Better than Batteries

Catching the djinn in the flashlight was his older sister’s idea. 

Clara had joined the Air Force a year before, to load and unload trucks. It was a waste of her talents, is what Mom and Dad said. It was the only thing they agreed on. Clara was smart—smart enough to be in politics, to design spaceships, to catalogue deepsea monsters—but now she was just an airman. No education, no degree. She didn’t even fly. Her home was a warehouse in Qatar, ten kilometers away from a McDonald’s.

Perry didn’t understand it either. Never bothered to think it could be understood. It seemed that, when you reached fourteen, all the people you knew expanded their orbit. Dad moved to a small apartment in the city; Mom moved in with Aunt Linda. They said it was because fires can’t be relit. Then Clara went to San Antonio for boot camp. Perry fluttered around in the middle somewhere like a pigeon feather in a cobweb.

The flashlight was heavy, solid. You could break a door down with it. “It’s a damned good Christmas gift,” Clara had said, “even without the djinn inside.” She leaned down, her breath smelling like bleach and pine, and kissed him on the top of his head. She downed another gin and tonic. She was only nineteen. She waltzed around in her military trousers, an athletic beauty speckled with beige and gray-blue, bouncing between Mom’s and Aunt Linda’s questions about life in the desert, life in uniform, life as government hardware.

The problem with the djinn being in a flashlight was there was no way for the thing to escape, no matter how much Perry rubbed. It just turned on, then off, then on again. The old oil lamps had spouts—at least in the cartoons—that sputtered and squealed like tea kettles, smoke spilling all over the room until a fat guy appeared and reluctantly granted three wishes. But the flashlight only had one possible opening at the base of the handle, which Clara had inexpertly welded together with her squadmates.

“That sucker kept escaping anything we put him in,” Clara said. “Crates, canteens, Airman Nowroski’s old boots—you name it. Flashlight was the thing come closest to a lamp we had. Worked like a charm. But we weren’t gonna take no chances.”

“What if I need to change the batteries?” he asked.

“You won’t. That’s what the djinn’s for, dummeh!”

The djinn was better than batteries. The flashlight lasted all through eighth grade, then all through to the end of high school. When Perry started college, the flashlight was his desk lamp while he studied, his backup in case of power outages, his nightlight. He used it to sneak around campus after curfew, drinking with his friends, climbing into his dorm window. He used it on camping trips, week-long hikes through national parks, evenings spent helping his neighbors track down pets who had escaped out the sliding glass door. He used it to wander the open fields under the stars with close friends, inspecting cow patties for magic mushrooms, popping a few, then cracking a beer, laughing, huddling in the chilled air, staring wide-pupiled at Orion and Ursa Major and the one that looks like a crooked finger.

If Perry was lucky, and focused just right, the circle of light would draw out hidden desires from the faces of those around him. Subtle depths, almost invisible. They floated like reflections in a pool of lemonade, sometimes no stronger than the twitch of an eyebrow or the sharpening of a scowl. It felt invasive to see hearts so plainly. On lonely nights he would shine it on himself, piecing together the inner wants of his own soul through hardened shadows and yellowed whispers.

When he felt truly close to someone, he would share the secret of the djinn in his flashlight. He would retell the stories his sister had told him, about the lizards and scorpions that would invade the warehouse in Qatar, and how sometimes they were actually trouble-making spirits of wind and fire just pretending to be critters for a laugh. And how her squad only ever caught and kept one, no matter how often they tried. And how Clara came home one Christmas and gave it to him. It was the light he used for everything, and it never went out.

The listener would laugh and he would smile, not sure what to feel, his insides eager and weak. Only one person resisted laughing, instead kissing him on the top of his head. Her name was Eyo, tender and calm with a confidently bent nose and a sugar smile. Perry offered to reveal her desires, angling the djinn’s light at her chin. She cupped his hands and they guided the tube together, spotlighting plants and pictures, tablecloths and empty bottles of wine, predicting their fates. That’s the person he built his life with.

Perry and Eyo burned brightly in their early years. They bought a house forty minutes outside of the state capital. They held parties for their friends on the holidays. They got passports and spent one summer driving around Central America in a rental van. They got jobs. They adopted two dogs from a shelter, named them Thelma and Luis, and taught them how to sit and stay. And then things settled, and settled, and stayed a certain way for many years.

In his late thirties, Perry found his magical flashlight in a box marked “misc. stuff.” He was surprised to find it so completely lost among his knicknacks, and even more surprised to realize he hadn’t thought about it in years.

He turned it on. In the mirror, the soft wrinkling of his skin turned hard. Dark brown hairs glowed gray at their roots. There were no desires to read. Perhaps there had never been. Imagination, and nothing else.

He was a different person than he had been ten, or even twenty years before. Responsibilities had piled up. Moods had soured. Worse, Eyo no longer loved him. He was getting divorced, packing up everything he could find, hoping it mattered. Images of his father, slumped shoulders, slinking out the back door in a t-shirt and jeans, flickered in Perry’s memory. He had seen it all before. The fire had gone out. He didn’t understand it then, he didn’t understand it now.

And the flashlight, which had given him so many good memories, and so much peace, just seemed like a flashlight—no brighter than a lit cigarette, less impressive than a SmartPhone. He could shine it as much as he liked, but it couldn’t tell him where to aim, or what he was seeing, or whether he should go in one direction or another. It was useless, like a hammer with nothing to nail, or a pot with nothing to cook. The mystique faded. He saw it for what it had always been: a cheap gift, a simple whatever that his sister had hastily pocketed before her flight home for the holidays. She hadn’t even wrapped it. And why would she? She was just his sister, just a teenager in thick boots. She was never a genius with wasted potential; she was like a million billion other girls her age, eager to escape a deflating family. All she was ever good at was stacking crates and drinking gin.

He clicked the flashlight on and off, on and off, his own damp face glistening sporadically in the strobing darkness. On, off. On, off. The light dimmed, and dimmed, until the object in his hands was nothing more than a metal tube.

“Dammit!” he yelled, launching the flashlight across the room with his full might.

The flashlight clapped against the closet door, dropped like a stone. Glass shattered. It rolled along the carpet in a clumsy arc.

Perry slumped against the wall, wiped the snot from his face with a greasy sleeve. Took a deep breath. “It’ll be okay,” he told himself. Another breath. The air caught in his throat.

He coughed. His vision darkened, flooding with gray-blue smoke.

Across the room, the flashlight sputtered and squealed like a tea kettle.

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Sources:

• Image: Lannie "Merlandese" Neely III