Some people call me a genie. Others, a djinn. But, yes, I can grant you three wishes. Not that I have any choice in the matter. If you have the bottle, just open the thing up and I puff out in a cloud of smoke or a flash of light or, if you like, I can just suddenly be there. Most people get tired of the smoke and light show early on and ask if I can just quietly materialize. Doesn’t matter to me, I don’t know what any of it looks like, although from time-to-time somebody will show me a recording he made with his 8mm camera/video recorder/digital camera/cellular telephone.

People always ask me what it’s like in the bottle. They imagine there’s a little apartment set up in there, with a bedroom, a kitchen and a living area. Some people guess I spend my time smoking a hookah or drinking alcohol. Others muse that I must pass the time by painting, reading or playing the sitar. People are always asking if I “keep up with the times” by miniaturizing modern conveniences and taking them into the bottle with me.

But I have no idea what it looks like inside the bottle. When I’m in the bottle, I don’t exist. There’s no thought or dreaming or passing of time, there is only not existing. And then someone opens the bottle and poof!, there I am. Could be minutes or years or centuries, but it’s all the same to me. One moment I’m granting someone’s third wish, the next moment I’m somewhere else, watching someone clap their hands to their cheeks in astonishment that they have a “magic genie bottle.” If there’s time in-between the events, I don’t notice it. I think I’d like the time off in the apartment with the miniaturized conveniences, though.

Everybody tells me the bottle looks exactly like what a genie bottle is supposed to look like, too. I’m the only one who sees it every time, and it looks different to each person who possesses it. Usually it’s some red and blue fluted deal with a bowl at the bottom. Sometimes it looks like an oil lamp. It was a Mason jar, once, which astounded the guy when he twisted the cap off. “Well, tha’s jes’ ‘bout what ya’d ‘speck one t’ look like, now that I think ‘bout it,”  the guy said. His name was Ninian Gaithers. He wanted the perfect moonshine recipe, a brand new Remington rifle and the complete 1936 Sears catalog Craftsman tool set.
^[a]

About half the people say they rub it, first.

Right now, I’m sitting on a stool in a garage watching Richard “Rick” Carver stare at me in amazement. Just an instant ago I granted Marsha Wheeler her third wish, which was “to find peace and inner harmony in life.” Her first two wishes didn’t work out so well for her, and making a person’s brain chemistry make them happy optimists is an easy wish to fulfill.

“You gotta be shittin’ me,” Rick said, looking at the green bottle and cork stopper in his hand. “This is a genie bottle? For real?”

I smiled. “For real.”

“I get three wishes? For real?”

I shrugged. “Yup. You get three.”

He put the bottle and stopper down on a work bench and walked up close to me and touched me on the shoulder.

“You’re real.”

“I am.”

“And you really came out of that bottle?”

So I’m told, over and over again. “Yes.”

“And I get three wishes? For anything?”

This is the tricky part. You can wish for anything, but I can’t grant every wish. I can’t alter your past, for instance. If, say, Marsha Wheeler didn’t fall in love with you back when you dated her, I can’t make her fall in love with you back when you dated her. It’s already been lived. If you want her to fall in love with you now, well, that I can do^[b]. But, be careful what you wish for. In general, I wouldn’t recommend wishing for love or anything that has to do with how another person interacts with you. But, I’m also not able to give advice on wishing.

“You can wish for anything, but I can’t grant everything,” I say. “If you make a wish I can’t fulfill, you get to keep trying until you get one I can fulfill.”

This keeps me alive more than anything. People are constantly wishing for “big picture” things like “world peace” or a “cure for cancer.” But wishes like those affect everybody on the planet, and I can’t grant wishes for everybody, just whoever got lucky enough to unbottle me.

Now, Rick is 53-years old, married for twenty-nine years to Julia. They have three daughters, Sara, Sasha and Sandra. They’ve been living here at 287 Connestoga Way for eighteen years and Rick has managed the mortgage payments so that they’ll pay the house off with nineteen more checks. I just know these things. I know Rick had a brief affair with a coworker twenty years ago and that his wife slept with a man she met at a bar while on a “girls night out” fortieth birthday party twelve years ago. I don’t know why I know these things, but I do. Instantly. I think the knowledge is supposed to help me in the wish fulfillment, but who knows? When they cursed me into the bottle they didn’t tell me the rules beforehand.

“How does it work?” Rick asked. “Do I just say ‘I wish’ and then whatever it is I want?”

“Pretty much.”

“I wish I don’t have erectile dysfunction,” Rick said.

Almost everybody has a wish ready to go. It’s almost always a solution to some current problem they want fixed immediately. Usually, it’s a health or money issue. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve healed people or given them money, but it’s almost every time.

I snapped the fingers on my right hand and pointed at Rick. “Done.”

“I wish the next lottery ticket I buy wins me a million dollars.”

Easy. “Done.”

