Genie, Just What the Hell Are You?
"Ahhh!"
Back home, I pulled a can of beer out of the fridge and chugged it down in one long pull, and a groan of pure satisfaction escaped me before I could help it.
There was no doubt about it now—Miss Eunmi had become my slave, completely and utterly! Until just days ago, she was the woman who'd mocked me as gay and treated me like something scraped off her shoe, the woman who basked in every man's attention at the office yet never let a single one of them get close, the woman half the company threw themselves at, each man scheming to be the one who finally got her into bed. And now that very woman obeyed my every word, panting and begging for my cock. A slave to my flesh, through and through!
Gulp, gulp, gulp! The beer slid down my throat all on its own.
"Kuk. Congratulations. Only two left now."
"That's right, Genie—this IS something to celebrate! Thank you! It's all thanks to you!"
"At first, with all your yammering about scholar's virtue this and gentleman's honor that, I feared I'd drawn myself some stiff-necked old pedant for a master… but you're coming along beautifully. Kukuku…"
"Heh heh. That's right. My noble scholar's spirit."
"So how do you intend to use the third wish? It's about time we started talking about it, wouldn't you say?"
Right—come to think of it, the Genie granted exactly three wishes. No more, no less. I fished another can out of the fridge and dropped into the chair at my desk.
"At least put some food in you while you drink."
"Heh, what's this? Looking after my health now? Don't bother. If a few cans of beer were enough to get me drunk or wreck my stomach, I'd never have survived as a salesman in the first place."
"Is that so? Kukuku… If I had a body of my own, I'd join you in a toast… but as you can plainly see, I'm a being without form, so…"
Which reminded me—I hardly knew a thing about the Genie. All he ever did was rattle on inside my head, meddling, needling, and sneering, so even holding a conversation with him felt like a chore. I'd never once sat down and really talked to him.
A being that lived inside my skull and saw straight through my every thought. And yet what I actually knew about him amounted to almost nothing: that he granted three wishes. That he dwelled in my mind, where no one else could ever perceive him. That he was deeply cynical and delighted in mocking people. That was the entire sum of it. Learning more about him now couldn't hurt.
"Hey, Genie."
"What?"
"What exactly are you?"
"In what sense?"
"I mean… how did you come into being? Why do you grant people's wishes? You know, that sort of thing."
"Ahhh~ so NOW you find yourself curious about me?"
"That's because you never shut up rattling around in my head! Come on, talk. What are you? Where did you come from? Why do you grant my wishes?"
"I haven't the faintest idea. I am a being that has existed since long, long ago."
"Even so—someone must have made you. Parents, a creator god, something. Or are you a god yourself?"
"I am no god. I, too, was created. I simply don't know which god made me, that's all. One day I found myself existing inside a lamp, and from the very moment of that existence, the only duty assigned to me was to grant a human being's three wishes."
"Really? Then why three, of all numbers?"
"I told you, I don't know. I've put that very question to myself time and again—tried raising the number, tried lowering it. Nothing works. It is always three. Exactly three."
"So wishing for a thousand wishes is off the table, then?"
"Kukuku… A great many humans have tried that exact trick, believe me. But no. It simply cannot be done. It lies beyond my power. A wish for more wishes does nothing but burn itself up and change nothing. Three wishes. That is the beginning and the end of it."
"Hold on! Did you just say the wish gets BURNED?!"
"I did. Wish for something beyond my power, and it does not come true—you have simply spent a wish for nothing."
"Why are you only telling me this NOW?! If I'd fumbled the wording of a single wish, I could have thrown one away for nothing!"
"You never asked."
God damn it… What an unhelpful bastard…
"Kukuku… And besides, isn't it entertaining? Watching a human flounder after tossing a wish down the drain. There is nothing quite so delicious as watching some greedy fool squander a wish. They are all identical, you know. First comes the shock, then the rage. They fly at me frothing, swearing they'll kill me—as if anything they did could change a thing. Kukukuku… And then, at last, they grovel and claw at my feet, begging and pleading for one more chance, just one more. The ones who waste their FINAL wish that way? Oh, those make the finest show of all. Kukukukuku…"
"You sick bastard… So what are you, then? A demon?"
"Not a demon. But no angel, either. You know this as well as anyone—the world is far too tangled a place for such tidy binaries. Call me… a being that observes human desire."
"Desire? Huh. Now that I think of it, you ARE always going on about desire."
"Yes. Desire. In the end, humans are creatures of desire. You all hunger after remarkably similar things. The fascinating part is how endlessly inventive you become in pursuit of them. Watching that unfold—there is no finer entertainment."
"So my desire, then—it's lust?"
"I couldn't point at it and declare, 'lust, precisely that'… though if you pressed me for a simple answer, I suppose I might. Your desire is, how shall I put it… more of a braid. Trauma and wounds, longing, a twisted imagination, fear… a desire spun from all of them tangled together."
