****
The sand was golden, the sky cloudless and blue, and the ocean surrounding the island in all four directions seemed endless. The Jumper had dug itself nose-first into the beach and was now useless, burned out and half-underwater. John had used what was left of the emergency parachute and what little equipment he could safe from the water to build a shelter from the sun between the few feeblish palm trees.
There was nothing and nobody else: no rescue in sight, not enough food to last more than perhaps two days, and even less fresh water. Fine, there was a single coconut on one of the palm trees, but that wouldn’t last him that long either.
“At least I’m not dead, yet,” he muttered, and flicked some sand off his shoulders. His air force jumpsuit still smelled of smoke and fire, and his hair felt singed at the tips and around his ears.
So, this was what having still some problems with the re-entry procedure meant, he thought wryly, and looked up, scanning the horizon for any ships or helicopters searching for him. Nothing. And there still was nothing three hours later, four hours later, five… he got nervous as afternoon turned more and more into evening with still no sign of help, and nothing he could do to contact his rescue.
The radio had died on re-entry along with pretty much anything else, and he doubted the emergency signal was still active after the heat it had to endure.
With his luck they’d probably decided he had burned up on re-entry, and now was nothing more than ashes floating about in the atmosphere. Colonel Caldwell certainly wouldn’t mind. He would think of it as confirmation for all his doubts about John’s test pilot qualifications for such an important project, and would go ahead and blame the loss of a million-dollar test aircraft on him, too.
Post mortem, but anyway, Caldwell would have enough arguments to close down the project for good.
John started circling the edges of the island, looking out and listening for any kind of engine over the sounds of the waves crashing onto the sand, but there was still nothing.
He waited an entire day.
But all he had encountered as the end of the second day approached, after another fruitless hour of circling, was an old, greenish bottle with a long neck and a round bottom he'd found washed up on the shore. The paint was flaking off around the middle, giving it the look of an old Christmas bauble, and it sparkled in the sun.
He busied himself with checking the bottle over for the next ten or so minutes. then he flopped back down in the shadow of his parachute, dropping the bottle into the sand next to him.
The second day was not different.
He had no water left for the third day, and after the coconut was gone, he’d have to go dry.
The coconut was gone awfully quick.
John was too tired and worn out to stay awake that night, and he woke the next morning with a stiff neck, a parched throat, and the painful understanding that he was going to die of thirst surrounded by water.
He had lost most of his hopes for rescue as the sun coloured the sky red and orange on the fourth day. He'd be able to stay alive for another day or two if he fell back on water recycling, but eventually he would have to face the unavoidable end.
Lacking anything else to do, he picked up the bottle and started to peel off the flaking paint to busy his hands with something instead of worrying about his impending death. In retrospect, he should have known something about that bottle was off the moment he found it, but he hadn’t listened to that tiny little voice of instinct. It was too late to do anything about it anyway, as the damn thing started glowing and shaking.
John yelped and threw it away as the cork flew off and strange pink smoke begun to spill from the bottle’s neck.
“Fuck!” he cursed and crawled away from the growing cloud, ending up with his back pressed up against one of the trees.
A human form shaped itself from the smoke, turning from pink smoke to flesh and blood, until a grown up man stood over the bottle. He had his arms crossed over his bare chest, wore hilariously pink harem pants and frowned down at John with obvious displeasure as soon as he opened his eyes.
And it got only worse as he became aware of where he was.
“Is this a…” he started speaking, and crunched up his face at the ocean. “Oh, no, it is. This is an island? I wound up on an island in the middle of nowhere? Really? I knew my last Master wasn’t happy about the way he had wasted his last wish, but seriously, he can’t expect me to know when he’s just cursing and when he’s wishing in earnest. 'I wish you’d go to hell' is a wish, strictly speaking…”
He threw his hands into the air and started pacing towards the water and back again to the trees, muttering and yelling on and on, and ignored John entirely.
John, after a few minutes of that show, started to really ask himself if he’d gone insane, or if the impact of his Jumper had caused a concussion which made him hallucinate, or… he had no clue what, but this wasn’t real.