And then he puts the cork on the bottle and the next thing I know is I’m a room lined with bookshelves filled with bottles, books and and a desk pressed against a wall with a computer on it. Rick is now fifty-seven, divorced, estranged from his daughters, a borderline alcoholic seeing a psychiatrist every Monday afternoon.

“So, that’s the bottle,” he said derisively. “How many fuckin’ bottles did I have to go through to find you? Do you know?”

“No idea.”

How many words have I spoken to this guy? Six? Once upon a time, I used to have to explain the whole concept, but the last couple hundred times or so, everyone who’s opened the bottle has just known the deal. Pop culture in the 20th Century made my existence known, and the variety of lottery games and casinos people now have has increased everyone’s “wish list sensitivity.” I mean, for a while now, everyone knows that there’s a chance if they buy a ticket they could win millions of dollars, so everyone’s already thinking about what they would do with the money. I’m the ticket, but with benefits. You get me, you can get more than just money.

“I got one more wish left, right?” Rick asked.

“Yes.”

“Can I undo the previous two?”

“No.”

“Fuck.”

He turned a circle in the room in agitation, then walked up to a window and stared through it. “I’m going to have to think about this a little bit more,” he said, putting the stopper back in the bottle.

“Holy shit! What the fuck was that?” is the next thing I hear. And, then, “Who the fuck are you and what are you doing in my apartment?”

I’m staring at Amanda Hastings, a thirty-seven year-old bankruptcy attorney who’s recently divorced from her husband after he left her when he found out she was banging her boss on business trips and “long nights at the office.” Her husband went through her text messages one morning while eating oatmeal after her phone sent a disturbing  push-message from her boss and her husband confronted her about the sexually explicit content of dozens of texts.

Who am I? I get that question often. I’m Anbar al Assam, son of Hakeem, a member of the Assassins Guild, cursed to fulfill the desires of others for eternity as punishment for taking lives that were not mine to end.

“I’m going to call the police if you don’t leave right this instant,” Amanda said.

I raise my hands palms upward and lower my chin. “If you want me to leave, just put the stopper back on that bottle.”

She looks at her hands and realizes what she’s holding. Her jaw drops. Then her eyes narrow and she puts the stopper in the bottle.

“You’re fucking kidding me!” she says a moment later, still in the same spot. “You’re a genie in a bottle? For real?”

I nod.

“I really get three wishes?” she asks.

I nod.

“Really?”

“Really?”

“How is that even possible?”

Ancient magics? Nobody told me. “It just is.”

“Do I have to wish right away?”

“Take as long as you want.”

Just then a kettle began whistling in her kitchen and she set the bottle down on a table. Typical “genie bottle,” again. Then she gave me a strange look.

“You’re not going anywhere, are you?”

I shook my head. Tried that many times in the beginning, thinking maybe I could take the bottle while in the material world and run away. But the bottle is air in my hands: I can’t touch it. Anything else, sure, but the bottle, no.

“You want a cup of tea?” she asks from the kitchen in a shout.

I haven’t had anything to drink in a while, so I accept. She comes back a few minutes later and sets down a kettle, two cups, and a bottle of honey in the shape of a bear.

“I can get you milk or sugar if you take it that way.”

I shake my head. “This is fine.”

“Are you hungry?” she asks.

I’m never hungry. Not anymore. But I can eat. I like to eat. Reminds me of living.

“No.”

She pours two cups and stirs honey into each before handing me a cup. I sip a tiny bit into my mouth and savor the flavor of life. I want to gulp it down and ask for another, feel the sensations of taste and texture - umami - on my tongue, but doing this job this long has taught me to remain cool, calm and collected. The wishers expect it.

“So, do I have a time limit?”

“No.”

“So, I can just backpack you along for my entire life and use a wish whenever I need to?”

“Yes.”

This isn’t uncommon. I’ve been held by people for long periods of time many times. I think they look at me as an insurance policy against adversity. They usually make a wish within a week or two, something they’ve been wanting for a long while but been unable to attain, then wait a couple of years to make the second, then longer for the third. Blinking in-and-out of a person’s life is weird at first, but you get used to it. I wish I could say I felt sad for them when they were elderly and trying to get something back from the past they erred on, but, well, I don’t. Time moves in one direction, and if you don’t make your wish when you’re young and can use it, I can’t help you undo what you did or didn’t do.

“Can you make my ex-husband Robert fall back in love with me?” she asks.

“No.”

“Can you say anything other than ‘yes’ and ‘no?’”

I cracked a smile. “Yes.”

“Will you?”

“Sure. What do you want talk about?”

“I want to know why all my relationships fail,” she says, then catches herself: “That’s not a wish, is it?”

“Not a wish, because you didn’t wish it,” I say, taking another sip of tea.

 She stared at me with dead eyes. “Cheating on Rob was a mistake. He was a good man, I just ... made a mistake. I thought I needed something more.”

