They are blind, asked man said, because they have looked upon my face.
—A Thousand and One Nights
Finally, Josephine breaks the silence. “A story for every—”
“Like Scheherazade,” he says.
“The first one is a memory. When we were on the island.”
“I remember.”
“Do you remember the painting? The one of Lucretia?”
“That was in Cambridge. Titian’s version of the Tarquin and Lucretia story. Tarquin, the violent aggressor, who—
“The other one,” she says. “We saw it in the small museum on the island. Remember the place that smelled of mildew?”
“That was a replica,” Alvise says.
She gives him an offhand shrug.
“It’s the one where she looks like she doesn’t mind.”
“Exactly,” she says.
Alvise says, “I will press you against the island in the center of the kitchen, make you bend over the countertop and—”
“Something in you wants to hurt me.”
“Bien sûr, madame.”
“You’re just jealous.”
“What should I be jealous of?”
An enigmatic smile makes a mask of her face.
#
Granular unraveling of wedge heels against travertine. Like clockwork blonde lady comes to get ice cream every day at 3:00 in the afternoon. I start getting hard the minute I hear the sound of her wooden wedge sandals. Today she is followed, hand to shoulder by an older man—her husband presumably—clad in a yellow shirt, head lowered, like an un-watered flower. I asked around. She and the hubby are vacationing on the island. He is some kind of finance manager in his fifties. She is a couple of decades younger, with an ass sculpted of marble and a streak of white hair that has the miraculous effect of seeming gilded, like so many petals of a goldenrod arranged in a line. She is not tanned, not yet, just a suffused glow that promises to turn into a glorious nutmeg hue.
When they step out she is licking a chocolate cone. The way her tongue slides over that chocolate can resuscitate the victims of the Siege of Malta. Rest in Peace.
“Let’s go to the beach,” she says, loud enough for me to hear.
I follow at a safe distance. Ten minutes later here I am, having paid the exorbitant admissions fee to the most exclusive beach rental place on the island as the outline of a cheekbone emerges from their cabin, followed by a slender hand, pink flip-flops, and a moving, breathing sculpture of a Botticelli in a two-piece black bikini, the top part of which is cut deep with a self-wrap closure around the neck and the bottom has complicated side closures begging to be torn apart.
A muscular boy drags two beach loungers, placing them exactly where the Lady’s extended finger indicates they should be placed. A waiter in a white jacket brings a bottle of bubbly on ice. The rubber soles of her flip-flops squelch against her lovely feet as she flounces gracefully this way and that—now pouring bubbly, now tossing a half-smile at the husband, now looking at her phone—like a daisy in flight.
Now, she is on her phone telling someone that they are staying at the villa on Mount L— for three weeks. She points in the general direction of the villa and her magnificent tits sway lightly, causing her bikini top to shift and free one perfect nipple, light coral going on hot pink, the shape and size of a Maraschino cherry.
Everything she does is a spectacle. She knows I am five meters away and she knows I am staring.
Without warning, she swings around and comes toward me, stops a couple of feet away from where I am. I stand there listening to the dark lullaby of a thunderstorm approaching and become hard, not giving a damn if anyone, especially her husband, standing a few meters away, and casting questioning glances in our direction, can see the effect his wife has on me.
She enquires about property values. They have rented but they’re thinking of buying.
“I don’t a-actually own a…” Why am I stuttering?
“But you’re a local.”
“Yes.”
There is a moment of silence, a weary, weird kind of silence. Then, there is a loud roar above us (American jet flying too low, I think) causing me to jump out of my skin. The lady doesn’t bat an eyelash.
She begins to turn like she is about to leave, then stops, pausing, arms open in a half moon, and turns to me, a perfect Pirouette. “I’m Josephine by the way.” She extends a manicured hand. She is looking at me, her green eyes bright as the searchlights of a prison, tiny wrinkles, rosy cheeks.
“Pleasure.” I take the soft hand in my coarse paw. My intention is to hold her hand a second too long, and make her uncomfortable but she is the one who doesn’t let go when I try to pry away my hand.
“Strong hands,” she says.
“You too,” I say. I mean it. She could crush nuts with those delicate fingers.
She smiles and looks at our intertwined mitts.
