Shiva and Other Stories

by Barry N. Malzberg

  Observe Stanford then, doing the best that he can (or so he insists) in this difficult and perilous city on the trembling verge of great changes in the chronology and the millennium, all of the Biblical changes, the signs and portents with which to contend, and Irene’s rages when now and then the grief and sheer inequity of her condition overwhelms his forty-three-year-old ex-wife and she will call him (usually after another staggeringly absurd relationship has ended or has just barely begun) to berate him for the attrition of her own possibility and the extent of her philosophy. Stanford does something vague and (he himself calls it this) subterranean in the advertising business, not quite copywriting, not quite supervision, used to be copy chief, now is in charge of account relations, trying to salvage the state of collapsing relationships, keep the copy chief and subordinates happy in the face of collapsing client confidence, heavy contact work with the external departments of automobile or electronics companies, many expense account lunches, too many expense account dinners, troubles. Troubles of all kinds are not foreign to Stanford, who only wants to try to hold things together yet has begun to understand as he paces the spaces of his divorced man’s apartment, a three-room enjambed set of boxes on the riverfront on a high floor, that he had better moderate his posture and ambitions, just trust that it does not collapse spontaneously and wholly atop him. He dates women from the corporate offices, usually secretaries, promises them little, makes assertions that he will not fall in love with these glistening, nervous, preoccupied women of the telephone, yet often enough does, finds himself crying out in vague and desperate phrases at the peak or depths of his necessity. All of these relationships end badly, some quite early, some in the middle; very few have a decent and protracted end. Stanford could sue for marriage, could look for something more permanent. In this age of plague the concept of a bachelor’s existence seems as pitiable and archaic as the expeditions he used to take with the children, fifteen years ago, to the last of the amusement parks in this area: spin the wheels, eat the plaster of cotton candy, stumble through the funhouse, listening to the wind machine and attending to the rattle of tape-recorded chains in the background, but Stanford sees no alternative, sees no real prospects. Women over forty bore or terrify him with their refraction of his own coming collapse; younger women want to nest and procreate, Stanford is convinced, regardless of what lies of adventure they utter. One hundred and forty thousand dollars is not enough between him and the abyss, not when he has to cough up six hundred and ten to Irene every blasted week, regardless of his opinions on the matter, not when he takes home fourteen hundred and change out of which he has to finance his declining health, his declining years, diminished sense of possibility.

  Stanford does not feel pity for himself, not even pathos, nor any grandiose sense as well; Stanford has been (he feels) in and out of too much trouble and limitation since the mid-nineteen forties to take anything except the end of the millennium seriously, but surging in or out of sleep, caught at that part of his life where he can neither construct defenses nor strip them but must simply confront (without the intervening walls of consciousness, of judgment), Stanford screams with regret, shrivels with fury, comes to shuddering and tendentious interface with the gasp and clutter of his life, the fullness of its insufficiency, the slivers which its furious power drill of decline sends straight to his foolish and shuddering heart. “Oh, love me!” he will cry to the secretaries or (occasional) junior account executives, caught in their random clutch, history battering at the door he has tried so determinedly to close, “Love me, love me true!” and so in and out to that source of all nakedness while he tries to avoid that more desperate knowledge conveyed by sleep.

  The Album, page by page

  Thus Stanford’s djinn, his familiar, his ornament of all desire. This intrusion of fantasy into Stanford’s life is neither calculated nor surreal; it simply occurs, as most of his life (he can now see in retrospect) has arrived without portent, as a juxtaposition that flowered into consequences.

  “You have three wishes,” the djinn says to Stanford. “You may take them in the usual way, or you may combine them for a grand sequence of events; you may try small changes or you may try one great, transmogrifying lunge. The choice is yours,” the djinn says casually, glad at last to have someone sensible with whom to share his magic. It has, after all, been a long time since the djinn has been able to engage in conversation; there are whole annals of buried time here, and they are hardly to be annealed by Stanford’s fortuitous discovery of the bottle. Of which more may never be said, all of this being part of the jumbled artifact and casual detritus which Stanford thinks of as the sum of his life.

  “That’s astonishing,” Stanford says. “I’ve never imagined anything like this. I can’t believe that this is happening. It must not be happening, I’ve gone over the edge. I didn’t think the partitions would stand for the rest of my life. I saw this all coming,” Stanford adds. “I knew I was heading for a total, a real crack-up. That Irene, she warned me. She wasn’t wrong—”

  “Enough of this,” the djinn says. “You can go on this disbelieving way or you can come to grasp your opportunities. You were always sincerely interested in opportunities, Stanford; it led you straight to the ad racket instead of graduate study in Chaucer, which you felt was an alternative back there in 1971 when alternatives seemed to count. I advise you not to delay too much of this, however; the situation is fluid and I am apt to pass on or to decompose now into thin, thin air. So you had best assume your choices, seize the possibility so to speak.” The djinn, who has been sealed away too long to really be effective in social situations, fixes Stanford with intense, Middle Eastern eyes and says, “Disbelief of itself is not going to resolve the situation here.”

