penalty for high treason ever since the thirteenth century. He was willing (he told the other Grand Ifrits) to learn the best lessons of the former imperial powers, and announced the inclusion of these medieval penalties in the legal code of the new sultanate, with immediate and devastating effect.

Most idiosyncratically of all, he declared his implacable enmity towards all forms of sealable containers, all jars with lids that could be screwed down or bottles that could be corked, all trunks with locks, all pressure cookers, all safety-deposit boxes, coffins and tea chests. His fellow Grand Ifrits Shining Ruby and Ra’im Blood-Drinker had no memories of incarceration, and reacted to these declarations with dismissive shrugs. But, he told them, once you’ve spent an eternity trapped in glass you develop a hatred of your jail cell. “As you wish,” Shining Ruby said, “but wasting one’s time on little things is not the hallmark of greatness.” Zumurrud ignored this slight. Men had imprisoned him. Now he would have his turn. That was a hatred in him born of those prison years that could not be assuaged, not by all the proscriptions and executions in the world. Sometimes he thought he did not so much wish to rule over the human race as to preside over its brutal extinction.

In this matter at least, Zabardast, who had also known imprisonment, was in full agreement with Zumurrud: it was time for vengeance.

The revenge of the jinn burns with unquenchable fire.

It wasn’t long before Zumurrud’s bloodthirstiness began to worry what remained of Ghazali. The philosopher’s dust, when informed by the great jinni of the thoroughness with which he was fulfilling the dead man’s demand that the human race be made afraid so that their fear might drive them to the divine, was obliged to consider the difference between scholarly theory and bloody practice, and concluded that Zumurrud, while undeniably assiduous, might have, in a certain sense, gone too far. When Zumurrud heard this he understood that the philosopher was no longer useful to him. He had gone beyond anything that could be taught by this old dead fool. “My duty to you is done,” he told Ghazali. “I return you to the silence of the grave.”

Zabardast, always the more controlled of the two senior dark jinn, always the more inward and soft-spoken (though in reality no less ruthless, perhaps even more so, because of his greater intelligence), proposed that the new sultanate be quartered, like the bodies Zumurrud was hacking to bits. It was too large to be centrally governed and Zumurrud’s “Foundation” in the remote land of A. was scarcely a grand metropolis, fit to be a capital city. It was already the case, he pointed out, that most of Zumurrud’s activity was in what might loosely be called the “East,” whereas he himself has done his best work, made the most mischief and created the most fear, in the powerful “West.” That left Africa and South America for Ra’im Blood Drinker and Shining Ruby. The rest of the world — Australasia, Polynesia, and the territories of penguins and polar bears — could probably be ignored for the moment.

This was a dispensation that pleased nobody, not even its proposer (for Zabardast secretly planned to take over the whole world), but which all four Grand Ifrits briefly accepted—briefly, until the quarrels began. Shining Ruby was particularly displeased with his lot. The jinn are happiest in those lands in which their stories are best known, more or less at home in lands to which their stories traveled in the baggage of migrant peoples, and ill at ease in zones less known to them, in which they too are less known. “South America?” complained Shining Ruby. “What do they know about magic there?”

Their wars of conquest sprang up like black flowers all over the globe, and many of these were small proxy wars, waged by men controlled by the jinn in every way a man can be controlled, by possession, enchantment, bribery, fear, or faith. The dark jinn sat indolent on their clouds wrapped in fogs of invisibility so thick that for a long time even Dunia couldn’t make out where her mightiest enemies were. They sat up there watching their puppets kill and die and sometimes they sent the lesser jinn down to join in the destruction. Within a very short time, however, the old failings of the jinn — their disloyalty, their lack of application, their whimsicality, their selfishness, their egotism — rose to the surface. Each of the four quickly came to believe that he and he alone was, and should be recognized as, the grandest of the grand, and what began as squabbling escalated at speed and changed the nature of the conflict in the lower world. This was when the human race became the canvas upon which the dark jinn painted their mutual hatred, the raw material from which each of the quartet sought to forge the saga of his own absolute supremacy.

