The Laptop
Jerrick
scrubbed his hands over his slick scalp then over his face. He looked at the glowing screen of the
laptop, the spreadsheet with its neat rows and columns. Numbers.
Jerrick knew numbers. Numbers were
his livelihood and his love, but if he didn’t fix this…this huge screw-up, they wouldn’t be for much
longer.
This is what he
got for buying a second-hand laptop.
This is what he got for thinking for one second he was smarter than a
djinn. Tricky bastard, he thought.
Now, he understood
the look in that girl’s eye, that skinny white girl who came charging into
Happy Pawn, babbling about a microwave and wriggling anchovies. He’d eavesdropped on that conversation enough
to decide the girl was half out of her mind.
He knew better now, just like he knew that if he went back and
complained to the old man that there was something not right with his laptop,
the old man would give him the same speech.
Besides, he’d taken his chances on other purchases that had turned out
to be not so great, although a different kind of not so great. The old man stuck to his policies: no
returns, no refunds. You buy it; it’s
yours.
The calculator was
his first purchase. The plus sign was
broken. Jerrick didn’t have the skills
to repair it, and it would’ve been almost cheaper to just buy a new one rather
than pay someone to fix it. He worked
around it by subtracting negatives.
Annoying, but it worked.
The laptop…that
was a completely other type of
broken.
Ctrl+Shift+G. A simple
typo was all it was. Jerrick intended to
use his shortcut for inserting the clip art of the company logo, but hit “G” instead of “F.” He couldn’t even remember what he’d been
working on when the smoke spewed from the innards of the laptop. He remembered thinking the thing was melting
itself and all his data, and then suddenly he was pushing up from his desk
chair, staggering back as the smoke coalesced into a heavily muscled, bluish
man with small golden horns and a long black ponytail. The man stretched out his arms and tipped his
head to Jerrick.
“How may I be of
service?”
A simple question
really, and one that Jerrick had answered in various ways. The first was to ask for infinite
wishes. The djinn had reassured Jerrick
that there was no need for this wish.
“As long as you hold the vessel,” the djinn pointed at the laptop, “I am
yours to command.”
Jerrick scrolled
down on the spreadsheet, seeing red, red, red.
He fallen into the trap, hadn’t he?
He watched those damn Wishmaster
movies. He’d read “The Monkey’s
Paw.” He knew there would be a catch,
but he also assumed he could be smarter.
He could be careful.
Now, his superior’s
secretary was dead, and he owed his accounting firm 2.6 million dollars. He’d considered going to the CEO, trying to
explain where the money went and promising to pay it back, but Jerrick knew he
could work overtime every day for the rest of his life and not pay off that
debt. Not at his salary.
It wouldn’t have
been so bad if he’d realized where the money came from before he’d spent so
much of it. He hadn’t expected the djinn
to be able to transfer money from one bank account to another. What had he been expecting? That some long-lost rich relative would die
and leave him a boatload of money? Sort
of. Okay, yes. But that didn’t happen. And then there was Leisha.
All Jerrick wanted
was for her to notice him, to notice him as a woman notices a man and not just
someone she saw every day at the office and spoke to because it was polite and
expected. What she’d become…Jerrick blinked
back tears as he remembered those first few nights together. Those nights turned into weekends, and then
suddenly Leisha wouldn’t leave. She
didn’t want Jerrick to leave, not even to go to work. He had taken a few vacation days, a sort of
dating honeymoon, and by the end of it, his entire body hurt from bites,
bruises, and overuse.
Jerrick wiped away
the tear that slipped down his cheek.
Until he made his stupid wish, she had been a lovely woman. Now, she was six feet under, after having
thrown herself off the top of his condo building.
Jerrick knew
better than to try to fix dead. He
couldn’t take back what happened to Leisha, and he would bear that mark on his
soul for the rest of his life. Which
wouldn’t be much longer if he didn’t figure out what to do about the missing
money. He couldn’t hide that much
longer, and he didn’t think he’d survive long in a federal penitentiary.
