He was just about to enter the shop. He stopped. “Yeah?”
I’m a demon, but I’m not Maxwell’s demon. You feel me?
He shook his head. “Uh-uh.”
Well, okay then, we’ll cover that part later. Do what you need to do, man. Let’s make this happen.
And we did. I was proud of the little guy. He negotiated the transaction without a hitch, and was even given a plastic bag to carry me home in. Technically that should have cost an additional 5p, but the woman behind the counter saw no reason to press the point. She was sorry for Henry, seeing him as someone intrinsically harmless and basically adrift on the currents of life. The same assessment I’d made, essentially, but whereas I wanted to form a parasitic attachment to him in order to exploit that naivety for my own unspeakable ends, she just felt a little motherly. I guess it would be a boring world if we were all the same.
Once we were back at Henry’s place, I encouraged him to take a test drive, as it were. Something small, I said. To make sure it works. Okay, Henry said. He screwed his eyes tight shut and wished for a goldfish. A nanosecond later, there it was, swimming its little heart out. Henry hadn’t wished for a tank or water, but I threw those in anyway – along with some sand and rocks to cover the bottom, a blue LED strip to provide a little atmosphere and a filtration pump shaped like a Spanish galleon. I could have just let the goldfish gasp out its last unavailing breaths on the linoleum – the literal-minded jobsworth gambit, as we call it – but that stuff is for losers. I mean it’s fun up front, in a dopey slapstick kind of way, but it makes for diminishing returns. I wanted Henry to trust me, or at least to trust the process. To feel like he could go for gold.
Meanwhile, a couple of continents away, an Indian textile worker’s bike lost a wheel on a downward stretch. The poor guy face-planted in the road and a car went over him before he could stop. A real mess, I can tell you.
Oblivious of this compelling human drama, Henry gave a little warble of glee. “I’ll call him Goldy!” he said.
You can call him Ivan the fucking Terrible for all I care, I thought. Just keep the wishes coming.
Which he did. As I’d hoped, that first demo, modest as it was, was enough to prime the pump. In short order, Henry wished for a second goldfish, an OLED television, a recliner armchair facing said television, two more goldfish, a DVD collection of the works of Oliver Postgate (Noggin the Nog, The Clangers, Bagpuss, all the greats) and a meal of sausages and chips followed by Ambrosia creamed rice. Oh, and some money. Enough to live on, he said, which I interpreted liberally. He’d been laid off some months before from his job (insert air quotes) cleaning the toilets at the Spires mini-mall, and was as near to destitution as made no difference.
This was still small stuff, to be sure, but small stuff can have big effects if you get the leverage right. A fuse blows in a Cape Town suburb. In the darkness someone trips and screams. A rock shatters a window. Before you know where you are, you’re knee-deep in collateral damage. I’ve done this stuff before, in case that wasn’t clear.
I got to know Henry pretty well, during this time. After all, we were housemates. Living under the same roof, sharing all of life’s hurly-burly in a way that would make an excellent TV sitcom. I learned about his no-good father (abusive, then abominable, then absent), the shit he took from sociopathic schoolmates, his mother’s untimely… I’ll spare you. It was as boring as it sounds. The guy was a punchbag with a face. Good raw material, terrible company. I suffer for my art, is all I’ll say on that score.
But now we were really gathering momentum. You always do, with unlimited wishes. The whole three-and-you’re-done deal was intended to land your wish-maker in a mess of unintended consequences and leave them there. Small potatoes, for a simpler time. Once we got our heads around the fine print in the laws of thermodynamics, we redefined our goals.
Not that Henry was straining at the leash, exactly. Far from it. He needed a lot of nudging and coaxing along the way. So, Henry, I said, about three days in. Tell me something.
“Yes, box?”
This is a big house for just one guy. Have you always lived here by yourself?
“No, my mum used to live here with me.”
Got you. Wow, was it tough on you when she died?
“I missed her lots. I still do. She always looked after me.”
I’m sure.
“I had a dog, too. Her name was Princess.” His eyes went wide. “Oh!” he said. “Oh!”
What?
“I could… I could wish for…”
Anything, man. Anything at all. Do it to it.
It came out all in a rush. “I wish Princess was alive again!”
I would have preferred the mother, frankly, and that was what I was angling for. More energy to play with, because a human timeline is a bigger, more complicated thing. But a dog’s better than nothing. Princess appeared in the middle of the living room, tail going like a hairy metronome set to prestissimo, and bounded into Henry’s lap.
Elsewhere, at the same time and not coincidentally, a sinkhole swallowed a house in Buenos Aires. I’d been meaning to do that for a while. The guy in the house was kind of a secular saint, with a limpidly beautiful, giving soul, and he pissed me the hell off.
Much more importantly, Henry’s wish had opened up the alternate timeline window. I reached back into the past and tweaked a few things – most notably the Ermächtigungsgesetz in the German Reichstag in 1933, which now passed handsomely instead of failing by one vote. Abracadabra! A world war that hadn’t happened now suddenly had. The bad guys lost, but they got in some sick licks before they went down and the ripples didn’t stop for decades. I was on a roll.
Henry may have been slower than treacle on an ice shelf, but he was starting to see at least some of the endless possibilities. If he could have his dog back, he could have some of the other comforts of yesteryear too. He still fought shy of bringing Mummy back from the dead. Maybe he’d caught a re-run of “The Monkey’s Paw” on Thirty-Minute Theatre when he was a kid, and it had left him with a vestigial sense of how badly wrong that transaction might go. But he could and did wish for lost toys, dead pets and the snows of fucking yesteryear. The dead pets in particular were a trial to me. The house was full of dogs, cats, hamsters and budgerigars, some of which had severe toilet-training problems and no respect at all for my mid-gloss finish.
But I endured all this with a philosophical patience. The flipside was mine, and the sky was now the limit. Literally. I filled it up with greenhouse gases, flipping the whole world onto a timeline where they’d discovered renewable energy very late and mostly ignored it. The biosphere was taking a pounding, extreme weather events were happening every other day, and the fun was only just getting started.
At the same time, I advanced the careers of bigots, hate-mongers and rabble-rousers, giving them the platforms they needed to spread their messages in a mainstream context. Rational discourse went out of style, and out of the window. Facts became an irrelevance. Hucksters and charlatans were revered as gods. It was a whole thing.
Maybe I overplayed my hand a little. I thought Henry was too lost in his ever-growing menagerie even to notice the state of the world. But one morning I noticed him looking out of the window with what is sometimes called a corrugated brow. Corrugated cardboard, in Henry’s case.