The Tale of Raj
by Alessandro Baktyar
The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.
― Jorge Luis Borges
When he was a kid his nana told him stories of ghouls, evil jinn who could shape-shift and appear to human eyes as beautiful women. The ghoul would lure you to its cave and consume you while you were still alive. It would eat you from the inside out, leaving only your skin. Every so often, as it was devouring you, it would pause and laugh at you.
Its laughter, his nana told him, is sharper than its teeth.
“Why would men go with the bad jinni?” the twelve-year-old asks his Nana.
“Because men follow a pretty girl anywhere.”
“I wouldn’t,” Raj says.
“Just wait,” his Nana told him, “you just wait.”
He asks his Nana what the bad jinni wants.
“She wants to escape her story.”
#
Tuesday night, Ruby came home with evidence of someone else’s desire on her neck.
She came in a little after eleven, wearing stretch denims, half boots, and a black bomber, not what she would normally wear to her book group meetup. When Raj made a comment about the mark on her neck, she told him that it was a mosquito bite, and when he inquired which book they were reading, she gave him an offhand shrug.
Ruby has sandy brown skin and eyes like obsidian, eyes that swallow light, give nothing back. She will be thirty-two in two months, ten years younger than Raj.
The next afternoon, Raj follows her. He watches her park across the street from the church on Mount Diablo, and cross the street. It is an atypical California evening in July, overcast and gloomy. Clouds wreathed in grey, like so many shrouds, drift to the horizon. He watches Ruby slither into the Motel 6 that is on Mount Diablo. As he stands there weighing his choices, for a brief absurd moment, he thinks he can hear the distant sound of hoofbeats and a woman laughing.
#
The room is on the second floor with a rickety bed that stinks of cat urine. A high stucco ceiling and heavy brocade Venetian drapes, plastic chairs in brown and orange, a wicker basket, a large armoire, and a mirror darkened with age from which a darker version of Ruby stares back at her. Through a small window there is a view of the church and a few umbrellas and raincoats.
Raj, of course, can’t see any of this. He is at the center of his own mind, making the entire scene up, but he can envision her, every gesture, every pout, every smile—he can imagine how wet she is.
Ruby kicks off her Prada pumps. The floor is cold under her feet. She takes off her crêpe sleeveless top and the fashionably distressed jeans Raj got her as a birthday gift. Now, she is in thigh highs, VS briefs, and nothing else. She turns off the light and turns to the window covering her breasts. In the reflected chiaroscuro of the glass she is a lambent silhouette.
Outside, Raj peers closely to see if reality follows imagination, if she is at the window, but he cannot see anything. Ultimately, the truth does not matter. How he feels, how she makes him feel is what counts. His jealousy is a dark light and it emits electrical pulses through the back of his neck, his throat.
The first few years of their life were routine, a bit restrained, but normal. They were happy, or so Raj thought. He was happy. Now, he realizes that they were moving sideways, never forward, shuffling in place with the weight of their differences, their quarrels.
Ruby opens the window. Outside, light rain flounders. At first she can’t feel anything. Then, she feels everything at once, the cold air, the invisible droplets of water tickling her skin. The anticipation of the encounter grows in her like light drifting across the dark room. In the fading light, beyond her image duplicated in glass, she can see Mount Diablo, the Devil’s Mountain. It seems like a brown wrinkled shirt, made out of a coarse fabric.
There is a familiar knock and she rushes to the door. Raj imagines her look of surprised surrender as her lover shoves her violently inside. Then, Raj imagines her with a pillow jammed under her belly, her magnificent behind high in the air, waiting.
#
Jinn can appear in the form of shadows or winds. They may appear in sandstorms. The dust storm that blew across Persia for nine days and nine nights carried a hundred jinn who leapt into the desert and started the Plague of Darkness, killing two million people.
Ruby once told him of a lover who had strange eyes and introduced her to coffin-aged French wines stored underground in burial mounds.
This was when you were in college?
It was a thousand years ago, she said.
That night, when Ruby comes home at a little past eleven, Raj is in her room. He is thinking about Goldberg’s daughter, Malizia. She was the first to notice the changes. A woman can always tell. Malizia told Raj that his wife was changing. I sense a darkness in her. When a woman glows like Ruby does there is lust or magic involved, perhaps a bit of both.
