part 3

He faced his grief with whatever shards of reason his mourning left him. There was no end to it, there never is, not for a son. It can be partitioned into stages, but every nuance is pain.

He found a therapist, support groups, under an assumed name with fabricated details, but he was not suited to sharing his burden nor others.

He abandoned these efforts to amortize his grief and suffered alone. Eventually his suffering blended into the background of his consciousness and ultimately he wore it as an emotional undergarment, always in contact but unseen by others.

Years passed. He survived temptations to destroy himself or his millions, and in the end gave himself over to using his resources to ease the suffering of the very young. He funded foster programs, children’s hospitals, pediatric research. His dollars crossed borders to support orphanages, inoculations, food aid.

The women in his life often told him what a good father he would make, but he couldn’t bring himself to become one. He didn’t want to look at a child and see always the face of another, think of it always as a replacement. And he didn’t want to take the chance he would leave it fatherless, because he had a plan, and there was probably some risk.

He also made some donations to a museum of which he had previous experience and took the trouble to get to know members of a certain department of personal interest.

Twelve years after he left his barren wife of another reality standing at a small round table in a suburban restaurant lounge with his five-dollar-bill in her hand, he drove to this museum, was admitted by security personnel who were expecting him, and took an elevator to the third floor where he opened a door with his own key and let himself in. He walked carefully to one of the laboratory tables where there was an area clear enough for him to place the viola case he was carrying. He released the latches and opened the case, revealing a core of foam rubber with a cavity precisely the dimensions of an object already on the table.

He took a step back and regarded this artifact with focused intent. He pulled up a lab stool, as he had done once so long ago, and leaned against it as he crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the clay bottle he had not had the opportunity to examine in his first encounter. Until he had seen the void in the violin case, he had expected it to be taller and more slender, but it was a fuller shape, wider at the top like shoulders under the thick neck, tapering to the base and covered with shallow carving of geometric shapes etched through a thin, blue-grey glaze. The workmanship appeared from his vantage to be very good and he decided without much analysis that it was quite beautiful.

These cognitive activities occurred under the weight of a powerful sensory response, the awareness that he was not alone, that he was being regarded, examined as well. He was surprised to find himself nearly calm, with some heightened perceptual acuity of course, a sense of anticipation, but not the kind of breathless nervousness he assumed would be inevitable.
He uncrossed his arms and began speaking without greeting.

“I questioned for some time whether or not you might be someone, something other than the being I released here in my other . . . incarnation. I decided it was silly to even consider that. We know each other and I suppose it’s even likely you know my mind at this moment as well, but I came here to say some things and it won’t be very satisfying if I just sit here and let you pick them out of my head.

“I can only see things from my own perspective and that’s probably not entirely fair, but it’s all I have as a frame of reference so I can only draw the conclusions that are available to me here. I’ve done a lot of thinking about things, as you know or can imagine, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that you are guilty.

“You’ve been confined for a very, very long time, longer than I would ever be able to comprehend, I know that. And you have no reason to treat any member of my race with fairness, you’ve suffered unspeakably at our hands and so have other members of your race, I know that too.

“But I also know that I didn’t do anything to you. I didn’t come to you and ask or threaten or coerce you into giving me what I wanted, you were compelled to offer me something and I tried to make an ethical decision. I only wanted a shot at doing a better job of living my life, do better by my son, and maybe help some other people along the way. Even that harpy would have been better off because I would have made it worth her while to behave like a decent wife and mother for awhile and eventually leave us alone, which is what she wanted anyway.

“Did I ask you to make me the best baseball player in the world? No, I just asked for the opportunity to explore the potential I already had. Did I ask you to make me rich at the expense of someone else? No, my good fortune didn’t keep anyone from making the same investments and I spread it around. Did I ask you to punish my ex for what she did to us? Did I ask you to give me power over others? Fuck no, I didn’t. Did I do anything to you personally? Was I the one who crammed you in there? No. You admit that. So why? Why not just tell me I didn’t do anything to earn a boon from you and let it go at that? No, you wanted to suck me in so you could rake me over the coals. ‘I have no need to be vengeful’ my ass.