I shrug. I don’t care. Everyone has problems. Everyone. And I’ve heard them all, repeatedly. The problem with “mistakes” is you make them on purpose, thinking you’re doing the right thing. For you. And then when you realize it was a “mistake,” you want everyone else to see you as vulnerable and human and worthy of forgiveness. I don’t give forgiveness, I give wishes. I used to kill people.

“I wish to know why all my relationships with men fail, I want to know what’s wrong with me,” Amanda says.

“Your relationships fail because you never let yourself accept the relationship you’re in because you always think there’s someone better out there for you, because you think you deserve more than you have,” I say. “Then you meet a new man and your hypergamous nature makes you have sex in the hopes that by giving him your body you will convince him he’s the right kind of man to lead you through life, provide you with comfort and impregnate you with perfect children.

“But since you frequently start having sex with the new man while still with the old man, you set them up in competition for your affections, only most of the new men you meet are only using you for sexual gratification because they know you’re in a relationship already and they never actually ‘choose’ you before your current man discovers you're cheating and ends the relationship.

“This isn’t entirely the fault of your personality, it’s partly biology. When you were in your teens and twenties, you were a very attractive woman and you garnered the attention of high status males, which conditioned you to believe that a better one was always just around the corner, so you put off marriage and enjoyed your youth.  But as you neared thirty, you sub-consciously noticed that the caliber of men asking you out was slackening off, so you settled on the man you married when he asked, sub-consciously worried it would only get worse. But, after a few years of marriage to him, you still detected interest from men and you thought you still had the chance to trade up, so you gambled one more time, hoping that maybe your boss would leave his wife for you and provide you the lifestyle he gave her, which your husband could not provide for you. Only, as you found out, your boss was merely using you for sex and ended the affair after you separated from your husband when your boss realized that you were going to press him for more commitment than he was willing to give.”

I don’t know how I know this, but I do. Tears are streaking down Amanda’s face because she knows it’s the truth, a truth she already knew, but, like I said, everyone has a wish ready at the get-go, and this was hers. I could go into more detail with her, if she wanted, since I know her entire romantic history, but she only puts the lid back on the bottle.

Over the next six months, she uncorks me twice and makes highly specific wishes that she has worded with lawyerly precision, but which I can break down rather easily: she wants to always be considered the prettiest woman her age so that she continues to attract the best quality men possible, and she wants to be the sole claimant of a lottery jackpot of at least $100 million the very next time there’s a jackpot of that amount available to win. People don’t change: they just know what they want.

Bryce Caplan is the next up, and I pop into existence in his living room without him even knowing I’m there.  There are six others passed out on the couch and floor from a night of heavy drinking and drug use, and he’s trying to figure out how to use my bottle as a bong. The bottle is in the shape of a metal oil lamp, which is pretty normal, historically speaking. After a few minutes he lights the hashish in the tank and inhales from the spout where the tea comes out, puffing in mightily until he leans back and holds his breath a moment. Then he exhales a small cloud into the room.

“Hey man, who’re you?” he asks.

“My name is Anbar,” I say.

“You want a hit?”

Now, I could do a hit. I’ve done everything over the millennia I’ve been in the bottle, and it does affect me so long as I’m out of the bottle. My corporeal body works just like anyone’s when I’m in the real world, and you can kill me when I’m walking among you. Put the lid back on and everything resets, though. I’ve been killed a couple of dozen times, though mostly with bladed weapons and nooses. It’s no fun being hanged after being put on some show trial for being a witch or an agent of the devil. The worst was some French knight named Hollande who cut me down with his sword every day for a month during The Crusades, certain I was some evil spirit sent to make him stray from his holy duty to free the Holy Land.

He died in battle never having made a single wish, and his personal staff delivered his belongings - and my bottle - to his grieving wife. She made three wishes.

“Maybe later,” I tell Bryce.

He nods. “Do I know you?”

I shake my head. “We’re meeting for the first time right now.”

“Oh, cool,” he says.

“I’m here to give you three wishes.”

“That’s cool,” he says, and bends over the lamp and lights the hashish again.

He exhales another cloud of smoke and then wanders through the room to a bottle of vodka, pours himself two inches into a glass, and takes a long sip. He looks at his friends and then his eyes trail across the room to me.

“What’d you say your name was?” he asks with a sheepish smile. “I forget names really easy.”

“Anbar.”

“Anbar?”

“Yes.”

He drains the rest of the glass in two easy gulps and sets it down.

“I’m gonna hit the sack man, help yourself to whatever.”

Then he walks out of the room and I hear him plop down on a bed. Being let out of the bottle like this isn’t that unique, either. I’ve been out for months at a time on several occasions, and I spent several years in the 1950s out of the bottle after being acquired by a rich Hollywood mogul who didn’t know what to wish for, since he thought he had everything. He did have everything, too. Well, everything that money, fame and a certain kind of power can attain. He was stumped when trying to wish. He’d wish for things I couldn’t grant and ask what use I was if I couldn’t make a person truly happy and not yearn for more.