Raj did not understand then. He dismissed her words, but now he is not so sure. He came to her room to—
“Raj?”
Ruby’s voice jolts him. She must’ve taken off her boots because he did not hear her approach.
“What’re you doing in my room?”
“I thought—thought you would stay o-out.” His voice barely holds together.
“Out? At night? Where the hell would I stay? Why’re you here?”
Imagine her room.
Tabriz and Esfahan rugs strewn across intricate mosaic floors. A wardrobe of linen pant suits and dresses studded with precious stones—the latter is her work uniform, the former when she entertains. Koranic brass urns filled with steaming liquids, an enameled Islamic glass vase, a Roman-style bathtub, a marble bath scraper, and a gold comb. There is a specific weight to the objects in the room. Jars filled with potions. Stoppered cruets of every shape placed everywhere. An ancient papier-mâché Venetian mask embroidered with gold. A bisque porcelain doll of the King of Girgenti, a little prince doll sticking his tongue out. A Pulcinella figurine.
Raj knows Ruby names her figurines and her dolls. There is a photograph of her parents on the bedside table so if the door is ajar it’s the first thing Raj sees walking by. But he knows nothing of her parents. He has never met them. She does not speak of them. Ruby is from a village in Kurdistan, but claims her heritage goes back to the rulers of Benevento, the capital of a Lombard duchy in Northern Italy. Her ancestors, although formally converted to Catholicism, worshiped a golden viper with two heads. Once, when drunk, Ruby claimed to have ties to Isis—the goddess, not ISIS, the terror group.
He offers to bring her wine.
She nods, still furious.
He finds a vintage Sicilian Inferno she likes, taking his time uncorking, and bringing it back. Give her time to cool down. She is calmer when he comes back. She takes a sip. “Sorry, I yelled, but you know how I feel about my privacy.”
He apologizes, promises to ask permission.
He assesses her jaw. It seems raw. Contact from her lover’s stubble, no doubt.
Her robe is open at the front. His eyes dart there in helpless little glances. He glimpses the love bite on her neck and he sees it. It is the shape of a crescent moon.
A memory drags itself into focus:
He remembers what his Nana told him about the powerful magic of the moon.
The waning and waxing crescent moons are veils between life and death. Sometimes they appear on a person possessed by jinn, like a seal of fate, a prophecy of things to come.
Raj is cold all through, like something has eaten through his flesh and has left a gaping void.
Did she say something?
“What?”
“You’re not listening.” She turns away and begins brushing her hair.
“I was. I can—”
“I want to go to bed,” she says.
Jinn (plural of jinni) exist in a subterranean connection between everything, a stratum of space-time we cannot perceive. Jinn may take human form and exist among us but only as long as they traverse the threshold between the two dimensions during the second phase of the moon.
Raj walks down the stairs with trembling legs. He pulls out his cell, and types:
< You were right >
< About? >
After a few seconds Ruby responds. < She is cheating on you? >
< Come. Please? >
< It’s late >
< I need to apologize. Properly > He adds an emoji. Then, another with hearts.
He steps in the yard and looks up. Ruby’s lights are off. The crescent moon is a sharpened sickle right outside her window as if its pale light is for Ruby alone. He walks back into the living room and flicks the light switch. The room is blanched with the suffused glow of the artificial light. Malizia is already there, wearing a Jonquil yellow dress that gives the impression of nakedness. She is arranged across the sofa, holding four red roses.
When he walks in she comes to life with a soft groan.
“Who gave you the flowers,” he says.
Luscious lips smile.
Malizia has pale skin and red hair like the nymphs of the Frank Bernard Dicksee painting, and like the models in the painting she seems eternally startled.
“I can’t be here,” she says.
“My wife’s lights are off.”
“I don’t care about your wife.”
“You look older tonight.”
“Gee, thanks Raj.”
“I meant it as a compliment.”
First time Raj saw Malizia was at the Goldbergs’ Halloween party. She appeared suddenly in his vision as though someone had robbed a magic lamp. She was wearing a white dress, white gloves, and white makeup, and beneath the dress, all subtle curves and shifting outlines.
“Colombina?” he ventured. “You’re a character from the commedia dell'arte?”
“And who may you be?” she said.
“I am Raj Ravi.”
“You came as yourself?” She giggled. “Handsome architect door neighbor? How original.”