“Well, I don’t care about that. I think it’s despicable but I can almost understand how you could be so twisted from living in a fucking bottle for six thousand years that you just didn’t care, maybe you needed to stick it to the first human you saw no matter what.

“But I’ll tell you what I can’t abide. You didn’t just stick it to me. You punished me by targeting someone else. You extinguished the existence of an innocent ten-year-old boy and that is totally, absolutely unsupportable by any sane creed or belief system or moral code. Anyone or anything that believes it can justify any end by deliberately bringing harm to the innocent, by targeting a child, is evil in the most basic, fundamental, and universal sense.

“I am also responsible. I made a decision and one of the consequences of that decision is the chain of causality that resulted in the non-existence of my only son. I have lived with the fact that if I had not made that decision he would still be alive, and must continue to live with it for the rest of my life.
“But I did not intend for his life to end, or not continue, or never have been, whatever you call what happened to him. You did. His fate was the result of your conscious, deliberate intent. You are not just responsible, you are to blame. It was your fault.”

He stood up and stepped to the table. He gently took the bottle in his hands and looked at it tenderly.

“You know what I think? I think you knew I would come back here. And I think you thought I would do something else, didn’t you? You thought I would break this bottle again and beg or threaten you to bring back my son. And you would explain how it wasn’t your fault, it was my fault, that I didn’t make the conditions of my wish specific enough, or there was some random factor that you couldn’t control, or some shit like that. And you would get me to make another wish, and you would entertain yourself by finding a new way to make me suffer and destroy the lives and happiness of those around me. You would find a way to make everything even worse, wouldn’t you? Am I right? Is that what you were thinking Mr Djinn, Mr Genie?

He placed the bottle carefully in the case he had prepared for it and leaned on the table with his hands on either side of it.

“Well, think again. I’ll tell you something, as much hell as that lying slut put me through the first time around, I learned some things from her. One is that you shouldn’t believe much of what you hear. People are always shading the truth, sometimes to make a better story and be entertaining, sometimes to make themselves look just a little better that they would otherwise, and sometimes, maybe often, they’re just flat lying to your face. Another thing is that people mostly don’t do what they say they’re going to do, whether they’re lying or not. And finally, no matter how hard your brain tries to rationalize a way not to believe what it sees because it doesn’t want to face the consequences of admitting the truth, believe it when you have that sudden moment of insight that makes your face burn and your stomach turn, because when these emotional insights tell you you’re being fucked, you’re probably being fucked.

“She fucked me over and over, Demon. You’re only going to fuck me once.

“I charge you with the premeditated murder of my son.

“I find you guilty as charged.

“I sentence you to life imprisonment.”

He closed the lid and latched it.

The flight was uneventful. He had made prior arrangements for his special parcel and kept it on the seat beside him which he had paid for for that purpose.

His rental car was waiting and the drive to the turn-off took just over an hour.

He pulled off the pavement onto two gravel ruts, drove another half an hour or so and parked next to a small trailer, an all-purpose construction office and workshop.

Rick went inside and placed the case on a table next to a large metal cylinder and a canvas bag, full and tied at the top with twine. He tossed his overnight bag on a chair, opened it, and changed into jeans and a t-shirt. Then he returned to the table and opened the case.

“There you go. Can you see better now? Hope you enjoyed the trip, it wasn’t near as long as some of the others you’ve taken, eh? Now, see what I have here? This will be your new home.” He knocked on the side of the cylinder with his knuckles. It didn’t make much of a sound. “Stainless steel. Quarter of an inch thick. Weighs a ton.” He unscrewed the top with both hands. “This is really nice, all custom made to my specs and threaded to close tolerances. There we go.” He laid the top beside the bag, then heaved the cylinder off the table and set it on the floor, rocking it into the proper position.

“And in here,” he said, turning back to the table and indicating the bag, “Silica! I know, it’s just sand, but silica sounds more scientific doesn’t it? It’s been sifted pretty fine, there’s a grade designation for it but I forgot what it is.” He untied the twine, then wrestled the bag off the table and began to pour the powdery grains slowly into the cylinder.

”The idea is to put some sand in the bottom first,” he paused, looked at the bottle, then continued pouring for a moment, “maybe just a little more . . . there, that should do it.” He set the bag on the floor, stepped back to the table and regarded the bottle. “As you can probably tell, I’m a little nervous about this part.”

