“This is actually the longest conversation I’ve had since I became a wish-facilitator.” Richard crossed his leg, ankle over thigh. “Usually, it’s just whomp-bomp-a-lula-three-wishes, and I’m back in the bottle. So tell me about your prize-winning play. If you want. I mean, it’s up to you.”
Marisol told Richard about her play, which seemed like something an acquaintance of hers had written many lifetimes ago. “It was a one-act,” she said, “about a man who is trying to break up with his girlfriend, but every time he’s about to dump her she does something to remind him why he used to love her. So he hires a male prostitute to seduce her, instead, so she’ll cheat on him and he can have a reason to break up with her.”
Richard was giving her a blank expression, as though he couldn’t trust himself to show a reaction.
“It’s a comedy,” Marisol explained.
“Sorry,” Richard said. “It sounds awful. He hires a male prostitute to sleep with his girlfriend. It sounds … I just don’t know what to say.”
“Well, you were a theatre critic in the 1950s, right? I guess it was a different era.”
“I don’t think that’s the problem,” Richard said. “It just sounds sort of … misanthropic. Or actually woman-hating. With a slight veneer of irony. I don’t know. Maybe that’s the sort of thing everybody is into these days—or was into, before the world ended yet again. This is something like the fifth or sixth time the world has ended. I am losing count, to be quite honest.”
Marisol was put out that this fossil was casting aspersions on her play—her contest-winning play, in fact. But the longer she kept him talking, the more clues he dropped, without costing her any wishes. So she bit her lip.
“So. There were half a dozen apocalypses,” Marisol said. “And I guess each of them was caused by people trying to prevent the last one from happening again, by making wishes. So that white stuff out there. Some kind of bioengineered corrosive fungus, I thought—but maybe it was created to prevent some kind of climate-related disaster. It does seem awfully reflective of sunlight.”
“Oh, yes, it reflects sunlight just wonderfully,” Richard said. “The temperature of the planet is going to be dropping a lot in the next decade. No danger of global warming now.”
“Ha,” Marisol said. “And you claim you’re just doing the most straightforward job possible. You’re addicted to irony. You sat through too many Brecht plays, even though you claim to hate him. You probably loved Beckett as well.”
“All right-thinking people love Beckett,” said Richard. “So you had some small success as a playwright, and yet you’re studying to be a doctor. Or you were, before this unfortunate business. Why not stick with the theatre?”
“Is that a question?” Marisol said. Richard started to backpedal, but then she answered him anyway. “I wanted to help people, really help people. Live theatre reaches fewer and fewer people all the time, especially brand-new plays by brand-new playwrights. It’s getting to be like poetry—nobody reads poetry any more. And meanwhile, poor people are dying of preventable cancers every day, back home in Taos. I couldn’t fool myself that writing a play that twenty people saw would do as much good as screening a hundred people for cervical cancer.”
Richard paused and looked her over. “You’re a good person,” he said. “I almost never get picked up by anyone who’s actually not a terrible human being.”
“It’s all relative. My protagonist who hires a male prostitute to seduce his girlfriend considers himself a good person, too.”
“Does it work? The male prostitute thing? Does she sleep with him?”
“Are you asking me a question?”
Wolf shrugged and rolled his eyes in that operatic way he did, which he’d probably practiced in the mirror. “I will owe you an extra wish. Sure. Why not. Does it work, with the gigolo?”
Marisol had to search her memory for a second, she had written that play in such a different frame of mind. “No. The boyfriend keeps feeding the male prostitute lines to seduce his girlfriend via a Bluetooth earpiece—it’s meant to be a postmodern Cyrano de Bergerac—and she figures it out and starts using the male prostitute to screw with her boyfriend. In the end, the boyfriend and the male prostitute get together because the boyfriend and the male prostitute have seduced each other while flirting with the girlfriend.”
Richard cringed on top of the sofa with his face in his insubstantial hands. “That’s terrible,” he said. “I can’t believe I gave you an extra wish just to find that out.”
