Blindfold

Douglas McDermott didn’t deserve what happened to him. Few people would. Torquemada, maybe, or Robespierre. When people say of a thing: ‘I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy,’ this would be such a one. But when Fate throws her darts, she always wears a blindfold.

Douglas was nobody’s worst enemy. He was a good-natured fellow married to a good-natured woman, and if he cheated now and then in small ways on his taxes or at solitaire, he certainly never cheated on his wife. Sometimes he peeked at the answers to crosswords and then pretended to know them off-handedly. Occasionally he parked carelessly in the company lot, edging into an adjacent space. But that’s really the worst that can be said of him, which just goes to show something about the unfairness of it all. Pity him, surely, but take a moment more to thank your particular stars that you are not in his place.

You cannot see Mr. McDermott now; he is somewhere dark and uncomfortable, though that is something of an understatement. Douglas is confused, in pain, and wondering when his predicament will cease. But understand that Douglas’s fate is merely the final chapter of a longer tale, the paper-thin wedge of space on which the wheel’s pin has finally settled.

/*/

Our story truly begins some centuries earlier, in the deeps of the deserts of Arabia. Imagine yourself there now: where dry gusts lick the sands from the tops of dunes; where cool oases of palm trees and clear pools vanish in a hopeless haze; where you can almost hear the wail of snake-charmer pipes and the haggling of turbaned merchants, except that, no, you’re simply delirious from the bleaching sun. If you can keep your footing in the endlessly shifting grit, take a look around. Where does the mirage go, in the instant that it shimmers and fades away? Where do your footprints go, as you look back and watch hot winds erase them, just when you were thinking of turning back? Where is that place between one grain of sand and the next?

It has a name, and you may have heard it: the City of Brass. A splendid place it is, too, with golden minarets sparkling in the blaze, diamonds and rubies crusted onto everything from palace gates to the carts of sweet-vendors, and richly dressed djinn, the toes curling up on their satin shoes, flitting to and fro on flying rugs. And it is here that things really started to go wrong for Douglas McDermott. Specifically, they started to go wrong in the home of a beleaguered djinni named Al-Tarqoz, late on his rent and holding down two jobs—the standard one as a silk-merchant, and a second, sweeping the streets of the City late at night.

(You might be thinking at this point what bunk this all is, as everyone knows that djinn-folk live in oil lamps, not cities. But that is an absurd fable with barely an ounce of truth. Djinn are taller than men by almost half, and there’s no way even the smallest of their babes could squeeze inside one of those lamps. Now, it is true that certain mischievous (at best) and malevolent (on average) wizards of the time enchanted lamps so that you could summon a djinni through them. But to think that the Kings of the Desert actually lived inside of little brass vessels would be like assuming the person on the other end of your phone conversation has been stuffed into the hand-set.)

Al-Tarqoz was an industrious sort for a djinni, one who didn’t mind hard work when most of his ruddy-skinned brethren would rather haggle and hawk and throw dice. And a good thing, too, since his luck was typically crummy, and more than once his entire stock of silken merchandise had been lost in a freak sandstorm or stolen by no-good fez-wearing apes. His last shipment had been accidentally transformed into a basket of vipers by a neighbor’s bungled attempt at a simple conjuration, and since in the City of Brass laws were as often ignored as obeyed, he had little recourse but to take a second job, keeping the bejeweled curbsides of the Great City free of dust, debris, and of course, sand.

It was on a clear night, beneath a sharp Arabian moon, that Al-Tarqoz was summoned to Morocco. He felt it coming a few seconds before, a sickening, churning feeling in his stomach. “Oh, bother,” he thought, as his body began to transmogrify into vapors. It only occurred to him at the last minute to drop his broom, which would have ruined the effect. Seconds later the City and the moon and faint smell of magic were gone, replaced by the stifling air and livestock odor of Marrakesh. A little man with impressive mustachios stood exultantly before him, a faded brass lamp clutched in his stubby fingers. Had Al-Tarqoz his own way, he would have had some choice words for the man. “Did it ever occur to you that I might not want to have been snatched from my home, away from my job and friends, simply to serve some simpering little man who decided to clean his sleeve on a rusty little lamp?” But of course Al-Tarqoz knew the rules quite well, so what he said instead was:

“Yes, my Master?”

The man, whose name was Mahfoud Ali Abdelaziz, was so elated at his trick, his voice rose uncontrollably into falsetto.

“It’s true! I’ve done it! A genie of the lamp, and he’s mine! All mine!”

His mustachios practically twirled themselves on his lip.

“You must do my bidding, yes?” the little man hooted. “You must grant me wishes. Yes, whatever I wish for! Now, let me see. Gold? Beautiful women?”

He frowned briefly.

“How long do I have to decide?”