Looking back, we tell ourselves this: the craziness unleashed upon our ancestors by the jinn was the craziness that also waited inside every human heart. We can blame the jinn, and we do, we do. But if we are honest we must blame human failings too.

It is painful to record that the dark jinn took particular pleasure in watching assaults on women. In the age before the separation of the Two Worlds women in most parts of the world had been considered to be secondary, lesser entities, chattels, homemakers, to be respected as mothers but otherwise disdained, and though these attitudes had changed for the better in some parts of the planet at least, the dark jinn’s belief that women were provided for men’s use and support were still those of the dark ages. In addition the frustrations caused by the sexual boycott imposed by the jinnia population of the upper world had made them angry, and so they watched without criticism as their proxies turned violent, as women were not only violated but killed thereafter, these new women, many of whom rejected the idea of their inferiority, and needed to be put back in their place. Into this war against the female gender Queen Dunia sent a soldier of her own, and the tide of battle began to turn.

Teresa Saca had her superhero name now. Not Madame Magneto or any of that tabloid nonsense, that was comic book stuff. Dunia’s voice in her head saying I’m your mother. I too will be something’s mother, she told herself, I will be Mother, the fiery mama of death itself. That other, more saintly Mother Teresa, she had been in the death business too, but Teresa Saca was more interested in the sudden-death variety than in hospices, no easing of the living into soft oblivion for her, just a hammer blow of voltage to bring life to a hard full stop. She was Dunia’s avenging angel, the avenger, or so she told herself, of every spurned, wronged, abused woman who had ever lived.

Moral exemption was an unfamiliar state to be in, the condition of having permission to kill, to destroy without feeling guilt at the destruction, there was something here that went against the human grain. When she killed Seth Oldville she had been full of rage but that didn’t make it right, she understood that, rage was a reason but it was not an excuse. He might have been an asshole, but she was still a murderer. The criminal was guilty of the crime, and that criminal would be her, and maybe justice had to be done, but, whatever, she added silently, they need to catch me first. And now all of a sudden her jinnia ancestor whispered into her and set her inner warrior free and tasked her with helping to save the world. It was like those movies where they took guys off death row and gave them a shot at redemption, and if they died, hey, they were going to get fried anyway. Fair enough, she thought, but I’m going to take a lot of bastards down with me when I go.

Closing the eyes revealed the grid system of the jinn, and her mistress Dunia had sent her the coordinates she needed. Turning sideways and leaning just so slipped her through a crack in the air into the travel dimension and then she was going wherever the grid decreed. When she emerged from the tunnel between the dimensions, she barely knew which country she was in — yes, the information Dunia had planted in her mind told her its name, A. or P. or I., but that alphabet soup didn’t help much; one of the characteristics of her new reality, of this new way of getting around and of the alternate reality that had created it, was this loss of connection to the material world — she could have been anywhere, any brown barren space, any lush green park, any mountain, any valley, any city, any street, any earth. Then after a time she understood that it didn’t matter, whichever country she was in it was always the same country, the country of attacks on women, and she was the assassin who came to avenge them. Here was a “man” possessed by a jinni — possessed, enchanted, bribed by jewels, it didn’t matter. What he had done condemned him, and here was the lightning in her fingertips that carried out the sentence. No, there was no need for moral introspection. She was neither judge nor jury. She was the executioner. Call me Mother, she told her targets. These were the last words they heard on earth.

Floating through the impossible corridors between time and space, the tunnels bored through the spiraling Magellanic clouds of nonexistence, possessed by the melancholy solitude of the wandering murderer, Teresa Saca contemplated her youth, its desperation, the nights when she floored the accelerator and drove her first car (her first actual car of her own, not the stolen red convertible of her first wild ride), a convertible, ancient, electric blue, as fast as she could go down country roads and through the swamps, really not caring if she lived or died. Always self-destructive then, there were drugs and unsuitable men, but she learned in school the only lesson worth learning, beauty is currency, and as soon as the breasts showed up she straightened her long black hair and headed for the big city to spend it, the only currency she had, and hey, she didn’t do so badly, look at her now, she was a mass murderer with superpowers, that was quite a career path for a girl from nowhere.

