Microfiction: 'The Lady in the Lamp'

Ivan was exhausted. After an inexplicably sleepless night, it had been a long day at work, filled with obscure technical problems that had turned his 9 to 5 into a 9 to 8. He was walking home from the train station, feeling half in the real world and half in some photo-realistic hallucination that was only enhanced by his head cold. Then it began to rain. He reached into his backpack. No umbrella. He had forgotten it again.

As the downpour intensified, he looked around for some temporary shelter. A flashing neon sign drew his eye. It said "Vesuvius." Ivan had trod this route from the station to his home many times, but he had never noticed this establishment before. It looked like a bar-restaurant. The windows were tinted so dark as to be impenetrable, but a soft, orange-tinged glow from the glass door seemed inviting. He went in.

The landscape of the interior was strange in only one respect: the round tables, covered with black tablecloths, had what appeared to be flames shooting out of their centers. It took Ivan a few seconds to realize that these were lava lamps filled with glowing, floating, throbbing blobs of orange or blue. Only a few people were sitting at tables or at the bar in the back of the room. "Sit anywhere," a voice said.

He ordered a brandy and a muffin and, inevitably, found himself staring at the lava lamp before him. The brandy made him even sleepier, and the slowly rising and falling orange blobs inside the lamp were hypnotically relaxing. After a while, the largest blob began to morph into a face, a woman's face with large, almond-shaped eyes and sensuous lips. Ivan snorted and said, "Who might you be?" -- to himself, not expecting any answer.

"I am the genie of the lamp," the face said in a muffled, gurgling, but decidedly female voice.

"Oh my god, of course you are!" said Ivan, snickering. "And you're going to grant me three wishes, huh?"

"No," said the blob. "I can't while I'm inside this lamp. You would have to release me."

"How?" Ivan said.

"Break it open?" said he blob.

Ivan wasn't about to do that. He didn't believe in genies or wishes or talking lava lamps. He assumed he was in some kind of hypnagogic state brought on by exhaustion, a head cold and brandy. But there didn't seem to be any harm in playing along with this little fantasy he was having.

"No way. I'm not going to make a mess and cause a scene here. And those three-wishes stories always end badly. You're not real anyway," he said.

The blob laughed, and gurgled, "That's what they all think...at first."

"Well, are there any little magic tricks you can do for me while you're stuck in there?" Ivan asked.

"No, but I can answer questions, if you like," the blob replied. "Questions about the future."

"Like a fortune teller?"

"Yes, like a fortune teller. Except I can tell you nothing about the stock market or lottery numbers or things of that nature."

Ivan giggled. "Then what good are you?"

"I can answer personal questions," said the blob. "You have already thought of one, have you not?"

It was true. Ivan did have a question he wanted answered, something he'd been thinking a lot about lately. "It's hard to put into words," he said. "I want to know if, if I'll ever have a...a moment of clarity."

The blob smiled at this.

"I want to know if a time will come when I'll know that every strange thing that's happened to me means something. That I made the right decisions. That I did the right things, took the right chances -- that it will all, finally, make some weird kind of sense. That life was worth living. That I'm not just a loser stumbling randomly through an absurd world."

"I can answer that if you're ready to hear the answer," said the blob.

"Another brandy, sir?" Interrupted the waiter. Ivan was startled and sat up straight in his chair. As he did so, his foot kicked against a cord under the table. Instantly, the lamp went dark and the blob-face sank into the ooze at the bottom.

"Sir?"

"No, thanks," Ivan said. "Not yet. I don’t think I'm ready yet."