Well, if you don’t know what will make you happy and content with your life, I can’t give it to you. It took three years for him to make a wish I could finally grant, and it wasn’t something money could buy. He asked this: “I wish to not be afraid of failure.”

That changed him.

“You’re still here?” Bryce said in the morning - it was almost noon - when he walked down the hall and into the living room, still in the clothes he had been wearing the night before.

I had slept on the floor after having a couple of drinks of vodka and sampling the various cigarettes from the packages his friends had left out. I love tobacco and wish it had been around when I had been alive. Well, “alive.” I smoked Camel Lights for a couple of weeks in the 1990s when an Army major at Fort Bragg possessed my bottle. He kept me out of the bottle the entire time he had it. He was just back from Operation Desert Storm and gotten the bottle from some Iraqi general who’d only made one wish. (“I wish to live through the war with the Americans.” Granted.)

Major Mike DeSoto’s wife had had an affair with another officer while he had been deployed, and it had devastated him. He’d risked his life for his wife and country and his wife had grown bored by the tedium of loneliness and let herself be seduced by a helicopter pilot she met at a bar.

“I wish Marcy would realize Jake is an asshole and fall in love with me,” Bryce said, flaming a cigarette to life.

“I can’t do that,” I say.

“The guy’s an asshole.”

Maybe. How would I know?

“He doesn’t deserve her,” Bryce says. “I thought you said I get three wishes. Did you come out of that?”

He nods to the lamp. I nod.

“How can you not do that? It’s a wish,” Bryce says.

“Yeah, but it’s a wish that makes someone else do something they might not wish to do. I can’t change other people’s lives, only yours.”

Everybody has a wish on demand ready to go. Everybody.

“So, what, I can’t wish for a cure for cancer or world peace, either, because that affects everyone?” Bryce said.

“No.”

“But those wishes would be good for everybody.”

“I didn’t make the rules, so I can’t defend them,” I say. I don’t even really know what the “rules” are, I just know instantly when I can’t grant a wish, and why. The same works in reverse: you can wish for something that would affect a great number of people but not change their lives, but change yours incredibly, and I’ll know the reason why that worked.

For instance, I can’t grant “world peace” because there are almost no two people alive at any one time that would agree on what that would look like and how it would work. What if Hitler had conquered Europe and then wished for world peace and the Nazis still ruled? But if you’re a struggling artist looking to write the next best-selling novel, well, that I can grant: you just write the damn thing and I make it land on the right desk at the right time on the right day of the month when some agent or editor or publisher is looking for exactly that.

And, yes, I can give you the path to the girl of your dreams, I just can’t make her fall in love with you. You have to do that. I can help, you just have to know what to wish for. But in my experience, wishing for someone’s love is a waste of a wish.

“So, what are the rules, then?” Bryce asks.

I shrug. “You can wish for anything you want. I can only grant you what I can, and you can keep on trying until you get three I can.”

Most people wish for money or a sure-fire way to make money based on some talent they have. Health issues are a close second: you can cure yourself of anything. Lots of people wish to live long lives free from injury and sudden accidental death. Lots of people have asked to live forever, which is possible - witness me! - but none have ever asked in a way that I could grant (though, in refusing, I know why each wish didn’t work).

Bryce finished his cigarette and crushed the butt in an ashtray. “Well, dude, I gotta go to work. Do I have to do anything with you?”

I shake my head.

“You’ll still be here when I get back?”

I smile. “If I’m not, just put the stopper back on the bottle. Then open the bottle again and I’ll be right here.”

Well, provided he still has the bottle. I’ve granted less than three wishes many times because ... well, I don’t know. I just ended up in someone else’s possession before the previous owner made three wishes.

Bryce left the apartment and I was alone. I get to live, again, and see what has become of the world. I look out the window and it looks pretty much the same as it has for the last hundred or so wishers. Cars. Buildings. What I’ve come to know as “Western Civilization.” I never get enough time in it to understand it, but it looks better every time I get unstoppered by someone in it. People lucky enough to live in this civilization don’t have any idea how fortunate their birth order in the universe is: the poor people now have more options than any kings from my time.

The remote controls, however, get more confusing every time I’m left alone. They used to be simple, but now they have more buttons and, oddly, there are often several of them to choose from, so figuring out how to work a television - and, how they’ve changed! - gets increasingly difficult. I’m told there are computers and an Internet, but nobody has shown me how to use one or it, so the last couple of dozen times I’ve been left out of the bottle, I’ve spent hours with remotes trying to figure out how to access the televisions. Can you believe you used to just turn them on? And change channels with a knob? Simplicity!

Alfred Bevilaqua showed me my first television and how to work it while he puzzled over his wishes. His television was black and white and had a small screen. His first wish was to find a bag of money that would “get him even” with all of his financial debts. Granted. He was astounded.

“You’re for real?”

“You don’t believe your eyes?”