“Wow, thanks. I can see why people hated you when you were a theatre critic.”
“Sorry! I mean, maybe it was better on the stage; I bet you have a flair for dialogue. It just sounds so … hackneyed. I mean, postmodern Cyrano de Bergerac? I heard all about postmodernism from this one graduate student who opened my bottle in the early 1990s, and it sounded dreadful. If I wasn’t already sort of dead, I would be slitting my wrists. You really did make a wise choice, becoming a doctor.”
“Screw you.” Marisol decided to raid the relatively tiny liquor cabinet in the panic room, and poured herself a generous vodka. “You’re the one who’s been living in a bottle. So. All of this is your fault.” She waved her hand, indicating the devastation outside the panic room. “You caused it all, with some excessively ironic wish-granting.”
“That’s a very skewed construction of events. If the white sludge was caused by a wish that somebody made—and I’m not saying it was—then it’s not my fault. It’s the fault of the wisher.”
“Okay,” Marisol said. Richard drew to attention, thinking she was finally ready to make her first wish. Instead, she said, “I need to think,” and put the cork back in the bottle.
* * *
Marisol watched a season and a half of I Dream of Jeannie, which did not help at all. She ate some delicious beef stroganoff and drank more vodka. She slept and watched TV and slept and drank coffee and ate an omelet. She had no circadian rhythm to speak of anymore.
She had four wishes, and the overwhelming likelihood was that she would foul them up, and maybe next time there wouldn’t be one person left alive to find the bottle and fix her mistake.
This was pretty much exactly like trying to cure a patient, Marisol realized. You give someone a medicine which fixes their disease but causes deadly side effects. Or reduces the patient’s resistance to other infections. You didn’t just want to get rid of one pathogen, you wanted to help the patient reach homeostasis again. Except that the world was an infinitely more complex system than a single human being. And then again, making a big wish was like writing a play, with the entire human race as players. Bleh.
She could wish that the bioengineered fungus had never dissolved the world, but then she would be faced with whatever climate disaster the fungus had prevented. She could make a blanket wish that the world would be safe from global disasters for the next thousand years—and maybe unleash a millennium of stagnation. Or worse, depending on the slippery definition of “safe.”
She guessed that wishing for a thousand wishes wouldn’t work—in fact, that kind of shenanigans might be how Richard Wolf wound up where he was now.
The media server in the panic room had a bazillion movies and TV episodes about the monkey paw, the wishing ring, the magic fountain, the Faustian bargain, the djinn, the vengeance-demon, and so on. So she had plenty of time to soak up the accumulated wisdom of the human race on the topic of making wishes, which amounted to a pile of clichés. Maybe she would have done more good as a playwright than as a doctor, after all—clichés were like plaque in the arteries of the imagination, they clogged the sense of what was possible. Maybe if enough people had worked to demolish clichés, the world wouldn’t have ended.
* * *
Marisol and Richard sat and watched The Facts of Life together. Richard kept complaining and saying things like, “This is worse than being trapped inside a bottle.” But he also seemed to enjoy complaining about it.
“This show kept me marginally sa
ne when I was the only person on Earth,” Marisol said. “I still can’t wrap my mind around what happened to the human race. So, you are conscious of the passage of time when you’re inside the bottle.” She was very careful to avoid phrasing anything as a question.
“It’s very strange,” Richard said. “When I’m in the bottle, it’s like I’m in a sensory deprivation tank, except not particularly warm. I float, with no sense of who or where I am, but meanwhile another part of me is getting flashes of awareness of the world. But I can’t control them. I might be hyperaware of one ant carrying a single crumb up a stem of grass, for an eternity, or I might just have a vague sense of clouds over the ocean, or some old woman’s aches and pains. It’s like hyper-lucid dreaming, sort of.”
“Shush,” said Marisol. “This is the good part—Jo is about to lay some Brooklyn wisdom on these spoiled rich girls.”