She might’ve meant it as a putdown but all Raj heard was handsome.
“Isn’t it past your bedtime?”
“Be a dear and get me a GT? Dr. Goldberg and his wife don’t let me drink.”
"You don’t call them Mom and Dad?”
She gave him a Gen Z roll of the eyes. “They don’t even see me.”
They talked in a quiet corner of the Goldberg’s garden for an hour. He remembers little of the conversation but he remembers her lips. They were the color of mango. He remembers the color of her eyes, and how they seemed to alter with whatever thought she was having, beechwood grey for frivolities, black coral for somber reflections. This was the closest he had come to falling in love.
This was last year when she was almost eighteen. She is nineteen now. Legal. Old enough, but still half his age.
Raj has always had transgressive thoughts that have translated into obsessive actions. When he was a kid growing up in Madras (now Chennai) he used to pinch his mom’s friends. He stopped when he turned thirteen and a vestige of a moustache began to sprout on his upper lip. Whatever Malizia gives him it quenches that peculiar longing he has, the craving to dabble outside the common bounds of human sexual normalcy. The amazing thing is that she enables him to do that, be naughty and wicked, without ever actually doing anything.
The upper part of her young tits are showing, dusted with freckles. She smells like fresh-baked cookies.
“What are you gaping at?” she says.
He can imagine every nook and cranny of her curves. He can feel her, every snow-white inch of her, even if he has never touched her. They have sexted, but never kissed.
Her eyes seem turquoise in this light, shimmering and deep like the Mediterranean. The eyes are staring at him now. She once told him that when she touches herself she bites her lower lip until she draws blood, until she can feel everything at once, the inner desperation that gnaws at her, the ennui, the hell of everyday things.
“I want you,” he says.
“You had your chance. You blew it.”
“Why’re you here then?”
“You sounded desperate,” she says.
Under her thin dress her mound is a dark rose.
“Listen—”
"I can’t be here,” she says. “Dr. Goldberg will be home soon.”
“Have you ever called him Dad?” Raj is genuinely curious.
“He thinks you’re a bore.”
Soft around the edges, always smiling, Dr. Goldberg has the false humility Raj associates with politicians and used car salesmen. Raj didn’t like him the instant he met him, liked him less after Dr. Goldberg examined him, poking a needle in Raj’s gums and spewing out numbers like incantations, four-three-seven....six-six-three...
That was Raj’s first encounter with a periodontist and hopefully his last.
Malizia says, “You could leave her, you know. Is there a prenup?”
“I am...” he begins. “I am not sure...” He doesn’t know how to finish the sentence, how to tell her that he does not want to be alone.
"You simp too much. Women can smell your weakness.”
“That’s not it.” Raj takes a deep breath. “I mean, there’s more. She is different. She is not the person I married.”
“People change.”
Raj shakes his head. “I think she is....possessed.”
"I thought you didn’t believe in superstitions.”
“Forget what I said. Forget that night. I was a fool. I said foolish—”
“You did.”
“Let’s start over. I want to be with you. I want to kiss—”
She interrupts. “No,” but she says it in a tone that is detached from the meaning of the word.
“Malizia.”
“Stop.” She takes a quick breath, thrusts her chest forward. He can see her breast rising in almost spasmodic breathing.
Denial and Reward. It is a technique in architecture. Present users with a partial view of their target, then conceal it. Heighten the impact of whatever delicacy lies beyond. Show them a glimpse of the aquamarine pool glimpsed through cypress trees on their way up to the mansion. Then, as soon as it appears, the pool is gone, only to be revealed later.
“Come closer,” he begs.
“You want to use me to take revenge on her.” She begins to turn.
“Wait.”
“You had your chance.” She swings around.
Bloody tease.
Raj’s mind fills with jealousy, with rage, with disgust, and lust. He is in a lovely, wretched state. He trembles with warmth.
They went out only once. That is the night Raj blew it. They had dinner at a decrepit trattoria in Berkeley. Malizia insisted on sitting at a table near the exit. She sat with her back to the wall, slightly belligerent. Bored already, or hungry. Perhaps both.
“No one knows us here.”
“Okay Dad.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“What should I call you then?”
“Raj is fine.”
That night she wore a black blazer over a short denim skirt—sexy and stern at the same time. “I’ll tell you a thousand stories,” she said.
“Like Scheherazade?”