“I like your skin color,” she says. “Looks nice next to mine.”
“Huh.” is all my fatuous brain manages to produce.
She has something to ask me. Why she approached me. Turns out she needs someone to do some heavy lifting around their place.
“If you’re not busy otherwise,” she says, “coming to the beach and stuff.”
Is she mocking me?
#
The jinn possesses the ability to assume diverse, often inscrutable forms that may appear slightly skewed to our senses. The jinni is impenetrable unless she wants to be penetrated, but even then, especially then, it is not she who is being subjugated.
Creatures that are more powerful than the jinn have mostly disintegrated in the depths of time, but from many generations ago, one remains. Josephine knows him as the Master. Master has spared her life so far. She has recounted 864 tales and put 675 specimens in sundūqs. (some do not make the transition, their hearts give out or they just die). One hundred thirty-six stories left to be recounted. One hundred thirty-six nights like a deep well between her and the real abyss to come, before the darkness, before death.
Or freedom.
#
The sun roams the rooftops, inventing pretty colors. There is a sense of jubilation in Josephine, mixed with fear, the complex bouquet of emotions she always feels before a story. The man is following her. This is not the first time. The day after their first encounter she saw him again. She was home, sitting on the toilet, looking at the sun taking a bath in the sea when she heard a rustling noise and glimpsed a light shadow on the wall in front of her. Two brown eyes appeared surreptitiously over the windowsill to her right. She stayed seated, suspended on the brink of that voluptuous moment before release, holding her pee, wanting to prolong the ecstasy of relief, not giving any indication of having seen him. Through the mirror, her eyes passed over his reflection as lightly as they pass over the marble wall and the towels and the sea over his shoulder framed in the mirror. She registered his eyes, insane with desire, and wondered if he was about to smash through the glass, rush in, and take her.
She waited. When nothing happened she peed, making a heavy sound like rain pelting the pavement. Then, with her dress pulled up and her panties at her ankles, she stood at the washbasin, picking droplets of water with her middle finger and rubbing them on her clit. She pinched her nipples and put a finger in her ass. She rose on her toes to rub against the smooth front of the marble vessel sink. She meowed and purred, rubbing against the smooth marble like a cat against a scratching post, hoping he would make a move, but he did not, and so, without a glance in his direction, she pulled up her panties, and darted out of the bathroom.
Now, here he is again, two days later, following her. She cannot see him but she can smell his sweat and his cheap aftershave. She can sense his yearning. She can feel the pain he is going to endure.
#
The women here come to be devoured by the locals. Even the married ones are not immune to the loving prowess of the islanders. The men step onto land, brimming with anticipation and joy. For them, it is either the prostitution dens or the gambling houses. The islanders, on their part, are counting on ridding the tourists of their possessions, fiscal and otherwise. Josephine has a glass of vino at the café near the port, wanders aimlessly for a few minutes, fending off a couple of gypsies with roving hands, and heads back.
Soon the darkness will come. Armies of clouds clash in the sky. She is hungry, she is restless, and she needs a bath. An old VW lurches around the corner and disappears. Slim sandals, golden hair to the wind, Josephine looks at a synod of black ravens perched on a high wall. Ravens are the Master’s watchers.
#
People see and hear things all the time, Buraq says in her ear. Only Jinn know when they’re real.
#
Getting closer to the gates of the villa he senses a shift in darkness, a blackness he has never seen. In the trees overhead there is a soughing sound followed by a roar. He sprints the last hundred meters to the villa. He does not want to get caught in the downpour. As he stands on the porch a gust of wind brings a rank stench like a dog’s breath.
He knocks.
#
There is a timid knock at the door.
She ignores it.
The knock becomes a bit more daring.
She walks to the door and stands behind it, holding her breath.
“Yes?”
“The guy for the heavy lifting.”
She opens the door. “Ah. I forgot. Come in.”
He walks in brushing past her and infests the house with his stench of the subterranean proletariat. He smells of sweat and earth and cheap cigars. She wants to lick him all over.
#
When I walk in the Signora wrinkles up her nose as if I smell. I glimpse a lace bra. She knows I am imagining the rest. She has shown herself to me in a bikini. She has shown me her trimmed peach and her lovely ass. I have seen her pee. I know she knew I was there. She has said yes a half-dozen times already, with her eyes, with the way she moves.