That girl didn’t matter anymore anyway. The past dropped away from her like snakeskin. She discovered she was good at this, the sudden appearance, the startled horror on the face of the target, the thunderbolt like a bright lance through his chest, or sometimes, just for fun, his genitalia, or his eye, they all worked. And then back into the nothingness towards the next rapist the next abuser the next subhuman creature the next piece of primordial slime the next thing that deserved to die, whom she was happy to kill, whom she killed without remorse. And with each act she became stronger, she felt strength filling her, she became, and this seemed to her a good thing, less human. More jinnia than flesh and blood. Soon she would be Dunia’s equal. Soon she would be able to look the Queen of Qâf in the eye and stare her down. Soon she would be invincible.

It was a strange war, haphazard, wayward, as the jinn are. It was here today and gone tomorrow, then back again without warning. It was colossal, all-consuming, and then distant, absent. One day a monster rising from the sea, the next, nothing, and then, on the seventh day, acid rain from the skies. There was chaos and fear and attacks by supernatural giants from their cloud eyries and then lazy hiatuses during which the fear and chaos continued. There were parasites and explosions and possessions and everywhere there was rage. The rage of the jinn was part of what they were, amplified, in the case of Zumurrud and Zabardast, by their long captivity, and it found an answering rage in many human hearts, like a bell chiming in a Gothic tower and being answered by its echo from the bottom of a well, and maybe this was what war was now, maybe this was the last war, this descent into random raging chaos, a war in which the conquerors were as viciously at war with one another as with the wretched earth. Because this war was formless it was hard to fight, harder still to win. It felt like a war against an abstraction, a war against war itself. Did Dunia have the skill to win such a war? Or was some greater ruthlessness required, a ruthlessness which Dunia did not possess, but of which she, Teresa Saca, was becoming more capable with every thunderbolt poured into the heart of a guilty man? At some point it would not be enough to defend the earth. It would be necessary to attack the upper world.

I’m too old to be in an army, thought Mr. Geronimo in the cloud tunnels. How many of us are there in Dunia’s raggle-taggle brigade, gardeners and accountants and murderesses, how many members of her bloodline has the fairy queen whispered to and drafted to face the most fearsome enemies in the known worlds, and what chance do we really have against the unleashed savagery of the dark jinn. Can even Dunia in her wrath bring all four of them down and their minions too. Or is the fate of the world to surrender to the darkness descending by finding the answering darkness within ourselves. No, not if I can help it, an inner voice replied. So he was a soldier in this war in spite of all his doubts. The aches and groans in his much-used body. Never mind. It was hard to know what a just war looked like anymore but this one, this oddest of conflicts, was one in which he was prepared to play his part.

“Anyway,” he told himself, “it’s not as if I’ve been given a frontline role. I’m more like the medical team than the vanguard. I’m the MASH.”

To bring down those rising and to raise up those in the grip of the crushing curse. This was his appointed task: the adjustment of faults in gravity. In his mind’s eye the global grid system located the victims, the ones most in need flashing brightest on his retina. What a way to see the world, he thought. The plagues of rising and falling were everywhere, sprinkled over the world by Zabardast the Sorcerer, the random terror of their arrival exceeding what would have been caused by a “normal” plague; and so everywhere was where he had to go. Here was a ferry approaching the gambling dens of Macao, a crowd shrinking back from him in wondering fear as he appeared from nowhere to save a traveler whose cries of pain they had all ignored, Mr. Geronimo bending over him whispering and the man rising to his feet, raised from the dead, or near-dead, and Mr. Geronimo turning sideways and gone, leaving his Chinese Lazarus to his fate, the poor man’s fellow travelers still eyeing him as if he bore an infectious disease, maybe he would go and gamble his savings away that night just to celebrate being alive, but that was someone else’s story to tell, and here was Mr. Geronimo on a mountainside in the Pir Panjal fishing a railway tunnel worker out of the sky, and then here, and here, and here.

