by Doctor MC
“Marvin? He’s at school.”
“No, not Marvin. It’s no biggie, Sher, go back to sleep.”
“Okay,” Sherry said in a trusting voice. Seconds later, she was indeed asleep.
Virgilia showered, did her face and hair, and threw the plastic bags that contained almost all of her worldly possessions into the back seat of her car. (The diamond necklace and Virgilia’s mink jacket were in a bus-station locker.) Then Virgilia headed off to the mansion where she had lived for the last two years, and which would soon be her residence for the next however-many years.
But Virgilia wasn’t headed to the mansion merely to move her stuff back in. She needed to talk to Fatima. Virgilia needed to know. Was Fatima a genie? Had Warren, and then Marvin, ensnared Virgilia through wishes granted?
Minutes later, Virgilia and her car were just outside the entrance gate to the mansion. Virgilia heard a young woman’s voice parroting through the speaker, “Can I help you?”
That must be Elvira, Virgilia thought. Nobody else at the mansion works so hard at sounding so bored.
Virgilia identified herself, and two minutes later, she and all her trash bags were at the front door of the mansion. Sure enough, it was French-Maided Elvira who answered the door.
As Virgilia walked in, while struggling with the heaviest trash bag, she casually asked, “Know where I can find Fatima?”
Elvira’s smile was catty. “Nobody’s seen her since last night. Know who had to help Janice with breakfast? Almie and me.”
“No shit? Fuck!”
Minutes later, Virgilia had carried the three trash bags up the stairs and into the bedroom that had been assigned to Sherry and her. Virgilia’s calf muscles burned, and she was sweaty. But she needed to find Fatima.
Virgilia needed to talk to Fatima. Maybe Fatima would lie, maybe she would refuse to answer Virgilia’s questions—hell, maybe Marvin had ordered Fatima to clam up. But what was Virgilia’s alternative to asking her questions and getting shot down? Not asking, and so going through life always wondering.
Thus with her ass on fire, Virgilia searched the mansion for Fatima, as only someone who’d lived there for two years could search. Virgilia walked through the garage, the pool shack, and the poolside kitchen; she walked through the billiards room, the electronic recreation room, the computer room, the ballroom, and the library; she checked the monster kitchen and the laundry room; and she peeked into every bedroom, including the guest bedroom downstairs. No Fatima.
When Virgilia got to Fatima’s own bedroom, Virgilia did more than peek in: She actually walked into the bedroom, looking for some sign of where Fatima might be. Not only was there no clue to Fatima’s whereabouts, the bedroom itself had a blank, not-lived-in look. Fatima’s bedroom reminded Virgilia of a vacated motel room after the motel maids had finished.
Then Virgilia went up the stairs to the attic, CLUMP-CLUMP-CLUMP-CLUMP-CLUMP. The attic was huge, not well lit, and already hot, but Virgilia walked it all anyway.
By now Virgilia had realized that if Fatima wasn’t a genie, then Fatima was now likely to be dead or dying somewhere on the property. And it would be Virgilia who found her body. Yeep.
SLAP! There was one walkway board near the attic stairs that wasn’t nailed down properly; anytime someone stepped on it, it made a loud noise. Virgilia never remembered to avoid it till too late.
A second later, Virgilia thought, I’m an idiot. She realized that she hadn’t checked the bathrooms. The mansion had twenty-two of those: one each for the monster kitchen, the poolside kitchen, and the guest bedroom; and nineteen for the upstairs bedrooms. Virgilia decided that she would search the upstairs bathrooms last, and Marvin’s bathroom would be very last.
So Virgilia headed for the attic stairs—SLAP! CLUMP-CLUMP-CLUMP-CLUMP-CLUMP down she went—then she walked across the second-floor hallway to the main stairs.
Twenty minutes later, Fatima still had not been found anywhere, alive or dead. Now Virgilia stood before the door to Marvin’s bedroom.
Fatima didn’t own a car; and she hadn’t taken Marvin’s car, Miriam’s car, the Mustang convertible, or any of Warren’s cars. And Virgilia was certain that Fatima wasn’t anywhere else on the property. So Fatima must be here, in Marvin’s bedroom, Virgilia figured.