“Who the hell are you?” a voice asks. I’m watching television, trying to figure out when I am in relation to the last time. Not that it matters, but the existence of radio and television makes me curious how long I’ve been out of the loop.

I turn around from my seat on the couch and see a woman in a tank top and bikini briefs, her brown hair a tangle, the previous day’s makeup still on. She’s got an aggressive stance, a pose I recognize as a girl who’s used to getting her way and thinks she can throw around attitude on men. I’m a man, so, of course she would think it could work.

“Nice underpants.”

She pauses. “What the fuck did you say?”

“Nice underpants.”

I wait a beat.

“Or are you one of those girls who calls them panties?”

She looks down at herself. Then back at me, trying to figure out if she’s still the dominant personality in the room. She’s used to men placating her.

“You really should put on pajamas or something when you’re lounging around a friend’s house, you wouldn’t want to give anyone the wrong impression,” I say, and turn back to the television.

Two minutes later she’s back in the room, dressed in last night’s clothing: jeans, same tank top, and a pair of lime green Converse hi-tops.

“Okay, so now do you want to explain yourself?” she asks.

“No.”

“No?”

“I’m Bryce’s invited guest, and you’re a straggler who spent the night. Does Jake know you’re still here? He left an hour ago.”

Yeah, I can fuck with people. When I’m out of the bottle, I’m me. Or, rather, the latest version of me, if that makes sense. The real me should be dead long ago, not spent his life witnessing the changes in the world in various-length snippets of time. I’ve thought about it a lot over the eons, but I don’t think I was one of those people who ever thought he wanted to live forever. When I was alive for real, life was a struggle, and nobody realized how large and awesome the planet really was. Most people lived and died within a few square miles of where they were born. Nobody back then would’ve wanted to live forever, working 24/7/365 just get enough food to live to the next day. Nobody could’ve imagined the changes over time that would make life increasingly easier and better for everyone.

I can’t tell you how many “poor” people I’ve been owned by that lived better than most of the “rich” people I’ve been owned by in the past. Bryce, my current owner, is a guitar technician at Guitar Planet and has a better standard of living than almost everyone who’s ever owned me pre-Twentieth Century. With a few exceptions, of course. And his biggest problem is that he wants this skinny brunette with small breasts to be the love of his life.

Speaking of Marcy, she gives me a long, hard look, suddenly trying to figure me out instead of wrangle me under her control. Her green eyes slip up and down me for a second as she unconsciously licks her pouty lips, last night’s red lipstick mostly worn off from a drunken sexcapade with Jake before he passed out moments after orgasm. She shakes her mane of thick dark hair and raises her palms.

“Sorry, I can be a little bitchy in the morning when I’m hung over. Is there any coffee?”

“In the kitchen.”

She comes back with a cup and takes a sip of it, then a longer glug and swallows. “Did you make this? You must have, because Bryce can’t make coffee for shit.”

I smile. “Yeah. I made it.”

She takes another long sip. “So, how long have you known Bryce? I thought I knew all his friends.”

How long have I known him? Well, I know everything about him, every detail of his life of twenty-three years. It’s just how this deal works: I have to know so that when the wisher makes a wish, I can grant it correctly. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, I’ve seen all the versions of the story where the genie is some sort of literal wish-granter who fucks over the wisher with bad wishes. I’m pretty sure that’s some literary device modern writers employ as a “be careful what you wish for” story. And, yes, you have to be careful what you wish for, but I’m not here to screw you over for being short-sighted or stupid.

Although there’s no shortage of people who have elaborately constructed wishes written down on paper with various caveats. And they’re not always lawyers. I used to be surprised that there were people who doubted their good fortune and hedged against it, but now I figure it’s just human nature: some people figure life/god/the universe is out to fuck with them just because it can. But me, I know what you want when you wish it, because I know who you are when I show up. If you wish for the best blue tooth brush in the world, I know what you’re looking for, not what “the world” would consider the “best blue tooth brush.” And, yeah, I know what that would be, too.

“Well, now you know a new one,” I say with a wink.

Marcy tries not to grimace and fails, but only barely. She’s used to getting what she wants from men, and men not answering her questions aggravates her. She knows Jake is a poseur at heart, knows he’s not for real, but doesn’t know that he’s using “game theory” on her because he knows she’s too hot for him. And both of them know their relationship is tenuous, at best, but Jake is capable of manipulating her just often enough to keep her hamster spinning, wondering if he’s just all bluster, a future-washed-up-ex-local band bassist loser-douchebag who never really had a chance at rock’n’roll fame.

Not that she’s been faithful. She attracts enough men that she hooks up with low alphas and the occasional sigma male, but those guys always discard her after use because she’s also a bit of a flake. Jake’s a nerdy guy who knows if he quits re-reading Bang or The Mystery Method he’s going to be hooking up with the girls he rarely hooked up with before he first read it. Unless the band breaks big and solidifies his status as highly desirable, and he has no real faith that the songs he and Bryce write are going to do it.

