“Then the exorcist arrived. He wasn’t a Sufi, or even an imam. Just an old man, a neighbor. He asked how the man had wronged me, so I told him. The exorcist said he wasn’t surprised, that he’d known the guy for years and thought he was a red-assed monkey with a mind like a shoe. But Ya Jinni, he said, you’ve answered a wrong with a wrong.”
Here Zahid pauses. The next part is important; he wants to get it right. “When he said it, it felt like a holy judgment. The words were a whip, and he’d flayed me open and exposed my soul to God, every hidden corner. I sobbed for a while, and confessed to every sin I could think of. Then I asked if he could recite a few surahs for me. Not to drive me out, but just so I could listen. He was a little surprised, but he recited for hours without stopping. By the time he finished, I knew without a doubt what I needed to do. I had to leave you, and I had to become an exorcist. I’d never been so certain of anything in my life.”
He glances up. The boy is frowning at the wall, a portrait of stoic unhappiness. Zahid looks down at his hands, fighting embarrassment. What did he expect, cries of joy? A spontaneous conversion? He knows how these stories sound to unbelievers, dull and absurd and all the same, like a human describing a dream. I went to school, and you were there, but it wasn’t you. You ate an orange, and I started crying. Pointless even to try.
“Anyway,” he mutters. “I prayed with him for a while, and then asked how to go about becoming a Muslim. He told me about an abandoned masjid he’d heard of in Meknes, where jinn meet to pray and study. So I thanked him, and left. And then I left you.”
He trails off into a heavy silence, unsure what to say next.
After a while the boy says, “Do you regret your time with me, majnun?”
It’s a question he’s asked himself, and he knows his answer. “You were my world, Aisha. I regret my sins, but they were mine, not yours, and I made them of my own free will. Who knows? Maybe I would’ve sinned more if I hadn’t been your consort. So, no. I can’t regret it. But I can’t go back, either.”
The boy leans towards him, eyes wide. “I can make you, you know,” he whispers. “I’ll turn this young man into my new favorite, my home away from home. Cast me out, and I’ll come back, again and again. There’s bound to be damage to him eventually. And in a way, it will be your fault.”
A cold touch of horror goes through him: would she, truly? But he shakes his head. “You wouldn’t.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“Because I’ve never known you to be deliberately cruel. You told me once, We are the chaos and release that they need, the necessary balance to their rules and rigidity. They know this, even as they drive us from their bodies.
“I don’t believe that anymore. But I know that you do.”
An offended snort. “I see. Your eyes have been opened, and now in your wisdom you are above Aisha Qandisha. I am just another of God’s deluded creatures to you. I suppose now you’ll go and tell the Sufis to stop the festival, to put away their drums and banners. Are they deluded too? Why would all of Sidi Ali parade through the streets chanting my name, if they don’t value what I bring them?”
He sighs. “They do value you, Aisha. They love and fear you, just as I do. But they think a little of you goes a long way.”
The boy leans on one arm, considering him. “You would never dare talk to me like that before.”
“I know.”
“So many things you know, these days. Do you also know that I haven’t taken a new consort?”
His brow furrows in confusion and surprise. Can it be true? He’s never known her to lie outright. But the thought of her without a consort barely makes sense. “Really? Whatever for?”
The boy shrugs, one finger tracing the bedpost. “For the novelty, maybe. Or maybe I just miss you that much.”
“Aisha.”
“You were so very good at your duties. So immensely skilled at pleasing me.” The boy raises a hand – the nails bitten, the knuckles sprouting their first hairs – and gently touches Zahid’s cheek. “Please, majnun. Come back. I am begging you.”
He closes his eyes, fights the desire that sweeps his body, the jolt that comes from hearing Aisha Qandisha beg for anything, least of all him. “I can’t.” It comes out strangled, a question. “Please, Aisha. If you ever loved me, don’t ask me again.”
A long moment passes. Zahid wills himself not to move, not to feel the boy’s breath on his throat, the heat that radiates from the thin frame.
