by Mindy Klasky
I stifled a sob.
Later. I’d think about him later. I couldn’t do it here, not while I was at work, not while I was trying to hold on to the last tattered shreds of my professionalism.
Later, I thought again, a bit more sharply, when I pictured the way he’d grinned at me across our first dinner in our shared apartment—Chinese takeout (one-dollar tip for the delivery guy)—the way he’d reached out with his perfectly balanced chopsticks, feeding me one of his Szechuan shrimp without even a hint of clumsiness, the way he’d laughed when I said that the spicy sauce made my lips tingle.
Later!
I shook my head, determined to make myself pay attention. As if to reinforce my firm command, there was a sharp knock on my office door. I cleared my throat before I answered, determined to sound normal. “Come in!”
The door opened slowly and Kira Franklin poked her head in. “Becca, do you have a minute?”
I shuffled papers on my desk, as if I’d been hard at work being the world’s best dramaturg. “Of course.”
She hefted a box into the room, grunting slightly as she balanced it on top of the junk that filled my single visitor’s chair. Dusting off her hands, she met my gaze with the directness I’d always found likable. “Well, that was pretty brutal.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry. I don’t think I said any of the right things in there.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know that there was any ‘right thing’ to say. You did better than I could have. I doubt it’s any comfort, but we really didn’t intend to blindside you. At least, I didn’t. And I know Hal would never do that to you on purpose.”
She sounded so…normal, so much like a friend, that my eyes teared up again. “I…It’s just…I can’t believe he did it! I can’t believe I was so stupid! I actually thought—”
I stopped myself before I could sound like even more of an idiot. She nodded sympathetically. “You’re not the only person who’s ever been fooled by a guy with a great line.”
“Yeah, right,” I said, hunching my shoulders. I pictured Kira’s husband, who came to meet her after every rehearsal. He was tall, lanky; if they ever decided to remake Clint Eastwood’s early Westerns, he could play the lead. He was more than some stupid cowboy, though—John McRae was an incredibly skilled set designer, so busy that he actually turned away work on a regular basis.
Kira shook her head. “I know you don’t want to hear my sob story now, but believe me, I know what I’m talking about.” Almost against my will, I gave her a suspicious scowl. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll spare you the details, but suffice to say, my first fiancé left me at the altar. And he was a director, top of the line in the Twin Cities. I was pretty much blacklisted from every house in town, except for a dumpy little dinner theater that thought Gypsy was cutting edge.”
I wiped a hand across my eyes. “What happened?” I asked, embarrassed to hear how thick my voice sounded.
She glanced at the cardboard box she’d set on my chair.
“Things changed.” She shrugged. “Completely unexpectedly, I landed the job of my dreams. Except it wasn’t. All that dreamlike, I mean. More like the worst nightmare any stage manager could imagine. But I met John there.” Even if I’d been blindfolded, I could have heard the smile behind her words. She trailed her fingers along the edge of the box, rattling her nails across the faint corrugated ridges.
“What’s that?” I asked, nodding toward the container.
“Mostly a bunch of clothes, from the costume shop. The Shepard costumes for Lauren, before she started putting on weight.”
The lead actress for the one-acts was nervous about her professional debut. In two months of rehearsal, she’d managed to pack on two full sizes. The costume designer had complained bitterly until Kira had taken him aside, told him to stop, reminded him that Lauren was likely even more unhappy about her weight change than anyone else could be. There’d been something about Kira’s tone of voice, something that told me our implacable stage manager spoke from experience, from firsthand knowledge of the never-ending Battle of the Bulge. Kira had smiled as she spoke, though, and reminded all of us that we were lucky—the costumes were normal, everyday street clothes. Nothing hard to find. Nothing that required major tailoring.
Ordinary street clothes. Like the ones that were now locked inside my inaccessible apartment.
The original Lauren and I were about the same size. My available wardrobe had just increased by leaps and bounds. “Thanks,” I said, and I meant it.
