Shiva and Other Stories

by Barry N. Malzberg

  Observe Stanford moan and dive! Observe—without erotic or prurient entanglement of any kind because this is research and anatomization, not pornography, not the recycling of helpless and self-limited fantasy—the true and solemn nature of his performance as again and again with closed eyes and open, torment and release, possibility and impossibility, he pays homage and adoration to Lilly von Nabokov in the only way he could have imagined at fourteen, in the only way he can imagine now. Dispense with the details which in any case would be predictable and unflattering to any sense of the true religiosity of this occasion, dispense with those graphics of form or motion which could only congeal the pure and terrible flight of sensibility in which Stanford, now coupled, would like to feel himself engaged. Upon the copious and accepting form of Lilly von Nabokov, Stanford pays what tribute he can, the full extent of his expenditure seemingly inadequate to the opportunity and surface presented, but still, considering his age and the endless disappointment which he feels has up to this point been his lot, a praiseworthy exercise of the flesh and spirit. Moving in and out of conjunction with the lovers, just as Stanford himself moves in and out of his own busy necessity, we can catch odd angles and strange perspectives, can perhaps understand the nature of life in the movies as nonobservers never could. The movies are both more and less than Stanford’s own experience over these years, his own perceptions of Lilly von Nabokov both greater and smaller than those with which he has indulged himself during those occasions of his maturity when for the most part he has liked to think of himself as a responsible adult.

  The wish does not in any way blanket Lilly von Nabokov’s response, her own feelings on the situation. In his haste and desire Stanford did not specify other than to make sure that in no way could the act be regarded as rape . . . but I am pleased to say that the actress responds with some enthusiasm and utter concentration to Stanford’s not entirely clumsy flounderings, and is able in her own engaged fashion to approximate a climax no less satisfactory (in fact, truthfully, more satisfactory) than that which has already seized the enthralled Stanford and cast him away. Actresses are, after all, capable of this, their very happiness and occupation is concerned with the conversion of the imagined to the real. Also, they are easily persuaded and amenable in the way actors must be, in order to enact their ancient and honorable craft.

  See Stanford sprawled upon her now, note the tangle or disentanglement of limbs! Stanford sings and mumbles into Lilly von Nabokov’s shell-pink and tenderly accommodating ear. The actress, reciprocally, suggests that they move apart because his weight, so pleasant in the moment, is oppressive in the aftermath. Stanford cooperates, turning slowly to one side, then when the actress gasps, to the other, rescuing his weight with an elbow and then dropping fully into the sheets. It is a splendid, grandiose bed, a dappled and accommodating room of which Stanford has seen all too little, so hasty was his departure to these quarters, so rapid was his entrance into Lilly von Nabokov’s diamond mine. Omitting specifics, the wish left the devices of fulfillment more or less to the djinn, and djinns are accommodating but unimaginative creatures, sometimes all too direct as a result of their lack of imagination. Stanford, however, can have few complaints; he surely cannot regret this second wish, the directness and force of his accommodation serving for him as refreshing contrast to the unknowable and imperceivable first wish, the results of which he will not be able to judge for a long time.

  We leave Stanford to his post-coital mutterings and his discussions with Lilly von Nabokov. Perhaps they will couple again and perhaps they will not. Perhaps this momentary assignation will lead to further relationship and then again it may be otherwise. Stanford is strictly on his own here and although all of the usual limitations apply, the djinn has, in the most gentlemanly fashion, given him some options, some open space. Nothing less would show the proper consideration.

  Life in a bottle

  Life in a bottle—since the djinn is asked, he would be discourteous not to respond—is very much like death in a bottle; there is this limitless grayness, this oblivious press of time, the centuries grind by like moments, the moments are centuries, all is strange and inseparable as a kind of imagic association for an imponderable period. It is compressed and encroaching, but it is not humiliating; humiliation is—as Stanford himself has learned through Irene and his children—more a state of mind than an absolute. At last the decanting, the infusion of air, the sudden and vaulting rush toward the light! And then in the midst of various astounding effects which are attention-getting in the extreme, the djinn stands revealed to the fortunate agent of decanting, ready to do service for the usual price and conditions which, like so much else, need not be discussed here.