“What the hell…” he muttered and tried to close his eyes, count to ten and open them again. The man was still there as he looked up again, and even worse, had returned to John’s shelter, staring down at him as if he expected an answer to an important question.
“Are you even listening to me?”
“Eh… What?” John asked, blinking up at the man.
“Oh, great. An idiot.” The man sounded as if he’d been just punished the worst way possible. “You know, actually that’s kind of fitting. With the Masters I had in the past, I’m surprised you’re not an ape or something. I though it couldn’t get worse, but it obviously has. I was probably stranded here for thousands of years, and now I’ve got an absolute idiot as my new Master. Not that any previous Masters were better in any way, always the same stupid wishes for fame, gold, girls, or camels. Always bigger camels, always faster, better, with bigger bumps…”
“Wow, stop, wait a second,” John said, trying to get a word in. “Master?”
“Master, yes, you are retarded, right? I said all that already,” the man said and swirled a hand dismissively towards him. “Do I speak Chinese or something? You should understand me, I’m pretty sure of that.”
“No… I mean yes.” John shook his head to clear it before he asked again, “Master? You said I’m your new Master. What's that supposed to mean?”
“You rubbed the bottle, you are the Master,” the man said, annoyance over that fact obvious. “You can wish for stuff, I have to do it.”
When John was young, not older than five or six, his dad had told him stories of Sinbad and Aladdin. About the Jinniee and the magic carpet Aladdin with what he had rescued his princess.
“Like…” John looked at the bottle and up at the man again. “A Jinniee?”
The man rolled his eyes. “I’m not a Jinniee, that’s what my sisters are called, and I’ve got a lot of them, alright, and we look nothing alike! I’m a Djinn, it’s spelled differently and sounds differently, and anyway, do I look like a girl? I’m a man, a manly male man.”
He waved his hands towards his body and John looked him up and down. No, he looked absolutely male, not as muscled as John was used from other members of the Military, but he had his charms. John stuffed that part of his brain that was responsible for the last assessment back where it belonged and started smirking, because maybe it was a male, but the pink pants, well.
“Well, your pants don’t exactly scream manly at me,” he drawled, and Djinn’s face turned red.
“Don’t mock the pants,” he snarled. “Your uniform isn’t that hot either. And anyway, I don’t take fashion advice from some random guy with sunburn and awful hair. Did you have a camel chew on it, or something?”
John patted his hair, suddenly aware of how it must look like after the little fire accident and days of sand and sun.
“Hey,” he grumbled. “It’s not that bad.”
“It’s bad enough,” the man answered. “Now: wishes…” he snapped his fingers impatiently. “Wish for women and money already so I can go back into my bottle, I’ve got more important things to do than wait around…”
John tilted his head. “Like what?”
Djinn spluttered for a moment before he composed himself. His mouth opened and closed a few times but no words came out. Eventually he huffed and crossed his arms again, chin held up arrogantly.
“Well, it’s certainly not waiting around until you make up your mind over what to wish up first!”
The answer answered nothing at all.
John scratched the back of his neck, sand rough beneath his fingertips, and contemplated his situation. The sun was already going down at the horizon, and there still was nobody around. He'd obviously gone insane, or had a brain haemorrhage or something, so he was likely to die anyway before any kind of rescue would arrive. He could as well indulge himself a little and enjoy his last moments on earth with whatever his damaged brain could come up with.
“Well, how many wishes do I have? Three?”
“Three,” the man repeated flatly. “No, there’s no limit. Who has the bottle, has the wishes. This three wish thing comes from some rather lazy examples of my profession who usually barely manage to keep their masters alive for longer than that, not all of us are as good in what we do as I am.”
“Alive…” John echoed.
“Yeah, carelessly phrased wishes can kill pretty damn fast,” Djinn said and shrugged. “So let’s go down to business already, what’s it gonna be? Fame? Fortune? Fast Camels? If it’s camels, I’ve got to warn you that I’m allergic to them. I get this rash all over my arms and face, my throats closes up and I start hacking up a lung which isn’t nice…” he trailed off at John’s amused look and huffed. “What do you want?”
Patience obviously wasn’t one of Djinn’s talents.