****
In my second-period French IV class, I noticed that a girl Andrea was wearing green nail polish. Seeing this made me think of Fatima, who’d worn shiny green nail polish when we’d gone on our dinner-and-a-movie date, and she’d worn green nail polish every time I’d seen her thereafter—
Fatima, jeez! I left her in her lamp!
Note to self: Apologize to her when I finally let her out. She deserves better.
I tried to remember what I’d done with the padlock. Had I left the footlocker unlocked? Was it obvious that the footlocker was unlocked?
Ah, I’m probably obsessing over nothing.
****
The door for the Master Bedroom had a key slot; but fortunately for Virgilia, Marvin hadn’t locked the door. Virgilia opened the door to Marvin’s bedroom and walked in.
Inside the master bedroom, Virgilia noted that Marvin’s clothes from yesterday were thrown on the floor, and the bed was unmade.
Also, there was an open padlock on the dresser.
How curious.
Virgilia walked into each of the two walk-in closets; each were as big as Sherry’s and Virgilia’s motel room. Of course Virgilia checked the master bedroom’s enormous bathroom. Still no Fatima.
Maybe she called a cab? But where in town would she want to go? And if she IS a genie and Marvin sent her away, why didn’t he tell anyone?
Virgilia felt stumped: She had absolutely no idea what to try next, or where to look next.
As Virgilia walked out of Marvin’s bathroom, her eyes fell on a recliner, a standing lamp, and a green box that all were by a window. These three things hadn’t been here when Warren was alive.
Still, two items she recognized. The standing lamp had come from one of the upstairs bedrooms, As for the recliner, Warren had bought it in the 1960s and he’d claimed it was “the most comfortable piece of furniture ever made,” and so he’d refused to replace it.
But the green box? She’d never seen it before. Virgilia would swear in court, under threat of perjury, that this green box had never been in Warren’s bedroom, in his bedroom closets, in his garage, or in his attic during the two years that she’d lived here.
The dark-green box had “HARPER W G” stenciled on the top, so this obviously was Warren’s Army footlocker. Then why had Warren hidden it away? Warren had shown his combat medals to her and to Sherry, but he hadn’t shown his women what was inside his footlocker? How odd.
Then Virgilia noticed that the footlocker had a hasp for a padlock, but no padlock was there. Meanwhile, on the dresser lay an unlocked padlock.
Virgilia grabbed the lid of the footlocker, and lifted.
Staring down into the footlocker, Virgilia’s first thought was Now all my questions are answered. Including the question, Where the hell is Fatima?
Virgilia’s second thought was Jeez, that hunk of metal completely changed my life, and it looks like something dragged out of a junkyard.
Then Virgilia was hit by Temptation.
I just need to pick up the lamp, rub it, and I can be free of all this mind control. And then I can make myself as rich as Marvin. And then I’ll have one wish left!
But then she thought, This lamp is Marvin’s. If I took it and rubbed it, that would be stealing. No matter how nice my life got, Marvin, Fatima, and I myself all would know me as a thief.
But my mind would be free! the first part of her mind argued. I’d no longer be any man’s slave.
But look at what you’d lose, the “status quo” part of her mind argued. No matter how you tried, you couldn’t keep being friends with Sherry. Nor would you stay friends with all the new friends you made at the pool party yesterday. In fact, you wouldn’t have any friends
at all—look at Warren, suspicious of everyone’s motives.
That point hit home; Virgilia did not want a life like Warren’s.
Virgilia remembered the time when Warren had shown her and Sherry his combat medals. The women had gotten excited—“You’re brave, Warren, you’re a hero!” It was the only time that Virgilia had felt respect for Warren. And yet he’d acted like the medals were junk, no more brag-worthy than if he’d won stuffed animals at a county fair.
Warren’s reaction had puzzled Virgilia then, but now she understood it. Just as Warren had wealth that he hadn’t earned, and sexy girlfriends that he’d “won” only by magical cheating, perhaps his medals were undeserved too.
What would it be like to go through life, knowing that you’d earned none of the good things that you had? Virgilia realized that Warren had been miserable at the end of his life, despite all his goodies.