Al-Tarqoz endured the man’s gloating with great equanimity. Appearances and all that. But also he wasn’t as badly off as you might think. Like some of his cleverer brethren, Al-Tarqoz had planned for just this turn of events, and the avarice in the little man’s eyes told him that his designs would probably bear fruit. So he bowed deeply, allowed his bald head to glint in impressive fashion, and said in a booming voice:

“Oh my Master, who is gracious and wise beyond words, I am your humble servant until your last wish is fulfilled. But, though I am unworthy to make such a suggestion, I have an offer which would prove to be to your advantage.”

“No tricks now!” snapped Mahfoud. “I know how you genies like to trick people given the slightest opportunity. I won’t be duped out of my wishes!”

“Wise Master, you wound me. I cannot deceive he who is Master of the Lamp! No, the offer I make is genuine, and solely to your benefit, I promise.”

Mahfoud stroked his chin pensively with one hand; the other hand still gripped the lamp, out of which streamed the smoky lower torso of Al-Tarqoz.

“Fine. Let’s hear it.”

“My Master, as you know, the ancient laws prohibit me from granting you more than three wishes. After the third I will vanish forever into the lamp. But if you will set me free in this very hour, I will instead give you this.”

From a pocket of his purple silken vest, Al-Tarqoz produced a shiny brass ring, unadorned with any stone, but glinting with an unnatural light.

Mahfoud eyed the ring with suspicion. “What is that?”

“This, oh my Master, is my greatest work. It is a Ring of Wishes. And while I am, to my shame, only able to grant you three wishes, the wearer of this ring will be allowed to make five, yes, five unassailable demands upon reality. I will give this to you, if you will but release me back into the lamp.”

Mahfoud squinted. “How do I know you tell the truth?”

“Surely, my most knowledgeable and cunning Master knows that I am bound to tell only the truth to he who has summoned me. Were I to break my word on this matter, I would be bound and imprisoned in the deepest, most snake-infested oubliette of my otherwise-fair city.”

Mahfoud peered at the ring in Al-Tarqoz’s blue palm. Glittering in an otherwise shadowy alley, it certainly did look magical.

“Tell you what,” he said. “You give me the ring, and you stay while I make my first wish. If it comes true, I’ll let you go back into your lamp.”

“Agreed!” said Al-Tarqoz, much relieved. Some of his friends back in the City of Brass had teased him, when he stayed up late every night for a year working on the ring. ‘What are the chances you’ll be summoned? And even if you are, you’ll probably be done in a few weeks tops!’ But Al-Tarqoz knew that the rate of summonings was on the rise, and that some djinn were kept as servants for years while their masters hemmed and hawed and waffled about their third and final wish.

“Let’s see then.” The man spoke in a slow, nasal voice, bloated with greed. The thought came to him that his first four wishes would hardly matter at all, since, with his fifth wish, he could wish for a hundred more wishes. So on impulse he said: “I wish for a sack of a thousand gold coins.”

There was a whoooosh, and a pop, and there before him was the sack, tough cloth bulging with the weight of the treasure within. Mahfoud thrust his little hand into the sack and drew it forth clenching a half-dozen gold dirhams. He let all but one fall back into the sack, and bit down hard on that one. It was real!

“Genie, your word seems to be as good as gold.” He cackled vapidly at his own meager wit. “Leave me the ring, and you’re free to go.”

“My Master is the embodiment of wisdom and munificence,” said Al-Tarqoz. And with that, he transported himself back to the City of Brass (via the lamp, of course), and there ends his part of the story. But the story does continue in the unpleasant person of Mahfoud Ali Abdelaziz. Mahfoud was a landlord who presided over a squalid row of one-room clay houses along a sewage-soaked street, in one of the more avoided neighborhoods of Marrakesh. The houses were inhabited by poor and helpless families who despised the vulturous Mahfoud, but had no other options save the sewage-soaked streets themselves. Mahfoud enjoyed being a landlord, since it afforded him a feeling of importance that was difficult for him to find elsewhere. It pleased him to no end that there were people in the world who feared him and yet relied upon him at the same time.

You may now be thinking how unfair it is, that a sand-snake like Mahfoud should be the one to stumble upon a djinni-summoning lamp. Do not fear; Mahfoud came to a bad end before the day was out. First off, he was left in an alleyway with a huge sack of gold which he could not hope to carry by himself.

When he spied two large and (he thought) disreputable looking men heading down the street towards his alley, he panicked, and, again thinking that his first few wishes would be essentially free, wished himself and his gold back to his house. His windows were open, and sunlight was streaming through, and that was no good since anyone might peek in and see his new fortune, and conspire to break in and steal it sometime when he was away. He drew the shades.

The home of Mahfoud was well-furnished with the fruits of inflated rents (and a few desperate bribes) collected from his harried tenants. But now Mahfoud looked at his carpets, wall-hangings, objet d’art and hand-blown glasswares with a frown.

“Ah, I should go straight for the top,” he said out loud. “I wish I were the Sultan of Morocco!”