Sometimes he arrived too late and a riser, already too far gone, was dying of hypothermia or breathing difficulties in the thin cold air of an Andean sky, or a crushee had been crushed in a Mayfair art gallery, his bones broken and compacted, his body a burst concertina leaking blood through flattened clothes, his hat atop the whole sorry mess, looking like an installation. But often, accelerating down the wormholes, he showed up in time, he raised the fallen, lowered the risen. In some places the disease had spread rapidly, there were great crowds of the terrified floating above the lampposts, and he brought them all softly down with a wave of his hand; and then, oh! the gratitude, bordering on adoration. He understood. He had been there himself. Proximity to calamity released the human capacity for love. The expression on the face of Alexandra Bliss Fariña after he restored the glory of La Incoerenza and brought her and Oliver Oldcastle back down to earth: every man alive would wish to be looked at in that way by a beautiful woman.

Even if standing next to that woman was her hairy estate manager, wearing exactly the same adoring look.

The lifelong pessimism of the Lady Philosopher had been wholly dissipated by Mr. Geronimo’s small miracle, burned off by his local magic like clouds by the heat of the sun. This new Alexandra looked at Geronimo Manezes as a sort of savior, capable of rescuing not only herself and her estate but the whole incoherent earth as well. It was to her bed that he retired at the end of these long strange days — What was a “day” anymore? he asked himself; the wormhole journeys across space and time zones, the staccato arrivals and departures a hundred and more times a day, disconnected him from any real sense of the continuity of life, and when exhaustion claimed him, the bone-weariness of the rootless, he came to her. These were stolen moments, oases in the desert of the war, and each of them made promises to the other of longer moments in the future, dream-moments in dream-places which were their dreams of peace. Will we win? she asked him, curled into his arm, his hand cradling her head. We will win, won’t we?

Yes, he told her. We will win, because the alternative is to lose, and that is unthinkable. We will win.

He slept poorly now, overtired, feeling his years, and in the half-sleeping nights he wondered about that promise. Dunia was gone, he didn’t know where, but he knew why: she was hunting the biggest game of all, the four great enemies she had made it her business to destroy. Messages and instructions from her poured daily and nightly into the newly opened jinn area of his brain. She was still running the operation, no question about that, but she was a hidden general, moving too far and too fast to be seen personally by her troops. And could “we” really win, he wondered, were there enough of us, or were there in reality more people seduced by the darkness of the jinn, was “victory” what people actually wanted, or did the word seem triumphalist and wrong, did people prefer the idea of making an accommodation with the new masters, and would the dark jinn’s overthrow feel like freedom or just the ascent of a new superpower, the Lightning Queen come to rule them instead of the Giant and the Sorcerer. These bubbling thoughts sapped his strength but the woman lying beside him gave it back. Yes, “we” would win. “We” owed it to our loved ones not to love. We owed it to the idea of love itself which might die if the dark jinn ruled the world.

Love, for so long dammed up inside Mr. Geronimo, was flooding through him now. His powerful intoxication with Dunia herself had started it, probably doomed from the start, being a thing of echoes, each seeing in the other their true love’s avatar … but that already seemed a long time ago, she had retreated from him into queenliness and war. Love itself had remained in him, he felt it splashing around in his insides, a great tidal sea of it ebbing and flowing through his heart, and here was Alexandra Bliss Fariña ready to dive into those waters, let us drown in love together, my love, and yes, he thought, maybe one last great love was permitted him, and here she was, ready for him, and yes, why not, he would take the plunge as well. He was so tired in her bed that there was little in the way of lovemaking, one night in four or five was about his speed these days anyway, but she was full of understanding. He was her warrior to be loved and waited for and she would take what little of him she could get and wait for the rest.

And outside her bedroom door when he set off again on his travels stood Oliver Oldcastle, not angry Oliver of old but new, grateful, obsequious Oldcastle, as dewy-eyed as any spaniel, cap in hand, a sickly yellow-toothed smile affixed to his usually lugubrious face as if tied on with a piece of string. Is there anything I can do for you sir, anything you need, just say the word. I’m not much of a fighter but if it comes down to it I’m your man.

These fawning obeisances got Mr. Geronimo’s goat. I think I liked it better in the old days, he told the estate manager, when you were threatening to kill me.