The genie is still floating there. His translucent red manlike naked torso tapers down to the lip of the bronze lamp’s spout. He’s enormous. He has had his neck crooked the whole time he’s been out, his head pinned to the four by fours on the basement’s ceiling. He pushes down with giant wispy red hands from time to time to bend his head back and forth, side to side, around and around, but then when he lets go, he floats right back up and has to crane his neck again.
I am sitting on the bottom step, smoking a cigarette, and carefully tapping ashes through the mouth of the empty Miller can as if needing to keep the basement floor clean. The genie pushes down, stretches his neck, lets himself back up. I exhale and watch for the line of smoke to break when it reaches the genie’s wispy see-through form. He can be touched. He can feel.
I haven’t made any wishes yet. It’s been three days since I released him. He is not a kind being. He is not a vengeful being, either. He is just a being who appears, sometimes, to be upset. I know he doesn’t like his head hitting the ceiling. He wouldn’t stretch if it didn’t matter. So, when he’s looking down from up there, he looks like he’s in discomfort. But he’s never asked to be moved. He’s never said a word about it. Although I know the lamp is now too heavy for me to budge, I could maybe think of some way to help. I haven’t dedicated any part of my brain to a solution, though.
“Are you uncomfortable?” I finally ask.
“I. Am. Fine.”
His voice is so deep that you feel it in your chest. It comes with a force that is startling, scary even. But the frequencies vibrate your muscles in a calming way. He is very loud. Each syllable takes him one full breath, so he speaks slowly. It’s wonderful to be shaken by the booming of his words, remembering that he will never want to hurt me. His voice is beautiful. I love listening to him.
My mother died months ago, and this week I began to go through her things. Digging through forty years of basement-worthy items and memories of my parents will take longer than my typical resolve. I found the genie’s lamp in a cardboard box along with bottles of spray paint, warped old textbooks from my mother’s nursing school, and spools of rope. The lamp stood out, so I removed it from the box, wanting to take it upstairs to a room I was filling with stuff to maybe not trash. After two strides, the lamp was ripped from my hands, slamming down into and cracking the concrete floor. I ran to the stairs and turned back to see the thing jerking back and forth. What I imagined to be red poisonous gas shrieked out through the lamp’s lip in erratic bursts. The genie’s emergence took a full day—first a gold-braceleted red wispy arm shot out from the spout and struggled for leverage, more shrieks and blasts of red vapor, then another arm, then, after hours of a terrible battle, the genie finally pulled his head and torso up into the world of my parents’ basement. The process was long enough for me to become curious more than terrified. It was a horrible, painful birth to witness.
When I’m on the bottom step, I’m out of his reach. He is not strong enough to move the lamp either.
“Did you meet my mother?” I ask him, dropping the cigarette into the can and hearing the last gulp of beer kill the ember with a tick.
“No,” he booms, the sound filling the entire basement, thick, rattling windows and throwing open dusty books, sputtering their pages.
“I haven’t told you about myself,” I tell him and wait to see if he cares to hear anything. He pushes himself down and cracks his neck. He lets himself up and folds his red tree trunk arms over his massive red chest. “This is my mother’s house,” I continue. “She died five months ago, and I was down here, going through everything. Everything she and my father accumulated in their lives. I was going to throw a lot of stuff away, to maybe clean it all and sell the place.” I realize I want to talk about my mother and father. I want to show him a photo or something. This impulse comes with guilt. I feel I must acknowledge my parents’ lives, really care for the memories now. Before I can move on.
“Do you know everything?” I ask him.
“No,” he booms.
When he finally came into full form in the basement, I realized I had been gripping the banister since running from the terrible lamp. He pushed down and slithered his torso around the space, his head and neck slowly scanning the room. His eyes, awesome black rotating globes, finally found me and he slid his great red head even with mine.
He boomed: “You. Have. Three. Wish-shez.”
Then he drifted back up to the ceiling.
I clutched the banister. I waited. “How long do I have?”
I don’t know what to wish for. I leave the genie and the basement to get perspective. I drink tall glasses of water and cans of beer, silently, while studying the woodgrain of the kitchen table. I pace on the back deck of my childhood home, thoughts swirling in my head. I smoke contemplative cigarettes. I stare out to the woods, down to the grass, up to the sky, for signs. Day and night. I think about all the times I’ve made wishes. It was easy in the past, because they wouldn’t come true. I didn’t truly believe, so it was always possible to think of something. Eyes closed before the faint warm glow of birthday cake candles. Always a throwaway wish before blowing an eyelash or tossing a penny into a fountain. A shooting star. In those split seconds I was able to think of precisely what I wanted. Because I knew what I wanted couldn’t possibly come true.
Now, I am coming up empty. I think of benevolent wishes, selfless wishes. I go down to the basement and ask the genie if they are in his power. They are not. Peace on earth he cannot do. Ending poverty. Eradicating diseases. Feeding all the hungry. These are impossible for him. My wish has to happen to me. I think of clever ways to achieve these grand wishes. I search for loopholes. But he cannot grant me the power to create peace on earth. He cannot give me more food than only I could want. He cannot give me will power.
So I continue to sit on the deck and look at the moon as it changes shape, and drink cans of Miller, thinking about the perfect wishes. Three things I won’t ever regret. There is an opportunity here that is impossible to miss and impossible to take. I go down to experience the genie’s great spinning black eyes and enormous translucent red form and thunderclap of syllables. I lie awake in my childhood bedroom where I used to do so much wishing, for toys, for superpowers, for bicycles, for A’s on report cards, for making sports teams, for winning, for girls, for acceptance. I watch TV. I read books. I clean out the other rooms of this house. I replace light bulbs. I go down to stare at the genie, sometimes with a wish on the tip of my tongue, life-long health and wellness or success in my career, or sometimes for someone else to have discovered the lamp. But I force myself to give it more thought. I smoke and try to relax on the deck. I think it all through. I think everything over. And over.
I do not rush. I go to work. I take lunch breaks. I meet up with friends at the bar and talk about their hopes and dreams and jobs and complaints and girlfriends. I play my guitar and write lyrics. I meet a girl and fall in love. A friend dies. I get married. We have children. We have successes and failures. We watch our friends grow. I raise my son and daughter. I travel to Paris and South America. I go to the movies. I go to graduations and weddings. Celebrate birthdays and ring in new years. I come home and sit on the deck and think about what to wish for. I go down to the basement, time after time, but it’s too much pressure. I will never be able to go back on my wishes, revise them. I putter around and think. I stare at the night sky and wonder what they should be. But I just can’t pick. I cannot choose. But he’s always down there, under my home, in the cool dark basement, among the boxes of my family’s stuff I never sorted or removed, craning his neck, folding his arms over chest, full of unimaginable power, waiting.