He cautiously lifted the bottle out of the case, examined it almost tenderly, then slowly inserted it into the cylinder, nesting it carefully in the layer of sand. He picked up the bag and began to pour more sand around the bottle. “See, the idea is to have something to support your bottle so it won’t break if the cylinder gets knocked around. I thought about concrete or something like that, but I decided having a lot of moisture in this thing wasn’t a good idea.” He stopped pouring when the sand was about halfway up the bottle and set the bag down for a moment. “I’m guessing when I get this part done you won’t be able to hear me, or at least not as well at you can now, so I better finish my story first.

“I hope you don’t think I”m stupid enough to believe this cylinder would be enough to hold you in there all by itself. I mean, you can’t get out of a lousy clay jar, but you have tremendous powers, that little bottle isn’t keeping you in there, is it? it’s the magic that’s holding you, and the bond disappears if the bottle gets broken. So if I want you to stay put, I need to keep the bottle from breaking. So anyway, that’s what the sand and the cylinder are for.

“Now, you may be wondering where I’m going to put you, but I can’t see any reason to go into all that, it will give you something to think about while you serve out your sentence. Just keep in mind I picked this location for its absolute geologic stability. They don’t predict any seismic activity around here for as far in the future as they bother to predict, so you don’t have to worry about being suddenly disturbed. And don’t worry, nothing is forever. Sooner or later plate tectonics will return this part of the Earth’s crust to the mantle and turn your little capsule here to molten slag so you can go home. I guess that would be later rather than sooner, eh?”

He paused for a moment and looked down at blue-grey ceramic container. “Well, I guess this is good-bye.” Then he filled the rest of the cylinder with sand and screwed the top on tight.

The full cylinder weighed almost two hundred pounds. He rocked it onto a hand truck and secured it with straps, then wheeled it down the trailer steps and over to the scaffolding above the mineshaft.
This was the part he was dreading. He wasn’t at all claustrophobic, but he was alone and uneasy with the possibility something might go wrong. He was breaking about fifty OSHA regulations, but what the hell. The mine had been abandoned for years but he’d had the lift installed and everything was new and tested and inspected several times. It was extremely unlikely anything could malfunction, but he was nervous all the same. There was always the chance the creature in the cylinder had enough power to make some trouble, he didn’t know.

He loaded his cargo onto the lift and started down. His heart was pounding as the shaft opening above his head appeared smaller and smaller and looking up just made it worse. He did some deep breathing and it helped a little. It was a long ride, nearly half a mile, but his anxiety would not abate further.

When he got to the bottom, he rolled the cylinder onto a concrete slab and over to a little niche he had dug into the rubble of the side shaft he had already collapsed with explosives. He didn’t want it in the direct path of the rocks and earth of the main shaft when they came down later. He unstrapped it and rolled it into place and looked at it one last time. Then he patted the cylinder. “Sweet dreams, demon.”

On the way back up he was tempted to stop and recheck the connections to the explosives, but couldn’t bring himself to delay his ascent. His anxiety began to ease as he approached the opening.

He felt much better as he stepped off the lift and walked to the trailer. His heart rate picked up again, this time with anticipation, as he unlocked the box to the demolition switches and made the needed connections. The charges were set to go off in a sequence, bottom to top, and the timing was wired into the panel, all he had to do was unlock the panel, flip the breaker that would make the ignition circuit live and throw the switch. He placed his key in the lock and turned it until the warning lights all went on, then snapped the breaker. He was shaking a little as he lifted the cover and placed his thumb against the switch lever. He’d been waiting twelve years for this.
He could make out the scaffolding through the window and tried to imagine what he would see when the action started. Probably a lot of dirt and rocks shooting out of the shaft until the air was so full of it he wouldn’t be able to see anything.

Then, unexpectedly, he saw something moving in the sagebrush beyond the mine. A coyote was heading somewhere at a leisurely trot, giving the site a wide berth but watching with feral curiousity. Rick switched off the breaker and went to the door to get a better view. He watched the animal inspect him casually, but it didn’t break stride and eventually passed out of sight among the brush and junipers.