“What am I supposed to do with a camel on this island? Right now I’d rather have some water,” John said. Somehow it was fun to piss him off.
Djinn rolled his eyes dramatically and produced a large pink umbrella from behind his back which he opened up with an evil smirk on his face.
“Fine,” he said and thunder growled in the semi-dark above. Rain started to fall in large, cool drops, hammering down on the makeshift roof of the shelter and collecting in the parachute’s folds.
John jumped up and started laughing and jumping about like a kid, mouth open and arms spread wide as he moved around and tried to catch as much water as he could. If his rescue had come at that moment, and he was oddly glad it hadn’t, they would have seen an Air Force major circle around a man wearing harem pants who was holding a pink umbrella over his head and scowling disgustedly at the major's antics.
“You know you're not exactly improving my opinion of your intelligence with that kind of behaviour, right?”
“It’s raining,” John yelled and remembered that he had to save the water somehow.
“Really? I hadn't noticed,” Djinn said sarcastically as he watched John spread out whatever he could rig up to catch the water.
“Is it enough now?” Djinn asked eventually.
“I think,” John answered. He was busy with filling the water from one of the parachute’s folds into the empty water bottle he had managed to rescue from the Jumper before.
“Wonderful.” The rain stopped and Djinn made the umbrella vanish just like it had appeared. “Anything else, Master?”
“You can call me John,” John said, smiling at him.
“Great,” Djinn set his mouth in an unhappy line and repeated his previous words. “Do you want anything else? And not that I want to criticise your survival strategies, John, or doubt your obviously very impressive talent for improvisation, but really, as I see it you’re stranded on this island, right?”
John nodded.
“So how about you wish yourself off the island, then?”
John might have just forgotten about that for a while there, damn it.
“I’m totally wasting my powers on you, you know? There should be a rule against fulfilling idiots' wishes.”
“Fine, how about some rescue then,” John snapped.
And not five minutes later a ship appeared at the horizon and a helicopter approached, light bright and blinding as it found John on his tiny island in the middle of nowhere. He hopped up and down in the spot of light and waved his arms around wildly, and as he looked back to where the Djinn had stood before, nobody was there.
So much for hallucinations, he thought, but he didn’t leave the bottle behind.
John somehow managed to take the bottle with him on the helicopter, and, after a few days of infirmary stay and a rundown from Colonel Caldwell about how John had to do better next time, he even brought it home.
He had a tiny house with brown grass in the garden and front for which he never had time. A rusty, classic Mustang in the garage which he should take out for spins more often, but never had the time for either, and a home with a wonderful view of the runway from the kitchen. He liked the airplanes enough to not mind the rattling of the cups in the kitchen shelves, and anyway, it wasn’t as if there were any houses on base which didn't have the same problem. His wife had talked about nothing else when she’d been out to meet the other pilots’ wives; that, and how the others had agreed that it was better to get a divorce now, before there were kids who'd be hurt by it, than later.
He put the bottle on the kitchen counter and sat down on a stool he had pulled over, a beer from the fridge in his hands. The bottle looked almost worse now than it had back on the island. Stripes of the paint were hanging loosely down its sides, and more of the silvery colour below had started to show through.
He had two choices: a) go and report to Doctor Heightmeyer about hallucinating a guy wearing pink harem pants that had some distinct similarities with a girl he faintly remembered from a TV show from the 50s. Or b) scrub a little more of the chipped paint off the bottle’s side, and see what happens.
By the time he was aware again of what he was doing, he had already started to peal a thin, foil-like stripe off of the bottle's neck.
The bottle rattled and fell over, and he stepped back as the smoke appeared right in the middle of his small kitchen. The man swirled around and gave his surroundings a measuring look as soon as he was half way solid.
“Okay, not an island which is an improvement,” he said slowly, and reached out to poke at a pile a dirty plates John may have forgotten to clean up before he’d left for the test flight. In his defence: he hadn’t counted on disappearing for more than a week.
“…but only a little. This is pretty unsanitary, really.”
“Sorry, but I was sort of tied up over the last few days, so washing my dishes was the last of my worries,” John said
“You could wish for a servant to do that,” the Djinn said.