She walks through the living room and opens her arms wide, signaling the grand view, ground-to-ceiling glass doors framing the water extending into the sky.
“You like?” She is gracious but not flirty.
“Beautiful.” My eyes are elsewhere.
She says, “I drew the Fool today.”
My expression must betray my cluelessness.
“The tarot deck,” she says. “I drew the Eternal Traveler, the Fool.”
“Didn’t know you told fortunes.”
“Ready for work?”
I feel a stirring in my gut. “Ready for anything,” I say.
Her full lips, pouting, smile.
Now she is flirting. “You love to tease,” I say.
“Excuse me?” The smile vanishes. One eyebrow makes a perfect arch.
“Your name is very peculiar,” I say, changing the subject. Her expression suggests that I may have overstepped.
“Quoi?”
“I said your name is very beautiful.”
“It’s French,” she says. “It’s a boy’s name…I am not—” She reads my expression. “I knew a caliph who liked boys…” He liked to pretend I was one, so when I was Aqiqahed in my seventh life, he named me Josephine.”
I have no idea what any of that means so I say nothing. She swings around and prances away. Her dress is cut even deeper on the back. I watch the swaying hips and follow obediently.
Over one splendid shoulder she explains what needs to be done in the villa. In my mind, I imagine jerking her around violently, her breasts leaving the confines of her lace bra, her lips trembling—
Her voice cuts through my dream.
“What was that madam?”
She tells me a story about Psyche. Psyche, feared by Venus and loved by Cupid was a Jinni. The most beautiful creature of all realms that everyone lusted after…. Blah, blah.
It all goes over my head but I love her voice. I could follow her supple milk-white body for days, months, years. I love her smell. I love the way she moves. I do not even know what it is that I feel. It’s a constriction in my throat, a kind of pain, lust, and obsession—something better, or something worse. It doesn’t have a name.
When she is silent I tell her that it was a beautiful story. Then, “This place is huge.”
Her voice echoes off the walls. “Do you know the parable of Zeno’s arrow?”
I profess ignorance.
“Zeno says that the arrow never actually gets anywhere, because at every instant it’s just sitting in one place. This is us. We are not actually moving.”
I am beginning to think that she is not entirely all there. You know, in the head. But, considering her other attributes, I could not care less.
We walk into a larger space. Cathedral-like windows cast deep shadows against the wall. One shadow seems almost like a beast. It disappears as soon as it appears. A play of light, probably. We keep on. This place seems endless. It seems to extend forever. Maybe, it’s that Zeno thing she said.
“The Fool’s spiritual power is cancelled when”—a brief look over her shoulder—“it is drawn next to a major card like the Devil.”
“What?”
“A few more steps, and you will be mine.”
What? Did I hear that right?
After a few steps something odd happens. The house begins to change. I have no other way of explaining it. It gets darker, more cavernous. The darkness is like something I have never seen. There is a weight to it, a thickness, like fog, you can taste.
She stops and turns to me.
Here we go, I think, but her eyes are a winter ocean, not the eyes of a woman who wants to make love. I am about to say something when there is loud noise, WHUMP! like a giant bird batting a wing.
Stretches of sand rise and fall, and rise, and fall—ad nauseam. I know I am not lost because I can see the sea. It is late afternoon with its unique sights and sounds, light shifting and swinging on the sea. I always think that this light reveals the essential strangeness of the sea, asI have—
With a jolt I remember that I am inside a house or was. I was not on a beach. There is a heavy breathing close to my ear. I turn quickly, raising my hands as a defense mechanism. I stare at a vast stretch of the sea. Fading light, sand, and a darter perched on a piece of wood minding its own business. Then I turn and see her foot, her creamy heel, the lovely color of her toe nails. It is the size of a two-story building.
#
She hands Alvise the sundūq, a coffer the size of a shoebox.
“Master,” she says.
“Was he a bad boy?”
“The brute tried to rape me!”
“We both know that is not true.”
She smiles her signature mischievous smile. “He was undecided, weak.”
“So you want me to torture him a bit more?”
“No.” She swings around. “I want gelato.”