“All right,” the boy says at last. “You win.” He draws away from Zahid and lies back on the bed, his face dull and stony.
For a moment Zahid has no idea what he’s doing. Then he realizes. “No.”
“Well, exorcist of nearly a dozen jinn? What are you waiting for? Is your faith not strong enough?”
“Don’t do this. Just leave him. Just let him go.”
But the boy says nothing more, only stares at the ceiling, and Zahid sees that he’s already lost the fight. This is his punishment, his penance. There is nothing he can do.
Feeling cold and sick, Zahid opens his backpack again and takes out a small vial of olive oil. He mutters a prayer over it, then rubs a few drops on the boy’s forehead. The boy shudders once, and closes his eyes.
The exorcism itself is straightforward, even textbook. She uses no feints or trickery, no clever dodges to make him think he’s weakened her or cast her out. She merely holds on, fighting him for every inch as he batters her with verses, pushing her out of the boy’s mind and down into his chest. It takes nearly an hour to herd her along the boy’s torso and into the arm that’s closest to the open window. At some point it becomes clear to Zahid that he will succeed, that he’s strong enough to do this; and he knows that she must realize it too. It’s over, he thinks desperately. Just let go. But still she fights him.
More verses, more surahs, and his strength begins to flag. But she falters first, her grip slipping. The boy’s hand starts to tremble. Quickly Zahid reaches across and pulls the string from around the boy’s forefinger. One last recitation – and she flies free, hovering before the window.
Zahid almost cries out at the sight of her: at her beauty, newly shocking after so long away, and at the ugly marks of his exorcism. He wants to throw himself on the floor beneath her, to whimper and crawl and beg her forgiveness.
“Farewell, Zahid,” she says, and flies away.
Zahid sags against the window frame and watches until she disappears. Then a noise behind him makes him turn.
The boy on the bed is stirring. The eyes flutter open. He rubs his face as though coming out of a dream, then startles and jerks his hands away, staring at the strings. He looks around, panicked, searching, but sees only Zahid. His face begins to crumple.
I’m sorry, Zahid wants to tell him. It has to be this way. It’s for the best. But the boy has turned away from him, and is weeping into his pillow.
Black Powder
Maria Dahvana Headley
THE RIFLE IN this story is a rifle full of wishes. Maybe all rifles seem to be that, at least for a moment, when they’re new, before any finger has touched any trigger. Maybe all rifles seem as though they might grant a person the only thing they’ve ever wanted.
At the beginning of this story, there are no bullets. At the end of this story, there are no more bullets left. In the middle of this story, there are enough bullets to change the world into something entirely different.
This rifle is full of anything anyone could want, each bullet a captive infinity, each an ever after.
Bullets may be made, in the old way, of a thin cylinder of any animal’s gut packed full of black powder and attached to the back of the projectile with glue. They may be made of bronze points, of buckshot, with tiny arrows – flechettes – embedded in them to maximize damage on entry. Rifles may shoot anything from orbs to thorns, which may be propelled, in antique weapons, by a mixture of charcoal, potassium nitrate, and sulphur, or, in certain situations, by the motions of something else entirely.
Thus may one fire a wish. Thus may one shoot a star.
That’s a story people tell, in any case. Like all stories, this one contains lies, and like all old rifles, this one contains the dust of its history.
Perhaps the story begins with a kid behind the wheel of a truck, this same stolen rifle beside him.
This kid – call him the Kid, why not? – has big plans. Here at the base of the mountains, he’s been looking up too long, seeing only girls who want nothing to do with him. He stole the rifle from the dumb old man at the pawnshop, who never even saw him coming.
The Kid shot the rifle once, and then –
The Kid’s nothing special. He’s gangle, denim, pustule and pouch. Back pocket of his jeans is full of stolen chew, and his hands are covered in corn chip ashes like he’s been elbow deep in a Dorito crematorium.
Something weird happened when he pulled the trigger, something he’s not thinking about.
