Three More Wishes: Be Kind To Your Genie

by Doctor MC

  “You could say that,” I answered. Then I gave her the same recap that I’d given my harem.

  Then Mom said, “Marvin, I don’t know if I did the right thing or not. But a reporter from NBC Channel Four just called, asking to speak with you. I told him that you’d just moved out, and I gave him your cel-phone number.”

  Indeed, I heard the “second call” tone. I didn’t recognize the phone number.

  I switched over, told the caller, “I’m talking to someone else, stay on the line, your call is very important to us, yada-yada.” Then I switched back to Mom.

  I told Mom, “It’s an annoyance, having to talk to that reporter, but I can hardly say you ‘did wrong.’ ”

  “Well, after I gave him your number, he asked for your new address. So he could interview you live on camera, he said. And I was distracted, getting ready for church, so I gave him the address of the mansion.”

  I shrugged. “I guess there’s no harm in a TV reporter learning my address. But if a door-to-door salesman asks, catch amnesia.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re cool with it; I just thought you should know. Fatima doing okay?”

  “Yeah, Mom, she and Janice are cooking me breakfast right now.”

  (I pulled the phone away from my mouth and said to Fatima, “Mom asks how you’re doing.” Fatima gave a thumb-up, then waved at the phone.)

  When I brought the phone back to my head, I heard, “...woman besides Fatima living at your house?”

  “Actually, Mom, I have six women besides Fatima living in my house. But the other five are going through drug withdrawal, and aren’t in shape to cook.”

  “And so it begins,” Mom said, in her “banter” tone of voice. “I guess you figured out why Uncle Warren built a house with twenty bedrooms in it.”

  “The bedroom downstairs, I’m reserving it as a guest bedroom. So only nineteen are in play.”

  “Such a relief, this convinces me that you’re not running wild with your new genie powers. By the way, I’m not telling your father about this. It would only make him envious.”

  In the background, I heard Dad’s voice: “Not telling me what?”

  ****

  I passed on Fatima’s greetings to Mom, Mom and I said goodbye, then I switched over to the on-hold NBC-4 reporter—

  “Hello, Marvin—mind if I call you Marvin? I’m Todd Caloraero with NBC Channel Four Eyewitness News, your local news leader! How are you today?”

  “I’m busy today. What do you need, Mr. Caloraero?”

  “Yeah, you’re probably still unpacking. Your mom tells me you just moved into your own place. Wow, you’re eighteen and you’re living by yourself? It’s great, right, Marvin?”

  “Yeah, it’s nice. Mr. Caloraero, I’m very busy this morning, so if you would—”

  “You’re on Shadyview, that’s two streets south of Paradise Lake Boulevard. The first story I covered after Channel Four hired me was at a mansion on Paradise Lake—trophy wife shot her millionaire husband. Have you had a chance to drive along Paradise Lake yet, and look at the nice houses?”

  I said, “Yeah, they’re pretty nice, big and expensive-looking.” I didn’t mention that I lived in an even bigger and more expensive house. “Mr. Caloraero, make your point or I hang up now.”

  “Marvin, the whole city is amazed this morning, seeing the dramatic footage that CBS-10 got of you last night, rescuing those kids and their dog—”

  “I didn’t save the dog’s life, she saved herself. I just opened the door.”

  “So modest. That’s part of why you’re a hero, Marvin.”

  “I’m not a hero. I’m just a guy who saw something that needed doing, with nobody else to do it, and there was no time to wait.”

  “That’s a great line. Can I quote you?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Marvin, I’d like to talk to you, on camera, about everything that happened. I want to get your thoughts in the cold light of day.”

  “Mr. Caloraero, I’m sorry but I’m very busy today.”

  “Marvin, please, help a guy out. My editor is royally pissed that CBS-10 got an exclusive with you on this juicy story, and he’s ordered me, ‘Don’t come back empty-handed.’ So even if you won’t talk to me, I’m coming out to 222 Shadyview and doing a stand-up in front of your house. Since I’m going to be at your curb anyway, why don’t you give me five minutes then?”

