There's No Way This Is Aladdin's Magic Lamp!
Weekends left me with nothing to do. Other people my age were out meeting lovers or heading off somewhere with wives and kids in tow, but for fifteen years now, weekends had been something I spent alone.
My gynophobia had at least let me save money. With no dates to rush off to after work, I'd climbed high enough to wear the title of team leader at the prematurely young age of thirty-one—and with nothing squandered on useless pursuits like dating, I could afford to live in an officetel studio like this one.
The inside of my officetel was crammed with computers and every kind of electronic device. I wasn't an engineering graduate, but given the field the company worked in, and with how chummy I'd gotten with the in-house programmers, at some point tinkering with gadgets had become my hobby. Three personal computers, two Macintoshes, an arsenal of cameras, smartphones, a full home-theater setup—the place was stuffed to the gills.
Looking around, I had to admit this was no place a person lived. It felt more like a place where machines lived, with a human wedged in among them.
"What to do with myself today..."
Muttering to myself, I switched on the television out of pure habit. On screen, celebrities were flitting from one famous restaurant to the next, squealing and fussing over every bite.
Watching them made my stomach growl too. I filled the electric kettle with tap water, boiled it, and made a cup of instant noodles. Then I settled into my chair, cup in hand with the noodles still slightly undercooked, and watched the screen.
"So what do I do now..."
Once the noodles were gone, the same old thought skittered through my head again. I considered going online, but somehow even that felt like too much trouble today. Sitting there, I just turned my head this way and that, surveying the room. What I needed was something to fritter the weekend away on.
Should I finally take apart the MacBook Pro I'd been putting off? Go out and buy a new camera lens? Work through some examples in that C++ book I'd been reading lately? But for some reason, none of it appealed to me.
So I lazed about, my gaze drifting aimlessly around the room, until it snagged on a white box sitting atop the shoe cabinet. It held the Arabian ceramic the president of Factory 1 had pressed on me a few days ago, calling it a gift. I rose from my chair and carried the box into the living room. I couldn't say why. Maybe simple curiosity—or maybe the box had drawn me to it. Either way, I brought it over and opened the lid.
"Ha! What the hell is this?"
The moment I peeled back the wrapping paper and lifted out the contents, incredulous laughter burst out of me. The thing I'd pulled from the box looked exactly like a genie's lamp. A brass lamp, shaped precisely like the one from Aladdin—the Walt Disney cartoon I'd watched as a kid. As long as my forearm, as tall as a coffee mug, with a long protruding spout, a handle at the back, even a little lid perched on top. Every inch of it screamed genie's lamp.
"What is this? Is it supposed to be some Bahraini specialty or something? Haha."
Only then did I understand why the president of Factory 1 had unloaded the thing on me. What would anyone even use it for? Nobody in this country ever needed to light an oil lamp. And as a decoration it was far too shabby—for its size, the finish and every other aspect of it looked unmistakably cheap.
"Hahaha. What happens if I rub it—does a genie pop out?"
Strangling down the laughter rippling through my whole body, I clamped the lamp between my knees and rubbed its side briskly with my right hand.
And then...
And then...
The lamp!!!!
As if anything were going to happen! All my frantic rubbing produced was heat in my palm.
"AHAHAHAHAHAHA!"
In the end I collapsed onto the floor, rolling around and howling with laughter at the sight of myself and at this absurd, comically ridiculous gift. A genie in a lamp. As if. In the twenty-first century, this age of cutting-edge science, a lamp spirit granting three wishes? Come on. It was exactly the brand of foul humor you'd expect from the president of Factory 1: not wanting to keep the thing himself, he'd dressed the junk up as a present and foisted it on a junior from his old school. Utterly in character, that man.
Then, out of nowhere, the events of that day flashed through my mind. And with them came the image of Seonju from that day. Seonju giggling at me the whole drive back from Factory 1. And then—what she'd been wearing returned to me, vivid and sharp.
Normally my gynophobia kept me from ever really looking at women, so I could rarely remember what any of them wore—but maybe because the two of us had been alone in the car that day, it was all burned into memory. Black hot pants. A white blouse, sheer enough that the skin beneath kept flickering through. Pink lingerie under that blouse. And the outline of her breasts, shoving both lace and fabric aside in open provocation. Legs running long and slim below the hot pants. Thighs padded with just the right measure of flesh, and her slender, delicate fingers resting atop them—every image seared in, painfully clear.