He went inside and got a beer out of the refrigerator, brought it back outside and sat down on the steps. He twisted the top off and threw it over his shoulder into the trailer.

The sun was low on the horizon to his left and he watched for any other signs of life. There were birds, he didn’t know what kind, except the turkey buzzards, soaring in their signature V, rocking back and forth on the updrafts, scanning the sagebrush with laser precision, endlessly seeking death.

He knew that as the sun went down, the place would be more active with critters, so when he finished his beer, he got another and brought out a folding chair. He was hoping to see a rattlesnake or another coyote, maybe some deer, but it didn’t happen. He had a few more beers and watched the clouds and the sunset, more birds, two jackrabbits and some lizards. He thought about how nice it would be if his son could be there with him. Then he cried for a long time.

The floor was hard, but that’s not what woke him. The sun was streaming in the east windows and and by eight o’clock it was too hot to sleep any more. He lay on his back until he was as clear headed as he was going to get for awhile, then stood up slowly and made his way out the door to urinate. There was a chemical toilet in the trailer, but there was no way he was going in there unless he had to. He dispensed his nitrogen in doses to the plant life around the trailer, a little here, a little there, use it wisely guys, you won’t get another meal like this for a long time.

When he was done it was time to scare up something to eat. The best he could do was a can of chili and some microwave popcorn. What the hell. There was a warm diet pop with the bottled water. He decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth and ate with more enthusiasm than his headache and bodyaches should permit. When he was done he had to face the chemical toilet after all.

An hour later he rolled the cylinder off the lift and wheeled it back to the trailer. He saw no point in trying to get it up the steps and inside. He brought out the viola case and opened in on the ground, then unstrapped the cylinder, unscrewed the top, and tipped it over. He emptied enough sand out to get a good grip on the neck of the bottle and worked it carefully free of the steel container. He shook off most of the sand, then placed it back in the case and put it on the passenger seat of the car. His first thought was to toss the cylinder back into the shaft, but he decided to keep it instead. He wedged it in the side of the trunk with his overnight bag so it wouldn’t roll around and went back inside the trailer. He had been planning this escapade for twelve years, and by God he was going to blow something up.

It was actually pretty satisfying. By the time the last charge went off, the dust and smoke was so thick you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. He pulled his shirt up over his mouth and nose and went outside to stand in the hail of dirt and gravel. He wanted to get dirty and he did.

On the way back to the main road he made some calls as soon as he could get a signal. When he got to pavement he anticipated what he would hear later and headed away from the city. He stopped at the first opportunity for gas and donuts and coffee. The donuts were pretty good. He got some for later.

It wasn’t long before he got a callback and detailed directions. The drive took more than two hours but he was in no hurry. He left the asphalt again and found himself on a forest service road that was not designed for a rental sedan. He didn’t care. He didn’t have any problems until it got rocky and steep but managed to keep going quite awhile, even after the muffler was torn off. Eventually he got it so high centered it wouldn’t budge, but he was only half a mile from the trailhead so he was satisfied. He took the viola case and a bottle of water and headed up the road. The donuts could wait for the return trip. He only needed to go about a mile and a half beyond the trailhead and he reached his destination in a little over an hour.

He stood on a slickrock promontory and looked down into a valley made of sandstone and granite. He sat on a rock and took it all in while he finished the last of the water. Then he opened the viola case and removed the blue-grey bottle. He carried it to the edge of the cliff and looked at it closely one last time.

The moment seemed to call for comment, but there was no one to hear save a demon with a twisted soul. The man stood empty of his hatred. He had found he could not inflict eons of pain, even on this creature from another reality who had done such a heartless thing. He knew, as he stood under the blue sky and high clouds of his native world, that the crime of the djinn was but a candle before the sun of horror that men not so different from himself brought upon their own kind and others every day. This day at least, he would not be one of them.

Without his focus, the man found he wanted no further commerce with the demon, not even words. He could sense the other presence, but rejected it, rejected his unspoken claim on a devil's bargain.

He threw the bottle as hard as he could and watched only a moment as is arced above the horizon. Then he turned and started down the trail without waiting for it to smash to pieces on the rocks below.