He’d already tried
bargaining with the djinn. “Put the
money back!” He screamed that sentence
again and again, but what was spent could not be unspent. Besides, didn’t his mother love her new
house? She deserved it, after raising
five kids on her own. Even so, Jerrick
had proven, once again, that you can’t get something for nothing.
He ran his damp
fingers over the keys of the laptop.
With a deep frown on his face, he typed Ctrl+Shift+G. The scent of the inferno filled his
nostrils. The smoke stung his eyes for a
moment before it swirled into a column and produced the djinn.
“How may I be of
service?” it asked.
“I don’t
know.” Jerrick looked into its strange
black-on-black eyes. “How do I fix
this?” He gestured at the screen then
spread his arms wide.
“It is not my
place to advise, only to grant what your heart desires.”
“Yeah, and how
many lives have you ruined granting wishes?”
The djinn tilted
its head in consideration. “None. No life is beyond repair.”
Jerrick laughed
bitterly at that. “Right. I brought all this on myself. I suppose you’re going to tell me that you
have no control over how the wishes are granted. Like there’s some sick, twisted god in
control of it all, and you’re just the messenger.” When the djinn gave no reply, Jerrick squared
his shoulders. “Well, you can tell whoever
is in charge that my heart’s desire if for someone to fix this! Fix the money. Fix Leisha!”
Jerrick’s face crumpled, and he pressed his hands to his eyes. “She didn’t have to die.”
“No, she didn’t,”
the djinn said. “Very well.”
****
Jerrick
jerked. The movement dragged his
steering wheel sharply to the left and sent his car swerving into oncoming
traffic. Belching curses, he yanked hard
the other direction, overcorrecting, but managing to get the car going straight
and in the proper lane.
How…what? He couldn’t think. Hadn’t he just been in his empty living room,
arguing with a djinn? He wasn’t
anymore. From the looks of things, he
was on the expressway, somewhere between the exit for work and the exit for
home.
He let out a
breath, eased back into the seat.
Something dark in the passenger seat caught his attention, and he
glanced that way. Then, he took a longer
look. There it was: the laptop. It sat there, the receipt taped to the
case. But that meant…that meant it was
August, three months before he’d been sitting in his condo and demanding the
djinn make things right.
Well, things are right now, Jerrick
thought. I can’t return it, but I won’t use it.
I won’t even turn it on.
“Yeah,” he said aloud. He nodded
in agreement with himself. He took the
exit for home with a renewed sense of hope.
He drove past the corner gas station, the old falling down houses. Sure, he’d be back in his crappy apartment in
one of the worst parts of town, but he would have his old life back. “Yeah, you sneaky sonofabitch. Won’t get me this time.” He grinned down at the laptop, and the laptop
was the last thing he saw.
****
When the cops
interviewed Muriel Shipp, she told them it was the oddest thing. She hadn’t heard a whistle blow. The lights hadn’t flashed, and the guardrails
hadn’t come down. But sure as there was
wreckage all over her lawn, the train had blown through and smashed that poor
man and his car to nothing.
Long after
everyone – police, media, nosy neighbors – had gone, Muriel went out into the
yard. There was debris everywhere, and
she wondered who she was going to get to come clean up the mess. Couldn’t count on her no-good grandkids to do
it. Well, she was old, but she could do
a few things. She went around with a
garbage bag, praying to God that she didn’t find any parts of the man. She was pretty sure the police had gotten all
they could of him. What a way to go.
Muriel was at the
edge of the yard when her foot rapped against something. Begrudging her hip, she bent down and picked
up a flat, black object. She lifted a
pair of half-moon readers to peer at it.
Why, it was one of those computer things. Muriel knew this one must have come from the
man’s car, but there wasn’t a scratch on it.
She had no use for it, but the things were worth a pretty penny.
Muriel made her
way back inside her house and slipped the laptop into a plastic grocery
bag. She’d take the bus into the city
tomorrow. She knew just the place to
take it to get the best price with no questions asked.