“Thanks, but I’ve got a dishwasher,” John said. The Djinn scowled at him and crossed his arms again, vibrating with impatience.
“Look, now that we’ve rescued you, what do you want next?”
John thought about it for a moment. Part of him still couldn’t believe he wasn’t hallucinating even as he was already trying to come up with all sorts of things to wish for. Like, say, a own plane, or some money to get a house off base. Well, there were a lot of possibilities.
“I don’t know,” John admitted.
“You don’t know,” Djinn said scornfully. “Just wish for money, that’s always popular, or, I don’t know, a woman? Do you have a wife?” He looked at the dirty dishes and at the tiny living room area and kitchen, and missed out on John’s flinch. “Well, no, you have no wife, so that would be a wish, right?”
John still had one, at least until he signed the papers.
“What would you wish for?” John asked and the Djinn squeaked indignantly.
“This isn’t about me,” he answered. He waved a hand towards John. “Just wish for something random already. A better house? This one is really small, you know.”
“No.
“A nice garden, with green grass…”
“No.”
Djinn looked out through the kitchen window. “Are you aware your yard is brown?”
“Yep,” John said.
It went on like that. John let Djinn rattle off suggestions and found himself enjoying it too much to actually wish for anything. He made popcorn after he finished his beer, and started picking a movie to watch. He didn’t know why, but the constant annoyed chatter somehow filled a place in him he hadn’t even been aware was empty.
“I could make you rich.”
John shook his head. “No, I’m fine.”
“What kind of human says no to money?” Djinn snapped, sitting on the couch with a bowl of popcorn in his lap.
“I do,” John said shrugging while he went through his pile of DVDs. “I’ve got enough money, the house belongs to the military, and I like my job, and even if Nancy – that’s my wife, well, almost ex-wife - wants half of anything, I don’t need that much.”
“Humans are all the same,” Djinn said leaning back in the couch. “You're all petty, greedy and selfish.”
“Not all of us.” John picked a random western from the shelf and popped it in before sitting down alongside the Djinn.
“Huh, sure. Who's got several millenia of experience here, you or me?”
Djinn may have only been introduced to popcorn about 10 minutes ago, but he already liked it enough to hog the bowl and devour its content with obvious pleasure. John couldn’t stop grinning as he went through DVD menu and started the movie.
“Well, you, but I still don’t need money.”
Djinn propped up his feet on the small coffee table. And look at that, John thought, the pants came with fitting pointy shoes.
“Women, then?” Djinn suggested.
If John had to be sincere, he didn’t really need that either right now. Besides, he couldn’t date a woman against her will. “Ah, well no…”
“It’s not goats, or… let’s say, something else you want me to…”
“Goats?” John couldn’t say he wanted to know that story. “No, no goats, thank you very much.”
The movie started and two cowboys appeared on screen, riding through a wide open desert landscape.
“So, are there people you don’t like? You could wish me to take care of them,” Djinn said with a full mouth, eyes fixed on the screen.
“You could kill someone for me?”
“No,” Djinn muttered. “I don’t kill, well, I could. But I don’t. I can put them someplace where they get lost for a while, though. I did that for some Viking Queen once, pretty creepy woman by the way, who wanted me to send her husband and his gang of dirt bags on a long, long journey…” he said and frowned. “I think I sent them to a place not that far from here, up north? Anyway, I can do that.”
John pondered for a moment if he'd be able to live with Caldwell getting lost somewhere, just for a while, but although he really hated the man he didn’t hate him enough for that.
“No, nobody,” he said.
“Okay, now you’re really lying,” Djinn said and poked a buttery finger accusingly into John’s shoulder. “You told me about your Colonel Caldwell already. I could make him lose all his hair if you want to…”
John laughed. “I think nature already did that for you.”
“You’re really hard to satisfy,” Djinn sighed and shook his head.
“Maybe,” John shrugged, reaching for the popcorn. “But you said I’d have to formulate carefully right?”
Djinn swatted his hands away from the bowl and rolled his eyes. “At this rate I’m going to be stuck with you for a long time.”
John wasn’t sure he’d mind that.