If not for my damned phobia, that was a body I'd have wanted to approach at least once. A body I'd have wanted to knead all over, my hands coaxing flames of rapture across her face. But... I had gynophobia. Standing in front of a woman, I couldn't string a sentence together—couldn't even meet her eyes properly. It was a sickness born of a trauma from when I was twenty.
"Fuck!"
I reached out and spread my laptop open on the floor. The lid came up, standby released, and the familiar Windows desktop appeared at once. A few swipes on the touchpad pulled up a folder packed with photos—shots from the company's spring sports day a little while back. The folder was brimming with pictures of the female employees.
That day, having appointed myself the office photographer, I'd raced all over the venue with my camera, snapping away nonstop. Everyone knew the shots were for the company website, so for once the women hadn't minded me—and through the viewfinder, I could ogle women to my heart's content. Which was exactly how I'd captured them. Especially the ones in this folder.
The folder teemed with brazenly voyeuristic shots of the female staff. None of them showed anyone undressed, but there they all were: angles up their legs, slender thighs beneath shorts, breasts bouncing as they ran, cleavage spilling into view when they bent forward, panty lines pressing through their seats.
Out of all of them I singled out one photo and stretched it across the full screen. Seonju, Nam Jihyun of Customer Service, and Oh Eunmi of General Affairs gazed out at me from the monitor, flaunting their long legs.
All three had joined the company this year on contract, and together they monopolized the attention of every man in the office. Birds of a feather, I supposed—the other two were every bit as haughty as Seonju, and then some. Nam Jihyun of Customer Service was the most approachable of the lot, all smiles and easy warmth, but even she kept to her own circle once work was done. The three of them stuck exclusively together, sparing the male staff nothing more than a nod.
"All three of them...!"
I tugged down the waistband of my sweatpants and took out my cock. The thing that always shriveled up miserably in front of real women swelled hard and stiff before these women on my screen. Running my right hand up and down its length, I let the fantasy unspool.
In my fantasy, the three of them pressed their naked bodies against me. Seonju kissed me while her hand closed around my cock and worked it up and down. Jihyun knelt before me, lapping at my nipple with her tongue as both hands stroked my waist. And behind me, Eunmi pressed her chest against my back, grinding the stiff peaks of her breasts into me while one hand slipped between my legs to toy with my balls.
It felt incredible. It was only in my head, but the sensation of the three most lusted-after women in the company clinging to me was pure electricity. Riding that feeling, I quickened the strokes of my fist around my throbbing pillar.
And that was the moment.
At the sudden sound of a man's deep voice, my hand froze mid-stroke and my eyes snapped open.
Was someone inside my home?!
Not even breathing, I scanned the room in every direction. No one.
What the hell?!
A strangled gasp escaped me.
The voice spoke again!
Startled out of my wits, I looked down to find my pillar had already shriveled back to its usual sorry state. I slammed the laptop shut, hauled up my pants, and scrambled to my feet.
"Wh-who's there!"
Terror had my voice trembling.
There was that husky man's voice again, murky beyond all description.
Cracked in places, threaded with something like the scrape of metal, the voice seeped a wickedness that was enough all by itself to make me shake.
Fumbling blindly, I grabbed the nearest metal chopstick, thrust it out before me, and spun in place, round and round, trying to hunt the man down.
A ghost! It's a ghost!
Wasn't metal supposed to reveal where a ghost was? Or was that wrong? Did it have to be bent into an L, like a dowsing rod?
"Wh... where?!"
Frozen solid, I gaped around the entire room, my voice quavering.
At my question, the man laughed with a sound like phlegm rattling in his throat.
"Wh-who are you!"
My voice had turned shrill and hysterical. The man's, meanwhile, was utterly relaxed, as if my state were none of his concern.
"Hah... hah... hah..."
Ragged breaths were tearing out of me now. Damn it... I should've just gone out to buy that camera lens!
"C-come out! Get out here, damn it!!"
The man's voice was pure mockery.
"Come out! I said come out!"
"Wh-what?!"
"Wh... what?!"
Dumbstruck by the man's words, I stared at the lamp lying on the floor.