Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (31 page)

“I bought the country,” he boasted to his followers. “It’s ours now.”

It didn’t take much. The underground jewel caves of Zumurrud the Great are celebrated in the lore of the jinn. Perhaps, and we believe this to be probable, at least one of these caverns was situated in the harsh mountainous eastern borderlands of A., deep below the mountains, hidden from human eyes by gates of stone. When Zumurrud presented himself to the leadership of the Swots they were overawed by his gigantic size, made witless with fear by being in the presence of a fire-born jinni—but they were also driven mad with desire by the golden bowls of diamonds and emeralds he bore, casually, as if they were nothing, one bowl in each immense hand. Diamonds larger than the Kohinoor fell from the bowls and rolled along the floor, coming to rest at the Swots’ trembling feet. “You can have as many of these little trinkets as you want,” said Zumurrud in his giant’s voice, “and you can do what you like with this godforsaken land, you can ban the wind, for all I care, you can forbid the clouds to rain or the sun to shine, go right ahead. But from now on the Foundation owns you, Swots, so you had better swot up how to keep me happy. If not, then bad things can happen, such as this.” He snapped his fingers and one of the Swots, a skinny, bent fellow with rotten teeth and a deep hatred of dance music, was transformed instantly into a pile of smoldering ash. “Just a demonstration,” murmured Zumurrud the Great, setting down the bowls of jewels. And that was that.

While Dunia and Mr. Geronimo were away in Fairyland the Zumurrud group launched a series of such “demonstrations,” albeit on a larger scale, designed to cow the human race and bring it meekly to heel. We say “the Zumurrud group” because, as has previously been mentioned, the Grand Ifrit himself was a person of considerable natural indolence, who preferred to let others do the dirty work while he reclined in an arbor, drinking, eating grapes, watching pornography on TV, and being serviced by his personal cohort of jinnia females. He had brought down a small army of lesser jinn from the upper world and mostly pointed them in the directions he desired, and off they went, assassinating prominent individuals, sinking ships, bringing down airliners, interfering with the computer operations of the stock markets, cursing some people with the rising curse, others with the crushing curse, and using the jewels he had in such quantities to bribe governments and bring other countries into his sphere of influence. However, the total number of fully fledged dark jinn who descended to the lower world almost certainly never exceeded one hundred individuals, to which the lesser species of parasite-jinni must be added. So, perhaps two or three hundred conquerors, on a planet of seven billion souls. At the height of the British Empire in India, there were no more than twenty thousand Britishers in that vast land, ruling successfully over three hundred million Indians, but even that impressive achievement was as nothing when compared with the rise of the dark jinn. The Grand Ifrits were in no doubt that the jinn were superior to the human race in every way, that human beings for all their pretensions of civilization and advancement were little better than bow-and-arrow primitives, and that the best thing that could happen to these lowlifes would be to spend a millennium or two in thrall to, and learning from, a superior race. This, Zabardast went so far as to say, was the burden the dark jinn had taken upon themselves, a duty which they were determined to discharge.

The Grand Ifrits’ contempt for their subjects was only increased by the ease with which they recruited human beings to assist them in the maintenance of their new empire. “Greed and fear,” Zumurrud told his three fellow leaders, who met, as was their custom, on a dark cloud circling the earth at the Equator, from which they watched and judged the mere mortals below them, “fear and greed, are the tools by which these insects can be controlled with almost comical ease,” a remark which made Zabardast the Sorcerer laugh loudly, because Zumurrud was well known not to possess anything that even slightly resembled a sense of humor. Zumurrud glared at him with open hostility. The gulf between the two senior Ifrits was growing wider every day. They had patched up their quarrel, made a truce and joined forces again, but trouble continued to rumble between them. They had known one another too long, and their friendship was nearing its end.

Lightning crackled in the heart of the cloud. Ra’im Blood-Drinker and Shining Ruby did their best to change the subject. “What about religion?” asked Blood-Drinker. “What should we do about that? The believers are multiplying down there even faster than before.” Shining Ruby, the self-styled Possessor of Souls, had never had any time for God or heaven. Fairyland was paradise enough and there was no reason to suppose the existence of a higher and better-perfumed garden. Showing a somewhat student-like fondness for proscription, he said, “We should ban it immediately. It’s a circus.”