"You talk about desire like it's the only thing in the world, but I honestly don't know what mine even is. I've got gynophobia, sure… but curing it doesn't feel like my deepest desire, somehow…"
"Kukuku… Stay with me long enough, and won't you come to see the true shape of your desire?"
"Hey, just tell me yourself!"
"No. I find I rather enjoy leaving you to it. Kukuku…"
"Damn it… Fine. Then what about the ones who came before me? What happened to them?"
"How should I know? Once the three wishes are granted, I return to the lamp and fall into a deep sleep. I simply slumber inside it until someone rubs the lamp and wakes me again."
"So if you went back into the lamp and I rubbed it again, you'd come out?"
"No. A pact with a master is made only once. Rub the lamp until your hands bleed—I will not appear."
"Then what if I smashed the lamp? Or hid it somewhere for the rest of my life? Would you just go on sleeping in there forever?"
"Try it, if you can. The lamp is eternal. No one can destroy it, and no one can own it forever. Hide it where you will, however you will—one day it will simply slip away, smooth as smoke. And no matter how hard you try, the lamp will not break. Do not forget: I have walked alongside your kind through the whole of your history."
"Then who were your masters, all this time? Anyone I'd have heard of?"
"Every manner of human has possessed me. Some of them you would know very well indeed. Do not flatter yourself that your history was made by human hands alone. Kukukuku…"
"All right, then. One more question. About Miss Eunmi—"
"That woman? She has become your slave, utterly and completely."
"That much I know. So you CAN manipulate a person's mind, then? If I wished for the power to reach into someone's psyche—if I asked for a hypnosis that would work on absolutely anyone—would that be granted too?"
"……That is a rather complicated thing to explain…… Hmmmm…"
The Genie, who normally never stopped talking, suddenly turned miserly with his words and turned the question over for a long while.
"…To put it briefly: impossible. I am not a god. Abstract, sweeping wishes of that sort accomplish nothing at all. However… viewed through the lens of your wishes… your first request to me was that three women—Oh Eunmi, Nam Jihyun, and Kim Seonju—be made to moan beneath your crotch."
That's right. Those three women… And now Miss Eunmi had become precisely that—a woman moaning between my legs.
"Kukuku… Yes. Where that wish is concerned, it would be more accurate to say Miss Eunmi's heart was not manipulated, but accelerated. And fused with your second wish—the one for virility—it pushed her transformation along that much faster."
I chewed over the Genie's words, letting them sink in slowly.
So that was the shape of it.
First: directly manipulating a person's mind was impossible, even by wish.
Second: as part of the process of granting a wish, a person's psyche could be reshaped to some degree along the way.
Third: those alterations could be accelerated to bring the wish to fruition that much sooner.
Fourth: wishes could interact, feeding each other's power.
Little by little, the Genie was coming into focus for me.
…No. Hold on just a damn second!
"Genie! Genie! Then shouldn't my gynophobia be cured by now? That would make bagging those three women so much easier! No—shouldn't it at least be cured where those three women are concerned?!"
"Kukuku… Are you a fool? Then you should have wished for your gynophobia to vanish from the very start, shouldn't you have?"
"By your own logic, my head should be changing too—that's how it ought to work!"
"Kukuku… A fool, through and through… Have you truly not noticed it yourself?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Doesn't it strike you as odd? You carry an aversion to the opposite sex, yet you feel nothing of the sort around Miss Oh Eunmi. And it doesn't end there, does it? Ever since you had your fill of that woman, your confidence around women has been swelling by the day. You find none of this strange?"
…He had a point, now that I thought about it. Compared to the past, my gynophobia had changed so much it could fairly be called a leap and a bound. These days, when it came to women I merely brushed past—a part-timer at the convenience store, a stranger across the subway car—there was almost no revulsion left at all.
"Yes. That is exactly it."
"So my gynophobia is gone, then?"
"No. No, it is not. You are asking the wrong question. The question is not whether your gynophobia has disappeared—it is whether your gynophobia was ever there at all."
"What the hell is that supposed to mean? Are you telling me I never had gynophobia in the first place?! Then what about the doctors' diagnoses? What was I so terrified of, all those years?!"
"It is all, every last bit of it, a matter of your own psyche. Kukuku… You are the one who has been running away into this thing called gynophobia. Look. I watch your heart, always. And so I can see it plainly. You have merely been hiding your trauma behind a handsome, plausible little word: gynophobia."
Hiding it…
"Because when you strip it all away, isn't that the essence? Han. Ga. Yoon."
Han Gayoon… my noona Gayoon… my first love…
The woman I had loved more than anything in this world… and the woman who had left me with a wound just as vast…
"Yes. That is it. You have done nothing but wrap the wound Han Gayoon gave you in a shell called gynophobia."