You come until you black out, then sleep until you wake, newly drained and doubly emptied—sometime after midnight, if the clock on that nearby desk still reads right. And when you do wake, though you can’t remember lighting the traditional post-coital cigarette, you find you have more than a bit of trouble trying to read the time at all.
Because the room is full of smoke.
* * *
Afterward, Maris reorders her clothing, tucking her braid away. Sufiya slips the rest of her jewelry back on, piece by jangling piece. She cleans her face with a dampened cloth, fastidiously wiping away all traces of their visitor, as Maris raises the recorked bottle, watching the darkness concentrated beneath its warped blue glass skin roil—like mercury—from the diffused heat of her hand.
Djinni are evil angels, Sufiya tells her, moving the cloth slowly over her cleavage. Unclean spirits, infinitely powerful, infinitely malign. Like ghools, but with no flesh—no way to feel the carnal impulse, except through the body of a human being. All-powerful as desert storms, they nevertheless envy the fragile strength of one’s simple human desires.
She pauses.
And it is in this way—that they may be trapped.
Maris, recalled to herself, sets the bottle down again and checks her camera for possible damage, tightening its lens cap against the wind-borne wave of sand that has alre
ady begun to blow in under Sufiya’s drawn curtains. Idly, she asks: Will these pictures come out, does one think? Or is your pet demon too shy to risk its soul in a foreigner’s machine?
Sufiya glances back at her, eyes narrowing. One would not call it shy, she says, finally.
Oh, no, Maris replies, hidden once more behind her tourist’s mask of propriety. Not after such a show as that.
The two women look at each other. Now it is Sufiya’s turn to lift—and offer—the bottle. She makes the movement silently, smoothly, as though it were part of some tiny ritual—pregnant with hermetic meaning, and just the faintest whiff of high style. Of simple showmanship.
Did what you see impress you? She asks. This is nothing. Once confined to the bottle, the djinni bows entirely to its keeper’s will. It wants flesh, and it takes it however it may, even briefly. It will be one’s double, one’s partner, one’s fallow mirror image in all erotic matters, its actions limited only by the range of one’s imagination.
Maris nods. Assuming such things have limits, she replies.
Sufiya dips her head in mocking imitation, the faultless picture of “subservience.” Her earrings swing together with a musical rustle, metal on metal. Bright as hovering insects.
One cannot doubt you want this, foreign lady, she suggests, slyly. Now that you have witnessed the—attractions—of its inhabitant for yourself.
The darkness, coiling. Licking the bottle’s sides.
Maris represses a shiver. Says, coldly: Would one really sell such a treasure?
Sufiya, shrugging. If another cares to buy.
And the price?
That part of the bargain . . . is not my affair.
True night outside, now. A fingernail paring of moon has already risen over the vanished horizon, slim and sharp.
The djinni catch us as well, of course, says Sufiya, slowly, perhaps more to herself than Maris. They catch us—by allowing themselves to be caught.
Maris laughs, briefly. Remarks, mainly to herself: Like every other woman.
But her eyes are drawn inexorably to the glass, to the darkness under it. She sees her own face stare back at her from inside the bottle—bluely elongated, tongue tip to upper lip, reflective. Almost seductive. Her own black eyes, no longer empty, but filled with an endless wealth of shadow.
Her stomach gripes; it seems to her, abruptly, that she has been hungry a long, long time—far longer, in fact, than she has ever been aware of.
Maris lays her nail against the bottle’s cork, softly, and thinks of a lover who will never fail or leave her. A lover who knows her, and loves her, like herself. A perfect reflection, whose constant hunger exactly matches her own—always growing, deepening, evolving. Never satisfied. Never slaked.
She thinks: How much would I pay, to be finally full? For once?
No price could possibly be too high.
* * *