  Life in a bottle is neither pleasant nor unpleasant; it is pointless and absurd in the way that twentieth century life for Stanford and so many of his tribesmen must be seen as pointless and absurd . . . but it is not more so. There are ancient and terrible oaths, huge, layered slabs of conviction, comparison, and mystery which overlay the occupant, that tend to reduce complaint to the level of acceptance. A djinn does not ask to be a djinn, this is so . . . but he does not ask for the reverse, either; this is all part of the levels of accommodation imposed. Did Stanford ask to be Stanford? But woke up once, undeterminable years ago to find that he was and the bottle of his containment no less real than that which entrapped the djinn. As has been noted before, we have no taste for metaphor; we are a concrete and settled race.

  The excursion fare covers all charges

  On the banks of the Seine, having for his third wish elected unlimited travel and displacement, Stanford allows himself small, greedy peeks at the river, so much the focus of artists in the last three centuries, looks covertly at women with parasols he would love to know but whose absence from his life he can now accept. Lilly von Nabokov may work out for him, then again she may not, it is all unsure. She has asked him to call her up when she has finished shooting her present project; a romantic adventure comedy, it is meant to wrap in three weeks. In Poland, Stanford has looked upon the rolling landscape, has admired the hearty Polish workers so earnest in their efforts and hopeful in their possibilities, he has mourned at the concentration camp memorials and has sought the comfort of simple Polish secretaries who in this country seem less technologized and not susceptible to his blandishments. In Seville, Stanford had gasped at the advent of machinery into that once-gentle landscape. In Peking, astonished by the sheer density of the bicycle and pedestrian traffic, he had tried to fathom the nature of cultural revolution. But now, in France, enacting as per the terms of his wish the instantaneous satisfactions and blurred transfers of a perpetual excursion rate, Stanford allows himself to settle against the high parapet, glances upon the river with longing and remorse, thinks of Seurat and Monet busily converting their own impressions so long ago. It is an experience both astonishing and humbling to Stanford, who in all these years until the decanting had traveled very little, had had little concourse with the world, had been compelled—as in the bed with the actress—to enact the most splendid or treacherous of his desires within a compass narrower than that of any seventh century saint.

  Stanford closes his eyes, dreams of the compression and flurry of events in these few weeks since the miraculous shift of his life, opens his eyes as if expecting to see all of it taken from him: no Seine here, but his own riverfront in front of him, no memories of Lilly von Nabokov but only Irene’s shrieking and tumultuous telephoned complaints, no immortal life but only the first intimations of metastases in his lungs which will slowly strangle all memory, all possibility. But no, none of this happens: as he stares into the panorama before him it is still the Seine which he sees and the memories of his connection are full and rich within him, entirely too convincing to be other than real. He feels himself inflated with potential, remembers a sunrise in Acapulco two days ago which struck him as an experience close to metaphysical, remembers riotous events in a Tijuana cantina which fortunately he had been able to disengage from
before the girl on the bartop had seen him or the active and curious donkey had poked a nose into Stanford’s gin. It has been very different, very different indeed for Stanford over these recent weeks and yet—the glassy and implacable sheen of the river would drive this insight into him most convincingly—he is still the man he has always known. Immortal, perhaps, consort of the world’s most famous and beautiful actress for certain, a perpetual wishful tourist now with his own travel agent and instant transfer . . . with all of this, he is the same old Stanford, the wistful and regretful guy he has come to know so well over these decades and he suspects that he always will be. Perhaps this is part of the paradigm of knowledge which these conditions have been created to place upon him: that three wishes or ten, that all fates or no fates will nonetheless cast Stanford always back upon himself. As if all signs and wonders, all meaning and portents, must eventually lead to this simple acceptance of the irretrievability of his life, the enormity of his regret. Stanford shrugs and turns from the river, trudges toward the hotel. Such thoughts are too weighty to have carried all this distance, although he was afflicted in Peking and Seville by epiphanies no less predictable and humiliating. He tries to think of this as little as possible, tries to ignore the women with parasols whom he dare not desire, since his three wishes thoughtlessly have included none of this.