“And there’s one more thing.” Kira reached into her magical box of tricks, extracting a plain blue pillowcase that was bunched up around something. She deposited it on my desk, generating a faint metallic clink.
“What’s that?” I asked. I reached toward it, but her hands lingered on the wrinkled cloth.
“Something I found a couple of years ago. Before I got that dream job, back in Minneapolis.” She smiled, a bit wistfully. “Use it in good health,” she said, meeting my gaze with an intensity that was unnerving. Her naturally dark eyes were even more shadowed in my dim office lighting, and for just a moment, I wasn’t sure if she was happy to give me her gift, or if it somehow made her sad.
“Kira?” I asked. “Are you okay?”
She shook herself a little, seeming to wake from a dream. “I’m fine.” And then she smiled at me—a full, open smile, as if we’d spent the morning talking about ponies and rainbows and other perfectly splendid diversions. “I’m fine. And you will be, too.”
Before I could say anything, she hurried out of my office.
I only hesitated a moment before grabbing the pillowcase. Kira had been some sort of guardian angel, dropping off clothes. I couldn’t imagine what else she might have left behind, what else would make my newly disgraced status more bearable.
I certainly never thought that she’d give me a brass lantern.
A classic brass lantern, like an oil lamp, one that would have been useful if the Mercer ever decided to stage a night of Turkish one-acts, or Scheherazade, or Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.
Something about the metal handle whispered to my hand, as if it hid a magnetic charge and I was made of iron. The spout swooped up gracefully, with a delicate flair that spoke of master craftsmanship. Nevertheless, the brass was tarnished—it looked like the lamp had spent decades buried in the back of some prop closet in a theater very far away from New York City.
I grasped its perfect handle in my left hand and used my right fingers to rub hard at the brass body, trying to clear away some of the dark residue. As my flesh made contact with the metal, though, an electric shock jolted up my arm, burning, jangling with fiery pain. Surprised, I cried out and dropped the lamp.
My fingers tingled viciously, as if I’d tried to grab hold of an electric fence. I shook my hand, snapping my wrist, trying to ease the pain. My heart pounded, and for one insane second, I wondered if Kira had been sent by the board, told to deliver a final blow, a message I couldn’t refuse, a brutal execution so that they’d never need to deal with my sorry self ever again.
That was absurd, though. Ridiculous. Absolutely, utterly stupid.
I forced myself to take a steadying breath, to move past the pain that had flash-dried the tears in my eyes. And then I was able to see the fog pouring out of the brass lamp’s spout.
Honest-to-God fog, swirling around me like I’d been transported to some London street. It poured out of the lamp, a cloud of tiny jewels, brilliant even in my dim office—cobalt and emerald, ruby and topaz, glinting like one of those Star Trek transporters gone berserk.
I blinked, and the mist disappeared.
In its place stood a woman—a tall, blonde woman, clad in a perfect navy suit. Her hair was expertly bobbed; her pumps looked like they cost more than my entire longed-for paycheck. Everything about her shouted professional—her calfskin briefcase only accentuated the fact that she had to be a lawyer.
Except my eyes were drawn to the hand that held that briefcase, to
the woman’s creamy wrist. A tattoo blazed there, the ink so brilliant that the design might have been completed only a heartbeat before. A delicate border of black highlighted shimmering tongues of red and gold, individual licks of glittering flame. The design reached out to something deep inside me, burrowing into memories I’d never known I had.
I gaped, speechless, as the woman smiled. She extended one perfectly manicured hand, which made the captivating tattoo dance with an energy all its own. “Let me guess,” she said, with a nod toward a sheaf of papers that had suddenly materialized in her manicured, tattooed hand. “You’re the party of the first part, aren’t you?”
CHAPTER 4
THE PARTY OF THE FIRST PART.
“I—” I wanted to answer. I really did. I wanted to say something calm, cool, and collected, something that would drag me back to my safe, little, normal corner of the world, one where I only had to worry about failed romance, economic disaster, and copyright law.
But I couldn’t keep my gaze from slipping back and forth, from the lamp to the genie.