Something asked him a question.
The something is in the back of the Kid’s pickup truck now, on the dog’s blanket. Maybe real, maybe imagined, maybe a flashback to some cartoon reality seen when he was little. He’s decided not to think about it.
Out here, near the remnants of the reactor, there’s a marker for a massacre of trappers, and there’s a historical designation for the place, their possessions enough to identify them.
In the summer, poison mushrooms leap from the shadows, shape of skulls. The spot is surrounded by cliffs that glow green at sunset, and the hollow in the center feels seen. It’s been declared safe enough, the radiation dispersed, though most people would never come here. It’s a bad place.
The Kid imagines the fire flooding up from it; pictures the pale blue sky when the meltdown happened, tree branches shaking, studded with black squirrels. The way ash fell from the heavens, and his mother walked out from the trailer and filled her hands with it, filled her mouth with it, rolled in it like a dog in snow.
“I didn’t know no better,” she says. “Lot of people didn’t. We thought it was some kinda miracle.”
Then she was pregnant, and she swears she doesn’t know how it happened, doesn’t know who the Kid’s father ever was.
He veers left on the highway and drives on the wrong side a while, singing along with the hum inside him. In the seat, the rifle sings too, bullets rattling, each a distinct tone.
The Kid feels stars inside his chest, burning novas, sparks flitting through his body. He’s a man on a mission, to spread the word of the dead.
He thinks about his future: a hero’s journey through the flat earth of high school. He’s readying himself to graduate from childhood and into legend.
DROP BACK IN time to another part of the story, a hundred and fifty years ago, long before the Kid’s even born.
Out here in these woods, at that time, there’s a notorious freetrapper who takes all the pelts and all the women. He pays in plague as well as in tradegoods, taking the beaver, the mink, the wolves, taking the daughters of chieftains, and the wives of warriors.
He’s a bringer of disaster, and in the years he walks the woods, he takes wife after wife, never for long. Some die in childbirth, and some die in rapids, and some die by bear. One leaps from a cliff. They walk ahead of him, and ride behind him. They are the starwatchers he uses when he can’t see a way out of the wild, and the warmth he relies upon in winter. The animals hate him, and the wives hate him, and he carries a black powder rifle, an axe, and a bottle of whiskey. Anything else he needs, he steals. Every time he takes a new wife, he’s cursed by all the inhabitants of the places he passes through. There are babies left behind after each wife dies, and he gives some to the animals, and puts others out to be collected by anyone who lives in the trees. The trapper wants only wives, not children.
The rifle in this story is the one that once belonged to this trapper.
DOWNWIND AND UPRIVER of the trapper’s territory, there’s a pack of company men with a bag of sugar and a bag of tea, a pile of pelts tied to horseback, the riders chewed over by the tilted teeth of the mountains. Each green cliff glints with ghosts, and each new place is written on a map of the men’s making.
Silk has not yet taken over the world. It’s the trappers’ mission to bring back fur and carry it into drawing rooms where the pianos are made of wood from other conquered places. At night the men circle, make their fire, boil the river, steep tea leaves, drink it hot and sweet, the only rightness, their ragged remnant of civilization. It’s a strange civilizer, the drinking of brackish water.
They write journals of their expedition into forbidden country: caverns narrow and full of black wings, pine trees sharp as knives pressed into soft bellies. Each man has his spoon. Each man has something gold hanging under his shirt. If they chisel into the stone they find only dark muddy green, stone the color of swamp, no emeralds. Above them, mountain lions stalk the white bone knobs at the back of each man’s neck.
One of the men’s got a monkey with him, the only source of comedy, brought from his lady at home, and he sets his monkey off into the woods. The monkey chitters high and holy, telling him where the beavers are building their dams. That trapper comes back rich in oily pelts, the decapitated heads of beaver strewn on the path behind him, ghost tails slapping the water while the men sleep.
