☑ Wish Granted

The greatest guitar player in the world sat, by long-established habit, atop the tallest pile of smoking rubble in the world. A panting acolyte perhaps nineteen years old climbed up over the edge of the platform on which he sat. It had once been a ping-pong table; now it was a sort of home for a man with a near-supernatural malodor and an extinct cigarette of uncertain provenance dangling from his lip. Nearby were the coolers and storage totes that held the necessities of his life.

“Well, well, well,” said the greatest guitar player in the world, whose name was Jared Everson. “What do we have here.” It wasn’t quite a question.

“Hello,” said the young man. “Are you—”

“The greatest guitar player in the world?” rasped Everson. “I do humbly admit to that distinction. What do you want?” He had a pretty good idea already, though.

“Jared Everson?”

“The very same.”

“Good sir, my name is Adebowale Jebet. I have come to you—”

“To learn to play the guitar? Let me stop you right there: no. I don't do that anymore.”

“But you must! I have heard the music of the guitar.” At this point, he held up a beat-up Discman. Jared could only assume he’d found a cache of batteries somewhere. An angular letter V and an equally angular letter H were dimly visible through the scratched window in the lid of the CD player. Jared noticed a headphone cable dangling from the kid's jacket pocket.

Fuckin’ Van Halen again, thought Jared.

“And now I must make this music, too,” finished Adebowale Jebet.

“Go on, then. Find someone to teach you. Someone who is not me.”

“I have tried. But no one is as good as this Edward Van Halen.”

“That’s because he was a god. Nobody will ever be as good as Eddie again.” His cigarette jiggled precariously but remained in place. “Literally.”

“But you do not understand!” Adebowale began to protest.

“Yes, of course I fucking understand! You think you’re the only adolescent male who’s ever had rock ‘n’ roll burn into his soul? Hell, it’s practically inevitable at your age! It happened to me, obviously. Your life will never be the same, am I right? You will not be complete until you can play ‘Eruption.’”

“Yes! Exactly!”

“Well, first off, ‘Eruption’ ain’t as hard as it sounds, once you know how to tap. I mean, it’s not Greensleeves or anything, and there are a lot of details you have to nail, but there are much harder songs. But, ahhh, fuck.

“Look, I’m getting too old for this shit. And even without my tutelage, a lot of people are getting pretty damn good at the guitar. So sit down. You’re gonna be the first person I tell this whole story to. And maybe you can tell two friends, and they’ll tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and maybe I won’t have to tell it more than once, and then everyone will understand why they’re all fucked.”

Jared took Adebowale’s stunned silence for assent, and began to relate his uncanny tale.

“You know what a genie is? Lives in a bottle, or a lamp, gives you wishes when you let him out? You have that story wherever you’re from?”

“Walt Disney’s Aladdin!” Adebowale nearly fell off the mountain of trash.

“Christ, be careful!!” Jared reached out and steadied him. “So: genies. They're real, which sounds weird just stated flat-out like a fact, but it’s true. But not like that Disney shit, okay? The real ones are fuckin’ mean. At least, the one I found was. Apparently they really hate being imprisoned in Bud Light bottles. Can’t say I blame 'em. I was just a dumb kid from bumfuck nowhere, of course. About your age. Not much of a match for an ancient magical power.”

Adebowale was not sure what he had expected to hear from the greatest guitar player in the world, but a rant about genies was not a possibility that had even crossed his mind. Eventually he gathered up his jaw and asked, “So what happened?”

“I found this bottle. Bud Light, like my dad drank. Except it wasn’t one of his because I found it in this big old house, a mansion by local standards, that they’d demolished in my home town. Which was Grove City, Ohio, also known as Grovetucky to the nearby denizens of the nearest metropolis, Columbus, because of the prevalence of rednecks like myself. The old crank who owned the house had died and it was nearly a year before anyone realized. So anyway, when they found out he’d died, and he didn’t have any next of kin, the county took out everything of value, a lot of really nice antiques apparently, and sold them at auction.”

“What is an ‘antique’?” asked Adebowale.

“It’s something that’s old, like really old, like older than anyone alive. But not broken to shit like most old stuff, as unlikely as that sounds. Good antiques are beautiful. They were made to last. Furniture, jewelry—that sort of thing.

"Anyway, they had started tearing down the house, because it hadn’t been kept up worth shit and was ready to fall down as soon as they nudged it with a bulldozer. I figured maybe the county guys might have missed something of value and convinced some friends to check it out with me. Well, and it was just cool to see a huge house in ruins, man. It was like a movie. The element of danger also admittedly was a factor.”