This remark caused Zumurrud the Great and Zabardast the Sorcerer actually to sizzle with wrath. They crackled at the edges like a hundred eggs frying in a pan, and Shining Ruby and Ra’im Blood-Drinker understood that something had changed in the two senior Ifrits. “What’s the matter with you two?” Blood-Drinker wanted to know. “Since when did you join the halo brigade?”

“Don’t be a fool,” Zabardast told him slyly. “We are in the process of instituting a reign of terror on earth, and there’s only one word that justifies that as far as these savages are concerned: the word of this or that god. In name of a divine entity we can do whatever the hell we like and most of those fools down there will swallow it like a bitter pill.”

“So it’s a strategy, a ruse,” said Shining Ruby. “That, I can understand.”

But now Zumurrud the Great rose up in wrath, and the rage of the huge giant was a little frightening even to his fellow jinn. “There will be no more blasphemy,” he said. “Fear God’s word, or you too will be numbered among its enemies.”

This came as a shock to the other three. “Well, you’re singing a new song,” Blood-Drinker said, refusing to sound impressed. “Who taught you that one?”

“You’ve spent your whole life carousing, killing, gambling, fucking, and then sleeping it off,” added Shining Ruby, “so sainthood sits as uncomfortably on you as that golden crown, which, by the way, is far too small, having been made for a human head which, if you recall, you quite unnecessarily severed from its body.”

“I’ve been studying philosophy,” muttered the giant, reddening, more than a little embarrassed by his admission. “It’s never too late to learn.”

The transformation of the skeptical giant Zumurrud into a soldier for a higher power was the last achievement of the dead philosopher of Tus. Ghazali was dust and the jinni was fire but the thinker in his grave still knew a trick or two. Or, to put it another way: when a being who, all his life, has defined himself by deeds finally opens his ears to words, it isn’t hard to make him accept whichever words you pour into them. Zumurrud had come to him. He was ready to receive what the dead man had to say.

“Every being which begins has a cause for its beginning,” said Ghazali, “and the world is a being which begins; therefore, it possesses a cause for its beginning.”

“That doesn’t include the jinn,” Zumurrud said. “We don’t need a cause.”

“You have mothers and fathers,” said Ghazali. “Therefore you began. Therefore you also are beings who begin. Therefore you must have a cause. It’s a question of language. When the language insists, we can only follow.”

“Language,” Zumurrud repeated slowly.

“Everything boils down to words,” Ghazali said.

“What about God?” Zumurrud, genuinely puzzled, asked at their next encounter. “Didn’t he have a beginning too? If not, where did he spring from? If so, who or what was
his
cause? Wouldn’t God have to have a God and so on backwards forever?”

“You’re not as stupid as you look,” Ghazali conceded, “but you must understand that your confusion arises, again, out of a problem of language. The term
begins
supposes the existence of linear time. Both human beings and the jinn live in that time, we have births, lives and deaths, beginnings, middles and endings. God, however, lives in a different kind of time.”

“There’s more than one kind?”

“We live in what can be called Becoming-Time. We are born, we become ourselves, and then, when the Destroyer of Days comes to call, we unbecome, and what’s left is dust. Talkative dust, in my case, but dust nonetheless. God’s time, however, is eternal: it’s just Being-Time. Past, present and future all exist together for him, and so those words,
past, present, future,
cease to have meaning. Eternal time has neither beginning nor end. It does not move. Nothing begins. Nothing finishes. God, in his time, has neither a dusty end, nor a fat, bright middle, nor a mewling beginning. He just
is.
”

“Just is,” Zumurrud repeated doubtfully.

“Yes,” Ghazali confirmed.

“So God is a sort of time traveler,” Zumurrud proposed. “He moves from his kind of time to ours, and by doing so becomes infinitely powerful.”

“If you like,” Ghazali agreed. “Except that he doesn’t
become.
He still just
is.
You have to be careful how you use words.”

“Okay,” Zumurrud said, confused again.

“Think about it,” Ghazali urged him.

“This god, Just-Is,” Zumurrud said on a third occasion, after thinking about it, “he doesn’t like being argued with, right?”

“He is
essential,
that is to say, pure essence, and as such, he is also
inarguable,
” Ghazali told him. “The second proposition unavoidably follows the first. To deny his essence would be to call him
inessential,
which would be to argue with him, who is, by definition,
inarguable.
Thus to argue with his inarguability is self-evidently to misuse language, and, as I told you, you have to be careful what words you use and how you use them. Bad language can blow up in your face.”

