“Marisol,” she said. “Marisol Guzmán.”
“Nice to meet you.” He extended his hand, but didn’t actually try to shake hers. She wondered if she would go right through him. She was standing in a world of stinky chalk talking to a self-loathing genie. After two years alone in a box, that didn’t even seem weird, really.
So this was it. Right? She could fix everything. She could make a wish, and everything would be back the way it was. She could talk to Julie again, and apologize for hanging up on her. She could see Rod, and maybe figure out what they were to each other. She just had to say the words: “I wish.” She started to speak, and then something Richard Wolf had said a moment earlier registered in her brain.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “What did you mean, ‘Not again?’”
“Oh, that.” Richard Wolf swatted around his head with big hands, like he was trying to swat nonexistent insects. “I couldn’t say. I mean, I can answer any question you want, but that counts as one of your wishes. There are rules.”
“Oh,” Marisol said. “Well, I don’t want to waste a wish on a question. Not when I can figure this out on my own. You said ‘not again,’ the moment you saw all this. So, this isn’t the first time this has happened. Your bottle can probably survive anything. Right? Because it’s magic or something.”
The dark green bottle still had a heft to it, even after she’d released its contents. She threw it at a nearby rock a few times. Not a scratch.
“So,” she said. “The world ends, your bottle doesn’t get damaged. If even one person survives, they find your bottle. And the first thing they wish for? Is for the world not to have ended.”
Richard Wolf shrugged, but he also sort of nodded at the same time, like he was confirming her hunch. His feet were see-through, she noticed. He was wearing wing-tip shoes,that looked scuffed to the point of being scarred.
“The first time was in 1962,” he said. “The Cuban Missile Crisis, they called it afterwards.”
“This is not counting as one of my wishes, because I didn’t ask a question,” Marisol said.
“Fine, fine,” Richard Wolf rolled his eyes. “I grew tired of listening to your harangue. When I was reviewing for the Times, I always tore into plays that had too many endless speeches. Your plays don’t have a lot of monologues, do they? Fucking Brecht made everybody think three-page speeches were clever. Fucking Brecht.”
“I didn’t go in for too many monologues,” Marisol said. “So. Someone finds your bottle, they wish for the apocalypse not to have happened, and then they probably make a second wish, to try and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Except here we are, so it obviously didn’t work the last time.”
“I could not possibly comment,” Richard Wolf said. “Although I should say that everyone gets the wrong idea about people in my line of work—meaning wish-facilitators, not theatre critics. People had the wrong idea when I was a theatre critic, too; they thought it was my job to promote the theatre, to put buns in seats, even for terrible plays. That was not my job at all.”
“The theatre has been an endangered species for a long time,” Marisol said, not without sympathy. She looked around the pasty-white, yeast-scented deathscape. A world of Wonder Bread. “I mean, I get why people want criticism that is essentially cheerleading, even if that doesn’t push anybody to do their best work.”
“Well, if you think of theatre as some sort of delicate flower that needs to be kept protected in some sort of hothouse”—and at this point, Wolf was clearly reprising arguments he’d had over and over again, when he was alive—“then you’re going to end up with something that only the faithful few will appreciate, and you’ll end up worsening the very marginalization that you’re seeking to prevent.”
Marisol was being very careful to avoid asking anything resembling a question, because she was probably going to need all three of her wishes. “I would guess that the job of a theatre critic is misunderstood in sort of the opposite way than the job of a genie,” she said. “Everybody is afraid a theatre critic will be too brutally honest. But a genie…”
“Everybody thinks I’m out to swindle them!” Richard Wolf threw his hands in the air, thinking of all the tsuris he had endured. “When, in fact, it’s always the client who can’t express a wish in clear and straightforward terms. They always leave out crucial information. I do my best. It’s like stage directions without any stage left or stage right. I interpret as best I can.”
“Of course you do,” Marisol said. This was all starting to creep her out, and her gratitude at having another person to talk to (who wasn’t Mrs. Garrett) was getting driven out by her discomfort at standing in the bleached-white ruins of the world kibitzing about theatre criticism. She picked up the bottle from where it lay undamaged after hitting the rock, and found the cork.
“Wait a minute,” Richard Wolf said. “You don’t want to—”