“And you found this Light Bud?”

“Bud Light. It’s a beer. Was a beer. Was a shitty beer, but a lot of people drank it anyway because it was cheap and it got you drunk… plus the commercials had funny frogs. So, yeah, I found this bottle. All of my friends were giving me shit for even picking it up. My buddy Scott found an honest-to-god half-karat sapphire ring that they’d somehow missed and I come out of the rubble with a Bud Light bottle. You could have found a dozen of them in the ditch in front of the house! But I had my reasons.”

“What reasons?” asked Adebowale eagerly.

“Well, first, I could see it was empty. But it still had the bottle cap on it.” He could see that Adebowale didn’t get it. “It was sealed. But it was empty. A mystery! And it felt heavy, like it had something in it, even though I could see there wasn’t. I even shook it a few times to be sure. And, I don’t know how to explain this, but it kind of got my attention and held on to it.”

“This bottle.”

“Yes. The bottle. Which I proceeded to open using my trusty Swiss Army Knife. In which, it transpired, was imprisoned a genie.”

Adebowale’s eyes widened. “No shit?”

“No shit. But like I said, this wasn’t the funny kind of genie. He did, however, offer me a wish.”

“I thought it was supposed to be three.”

“Maybe that varies genie to genie, or something. I don’t exactly have a Ph.D. in genie-ology and I only ever met the one. But I already knew what I wanted. I’d had the fantasy since I was a kid. If anyone ever offered me one wish, whatever I wanted, no limits, I only wanted one thing.”

Adebowale’s face lit up. “To be the greatest guitar player in the world!”

“Exactly. So that’s what I said. Genie, man, make me the greatest guitar player in the world. And he did.”

“And that is why you will not teach me? Your skill is a magical gift you cannot share?”

“No!” Jared said with sudden agitation. “You’re not paying attention! I told you this wasn’t the nice kind of genie! If you make a wish, and there’s more than one way to interpret what you asked for, that genie was gonna take the angle that fucks you over the most!

He could see Adebowale still didn’t understand. “See, if you ask to be the greatest guitar player in the world, there are two ways a genie can fulfill that wish. First, he can make you a really, really good guitar player. Eddie Van Halen caliber. More than that! All the greats rolled into one, but even better. The other—”

Adebowale twigged. “Oh no. Oh my God.”

“Yeah, you get it now, don’t you. The other way is: he can kill everyone who’s a better guitar player than you already are, however good that happens to be.”

Adebowale stared. “He truly did this monstrous thing?”

“Man, seriously? I dare you to look around this shitworld and ask that question again! I was a piss-poor guitar player at that point. I knew like two chords, not even enough for a proper punk tune. So basically, all the guys I idolized, the greatest rock 'n' roll guitarists of the late twentieth century? There were literally dozens, hundreds even, and Eddie Van Halen was only one of them. Dead, just like that. A lot of jazz and classical greats too—I wasn't as familiar with them.

"But not just them! Almost anyone who knew even a little about playing the guitar was better than my beginner ass. So, dead. There were billions of corpses by the time that little fucker was done.”

“Good God.” Adebowale’s eyes were wide. The world he’d grown up in and his desire to play the guitar had unexpectedly collided in the most bizarre and horrific manner. He leaped at Jared Everson without thinking.

“You said it. —Hey, wait, what the shit?” Adebowale was trying to throw him off the pile, he realized. He would probably break his skull on the way down. So this is the way the world ends, he mused. “Goddamn it, stop! There’s more, and it's kinda important!”

Bringing himself under control with visible effort, Adebowale stared daggers at Jared, who was self-consciously checking his injuries. “Talk.”

“I thought you might have broken my wrist, but it’s probably just sprained.”

“My father played the guitar. Talk.”

“All right, Jesus fuck. I am really and truly sorry about your dad, and everybody else’s dad, including my own, in case you were wondering.” Everson dusted off his jeans. “He couldn’t play guitar, but he died in the aftermath."

“Continue,” prompted Adebowale icily.

“Okay already. So, after this all happened, I was freakin’ out. As if everyone could somehow tell I was the guy who was responsible for all these deaths. But of course they couldn’t, they wouldn’t have been able to even conceive of it! A genie? Really? And I was hardly the only person freakin’ out, right? Everybody was freakin’ out. Because a huge number of people had just dropped dead of no fuckin’ apparent cause.

“I thought seriously about killing myself for quite some time, but for a specific reason I will get to pretty soon, it’s a damn good thing I didn’t.

“See, before long, the people who were left started joining up into tribes for protection from the other people who were joining up into tribes for protection. And then they started settling into routines. People even started having kids again!” He shook his head in disbelief.