The episode ended, and another episode started right away. You take the good, you take the bad. Richard groaned loudly. “So what’s your plan, if I may ask? You’re just going to sit here and watch television for another few years?” He snorted.
“I have no reason to hurry,” Marisol said. “I can spend a decade coming up with the perfect wishes. I have tons of frozen dinners.”
At last, she took pity on Richard and found a stash of PBS American Playhouse episodes on the media server, plus other random theatre stuff. Richard really liked Caryl Churchill, but didn’t care for Alan Ayckbourn. He hated Wendy Wasserstein. Eventually, she put him back in his bottle again.
Marisol started writing down possible draft wishes in one of the three blank journals that she’d found in a drawer. (Burton had probably expected to record his thoughts, if any, for posterity.) And then she started writing a brand-new play, instead. The first time she’d even tried, in a few years.
Her play was about a man—her protagonists were always men—who moves to the big city to become a librarian, and winds up working for a strange old lady, tending her collection of dried-out leaves from every kind of tree in the world. Pedro is so shy, he can’t even speak to more than two people, but so beautiful that everybody wants him to be a fashion model. He pays an optometrist to put drops in his eyes, so he won’t see the people photographing and lighting him when he models. She had no clue how this play was going to end, but she felt a responsibility to finish it. That’s what Mrs. Garrett would expect.
She was still stung by the idea that her prize-winning play was dumb, or worse yet kind of misogynistic. She wished she had an actual copy of that play, so she could show it to Richard and he would realize her true genius. But she didn’t wish that out loud, of course. And maybe this was the kick in the ass she needed to write a better play. A play that made sense of some of this mess.
“I’ve figured it out,” she told Richard the next time she opened his bottle. “I’ve figured out what happened those other times. Someone finds your bottle after the apocalypse, and they get three wishes. So the first wish is to bring the world back and reverse the destruction. The second wish is to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But then they still have one wish left. And that’s the one where they do something stupid and selfish, like wishing for irresistible sex appeal.”
“Or perfect hair,” said Richard Wolf, doing his patented eye-roll and air-swat.
“Or unlimited wealth. Or fame.”
“Or everlasting youth and beauty. Or the perfect lasagna recipe.”
“They probably figured they deserved it,” Marisol stared at the pages of scribbles in her hands. One set of diagrams mapping out her new, as-yet-unnamed play. A second set of diagrams trying to plan out the wish-making process, act by act. Her own scent clung to every surface in the panic room, the recirculated and purified air smelled like the inside of her own mouth. “I mean, they saved the world, right? So they’ve earned fame or sex or parties. Except I bet that’s where it all goes wrong.”
“That’s an interesting theory,” said Wolf, arms folded and head tilted to one side, like he was physically restraining himself from expressing an opinion.
Marisol threw out almost every part of her new play, except the part about her main character needing to be temporarily vision-impaired so he can model. That part seemed to speak to her, once she cleared away the clutter about the old woman and the leaves and stuff. Pedro stands, nearly nude, in a room full of people doing makeup and lighting and photography and catering and they’re all blurs to him. And he falls in love with one woman, but he only knows her voice, not her face. And he’s afraid to ruin it by learning her name, or seeing what she looks like.
By now, Marisol had confused the two processes in her mind. She kept thinking she would know what to wish for, as soon as she finished writing her play. She labored over the first scene for a week before she had the nerve to show it to Richard, and he kept narrowing his eyes and breathing loudly through his nose as he read it. But then he said it was actually a promising start, actually not terrible at all.
The mystery woman phones Pedro up, and he recognizes her voice instantly. So now he has her phone number, and he agonizes about calling her. What’s he afraid of, anyway? He decides his biggest fear is that he’ll go out on a date with the woman, and people will stare at the two of them. If the woman is as beautiful as Pedro, they’ll stare because it’s two beautiful people together. If she’s plain-looking, they’ll stare because they’ll wonder what he sees in her. When Pedro eats out alone, he has a way of shrinking in on himself, so nobody notices him. But he can’t do that on a date.