  Perhaps in some other way, some other simulacrum of Stanford might have worked out a different situation, he thinks, but that is beyond him. Most things are beyond him. He trudges onward, this traveler of the late millennium, seized not by limitation but by purpose as he considers the many advancing millennia through which he may be able to consider this condition.

  Last slide, please

  Here is Stanford, confronting the bleak and illimitable landscape of imponderable millennia, not trudging, holding fast now, trying to establish some final understanding of his condition. “This was the price, wasn’t it?” he says to the djinn. “But what if I hadn’t asked for immortality? Would I still have been condemned to this wasteland?” Stanford chooses not to discuss the apocalypse which—like everything else—is many millennia behind him. He is thinking not now of the Biblical but the practical. “That was the plan all along, right?” he says.

  The djinn—still in punk guise, he is kind of fond of it, he has decided, and finds it the most amenable of all the guises he had adopted through his own imponderable progression of time seized—says, “I don’t know. I don’t think of this as punishment. I don’t think of this as anything at all. I told you, djinns have no understanding of metaphor. One thing doesn’t stand for another thing; it simply is. That’s the best way to carry on our condition.”

  “It’s monstrous,” Stanford says. Millions of years have thickened his lungs, stuck in his throat, made his speech guttural, although otherwise he is more or less the same guy, only burdened by the sheer dimensions of his knowledge. “I wouldn’t have done it if I had known. Who wants to hang around like this? And it’s all turned out the same.”

  “Well,” the djinn says, snapping gum and adopting a more convincing guise although it has not been necessary for a very long time to masquerade, to adopt a convincing persona, “that’s like the total unit of it, you know? The sameness of everything? But you had to find that out on your own.”

  “It’s crazy,” Stanford says. Here is Stanford, still trying to be sane at the edge of the world, but admitting to craziness as a cunning way of deferring, he thinks, an inevitability. He is wrong. He has always been wrong, although less than ever is this a proper concern. “The wishes had nothing to do with it, did they? This was all set out from the beginning.”

  “I don’t know” the djinn says. For sport, he turns into an Arabian potentate of frightening mien, whisk! one exercise of transmogrification, and he fixes Stanford with unblinking and terrifying eyes. “It is all in the cause of prophecy, of course. The prophetic is the absolute,” the djinn says mysteriously and then strides off (as the djinn has been so apt to do over these millennia), leaving Stanford once again alone, amidst the dusk and dirt of exhausted possibility, looking at the gray band of sky against the gray ribbon of river, trying to find some conjunction that cannot exist.

  “Three wishes,” Stanford says, “three wishes.” He seems to want to say more and if there were an observer to consider the situation, there might from Stanford be some outpouring of final revelation. But there is no observer, all observation ceased long ago, and so it is not possible to judge what has been said. Second millennial man confronts the fullness of his destiny against that gray and diminished ribbon of sky and for the meaning of all this, for its implication and portent, one must as always turn elsewhere. The situation is not inconsiderable, but it is far beyond Stanford’s means to apprehend.

  The unbottling

  Stanford twists the stopper, yanks at it, feels it leap within his hand, and then the steam begins its arc through the spaces of his riverfront digs, his hand clutched with the arthritic imprint of something at last beyond his control. Swirls and steam convulse in the ceiling, and from their outline congeals a figure which Stanford feels he may recognize from old books, half-glimpsed in childhood. Perhaps not. It is very difficult to keep a steady eye on all of this. At length, something which might be human streams from the ceiling, settles before him, grants him a wink from a glazed eye under a turbaned cap. “That is a pleasure and a portent,” the figure says, “and in return I am prepared for the most minimal arrangements to offer you three wishes. Three wishes which will change your life. You must, however, embark upon them quickly; otherwise my power and obligation will disappear and nothing, nothing at all will happen.” The eye is watery but filled with conviction. “It will be for your best interest to choose quickly,” the figure says.