  “Mr. Caloraero, I’m giving you five minutes now. Instead of arguing and pleading, ask your questions over the phone, or you’ll have even less to give your editor.”

  The TV reporter sighed theatrically. “Very well, Marvin. Would you do it again, run into that burning house?”

  “The next time, the Fire Department can be called, so I won’t be needed. Next question?”

  “What were you thinking when you were walking around in that burning house?”

  “I thought, ‘Boy, it’s sure hot in here!’ Next?”

  “Were you scared?”

  “Mr. Caloraero, that house was like a walk-in oven, and burning chunks of the ceiling were raining down. I was scared shitless! Next?”

  “Damn, I’m gonna need to edit that one out. Ahem. You saved these children while dressed as Captain America. Did you do this because you thought it was something the comic-book Captain America would do?”

  “No, I did it because the house was on fire, the kids were trapped, and there were no fire trucks around. Next?”

  “Those are all the questions I have, Marvin—”

  “Good. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

  “But as soon as I can borrow a cameraman, I’ll be filming that standup in front of your house. I figure ... oh, thirty minutes from now. And when I get there, I’m going to ask again for an on-camera interview with you. I really hope that you’ll be a buddy and do it.”

  “Mr. Caloraero,” I said, “thirty minutes from now, I’ll likely be several miles away from my house. I have a lot of errands to run this morning.”

  And indeed, thirty minutes later, Fatima and I were shopping for party food at Wal-Mart Supercenter. All the time that I was grocery-shopping, I didn’t once think about Todd Caloraero of Channel Four News.

  But I should have thought about him. Because while Todd Caloraero was standing at my curb, staring at my mansion through the closed driveway gate, he was thinking about me. And his thoughts were going in surprising directions.

  As I think back on it, maybe I should’ve done that on-camera interview that he wanted so badly. Then I would’ve blasted his brain with magic pheromones, and maybe my life wouldn’t afterward have been overfilled with the high drama that it actually was.

  Chapter 33

  Drat, I’m Famous

  I turned off my cel phone as soon as Fatima and I walked into the Wal-Mart Supercenter. Anyone who’s ever tried to talk inside a Wal-Mart on a cel phone will tell you why I did this.

  I’m a guy, so I approach shopping the same way that a Special Forces team works a mission: Make a plan, rush to the objective, work the plan, leave quickly. If I’d gone to the Wal-Mart Supercenter by myself to buy party groceries, I could have been in and out in twenty minutes. But instead, Fatima was with me.

  So the trip to Wal-Mart took two hours. During that time, I was entirely out of cel-phone contact.

  And it’s all my fault. If at any time I’d said, “We’re leaving,” Fatima would have walked away from shopping—magical compulsion to obey, and all that. But 99 percent of the stuff in that store, other than clothing, Fatima knew only from reading my memories. When she actually got to see and touch things for herself, she was a joy to watch. Who over the age of seven finds an eggbeater fascinating?

  The only other thing worth mentioning about that shopping trip was that I bought five boxes of condoms. This wiped the bored look off the cashier’s face.

  As I said, Fatima and I spent two hours in Wal-Mart. So it was only in late morning, when we finally walked out of Wal-Mart, that I got the voice mail from Almira: Bail
for her and Elvira had been set at ten thousand dollars apiece.

  Then after we got driving to the mansion, TV reporter (and my secret touch-slave) Gennifer Ashton called me. Hoo boy.

  ****

  Since I was driving, Fatima answered my phone. When she put the phone to my ear, Gennifer was crying—

  “Marvin sir, please tell me what I’ve done to displease you so. I need to know. Was the blowjob bad?”

  “Why are you crying? You haven’t done anything to displease me.”

  In a hopeful voice, she asked, “I haven’t?”

  I said, “Tell me why you think you’ve displeased me.”

  “You told that airhead Todd Caloraero that you inherited a big house, and cars, and billions of dollars from your rich uncle. And you told me none of that!”

  I smacked the steering wheel in shock and frustration.

  When I could speak (almost) calmly, I said, “I told Caloraero none of that.”

  Gennifer asked hopefully, “Then it’s not true?”