But while Warren was surrounded by undeserved rewards, Virgilia had a bragging right: She was one of the three highest-tipped strippers at Nimfo Club. So what if her former friends in the Abzug Society didn’t consider this worth boasting about? She was proud of what she’d done, because she’d had to learn a lot, unlearn a lot, and bust her ass (literally!) in order to achieve as much as she had.
Virgilia didn’t want to lose that pride. But she knew that if she touched the lamp, she’d be wondering for the rest of her life, Is this great accomplishment MY doing, or Fatima’s?
Plus, right now Virgilia had a purpose in life: serving and pleasing Marvin—a purpose that she shared with twenty other women. So what if her devotion was artificial? Fatima and Anna Kay were devoted to Marvin too, of their own free choice. Perhaps Fatima and Anna Kay were devoted because in the last week, Marvin had rescued six exploited hookers and two endangered children. So there, imaginary feminist critics!
Bottom line? Virgilia right now was happy. But if she rubbed this lamp, she’d become rich, and famous, and desired by men, and loved (perhaps), and admired (perhaps)—but this day would be the last happy day of her life. Plus, every morning she’d see a thief, an impostor, and a lonely woman in the mirror.
So the right choice was a no-brainer, really.
Virgilia shut the lid (without touching the old lamp), padlocked the footlocker, and walked out of Marvin’s bedroom.
As she walked down the stairs, Virgilia thought, Now I know how Pete Ross felt.
Downstairs was a French Maid who smiled at Virgilia (so this had to be Almira). “Find Fatima?” the French Maid asked.
“Nah,” Virgilia replied, “but I found her note; it was on the floor. She’s out running errands. If she’s not back before Marvin returns from school, she’ll be home soon after.”
****
Mr. Spinelli dropped the chalk in the chalk tray. He started to turn away from the blackboard, to face the class. As he was moving, he said to us, “However, the Supreme Court overturned—”
And then Mr. Spinelli stopped moving.
At that moment, almost all the sounds in the class stopped. Outside I heard someone hurrying down the hall (it was three minutes after the bell), and overhead I heard the hum of fluorescent lights. But the scratching of pens? The shifting around of chairs and books? The tapping of feet? Inside Mr. Spinelli’s classroom, all those sounds were gone.
I looked around. Everyone in class was a statue. They were breathing, but Joe Blake didn’t blink when I waved a hand in front of his face. Behind me, the face of Jorje Rodriguez was locked into eyeing Harold and smiling mischievously. Jorje was holding something; I’m guessing he was about to throw it.
“Greetings, Marvin Harper of the Six Wishes,” said a woman’s voice from the front of the class.
I faced forward. Standing by Mr. Spinelli’s desk was the semitransparent image of a young woman. She was wearing pink and rose-pink Middle Eastern clothing, but over this she was wearing an unbuttoned blue flannel shirt. Her hair was blond and pinned-up braided, so that she looked like a Danish milkmaid, but she also was wearing a gold-embroidered, rose-pink brimless cap.
The woman’s eyes were a vivid color, even being semitransparent. They weren’t brown, green, or blue; her irises were Barbie pink.
The most shocking thing about what I was seeing: Most of her clothing, and also her bare midriff, were covered with frost. This was despite a tiny pink fireball that did a figure-eight orbit around her hands and lower face.
The ghostly, pink-eyed woman said, “Marvin Harper, I am Jerngert, bound djinni of the Pink Tribe; Paula Sarin is my Master—”
“Paula Sarin, the senator?”
“Yes. I don’t have much time left, before I die, to warn you. You are in danger from my master, who intends to steal your ‘bottle,’ and Fatima with it.”
I don’t know what it says about me, but I replied first to the most unimportant part of her statement: “Fatima isn’t in a bottle, she’s in a lamp.”
“I know that, but Master doesn’t. I let her be misled.” The genie’s image smiled. “Call it payback for freezing me to death.”
“She really is trying to kill you?”
“She is killing me, Marvin Harper. My Master ordered me into a meat freezer, and then ordered me to stay here. All because she won’t believe that I don’t know where Fatima’s Vessel is.”
Jerngert slowly unbent one elbow and rapped her knuckles on her frosty hip; the result was a tink-tink-tink sound.