“She was a jinni. Scheherazade, I mean. Only jinn know the secret of storytelling.”
“Which is?”
“What evokes our affection for a story is neither the plot nor the characters,” she explained, “but a single defining moment, when you, the reader, become the story, when you’re bound to it, trapped inside of the story.”
“Trapped? Are you serious?”
“You’re mocking me." Her face did something that made him realize he had misspoken. “Listen, I meant—”
"I need depth. Your culture. Your heritage. I thought you were different. You knew commedia dell’arte. That impressed me. Intelligence impresses me. Stories impress me. Your success? Your fancy car? Is that why you think I’m here?”
He offered to order her wine. “The waiters, here. They will not card you. You can order anything you want.”
“Trying to get me drunk? You are a cliché.”
She had him order a fritto misto for her, but when it arrived, she did not touch it. Said she was not hungry.
“Can I—”
“I don’t want dessert.”
His fantasies had involved her in a hotel robe, naked underneath, bringing him coffee in bed, but now he would go home alone, and spend the three-day weekend in front of the TV waiting for Ruby to come back from her business trip.
He tried honesty. “I am an asshole. I was nervous and I misspoke. What could I possibly do to make it—?”
“Just take me home, Dad.” Loud enough for the adjacent tables to hear, but no heads turned.
#
He is in his house watching her sashay away, then with the sleight of hand only dreams and movies can achieve, he is on a deserted beach, sampling a pastry—quite yummy actually, not salty but not sweet either. It’s crispy on the outside, honeycombed with thin lines of what could be dark feces. Inside, it is filled with cream and tiny specks of fruit. The fruits are crunchy. They explode on his tongue like fireworks releasing exotic reds and blues in his brain. Beneath the fruity crunchiness the taste of fecal matter is distinctly robust but the Mr. Raj in the dream is not bothered by the taste. He seems to be actually enjoying it.
He opens his eyes. He is on the sofa. He must have fallen asleep. He is in that cloudy place between dreaming and waking where he is vaguely aware of the possibility that he is not yet fully awake. He remembers a song from his childhood and a large knife. His memory is fragmented, made up of pieces that do not quite fit together. Ruby in his dream captures a porcupine and brushes her hair with its coat of sharp quills before swallowing it whole. The Ruby in this world would never eat a porcupine. She is vegan. Thinking is like negotiating a maze-like labyrinth that twists on itself and goes nowhere. He hears a sound he cannot place and opens his eyes. There is that sound again and he can tell it comes from upstairs. It is a muted thud followed by a muffled voice or voices. He stands, feeling the knife in his hand.
Why is he holding a bloody knife?
He rushes to his wife’s room. There is a rotten smell like incense after it has burned, cloyingly sweet. There is something in the corner. He fixes his gaze on it—a blanket thrown over something. Could be an animal or simply a large box.
He takes a step forward, overcoming the weariness and exhaustion that tugs at him like a newer, stronger kind of gravity. The ground is uncertain under his feet as he lifts the blanket, and registers Ruby's unseeing eyes. Things duplicate themselves in his mind. But they become sketchy, unreliable. Now there are two corpses, and one is speaking to him.
“Ruby never loved you the way I could.”
“Malizia?”
“I can save you.” There is something in her gaze, a flicker of mischief, familiar. “You’re not made for prison, Raj.”
“I—I did—what...?”
“Let me save you.”
Raj wants to say no, but something in him has already surrendered.
Malizia’s lips move, instructing him to accept.
“Accept?”
“Accept my story.” The lips hold the promise of a smile.
“Yes, yes.” Raj can feel love enfolding him like a web. “I do.”
The smile blossoms.
“Did I...?” Raj begins. “Did I stab...?”
“You did what needed to be done.” The corpse is the most repulsive thing Raj has ever seen, yet he is madly in love with it. He watches a centipede crawl into an eye socket. The corpse’s lips are two perfectly hinged petals that open and close, whipping words: “Now you’re bound to the story Raj. In a world hidden just beneath this one.”
He wants to move but he is stuck. The air is thick and sugary. Something gluey is wrapping itself around him in a way similar to an octopus tentacle. The phase of frenzy dissipates and transforms itself into fear, pure and awesome. He has never been this frightened in his life, this lost. He closes his eyes, and remembers the courtyard of his childhood, steam coming off a pool of water at its center, fist-sized flying cockroaches hovering above, a silver cobweb in the background, a spider with black eyes at its center, radiant, angelic, waiting for him. She has been waiting forever. He needs to get hold of his thoughts, anchor himself to something, anything, but all his mind conjures up is Malizia’s loathsomely seductive eyes.