At last, Pedro calls her and they talk for hours. On stage, she is partially hidden from the audience, so they, too, can’t see what the woman looks like.
“It’s a theme in your work, hmmm?” Richard Wolf sniffed. “The hidden person, the flirting through a veil. The self-loathing narcissistic love affair.”
“I guess so,” Marisol said. “I’m interested in people who are seen, and people who see, and the female gaze, and whatever.”
She finished the play, and then it occurred to her that if she made a wish that none of this stuff had happened, her new play could be un-written as a result. When the time came to make her wishes, she rolled up the notebook and tucked it into her waistband of her sweatpants, hoping against hope that anything on her immediate person would be preserved when the world was rewritten.
In the end Pedro agrees to meet the woman, Susanna, for a drink. But he gets some of the eye-dilating drops from his optometrist friend. He can’t decide whether to put the drops in his eyes before the date—he’s in the men’s room at the bar where they’re meeting, with the bottle in his hand, dithering—and then someone disturbs him and he accidentally drops the bottle in the toilet. And Susanna turns out to be pretty, not like a model but more distinctive. She has a memorable face, full of life. She laughs a lot, Pedro stops feeling shy around her. And Pedro discovers that if he looks into Susanna’s eyes when he’s doing his semi-nude modeling, he no longer needs the eye drops to shut out the rest of the world.
“It’s a corny ending,” Marisol admitted. “But I like it.”
Richard Wolf shrugged. “Anything is better than unearned ambivalence.” Marisol decided that was a good review, coming from him.
Here’s what Marisol wished:
1) I wish this apocalypse and all previous apocalypses had never happened, and that all previous wishes relating to the apocalypse had never been wished.
2) I wish that there was a slight alteration in the laws of probability as relating to apocalyptic scenarios, so that if, for example, an event threatening the survival of the human race has a ten percent chance of happening, that ten percent chance just never comes up, and yet this does not change anything else in the material world.
3) I wish that I, and my designated heirs, will keep possession of this bottle, and will receive ample warning before any apocalyptic scenario comes up, so that we will have a chance to make the final wish.
She had all three wishes written neatly on a sheet of paper torn out
of the notebook, and Richard Wolf scrutinized it a couple times, scratching his ear. “That’s it?” he said at last. “You do realize that I can make anything real. Right? You could create a world of giant snails and tiny people. You could make The Facts of Life the most popular TV show in the world for the next thousand years—which would, incidentally, ensure the survival of the human race, since there would have to be somebody to keep watching The Facts of Life. You could do anything.”
Marisol shook her head. “The only way to make sure we don’t end up back here again is to keep it simple.” And then, before she lost her nerve, she picked up the sheet of paper where she’d written down her three wishes, and she read them aloud.
Everything went cheaply glittery around Marisol, and the panic room reshaped into The Infinite Ristretto, a trendy café that just happened to be roughly the same size and shape as the panic room. The blue-leather walls turned to brown brick, with brass fixtures and posters for the legendary all-nude productions of Mamet’s Oleanna and Marsha Norman’s ’night, Mother.
All around Marisol, friends whose names she’d forgotten were hunched over their laptops, publicly toiling over their confrontational one-woman shows and chamber pieces. Her best friend Julia was in the middle of yelling at her, freckles almost washed out by her reddening face.
“Fuck doctors,” Julia was shouting, loud enough to disrupt the whole room.
“Theatre is a direct intervention. It’s like a cultural ambulance. Actors are like paramedics. Playwrights are surgeons, man.”
Marisol was still wearing Burton’s stained business shirt and sweatpants, but somehow she’d gotten a pair of flip-flops. The green bottle sat on the rickety white table nearby. Queen was playing on the stereo, and the scent of overpriced coffee was like the armpit of God.
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