Jerngert explained, “Most of my body, I cannot move it now, or shape-shift it. When all of me turns solid, I’ll die. That will be soon, because my fingers are almost frozen.”
Then Jerngert spent the next minute telling me what I needed to know.
To which I replied, “Well, shit. Why is she doing this? If she already has you, why does she want Fatima?”
Jerngert said, “Paula Sarin only got one wish from me, but owning Fatima gets her three more wishes.”
“What wish did you grant her, exactly?”
“That once a day, she can touch someone and speak a sentence, and after that, he will believe or feel or do everything in that sentence. But she cannot give that person another Suggestion unless she touches him again after midnight, local time.”
“Which confirms the rumor about the Canadian War. Jeez, she’s a U.S. senator with mind-control powers. That’s a problem.”
“Here is another problem, Marvin Harper: Fatima is forbidden to enchant her Vessel or anything around her Vessel, to block a human from touching it—”
“Yeah, she’s told me as much.”
“To stop my Master from owning Fatima, you must protect the lamp, by human means. As Fatima’s friend, I beg you, protect her lamp. Fatima doesn’t deserve to have Paula Sarin as her master, she deserves you.”
Jerngert’s nearly straight right arm bent at the elbow, and the motion was even slower than minutes earlier. “My time is short,” Jerngert said.
“Do you have anything else to say to me?” I asked.
“Oh, I have much to say. But it is difficult now to move my hands and fingers—I cannot ‘broadcast’ much longer. Please, Marvin Harper of the Six Wishes, when Fatima learns of my death, comfort her; she will grieve fiercely. Tell her that she was the best friend I’ve ever had.”
“I will. Jerngert, I wish I could’ve met you under other circumstances.”
“Same here, because Fati—”
The pink fireball sputtered, then vanished. Jerngert’s face looked doomed as she said, “Help her, Marvin Harper, you’re her only hope.”
With that, the pink genie’s image vanished, and the classroom woke up.
****
Paula Sarin gave Ted a list of groceries to buy, and walked him out to the garage. As soon as he’d driven away in his truck, Paula went to the freezer.
She didn’t find Jerngert there. Instead, on the sheet-metal floor, she found a pile of pink gravel.
Paula fetched a foxtail and dustpan, and (being careful not to touch bare flesh to the subfreezing metal) she swept up the pink gravel.
A few minutes later, the dustpan was empty, and there was a pink mist filling the garage.
By then it was obvious that Jerngert wasn’t going to re-form from the pink smoke.
The bitch got what she deserved, Paula thought. Jernie should have told me what I wanted to know, instead of holding out on me.
****
Monday, 3:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time
I had Janice drive my clunker home; otherwise I maybe would’ve gotten a ticket—or maybe even hurt someone. But it was oh so hard, not telling Janice to go faster, or to run that stoplight.
As soon as I got inside my mansion, I dashed up the stairs, three at a time. (When you’re very tall, very strong, and very motivated, you do that.)
Fortunately, the footlocker was locked. Good, one worry unrealized (though I didn’t remember locking it).
As soon as Fatima de-smoked, she looked at me worriedly and started to say, “Master, you need—”
I threw my arms around her and said, “Fatima, I will not let Paula Sarin take you away! And I am so, so sorry for oversleeping and forgetting about you. Please forgive me.”
Fatima kissed me on the cheek, but then she looked at me in confusion. “How do you know that Jerngert’s master wants to steal my Vessel?”
“She appeared to me at school this afternoon. She said she had to warn me before she died.”
Fatima stared. “Jerngert is dead?” Fatima’s scrying ball appeared, and Fatima worked it for five seconds, then she looked at me. “My scrying ball isn’t working right. Jerngert must be alive!”
Fatima gestured, and a green lightball appeared between her hands. She shoved it away, and it sped off in a northwest direction—
—and quickly stopped, not even hitting the wall. Then the lightball started moving around and around, and up and down, its path describing a sphere.
Fatima gasped. “My message ball can’t find Jerngert! But I know she isn’t in her bottle.”
Then Fatima dropped to her knees, wailing.
I hurried to the bedroom door, locked it, then I rushed back to Fatima. I dropped to the floor, put my arms around Fatima, and held her as she sobbed. I didn’t say a word, I just held Fatima.