Now you’re bound to the story Raj, she said. In a world hidden just beneath this one.
He crosses his hands across his belly like a pregnant woman and vomits, mostly on himself.
#
He wakes up in bed, next to Ruby’s bloody corpse.
His joints creak as he descends the stairs. The smell of topsoil from his backyard is everywhere. No wonder he dreamt of eating shit. He closes the door to his backyard and turns toward the kitchen. He is so thirsty. Ruby’s phone is on the table at the center of the room. He picks it up, and enters her four-digit code, expecting her to have changed it, but the home screen appears and Raj dives into her photos. He remembers seeing nudes. He remembers taking the knife after he saw pictures of his wife, naked in the arms of another man. There are two dozen or more new pictures. No nudes. Did he dream all of that?
Another memory drags itself into his consciousness: Malizia telling him that he is bound to the story. In a world hidden just beneath this one.
He thinks he understands what has happened. He feels a sharp pain, quick and precise, like a knife blade piercing his back.
He needs to speak to the Goldbergs, to alert them.
He heads out feeling oddly slack-muscled, like an invertebrate. He wants to move faster but he is too numb. The doctor and his wife are already awake, cooking something in their kitchen with the large windows, watching him approach. He waves. He mumbles. He points at the door.
A minute passes and they open the front door. They stand there, gawking at him.
He manages, “Malizia.” He can’t think of anything else to say.
“Raj?” Dr. Goldberg has the look he reserves for patients unsure of bone grafting. It is a comforting look, the look of a man who knows what is good for you. “Take a breath.”
“Your daughter,” Raj says. “She is. She—”
“Raj, are you okay?”
The inside of their house smells of dead sheep.
“She can be saved by recitation from the Quran. You need a pure person to command the King of the Jinn to—to leave her. Seeking refuge with Allah—”
“Is this a joke?” This is Ms. Goldberg.
Dr. Goldberg says nothing but his smile is beginning to lose its luster.
“I said your daughter—she is not who... L-listen.” He is trying to keep his voice steady, keep it from trembling.
“What is this nonsense?” Ms. Goldberg says.
“Raj,” Dr. Goldberg says, “come in. I have—”
Inside the house a grandfather clock ticks and tocks.
“L-list. Nor...” Raj knows what he wants to say but the words of the English language, of any language for that matter, are abandoning him. He knows the words are still there but the paths leading to them are being erased.
“Enough.” Mrs. Goldberg pivots and retreats back into the house.
“Jinn,” Raj manages, “Your da-daughter—”
The doctor interrupts, telling him, but Raj needs to hear it again. So he asks Dr. Goldberg to repeat, gesturing to make him comprehend because by now Raj has lost language.
“I said,” the doctor now speaking slowly, enunciating every syllable, “We don’t have kids Raj. Our daughter passed away when she was ten.”
Raj stands there gaping at him, listening to a Blue Jay making a ruckus somewhere in the driveway he shares with the Goldbergs. He turns toward the bird and sees, instead, a man, who looks just like him at his doorway. Then he sees Ruby open the door and kiss the man who looks like him. He watches the two enter the house.”
After a few seconds Mrs. Goldberg’s voice reaches him from the kitchen. “Honey, who are you talking to?”
Dr. Goldberg looks at Raj, then past him—through him is a better word. “I thought there was someone here, but I cannot see anyone.” He shuts the door as Raj tries to prevent it but he cannot. He has no arms. There is no substance to him. Raj disappears, layer after layer, limb after limb, until only memory remains, suspended in emptiness. Then, Malizia’s laughing voice comes from inside of him: Once upon a time...
Alessandro Baktyar was born in the Middle East but is mostly an artifact of Italy, and grew up between cultures, before eventually settling in California. Along the way they held an eclectic assortment of jobs—including night manager at a seedy hotel in Rome, photographer, dishwasher, and antiques salesman—experiences that continue to inform their fiction. Alessandro studied comparative literature as an undergraduate in Rome and later pursued fiction at the San Francisco Writers' Workshop.