“So, what are you doing today?” Marcy asks.

I shrug. “Just hangin’.”

She nods. “Wanna hang with me? I’m off today, so I can do whatever.”

“I don’t have any money.”

She rolls her eyes. “I’ll treat if we have to eat.”

“We could just stay here and watch TV all day. There’s booze.”

She shrugs. “I just did that last night. Besides, I need to shower and change.”

Now, it’s not abnormal for people who don’t know me or have just met me to want to hang out with me. I give off a vibe that tells people I’m somebody who can do things, because I am. Bryce has left me out of the bottle, so I can do whatever I want until he calls me back.

“Okay, sure,” I say. “Let’s go.”

So, you might be asking yourself, “what does a thousand-years-old genie-in-a-bottle look like?” Well, I look like what you think I would look like. And, no, I don’t look like some “genie” in Arab robes, because that’s what you think a “genie” would look like. When you first see me, you don’t know I’m a genie, so I look like whatever nondescript person you’d expect to meet under the current conditions looks like, so right now I’m wearing faded blue jeans, a T-shirt that says “Vorpal blades go snicker snack”, black leather ankle boots, and a belt with a metal chain that connects to a wallet in my right rear pocket that includes various identification cards establishing my existence in reality, but no money. I still have brown hair and eyes and a slightly olive complexion, although I can tell I have shaggy longish hair and two-day stubble instead of a close-cropped beard.

It’s a twenty minute drive across town, and five minutes of her circling her neighborhood looking for on-street parking. On the way to her apartment, she dips into a convenience store and picks up two breakfast burritos and two sleeves of hashbrowns which we eat on the couch when we get inside her apartment. I’ve almost stopped being amazed at how easy it is to eat the further I get into the future. For most of my journey through time, getting something to eat required waiting for someone to cook something, if they had anything to cook. I’ve granted more than a few wishes to people looking for stable food sources. And then one day Richie Cunningham took me to Al’s and bought me a burger, fries and a shake, and within a few short minutes I was having one of the best meals of my life.

I was with Richie for three weeks while he puzzled through his wishes. He was a twenty-five year old Korean War vet traumatized by his experiences as an infantryman, and after his return from the war he had spent a couple of years drinking and working as a handyman. He wished to quit alcohol, gain a skill set that would get him a job that he could use for a lifetime, and to find a hobby that would give him fulfillment in his spare time. Granted all three. Easy to do when a person wishes for what they already know they want and can do. Sometimes, all you need to grant is gumption.

Marcy takes the wrappers from the coffee table and throws them into a trash can in the kitchen, stops in front of me to tell me she’s going to shower and change, and points to the remote control for the television.

“I was going to do laundry and go grocery shopping today, but since I’ve got you we can do whatever. I haven’t done anything touristy in a while, and Philly has great museums if you want to go check them out. Or anything, really. I’m game.”

And then she’s off down the hallway.

Museums? I’ve never been in one, but I’ve heard about them from time-to-time over the last few hundred uncorkings. Modern people digging up the old stuff and putting it on display for people to see so you can marvel at how people used to live. This isn’t a mystery to me. Every time I come out of the bottle, I’m interested in now and how the world’s changed. So, I turn on the television and switch through to the news channels.

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed in watching television news, it’s this: it’s always bad news. I’ve come to the conclusion that much of it isn’t even “news,” since people have been killing people since before recorded time. But, modern people find this interesting, apparently, because if someone’s been murdered, it’s on the news. And sharks. If sharks bite someone, that’s news.

But what really blows my mind is why modern people are interested in actors and musicians. These people were more-or-less scum in my alive days, but in the modern world, they’re aristocracy. Not that I have anything against being entertained, mind you, but why anybody would think the private lives of these people is any more interesting than their own is a mystery. There’s no shortage of television shows telling you about the private lives of the people who entertain you for a living. Why are there no television shows about the people who provide the food and energy that keeps you alive? Arguably, they provide a more important service to your daily life. Brad Pitt doesn’t make a movie for a year and you don’t notice any difference in your life. Corporate Tycoon A doesn’t provide electricity or gas or phone service for a year, and you go from modernity to when I lived a tent in the desert.

In my day, musicians and actors were people who couldn’t produce anything to live on, and entertainment was a luxury. Nowadays, judging from my recent history, entertainment is the most important thing in a person’s life, and the necessities are just expected to be constants. I guess there aren’t barbarian invasions from nowhere anymore to remove the uncertainty from life.

And, yeah, Brad Pitt got his three wishes.

“How do I look?” Marcy asks.

I turn around and see her wearing a denim skirt and an asymmetrical top that reveals a dragon tattoo wrapped around her left shoulder. Her hair falls over her shoulders and her green eyes burst from her face with the eyeliner she’s drawn around them. And, then...

“You’re wearing flats.”

“We’re going to be walking. I want to be comfortable.”