“With survival covered, people started trying to make life a little more bearable, which among other things meant art, and music, and some of them found or even made guitars and started playing 'em. They were all worse guitar players than me at first, but they kept trying, and little by little they got to be better at it. Up to a certain point. Right around the time they learned their third chord, every one of them would suddenly drop dead of quote, mysterious causes, unquote.

“But the causes weren’t mysterious to me. That magical motherfucker had fixed it real good. It wasn’t just that he'd made me the greatest guitar player in the world at that one moment. It was for all time to come. So anyone who ever got better than me at playing the guitar was, to put it bluntly, a dead man. Or woman—this genie was an equal-opportunity fucker-over.

“Once I personally witnessed a few people dropping dead from a mild case of pickin’ and grinnin’, I left the tribes for a life of solitude. I couldn’t bear watching it. Eventually I found what seemed to me like the most solitudinous place in the world and climbed up on top of it. And here I sit to this very day. Home sweet home.

“I have no fuckin’ idea how nobody figured out it was the guitars. Or hell, maybe they did. Maybe there are tribes out there with irrational yet completely justified superstitions about practicing the guitar too much.”

“So you’re not really the greatest guitar player in the world. You can’t play ‘Eruption’ either.”

“Fortunately for all mankind," declared Jared Everson, “I am not quite that big of an asshole. After I realized that everyone who learned to play the guitar in even a half-assed manner was doomed, I had no choice but to learn to play better. Give everybody some headroom. So I started studying. It was really hard, too, given that all the guitar teachers were, you know, dead, and YouTube went down with the rest of the Internet, so I had to learn from fuckin' VHS tapes.

"Anyway, I have to say, I’m pretty fucking good now. I have practiced a whole damn lot and most of you bastards are safe. Unless you’re a natural talent, which I can’t help, or maybe if your musical skill came from a genie who wasn’t a total cock. So yeah, I can play ‘Eruption’.” He casually picked up a nearby Strat and demonstrated. "I don’t have an amp, or electricity for that matter, so it sounds like shit, but you recognize it, right? Of course you do. I’m not Eddie, never will be, nobody ever will be again, but I could probably get the occasional gig at a coffee shop playing unplugged covers.”

Adebowale, tired of references he didn't understand, gave him a pointed look.

"Never mind, I’ve clearly been avoiding getting to the point, which is this: I’m closing in on fifty and all the guitar-playing has made my hands stiff. And it’s only going to get worse. I’m not going to be able to keep ahead of everybody forever. Eventually I won’t be able to play very well at all, and meanwhile, everybody else just keeps pluggin’ away, nibbling at their margin of safety without even realizing the narrowness of the precipice they’re dancin' on the edge of.”

"Then we must smash all of the guitars,” Adebowale declared.

"That is an excellent idea that, in hindsight, I wish I had thought of right after the shit hit the fan. But it only postpones the inevitable. Because eventually, sooner than I want but later than I deserve, I’m going to meet my maker and all the guitarists I accidentally murdered by making a rash, stupid wish.

"And then, assuming you have fingers—or really, any body part you could even theoretically rub against a guitar string to make a sound—you will be a better guitar player than the late, great Jared Everson. And then you will die.”

"But that is everyone!” Horror was writ large on Adebowale's face. "You are certain of this?”

"No, of course I’m not certain. This genie didn’t exactly stick around to explain the rules of his diabolical little prank. But it's exactly what a major prick would do, and this genie was obviously a major prick, so Q. E. fucking D.”

Adebowale realized immediately that Jared was right. And just as quickly, he saw what he had to do. With diligence and a little luck, he assured himself, he could set things, if not right exactly, at least righter. But he must start immediately. Who knew how much longer Everson would live? He didn't look so good…

Adebowale found himself on his feet. First, he thought, he would talk to his grandmother.

Jared braced himself. But the young man's mind was far away from Everson's dismal pile of trash and broken dreams.

"Hey, where're you going?” called the greatest guitar player in the world, as Adebowale Jebet, the savior of humanity, began his descent down the world's tallest smoking pile of rubble.

The young man grinned, teeth gleaming. "I am going to set things right.”

Jared's brow furrowed for a moment, then a smile broke like dawn across his face. He admired Adebowale's spirit. Maybe his optimisim was misplaced; maybe not. At least, now, someone knew the truth, and was going to do something about it. Or try to. "Well all right."

And he picked up his favorite guitar and began to play, and sing : a curious tune involving a joker and a thief and their mutual need to find some kind of way out of there.

Not much later, the wind began to howl.