There was a whoooosh, and a pop, and then the uncomfortable feeling of having damp cloth stuffed into one’s mouth. Mahfoud’s house had vanished (from his point of view), and in its place appeared an opulent bedchamber in some considerable disarray. After he noticed that there was something gagging him, he went on to discover that his hands were tied behind his back. And that there were about a dozen men standing around him brandishing curved swords in his general direction. And that his sack of gold had failed to come with him.

“I am the Sultan of Morocco!” he said. Or at least he tried to say that. What he actually said was: “Mm mmf mm Mmmfmm mm Mmmmmfmnm.”

The man nearest him looked down in horror.

“Demon! The Sultan is a shape-changer! A vile efreet!” (Ah, the irony.) “Enough of this banter. We must slay him at once, before we are accursed!”

And so saying, the soldier did just that. With one sweep of his scimitar, he sheared Mahfoud’s head from his shoulders. It spiraled gracefully in the air, trailing a ribbon of blood, and landed on the sumptuous feather bed of the Sultan.

Had Mahfoud a head for politics, he might have known (or at least heard the rumors) that the current Sultan had fallen into disfavor some years before, after demanding an excessive tribute of camels and malachite from the surrounding lands. A coup had been brewing for the last two years, and had come to a head only moments before Mahfoud had wished himself to be Sultan. (Al-Tarqoz would have been pleased at this turn of events, though he never found out about it.)

So ends Mahfoud Ali Abdelaziz’s chapter of this tale, and good riddance to him, too. It can be a comfort to us, if not to Douglas McDermott, that at least one person deserved what the ring brought him.

After Mahfoud, the ring wound its slow way through the centuries. One of the soldiers effecting the coup took it for himself, along with some bracelets, ear-cuffs and toe-rings that Mahfoud had liked to wear. He was wearing it still, ten months later, (having never uttered the words “I wish…” in all that time) when he died in battle with the Turks. There the ring lay unclaimed on the battlefield for yet more months, until it was eventually carried off by an eagle that had spied its glint from afar. For decades it rested in the eagle’s nest, until a poacher, climbing up to the eyrie to steal the eggs, discovered it and placed it in his pocket.

The poacher’s name was Youssef, and he wasn’t the sort to wear jewelry. Once home, he tossed the ring into a wooden box, intending to sell it off, but days later he was arrested and all his possessions confiscated. (Not for poaching, mind you. This was before all the clamor about endangered species. He was arrested for blasphemy.)

Through a series of complicated turns of fortune, the ring had made its way to Europe by the end of the 19^th century. Hung by a gold chain around the neck of a Spanish soldier, it arrived in Cuba in time for the rebellion of 1895, in which Spain lost the last of its foreign holdings, and in which the soldier lost both the ring and his life. It came to Florida some decades later, along with a raft of desperate refugees, where it was then handed as a bribe to a Coast Guard official. (The fourth wish was made during that journey, as the woman wearing it wished fervently that she and her baby would not be eaten by sharks. They weren’t.)

Finally, the Ring was sold to the owner of a used jewelry shop in Miami, and there it sat on a shelf for thirty more years, until it was bought on a whim by Douglas Connor McDermott, who was in town on business. It reminded him of his class ring from MIT, his so called “Brass Rat,” which he had lost years earlier while white-water rafting.

Ah, Douglas. Let us now return to him and his sad fate. To discover the source of his difficulty, you must go back three months (only days returned from Miami), to a water-cooler conversation he had with a co-worker in his office. The topic at hand was Disney films, since both Douglas and his associate had nephews of the appropriate age. Their talk turned to Aladdin, and the genie who befriends him.

“Now that’s living in style,” the co-worker had said. “My nephew said he wishes his room was like the inside of the genie’s lamp.”

“I’ll say,” Douglas had answered with a laugh, and plunging all unwitting toward his fate. “Heck, sometimes I look at our little apartment, and Iwish I was living inside one of those lamps.”

At least, before he had gone to sleep that night, he had told his wife that he loved her. The next morning he was gone, and it didn’t take long for Mrs. McDermott to discover that he hadn’t simply woken early and walked to work. He was declared a missing person by that evening, and even a year later the police were entirely at a loss. There was no motive, no sign of forced entry, no ransom note, no anonymous tips, no signs of foul play, and no mysterious correspondence left behind that could offer the tiniest hint as to what had happened.

Douglas McDermott didn’t know either. He had forgotten all about his wish, and even had he recalled making it, he was far too distracted by the stifling dark and crushing agony that was now the entirety of his world. By rights his life should have been snuffed out at once, but he had been specific in his wording on that point.

The arrows of fate land willy-nilly, and are as apt to strike the Douglases of the world as they are the Mahfouds. Or you, or me. They fly too fast; by the time you see the shadow of a shaft or the glint of a point, it’s too late. Al-Tarqoz, sweeping the streets of the City of Brass late at night while his friends are out drinking mulberry wine, would be the first to tell you that life isn’t fair. But there’s no point in expecting that life will be fair.

You might as well expect that wishes will come true.