  “Oh, it’s very true. Every word of it.”

  “Wow,” said Gennifer.

  I asked, “Who knows about this? How did you find out?”

  “If you tune in Channel Four, at the bottom of the screen you’ll see a picture of you, and a crawl about the ‘hero billionaire.’ If you go to Channel Four’s News webpage, they’ve got a big story about you. It’s been up for half an hour.”

  “Shit, shit, shit.”

  Gennifer said, “Marvin sir? Um...”

  “Yes?”

  “My boss just told me to go to your house and try and interview you. I’m probably not alone. If your doorbell isn’t already ringing, it will be, very soon.”

  “I wouldn’t know about my doorbell. I’m out running errands.”

  “Um, Marvin sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “May I interview you at your house?”

  That was a good question. This afternoon was the party for my touch-slaves, and I was going to tell most of my touch-slaves to move into my mansion. Sunday night and Monday would be taken up with that, and I did not want camera crews noticing attractive women coming and going from my house. Hm...

  “Gennifer, today is a very busy day for me. I wasn’t planning on holding a press conference, and I don’t have time for one. What would happen if you and those other guys showed up at my house and I didn’t talk to them?”

  “Marvin sir, don’t do that! Then the press people would hate you, and then whenever your name came up, they’d slant the news to make you look bad.”

  I thought hard, while Gennifer waited quietly. I toyed with Fatima shapeshifting herself to look like me, and then she-as-I bailing the twins out of jail. But so much could go wrong with that; I dropped the idea. Then I thought some more.

  After a long silence, I asked, “Would you press people accept a press spokesman? Or would you still turn nasty on me?”

  “No, we wouldn’t mind a press spokesman too much. Unless we thought that you were trying to hide something.”

  Oh, you mean like the fact that I own a brass lamp with a genie in it, who can turn me into a sex god and make me be worth billions, literally overnight? Or the fact that nearly a dozen sexy women would be arriving at my house in a few hours for a party? Yeah, I guess I DO have something to hide.

  Then I had a horrible thought: The news media showing up at my door wouldn’t be a one-time thing. I needed a long-term press strategy. Shit.

  After further thought, I said, “Gennifer, you asked if you could interview me, and I never answered. You and your crew come by my house Tuesday afternoon. Come at four o’clock.”

  “Thank you, Marvin sir!”

  “And Gennifer, dress as attractively as you can get away with, without starting your coworkers gossiping.”

  Gennifer’s voice dropped an octave: “I’ll give you a boner when you see me, Marvin sir.”

  Five seconds later, I told Fatima, “End call.” As she was obeying that order with my cel phone, I updated her on what Gennifer had told me.

  Fatima said, “Congratulations. You’re a Genie Master for only nine days, and you’re featured on local TV news.”

  I sighed. “Tell me about it.”

  She summoned her scrying ball and told me, “There are three television-news crews and two newspaper reporters outside the gates of your house. What do you want done?”

  “Well, we need to get to the mansion and unload these groceries, without being detected by reporters.”

  “I think I can—”

  “Then I need to get twenty thousand bucks in cash out of my safe, then drive to the jail, without the reporters detecting me.”

  “I’m sure I can—”

  “Then I need to bring Almira and Elvira back to the mansion, without the reporters detecting this or the twins thinking that anything is strange.”

  “Now it’s getting complicated.”

  “And meanwhile, I or someone has to talk to the reporters, before they start saying that I poison drinking water for fun.”

  Fatima raised an eyebrow. “You don’t ask for much, do you? All this should count as a seventh wish.” But she was smiling when she said this.

  Fatima got thoughtful, then summoned her scrying ball. “Please pull the car into someplace where it can’t be seen from the street.”

  I did, driving into a medical office park. Since physicians don’t want to work on Sunday, all the parking lots were vacant.

  I pulled behind one building, but Fatima, while studying her scrying ball, said, “No, there’s a security camera covering that spot.” She looked up from the scrying ball and pointed. “Park over there, please, Master.”

  After I moved to the assigned spot, Fatima consulted her scrying ball for ten more seconds, then vanished it. “No cameras see us here,” she said. I killed the engine.