  Stanford, who had only wanted a wine cooler and a light, easily absorbed drunk before dinner, stares in fixity and fascination. From the depths he feels an obscene necessity, a certain pornographic recognition and even as he tries to deny those emotions they seem to flood him as the steam has flooded his upscale but distinctly underfurnished condominium.

  “I can’t name my wants so easily,” Stanford says. “Nothing like this has happened before.”

  “Everyone,” the figure says, “can codify his wants. It goes with being human.” It stares at him solemnly and this time winks. “You may call me Djinn,” he says. “That is not my name, I have no name, but that is my condition and the condition is as close to naming as you may become. All power, possibility, all riches lie within your means if you choose correctly,” the djinn says. “If you do not, of course, the opportunity has vanished. It is almost time,” the djinn says. “It is almost time, it is nearly time, it is time as my power already crumbles.”

  Stanford, dismayed, twists his thumb in the bottle; there is, of course, nothing else. Contemplating, formed to full attention, he considers the djinn while the djinn considers him and it is as if the full weight of his futile meanderings and convolutions has come upon him and with it the desire to change, to shift the focus of his being toward some kind of adjustment and possibility.

  “I’m thinking about it,” Stanford says. “Let me think about it. I’m thinking about it as fast as I can.”

  The lights, please

  “The lights, please,” Stanford says, staring out at the impossible and ravaged deadlands, but of course there are no lights. There are no lights and no djinn to rekindle them. There is, however, a profusion of memory and for all I know, Stanford is recycling it at this very recollected moment while the rest of you are, I am empowered to say, dismissed. Please do not crowd the aisles and leave the visual aids you have been given on the front desk.

  Ready When You Are

  THE WORLD IN HIS WORKS—

  * * *

  Finzie, the big producer, biggest guy in the industry now, hovered over the lush blonde, his limbs poised for long, cool, detached entrance but—knowing better the insistent demands of collusion—gave into it with a sigh, sighed and gave into it, penetra
ted his partner, the most desirable and successful romantic star in the Western world, an absolute top star, feeling the shock of uncoiling, the gathering as if from his most distant places of a soft and baleful scream. What a deal this whole thing was, what a wonder!—and in his mind the film unreeled, slow dissolve to close-in shot, the heaving and thrashing of the bodies. Soft-core only, no detail shots, the genitalia discreetly covered. From the corner of one eye, in diminished perspective, Finzie caught a slash of Mediterranean, a slash of sun passing through clouds in this beaming and pleasant landscape. Oh boy, oh boy the big producer, a real hero thought, if only I could send a memo back to Flatbush Avenue, to that thirteen-year-old pounding himself in the familial bed, trying to put his strokes where they would make the least noise and do the most good. Made it, made it, made it! Finzie advised his thirteen-year-old self and pan shot into the blonde, Dorothea Harkins from Easton, Pennsylvania, transmogrified by the star system and clever agents to Eve Harlow and all his, his, his property now in this equipment room of the most exquisite furniture and design.

  And later, later then: Eve Harlow was sent to her room to lie in diaphanous, dreaming splendor and Finzie took a stroll through the garden of Cannes, surrounded by cameras and reporters, sycophants and jury, the troops trembling with their divergent and physical needs as he strode to the judging panel where he would make the long-anticipated announcement: Finzie was going global. Astonishing Productions would link with Italian financiers, Japanese bankers, ancient French money, British quick-hit money, the substance of the secret governments worldwide for a long-term contract which would carry the Finzie vision in eighteen languages and thirty-seven separate versions to all of the corridors and pockets of the world. In Zaire, voices dubbed in Swahili would articulate the political subtext; in Sweden, actors with heavy American accents would put dour Scandinavian words to the Finzie vision of compassion transcendent. Premier filmmaker to the world, orphan king of the 21st century, he feels the spectacular glow of close-in lights heating his features to ruddy and tumescent glory.