I say nothing and offer the barest shrug. She makes a face, almost rolls her eyes and heads back to her bedroom. A minute later she returns wearing a pair of mid-calf boots.

“Better?”

I nod. “Now you’ve got an outfit.”

A smile flickers across her face. ^[c]We end up spending the day ducking in and out of shops - mostly women’s clothing stores, but also a couple of thrift shops, a jewelry boutique, and a hat store - before she leads us into a bar. It’s an old bar, one of the oldest in the city, and there’s something vaguely familiar about it to me. We sit down on bar stools and she leans forward when the bartender slides over.

“A lager,” she says.

The barkeep looks at me. I shrug, “Same.”

After a moment, Marcy asks, “What are you looking for?”

She’s noticed that I’m trying to figure out why - or how - I know this place.

“I think I’ve been here before.”

“And here I thought I was bringing you to the cool place nobody cool goes to anymore because it’s a city ‘institution,’” she says, making quote marks with the fingers of her hands.

“I’ll be right back,” I say, and walk out of the bar and downstairs and onto the street. A sign announces the bar as The Black Horse/Dickens, but it was called something else two-hundred or so years ago when I last sat in it. It’s bigger, different, but I can tell it’s the same place.

I look around the street and see some of the similarities from way back then - seems like months ago to me, given how I jump through time - and I marvel, again, at how civilization in this part of the world has marched steadily forward. No horse shit on the the road. John Hawkins brought me here one night just before he made his final wish, to celebrate in advance the good fortune he was going to experience. His first wish had been to be restored to perfect health, for he was desperately ill from numerous diseases, most notably what they now call Stage Four Pancreatic Cancer and a raging case of syphilis. He had been surprised when I granted the wish that it also included new teeth, 20/20 eyesight and the ability to fully use the fingers of his left hand (damaged when a musket barrel exploded).

I slip back onto the barstool and Marcy gives me a once-over. “Same place?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Different, but everything changes with time.”

She nods. “So, if you could wish for anything, what would it be?”

Hah! I can’t wish for anything. I’ve tried. I’ve wished to be set free. I’ve wished to die. I’ve wished to live a normal life. I’ve wished I never joined the Assassin’s Guild and lived normal life and died and died centuries ago. I’ve even wished to know what it was I could wish for to set me free even if in knowing the answer I was still cursed to remain in the bottle.^[d] Twice, people have used their final wish to try to free me only to find that that particular wish only freed me from them. They don’t know it only vacated their third wish and sent me to my next owner. I assume both of them thought they had granted a tired genie his freedom to live out his life and not merely wasted their last wish. Wish granted, though.

If there’s a cure to this curse, I don’t know it.

I give Marcy a shrug and a smile. “You first.”

“You can’t do that, I asked you first.”

“That only means you have a wish you’d ask if you could, but you don’t want to go first because you think it would be weird to just say it. So,” I take a long sip of beer,” just tell me what it is.”

She makes a weird face of disappointment, stares down at her beer, drinks some of it, and then looks at me. “I wish I knew what my true talent was so that I could pursue it.”

I smile. This is a not an uncommon third wish. I could grant it, if she owned my bottle, because I’d know what it was.But, she doesn’t own me. And then I’m back in Bryce’s apartment watching him spin quickly around until he finds me on the other side of the couch. This happens. Marcy will never know I suddenly vanished mid-beer as the curse has a provision for that, somehow. I just know that the next time I see her, she won’t know I suddenly poofed into thin air.

“Where were you? Jesus, I thought you were gone,” Bryce says quickly.

“I was out with your friend Marcy all day,” I say. “She was showing me the city.”

This fixes him in place for a moment and he cocks his head to the side slightly. “You were out with Marcy all day?”

I nod.

“What were you guys doing?”

“Mostly shopping for clothing.”

“That sounds like a drag.”

I shrug. “I don’t often get to spend time with a non-wisher doing normal things. I almost feel human, again.”

“You’re not human?”

“I’m a genie in a bottle.”

“You don’t hang out in the bottle when you’re bored?”

I shake my head and fill him in on how my “bottle life” works.

“Wow. So you’re like some sort of time traveler moving in jumps to the future. That’s gotta be weird.”

“You get used to it after a while.” Well, sort of. You really want it to end after a while. The pace is relentless at times, and the uncorkings where I spend a few days or longer somewhere have become vacations for me. I can settle down for a while, live something of a life, and actually get some sleep. Not that I need sleep: I could stay awake the entire time I’m out of the bottle and never get tired. It was a long time of jumping through time before I tried to sleep, and when I did, it was amazing to be able to dream. I’d forgotten that aspect of sleep after a thousand^[e] or so years of not sleeping, of not needing sleep. If Bryce doesn’t bottle me up tonight, I plan on sleeping on his couch while the television plays softly as white noise.