She had to be a genie, right? If she’d come out of the lamp? Even if she didn’t look like one? Even if she seemed miles and centuries away from magic carpets and turbans and abracadabra and open sesame and all that?
The woman clicked her tongue and rolled her eyes, the perfect picture of corporate exasperation. “It wasn’t that difficult a question. If this were a real deposition, I’d be asking the court reporter to let the record reflect your speechlessness.”
“You’re a lawyer?” I gasped.
She shrugged, a perfectly controlled little roll of her shoulders, eloquently dismissing my boggle-eyed amazement. “I’m not a lawyer, but I play one in my lamp.”
“In your lamp,” I repeated. Suddenly, I glanced at my office door. Was this all a joke? Was Kira standing out there, listening to every word I said? Or didn’t say, as the case might be? But if this was a trick, how had Kira done it? How had she made the fog, summoned a living, speaking body out of nothingness? I forced myself to choke out, “So you really are a genie?”
“That’s right,” she said. “I’m Teel.” She gave me a single firm nod, as if she were checking an item off on some mental list. She delivered the unfamiliar name as smoothly as if she were announcing that I should call her Tiffany or Madison or Crystal. “At your service.” She placed her right hand across her heart in a gesture that an ordinary human would use if she were pledging allegiance. That is, if I were the flag. I found myself unable to look away from the sparkling tattoo on her wrist.
“What is that?” I asked, stretching my own fingers toward the fresh-inked flames. My hands tingled with a diluted version of the same compulsion that had led me to rub the lamp.
That movement was enough to make faint shadows leap to life on my own fingertips. I tilted my hand in front of me, making out the vaguest echo of flames on my own flesh, as if my fingerprints had been magically transformed from police-procedural arches and whorls into pulsating works of art. Fascinated, I pressed my thumb to my index finger and squeezed, half expecting to see color leak out from the crease. I started to ask a question, but I needed to clear my throat. Then, I realized that the impossible creature in front of me—the genie?—had started to root around in her briefcase. Trying to smother an almost incapacitating wave of shyness, I pressed my fingers together even more tightly and raised my voice to get her attention. “Teel?” I asked.
As I spoke, the genie’s own fingers flew to her temples. She shook her head queasily, as if I’d shouted through a bullhorn the morning after an opening-night gala sponsored by Dom Pérignon, Jack Daniel’s, and a half-dozen other purveyors of alcoholic temptation. “I’m right here,” she croaked. “No need to shout.”
As she groaned, the flames on her wrist stood out even more sharply than they had before. Mystified, I reached toward her, more than a little worried that my simply repeating her name had caused her such distress. As soon as I opened my hand, though, revealing the marks on my own fingertips, Teel’s tattoo faded back to its original compelling glint. Unable to resist a little test, I clenched my fingers together again, watching the parallel marks on the genie’s wrist surge back to full brilliance. I managed, however, to squelch the impulse to say her name out loud. Better not to cripple my genie with a permanent migraine before I even learned what this strange magic was all about.
Eyeing me balefully, Teel swallowed hard, grimacing like a person knocking back a fistful of aspirin. Then, she reached for her briefcase. “Well,” she said, her efficient smile turned brittle, “I usually end a first session by telling people how to get my attention. At least we have that all taken care of.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to force a bit of meek apology past my fascination.
“Why don’t we just go through the paperwork?” She flourished her extensive set of documents. “You’ll find everything’s in order—the newest boilerplate is already incorporated.”
“Boilerplate?” I felt like I was scrambling a few steps behind as Teel led me along some tangled forest path. One part of my brain was frantically fighting to catch up, to accept that a creature had just coalesced out of fog in the middle of my office, a magical being who seemed intent on handing me a ream of paper that was thicker than most scripts that I read. Another part of my brain had already accepted what was going on here—after all, I’d absorbed more shocks in this one day than I’d ever thought possible, going from beloved, financially secure, well-housed theater professional to a jilted, broke, homeless…theater professional.
