“You were in the lamp... you gave us all this... but you said you’d give us nothing but aggravation! Why?”
In deep, mellifluous tones Danny had come to associate with a voice that could knock high-flying fowl from the air, the djinn smiled warmly at them and replied, “Your good wife freed me. After ten thousand years cramped over in pain with an eternal bellyache, in that most miserable of dungeons, Mistress Connie set me loose. For the first time in a hundred times ten thousand years of cruel and venal master after master, I have been delivered into the hands of one who treats me with respect. We are friends. I look forward to extending that friendship to you, Master Squires.” He seemed to be warming to his explanation, expansive and effusive. “Free now, permitted to exist among humans in a time where my kind are thought a legend, and thus able to live an interesting, new life, my gratitude knows no bounds, as my hatred and anger knew no bounds. Now I need no longer act as a Kako-daemon, now I can be the sort of ifrit Rabbi Jeremiah bin Eliazar spoke of in Psalm XLI.
“I have seen much of this world in the last three days as humans judge time. I find it most pleasing in my view. The speed, the shine, the light. The incomparable Lena Home. Do you like basketball?”
“But how? How did you do it, Connie? How? No one could get him out...”
She took him by the hand, leading him toward the fifteen-foot-high doors. “May we come into your apartment, Mas’úd?”
The djinn made a sweeping gesture of invitation, bowing so low his head was at Danny’ s waist as he and Connie walked past.
They stepped inside the djinn’s suite and it was as if they had stepped back in time to ancient Basra and the Thousand Nights and a Night. Or into a Cornel Wilde costume epic.
But amid all the silks and hangings and pillows and tapers and coffers and brassware, there in the center of the foyer, in a lucite case atop an onyx pedestal, lit from an unknown source by a single glowing spot of light, was a single icon.
“Occasionally magic has to bow to technology,” Connie said. Danny moved forward. He could not make out what the item lying on the black velvet pillow was. “And sometimes ancient anger has to bow to common sense.”
Danny was close enough to see it now. Simple. It had been so simple. But no one had thought of it before. Probably because the last time it had been needed, by the lamp’ s previous owner, it had not existed.
“A can opener,” Danny said. “A can opener!?! A simple, stupid, everyday can opener!?! That’s all it took? I had a nervous breakdown and you figured out a can opener?”
“Can do,” Connie said, winking at Mas’úd. “Not cute, Squires,” Danny said. But he was thinking of the diamond as big as the Ritz.
“REPENT, HARLEQUIN!” SAID THE TICKTOCKMAN
Got to be careful about codifying the “lesson” in this one, because it is, in some ways, a statement about the way I live my life, and if you follow the trail too closely, you’ll get into more trouble than you deserve, which is the opposite of what this book is supposed to do...according to my publisher, who says this book is intended to make you better citizens and happier individuals, with an understanding that if you litter your Taco Bell and Burger King garbage in the streets I will seek you out no matter where you live, and I will nail your head to a coffee table. At least that’s what my publisher tells me this book is supposed to do. But I haven’t lied to you yet, not as far as I can tell; and I’m not about to start now. As if I gave a-Well, the point of the lesson in this story-which I’m told, by academics who teach it in literally hundreds of college English and Modern American Writing classes, is one of the most reprinted stories in the English Language-have you noticed, it’s only my charming humility that has held me back from true stardom-the lesson is that if they suck you into the System, extricating yourself may be damned near impossible. Letting your life be set to other people’s schedules may satisfy their needs, but you’ll be trading off bits and pieces of your own life to placate others who do not, in actuality, care much about you or your problems or desires or potentialities. They mumble “I know how tough it is for you” or “I understand” but when it comes right down to it, it is their production schedule or swing shift time or actuarial table that mesmerizes them. Their hearts bleed that you’re lying on an operating table having your stomach replaced with a vacuum cleaner or a bidet or somedamnthing, but that pulmonary drip-drip-drip only masks their annoyance that, like the mule you are, you’ve fallen to your knees under the yoke of their schedule. Yes, as I told you before, DO THE DAMN JOB, just do it; nonetheless, Life keeps getting in the way of Being On Time, and once in a great while you just have to say screwit! And bear this in mind, folks: if you work at their pace for twenty-seven years, do 1,444 jobs well, and do them to the deadline, if you ain’t got the juice and you mess up on the l,445th gig, you will catch the same amount of flak and the same amount of guilt and the same amount of badmouth and opprobrium you would snag if you’d been late every time. The lesson here is one that will get you clobbered if you follow it. Run your life at your own pace, not that of the Man.
There are always those who ask, what is it all about? For those who need to ask, for those who need points sharply made, who need to know “where it’s at,” this:
The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others-as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders-serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.
That is the heart of it. Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself.
But because it was the very world it was, the very world they had allowed it to become, for months his activities did not come to the alarmed attention of The Ones Who Kept The Machine Functioning Smoothly, the ones who poured the very best butter over the cams and mainsprings of the culture. Not until it had become obvious that somehow, someway, he had become a notoriety, a celebrity, perhaps even a hero for (what Officialdom inescapably tagged) “an emotionally disturbed segment of the populace,” did they turn it over to the Ticktockman and his legal machinery. But by then, because it was the very world it was, and they had no way to predict he would happen-possibly a strain of disease long-defunct, now, suddenly, reborn in a system where immunity had been forgotten, had lapsed-he had been allowed to become too real. Now he had form and substance.
He had become a personality, something they had filtered out of the system many decades before. But there it was, and there he was, a very definitely imposing personality. In certain circles-middle-class circles-it was thought disgusting. Vulgar ostentation. Anarchistic. Shameful. In others, there was only snickering, those strata where thought is subjugated to form and ritual, niceties, proprieties. But down below, ah, down below, where the people always needed their saints and sinners, their bread and circuses, their heroes and villains, he was considered a Bolivar; a Napoleon; a Robin Hood; a Dick Bong (Ace of Aces) ; a Jesus; a Jomo Kenyatta.