One day a woman appears at the edge of their camp. She carries two pistols and wears trousers made of leather. Her eyes have tattoos of treelines along the lids.
Call her the Hunter.
With her is the French Canadian freetrapper, whose legend the men all know. He’s the Bluebeard of the Rocky Mountains, and his tales travel, but something’s wrong with him. He rides on the back of her horse, sidesaddle. He sucks at the insides of his cheeks, spits in the dirt, and bows his head. He wears a brilliant blue blanket around his shoulders, and shivers, even when he’s near the fire. His beard’s gone half white.
The trappers decide he’s no longer a man. Something’s gone wrong, and whatever it is, they won’t ask. They decide never to speak of him again. Bad luck.
“What are you doing here?” the leader of the company men asks the woman. “What are you hunting?”
He’s already given her all the tobacco they’ve brought, though he doesn’t know why.
“What do you think I’m hunting?” she asks. “Don’t you know where you are? What do you call these mountains?”
They tell her their name for them, and she laughs. “That’s not their name. I’ve been following them around the center of the world. I’ve been hunting a long time.
“Let me tell you a story,” she says.
The men carefully fail to listen. The only stories to tell nine months into a trapping are about women, not by them. Girls on their backs, girls on horseback, girls in horsehair. No man wants to risk drawing the attention of his own ghosts, not this far in. The longer they travel in this country, the more fear travels with them. The women in these mountains are dangerous if they exist at all, and the men pretend they don’t, in favor of the few women working up in the gold veins and silver valleys outside the tourmaline range. The men make progress toward them, gathering pelts for payment at bars and brothels.
The story the Hunter tells them is something about a magical creature in the trees, left here by an earlier expedition, offloaded from a wagon and chained in a room made of metal out in the woods, all alone.
“I ran up on the last man from that expedition, and he told me they put their monster where nobody would ever find it,” she says, and the men shudder.
“Next time I saw him, he was turned innards out,” she says, “and hanging from a tree. He was missing all his mains. So I guess they didn’t cage it well enough, now, did they? You haven’t seen it?”
They haven’t seen it.
When she rides away, the freetrapper looks back at them, and they pretend not to notice. All is well. Pelts and then home.
One morning, though, the men come upon a gathering of the dead, skeletons sitting in a circ
le, drinking tea. Cups shattered in the snow, gilt-edged smiles, brown stains in the ice. All the dead are dressed in furs, layer after layer of them, beaver, bear, and wolf. The skeletons are wearing the claws of the animals, the teeth of the animals, the tails of the animals.
The monkey leaps from its man’s shoulder and runs to one of the dead. It shrieks in recognition.
One of the living men kneels beside one of the skeletons, and touches the skull with his fingernail, tapping it. With that touch, the skeleton blooms, regaining all its lost flesh, young and strong and fat with feasting. It is a body full of brilliant blood. It is a familiar body. Each man sees himself there, and shudders in time, himself living, himself dead, all in the same moment.
There’s a whipping wind now, and hailstones. The fire rekindles in green flames, and there is a voice, and the voice tells them to eat.
There is the Hunter with the trees tattooed on her eyelids too, but she doesn’t arrive until somewhat later, and by then, the thing she’s hunting is gone.
WHAT DO WE hunt but each other? A hunter might go on an expedition, might map the forest and mountains, but what they’re truly looking for is their own broken heart hidden inside an elk, their own lost lover hidden inside a wolf, their own dead child hidden inside a bear. A hunter is always looking for wishes to come true, and if it takes blood and rending to get them, then it does. There is a magic in the explosion, in the black smoke cloud, in the way whatever one is hunting runs off, the way the hunter is left standing there, inhaling powder.
All most people wish for is more, wishing forever until tongues are parched and hearts are tired of beating. Love is a kind of wish.
Wishing for love is the same as wishing for more wishes.
SNAP FORWARD IN time again, a hundred and fifty years. Now there’s a pawnshop down a dirt trail, deep in the woods, near the spot where the trappers died.
The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories Page 8