I still had my life as a dramaturg.
Dean couldn’t take that away from me.
“Boilerplate,” Teel repeated, as if I hadn’t just lost myself in further contemplation of my disastrous morning. “Legal terms that are standard for all contracts. Term and termination. Choice of law. Blah-de-blah-de-blah and all the rest of the boring stuff.” She yawned.
Okay. Maybe she wasn’t actually the severe lawyer that she appeared to be. I didn’t think that Bill Rodriguez, the attorney who had crushed my morning in the conference room, would yawn as he quoted chapter and verse at me. I took Teel’s stack of paper and started glancing through the pages.
Every single sheet was crammed with tiny writing. The minute text was broken up with boldface headings and with outlined indents that led to paragraph numbers like V.A.iii.h.(iv).(q). The more that I examined the words, the more they danced before my eyes.
I blinked hard, then tried again. The words stayed stable this time, but I still didn’t understand them. One passage, printed in bold, stated: “Where any wisher stands to be seized, or at any time hereafter shall happen to be seized, of any lands, tenements, rents, services, reversions, remainders, or other hereditaments, to the use, confidence, or trust of any other person or persons, or any body politic, by reason of any conveyance, contract, agreement, will or otherwise…”
I dropped the pages onto my desk. “This doesn’t make any sense at all.”
Teel sniffed in annoyance. “Nineteen out of twenty wishers said the exact same thing. That’s why we simplified the terms. We’ve just completed our review of all the paperwork. It’s much more basic now than if you’d summoned me a month ago.”
“‘We’ reviewed the paperwork?” I couldn’t smother my suspicious tone. “Who’s we?” I pictured a bunch of women who looked like clones of Teel, all gathered in a huge conference room, masquerading as the Lawyers of the Round Table.
Teel didn’t change my mental image substantially when she said, “Magic.”
“Magic?”
She clicked her tongue. “MAGIC,” she repeated, a bit more forcefully. “The Multijurisdictional Association of Genies and Imaginary Creatures. We just concluded our Decadium last week.”
“Decadium?” I parroted, as if I’d forgotten how to speak a full sentence.
“Our group meeting? Every ten years?” She rolled her eyes, and I was pretty sure she was saying that only an idiot would be unfamiliar with
the concept. “All the genies in the Northern Hemisphere get together to discuss important things like case distribution and wish escalation. And simplification of contract terms.”
She made it sound so simple. So normal. So absolutely, positively commonplace. Still, I couldn’t quite picture the meeting. “You get together? You mean, like a conference? In a hotel?”
She pursed her lips. “Not exactly. MAGIC doesn’t convene on your plane of existence. Or in your time, for that matter. It can be a little complicated.”
“Complicated…” I repeated, my eyes straying back to the brass lantern. Somehow, I could see that my entire life had just become a lot more complicated. “Wait a second. You said genies and imaginary creatures. So am I only imagining you?”
“Well, everyone would think you were imagining me if you ever told them about this conversation.”
“That’s not really an answer,” I pointed out.
“That’s as much of an answer as I can give. Isn’t it enough to know that you’re talking to me? And I’m answering? And I’m offering you a wish contract with the most current terms?”
I reached behind me for my desk chair, locating the familiar padded arms without too much fumbling. As I sank onto its seat, I shook my head. This was crazy. Absolutely nuts. Sure, my morning had been a disaster, but had it been so stressful that I was actually hallucinating? Imagining a genie? One who spouted words that sounded like the sort of institutional technospeak that every human trade association gives itself? I recognized self-aggrandizing babble when I heard it—I had a masters degree.
I reached out to touch the contract again. The paper was real enough—a little heavier than the cheap stuff the Mercer used in its laser printers, but absolutely, unqualifiedly real. If I were hallucinating, I wouldn’t be able to feel the paper, right? I mean, hearing was one thing, and seeing nonexistent creatures was probably relatively commonplace. But if the contract on my desk was a pure figment of my overstressed imagination, would I really be able to feel it?