  Fatima gestured for a bit, took a deep breath, and made a final gesture. FOOM—suddenly the mansion was in front of us, and my nine-car garage was in my rear-view mirror.

  As we were unloading groceries, I told Fatima, “That was impressive.” She grinned.

  When I returned to the car, with twenty thousand dollars in a sealed envelope, Fatima was waiting for me. She said, “I’ll return you to the same spot that we left from. Then you drive to the jail and get those young women. Once you get in the car, I’ll wait five minutes and then I’ll put them to sleep. After they fall asleep, you say the word genie and I’ll foom the car here.”

  I smirked. “Nah, not genie. Since it’s instant transportation, the activating word has to be Energize.”

  Fatima smiled at my joke.

  Then I said, “Come to think of it, I don’t know that I want the twins falling asleep as soon as we leave the jail. I’ve never bailed anybody out before; there might be errands we need to run. Tell you what: When I say Acapulco, put the twins to sleep over a sixty-second period.”

  “Yes, Master,” Fatima said. Then she asked a seemingly trifling question: “What about the reporters out there?”

  “You go talk to them,” I said. My answer seemed at the time to be a no-brainer.

  “Me? Not a human girl?”

  I waved it off. “You know enough from memory-reading me, you’ll have no problems. Be sure to tell them that Gennifer Ashton has dibs on me Tuesday. If they ask, ‘Did Marvin know that he was going to inherit Warren Harper’s billions?’, tell them, ‘It came as a complete shock.’ If they ask...”

  During the next fifteen minutes, I came up with a complete “If they ask X, you say Y” script for Fatima to follow. Since neither Fatima nor I can foresee the future, that made planning the script be hard. On the other hand, reporters are lazy, and look for scandal over substance, so that made cooking up a script be easy.

  Fifteen minutes after I started, I was saying, “...One final thing, Fatima. When you talk to the reporters, refer to me as Marvin, not Master. Otherwise, there could be complications.” She smiled at my joke. I said, “Well, I’m ready to go to jail no
w.”

  She said, “Master, may I ask why you’re bailing the twins out of jail with your own money? From reading your memories, I see that they are wicked women. Why not leave them there to rot?”

  I said, “I agree, they’re wicked to the bone. So they’ll each get justice; I’ll make sure they’ll both wear jumpsuits. But I think that they both can be rehabilitated. Or at least Almira can, and I intend to lead her back to the yellow-brick road. Energize.”

  A split-second later, my clunker and I were back in the medical office park.

  Were you paying attention, Reader? I spent over fifteen minutes planning out what should be said to the reporters, and I gave less than a second’s thought to whether Fatima should be who said those things. Ah, such is the value of hindsight.

  ****

  I’d been clueless, just assuming that posting bail wasn’t much different than ordering carry-out pizza. Meaning, you hand over the cash, and twenty minutes later, you get the goodies.

  Let me tell you, they ain’t the same—there’s no paperwork involved in receiving your pizza, but there’s a boatload of paperwork that you have to sign, in order to spring someone from jail.

  But eventually I had twin fangs-less vampiresses standing by my car, each stroking and kissing her sister.

  “Thank you for getting us out of jail, Marvin sir!” purred Almira (in black). “We are sooo grateful.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” said the red-clad twin.

  I looked at them and I said, “I bailed you out of jail when I didn’t have to. But now I’m on the hook for you showing up for your trials. So until you get jailed, you’re living with me.”

  “R-i-ght,” said Elvira. “You just want twin college babes living with you as your personal French maids. But that’s not part of my plans, chump.”

  You’ll recall that Elvira was immune to my powers of persuasion. But you’ll also recall that Elvira was nonstop horny for her sister Almira—just as Almira was nonstop horny for her. And you’ll also recall, I had a lot of magical control over Almira—

  Last night, I’d discovered that my powers over my touch-slaves included the power of suggestion. So now I practiced my new-found ability: “Almira, you are no longer hot for Elvira, not in the slightest. You are, however, willing to pleasure your sister, in trade for your sister pleasuring you. Step away from Elvira now.”