  I should point out—evoking without further delay the first person which is crucial to any understanding of my functions—that I am the djinn at issue, that the events of this narrative, from the start, and will throughout, have been refracted through my own perspective. I cannot claim full access to Stanford’s consciousness, much of what I infer or state has come from his own confessions, my imperfect knowledge, and yet I can assume for the sake of this recollection a kind of omnipotence which, no less than Stanford’s reiterated hopes and platitudes, can be seen as central. Of my background, of my presence in the bottle, the difficult, riotous journey from the refinery to Stanford’s possession, and of the unstoppering of the bottle resulting in this collision . . . of all of this, perhaps, the less given, the better it will be, although Stanford himself has expressed at times a great interest in my background. Like any devoted member of the middle class, Stanford is fascinated by mysticism, seeks signs and wonders, is enthralled by portents; it is this and only this (he has felt) which could possibly change his life, his life otherwise being wholly and ruinously carved out by circumstance. But I am not interested in exploring a personal history here; I come to the situation with a good deal more chronology and experience than Stanford or anyone presently in his circle of experience and what good has it done me? What good has any of this done me? My circumstances have been pitiably limited for centuries and now, as the outcome of my own curse, my own assignation, I have been given the idiot task of proffering and executing wishes for a man too stunned or disbelieving to utter them. It is idiot’s work, after all, it is work as mindless as Stanford’s own duties which are to quell the apprehension of one client after the next that the work done by Stanford’s firm is utterly specious. The fulfillment of wishes! But what, after all, is left for Stanford and djinn alike as circumstances crawl to their unmerited but long-foreshadowed apocalypse, an apocalypse so soon to come, so needlessly spectacular in its essence. In that thunderous set of moments so long ago when I was created and sent out on the first of these silly and florid errands, I was given no more understanding of the situation than I have at present; the important thing is to entice Stanford into living out his fate so that I may move on. Or not move on as the case may be. It is difficult to apprehend or find
some final posture for any of this, as one might well have inferred by this time. Inch by inch, episode by episode, I have crawled my way through the centuries and what, for all of these florid gifts so extravagantly given, have I been able to gain? Most of those centuries a neonate clutched in a bottle and then dialogues or disasters visited upon the Stanfords of their time. It would all be too much to grasp if I had a visionary intellect, but I do not. Djinns have no taste for metaphor, djinns merely execute as I have pointed out to Stanford already, without particular success or communion.

  “Or so it might be said,” I offer.

  “I don’t know,” Stanford says. “I have to think about all of this. I have to give it some thought. I mean, it is too much for me, being faced with decisions like this, and I a man not given to wishes, fantasies, or fairy tales of any sort. Do I have some time to decide? Or do I have to decide right now? This is very difficult for me,” Stanford says. “It is all I can do to handle the realistic details, and then you confront me with stuff like this. Well, I didn’t ask to be a loss leader,” he says pointlessly, and looks at the bare walls of his apartment. Maybe there is some clue flickering on those walls, handwriting or something like that. But there does not seem to be.

  “A little time,” the djinn says. “We can understand that. My Masters and those who convey me, I mean. You can have a little time to work this out. But not much. Events pass on, there are priorities and mysteries beyond your own divining and if you do not express a wish, I’m going to be forced to express one for you . . . there is very little slippage or leakage in this practice, and we cannot allow the circumstances to pass.”

  “I understand that,” Stanford says, with what he takes to be a hollow laugh but which—to the djinn whose experience with inference is far greater than Stanford’s, and who knows every crevice of the man’s despair and regret, pinned by this grim, unwanted apprehension—is allied to a sob. “I think I am coming to some profound understanding.” But of course he is not. What must be understood about Stanford and all his companions and compatriots in this time of diminution and loss, is that he understands nothing, he proceeds through his life and toward his end with the stunned and incipient dismay of a farm animal; he has the illusion of understanding, but the farm animal has the illusion of the farm. When, of course, it is only the plow, the barn, the whisk of the slaughterhouse ax which that animal can properly assess.