“I think there’s a song in that,” Bryce says suddenly, heading down the hall and returning with an acoustic guitar. He sits down on a chair and begins strumming chords - A minor, D minor, C Major 7 - while humming along.

And then he tries a lyric: “I’m cursed in a bottle ... traveling through time ... pop the lid and out I come with three wishes.”

He improvises a riff in the E minor pentatonic scale and then returns to the chord structure he’s building.^[f] He mumble-hums a little to himself, lost in the thoughts in his head, and spits out another lyric: “I’m paying for my sins for eternity ... granting you whatever you desire ...”

He stops and looks at me. “Can you really grant me whatever I desire?”

“Within limits.”

“Can I wish to be the greatest guitarist of all time?”

“You can.”

“I wish to be the greatest guitarist of all time.”

I snap my fingers. “Granted.”

Now, “all time” is all the time up until this particular moment of the wish, so it’s something I can do. Lots of people wish to the be the greatest at something and say “of all time” not realizing that there’s still more time coming that’s not covered, since I can only grant wishes in “proven time.” I don’t know why. It’s a rule, and I didn’t write them, but you can’t undo a future that isn’t written, and if someone better than you comes along later, well, I can’t prevent them from being better than you, but I can make you better than everyone who’s come before you.

So, at least for this moment, Bryce is the best guitarist in the world. He picks up his guitar and starts playing it and a minute later puts it down.

“Fuckin’ hell yeah, man,” he says. He lights a cigarette and gives me a quizzical look.

“Did Marcy say anything about me today?”

“Not really.”

“And there’s nothing you can do to help me out?”

“I’m not here to give advice, just wishes.”

“Can you give advice?”

Well, sure. Sort of. But why would you take it? I’m a genie in a bottle. So I say, “Well, sure, sort of.”

“So what can I do to make Marcy like me?”

How the hell would I know? “Well, you are the best guitarist in the world. Maybe she’ll notice.”

He shakes his head. “Nah, I’m already the best guitarist she knows. She’s not the kind of person who would notice a difference between then and now.”

“Then” and “now” are less than two minutes in separation.

“Well, as the world’s best guitarist, maybe ignoring her and working on other women will make her see your greatness. Taking an active disinterest in a woman can sometimes cause her to reappraise your status and stirs interest. If she realizes you’re moving on, she might be curious as to who you find more attractive than her.”

“You just can’t make me the kind of guy she’d want?”

Well, maybe if I knew what kind of guy she wanted. “I think you have to make her believe the guy you are is the kind of guy she wants. You know, be confident, assured, aloof, witty, strong of will and let her know you’re on a path to success and nothing will divert you from your mission in life.”

While I know everything about Bryce, he doesn’t seem like the kind of man I just described. In a sense, this is the curse: getting to know humanity one person at at time, over and over again, and understanding their dreams and desires. I guess this is supposed to make me realize that all the people I killed were just like these people, just doing what they had to do to get through life, and then I came along with a contract in hand and ended it all.

I get that your life is valuable to you, but millennia^[g] of granting wishes has only reinforced my belief that your life is not necessarily valuable to anybody else. I was an assassin, not a murderer. I was paid to kill people others wanted dead for reasons that didn’t concern my life. Businessmen wanted to kill off rivals. Rulers wanted to kill off rivals. Men who felt they were wronged wanted justice. They made their cases to the guild, and the guild would assign an assassin to do the deed if the guild believed the cause to be just. And I was just a very good tool in the box the guild used.

But everyone dies. Your death is sadness and grief for a while, then acceptance before those living have forgotten you were among them. Maybe I’m cynical, but nobody is irreplaceable. Life is not universally precious, and not everybody living knows what to do with the life they’re living. So, if the sorcerer^[h] who cursed me into the bottle thought he was going to teach me a lesson about the lives of people, well, he never met as many of them as I have.

“So you think I should ignore Marcy and work on my music?” Bryce asks.

I look him in the eye. “You need to live your life for you first. Do what you want to do with it. Take it where you want to go. The people who want to go on your journey will, and if Marcy is one of them, well, good for you. If she’s not, why waste time and energy on her?”

He stubs out his cigarette and looks away. “Ignore her? I’ve been in love with her since tenth grade.”

I shrug.

He leaves me out of the bottle and lives his life as if I’m some sort of roommate. He goes to work in the morning and comes home eight hours later, microwaves a frozen meal in a box and eats it while watching television shows about celebrities. Some nights he sits around and works on songs, others he has band practice, and a few involve nights out with some friend or another.

He’s not ignoring me, though. We chat when he’s around, and on nights he’s writing we throw back a few beers or smoke a little dope, but he hasn’t added me to his “friend’s queue,” if you will. I’m the new roomy sharing time and space with him. This happens on occasion: people who don’t want to “waste” their wishes hope getting to know me “organically” will improve their wish ability when they get around to it. There is a strong undercurrent of distrust in genies, a fear that we will ruthlessly grant your wish to your detriment by giving you “exactly” what you wished for.