“Like explosives,” Zumurrud said.

“Worse,” Ghazali said. “This is why wrong words are not to be tolerated.”

“I have the feeling,” Zumurrud mused, “that these wretched mortals of the lower world are even more confused about language than I was.”

“Teach them,” Ghazali said. “Teach them the tongue of the divine Just-Is. The instruction should be intensive, severe, even, one could say, fearsome. Remember what I told you about fear. Fear is man’s fate. Man is born afraid, of the dark, of the unknown, of strangers, of failure, and of women. Fear leads him towards faith, not as a cure for fear, but as an acceptance that the fear of God is the natural and proper condition of man’s lot. Teach them to fear the improper use of words. There is no crime the Almighty finds more unforgivable.”

“I can do that,” said Zumurrud the Great. “They’ll be speaking my way soon enough.”

“Not
yours,
” Ghazali corrected him, but only mildly. When one was dealing with a Grand Ifrit one had to make certain allowances for his vast egotism.

“I understand,” said Zumurrud the Great. “Rest now. No more words are necessary.”

There ended the lesson. As Ghazali would soon discover, sending the most potent of the dark jinn down the path of extreme violence could have results that alarmed the sender. The student soon surpassed the master.

Dunia awakened Ibn Rushd in his grave for the last time. I’ve come to say goodbye, she told him. I won’t be back to see you after today.

What has taken my place in your affections? he asked, his voice heavy with sarcasm. A pile of dust knows its limitations.

She told him about the war. The enemy is strong, she said.

The enemy is stupid, he replied. That is ground for hope. There is no originality in tyrants, and they learn nothing from the demise of their precursors. They will be brutal and stifling and engender hatred and destroy what men love and that will defeat them. All important battles are, in the end, conflicts between hatred and love, and we must hold to the idea that love is stronger than hate.

I don’t know if I can do that, she said, for now I too am full of hatred. I look at the jinn world and see my dead father there, yes, but beyond that I see its shallowness: its obsession with shiny baubles, its amorality, its widespread contempt for human beings, which I must call by its true name, racism. I see the narcissistic malice of the Ifrits and I know that a little of that is in me too, there is always darkness as well as light. I don’t see any light in the dark jinn now but I sense the darkness in myself. It’s the place from which the hate comes. So I question myself as well as my world but I also know that this is no time for discussions. This is war. In wartime one must not ask, but do. So our discussions too must end, and what has to be done must be done.

That is a sad speech, he said. Reconsider. You need my guidance now.

Goodbye, she answered.

You’re abandoning me.

You abandoned me once.

Then this is your revenge. To leave me conscious and impotent in my grave for all eternity.

No, she said, kindly. No revenge. Only farewell. Sleep.

Natraj Hero dancing the destruction dance.
Find the jinni within yourself, the hot girl told him, the skinny little chick who said she was his great-great-great-great-and-more-
great
s-granny. His home was gone his mother didn’t last much longer his mother who so far in life was the only woman he had truly loved. The shock of the night of the giant and the burning house did her in. He buried her and then was stuck on his cousin Normal’s couch missing her more every minute of every day. His cousin who he fuckin’ hated more every minute of every day. When I get in charge of my inner goblin, Normal, you jus might be the first a-hole I blast. Jus waitonly, waitansee.

The whole world gone to hell in a handcart and he, Jimmy Kapoor, spending his nights hittin’ the graveyards with, because he’s a funny guy, a lightning bolt painted on his
matha
like Harry P. He uses St. Michael’s mostly, cradled in the outstretched arms of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway or the way he really thinks of it the fuck-you V-sign of the BQE, all those headstones with lady angels perched on top looking down sad-faced at the stiffs. He’s different now, ever since his hot granny whispered against his body, first his temples then his heart, bleeve it bruh she put her lips against my chest and worked her Hogwarts magic.
Bam
his head blew open like in that Kubrick flick like a rushing towards somewhere very cool and he’s seeing shit he never dreamed, the grid of jinn knowledge and capability. It’s actually mind-blowing, fuck, his mind is literally blown, but hey, interestingly, it hasn’t made him crazy. Guess why. Guess that inner goblin is awake inside him and can handle this stuff. This must be what it feels like when people say, I feel like another person, or, I feel like a new man.