  The first wish

  Stanford’s first wish, as is so common among those of his age and condition, is for immortality, for the contemplation of an unending lifespan through which, he feels, he can pick the best, the finest and most apt of possibilities for his second and third wishes. Why someone in Stanford’s circumstances would opt for eternal life is beyond me, beyond the djinn, beyond the prophets, sages, visionaries or martyrs who look dimly upon this adventure from a grave and mourning distance, but that is of course irrelevant. The djinn nods assent, lifts a taloned hand, emits a theatrical puff of blue smoke, divided into the horns of Satan which is a bit of stage business which is always effective, never ignored. “You are now, for all intents and purposes, immortal,” the djinn says. “I would not recommend leaping from your patio here or going through the cities deliberately seeking deadly diseases, but within the expected limits of a life conventionally lived, you will stay in this condition forever or at least a reasonable simulacrum of forever. Stanford transmogrified! Stanford triumphant! Stanford eternal! as you might say. The usual conditions apply, of course, but they would have applied in any case, and there is no need whatsoever to discuss them.”

  “How do I know that?” Stanford says. The djinn and Stanford are no longer in his apartment; they have adjourned to the riverfront walk, where for the past quarter of an hour they have been pacing in the odors of the late evening, the trash and oil slick of the harbor coming over them, and have been discussing issues such as this toward, at last, a definite outcome. The djinn has assumed for the purpose of this public appearance, the form of an adolescent girl, about five feet two, punk jewelry, punk hairdo and a slight nasality of address which reminds Stanford of his own daughter some years ago but in no pleasantly nostalgic fashion. The djinn can, of course, assume many forms or postures (not an unlimited number, however) in addition to the normal green dwarfism, but Stanford and he have both decided that a punk hairdo and tiny, suggested breasts under a T-shirt saying GRATEFUL DEAD TOUR 1992 is best. “I mean, I don’t feel any different than I did two minutes or twenty days ago. The whole thing could be some kind of cosmic joke, some cheap scam worked out by the fates, not that I doubt that there is something substantial going on here because the shapechanging is very convincing. Also the effects with the smoke.”

  “You’ll have to take it on faith,” the djinn says. “What otherwise could I tell you? Your era is an expression of faith: turn on the switch for the electricity, eat the frozen food trusting that it is not poisonous, accept the pledges of politicians that they will not kill you or level your possessions for the sheer sport of it. Go with strange women to their place or yours in the faith that they will not kill you or communicate a dreadful disease, act with the clients downtown as if their work and yours were not absurd and pointless. Accept the irrelevance of all Biblical prophecy to the coming closure of the millennium. Why should this be any different, then, why this expression of faith any more dramatic—or less dramatic—than the others? There comes a time when you must come free of all history, make that sheer leap into possibility. Or is this too complex for you, Dads; is this as evasive as acid rock or like what your middle-aged jollies are?” The djinn, noting fellow strollers and passersby taking some interest in this couple, has deliberately broadened and extended his speech patterns, has become more purely punk and filial in his appearance as he and Stanford have come close to those sightseers, then relaxes his grip and modifies his rhetoric as they pass on. “Anyway, that’s what the situation is.”

  “I suppose so,” Stanford says. His cells do not seem to be bubbling and expanding with changed or charged health but then again, as has been pointed out, how would he know? Immortality cannot be proven other than by the absence of death ever and Stanford does not seem to be dying now. Except internally, but that is the same old story. “All right,” he says. “I’ll accept that I’m immortal, at least until I turn seventy and inch by inch feel it all sliding away. There’s no way to prove a negative, right? Now, how long do I have for the other two wishes?”

  “Not too long, Dads,” the djinn says, squeezing Stanford’s arm again as two youths in motorcycle dress squeeze by on the narrow walkway, look at the couple with vagrant interest modulated only by their own abstract and imponderable concerns. “Maybe an afternoon and an evening. You wait and wait and wait in a bottle but eventually, when it comes, commission has to be real fast, like you understand? Sort of like sex where you can spend a week or a lifetime plotting, but when you pound toward the ultimate it takes maybe three or four seconds. But what a three or four seconds, right, Pops?” the punk-haired djinn says enthusiastically, making quite a convincing case of their huddled companionship although after all these centuries in old Persia or the dank spaces of the bottle, you wouldn’t put it past the djinn to be hopelessly out of date. It is one of the small surprises—oh, there have been many for Stanford in this voluble and disconcerting thirty-six hours—with which this relationship, this strange collision, have been filled.

  Next slide, please

  Here is Stanford entering the actress Lilly von Nabokov in her elegant, great bed in the elegant, grand house in Bel Aire where she has lived for these seven years, just about the same span since she legally changed her name to this expressive and resonant pseudonym and assumed full responsibility for her career. Stanford is ecstatic, he is incoherent, he cannot believe that this is happening while at the same time—at the precise and simultaneous moment of his connection—he knows that this is going on and that it is happening at a level of conviction and force which has characterized no other part of his li
fe.

  Here is Stanford expending his second wish, the frivolous wish, the wish that he knows is for pointless pleasure and with which he will indulge himself before embarking upon the serious and irrevocable business of the third wish. He has always wanted to have congress with a famous actress, to be actually entering the woman on the screen in ways which will enable him to feel, as he has never before been able to feel, that he is living his life.