As Good as New Read Free

again, then stopped and looked around.
    â€œHuh.” He sat and sort of floated an inch above the sofa. “Nice digs. Real calfskin on this sofa. Is this like a bunker?”
    â€œI can’t answer any of your questions,” Marisol said, “or that counts as a wish you owe me.”
    â€œDon’t be like that.” Richard Wolf ruffled his two-tone lapels. “I’m just trying not to create any loopholes, because once there are loopholes it brings everybody grief in the end. Trust me, you wouldn’t want the rules to be messy here.” He rifled through the media collection until he found a copy of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , which he made a big show of studying until Marisol finally loaded it for him.
    â€œThis is better than I’d remembered,” Richard Wolf said an hour later.
    â€œGood to know,” Marisol said. “I never got around to watching that one.”
    â€œI met Tennessee Williams, you know,” Richard said. “He wasn’t nearly as drunk as you might have thought.”
    â€œSo here’s what I figure. You do your level best to implement the wishes that people give you, to the letter,” Marisol said. “So if someone says they want to make sure that a nuclear war never happens again, you do your best to make a nuclear war impossible. And then maybe that change leads to some other catastrophe, and then the next person tries to make some wishes that prevent that thing from happening again. And on, and on. Until this.”
    â€œThis is actually the longest conversation I’ve had since I became a wish-facilitator.” Richard crossed his leg, ankle over thigh. “Usually, it’s just whomp-bomp-a-lula-three-wishes, and I’m back in the bottle. So tell me about your prize-winning play. If you want. I mean, it’s up to you.”
    Marisol told Richard about her play, which seemed like something an acquaintance of hers had written many lifetimes ago. “It was a one-act,” she said, “about a man who is trying to break up with his girlfriend, but every time he’s about to dump her she does something to remind him why he used to love her. So he hires a male prostitute to seduce her, instead, so she’ll cheat on him and he can have a reason to break up with her.”
    Richard was giving her a blank expression, as though he couldn’t trust himself to show a reaction.
    â€œIt’s a comedy,” Marisol explained.
    â€œSorry,” Richard said. “It sounds awful. He hires a male prostitute to sleep with his girlfriend. It sounds … I just don’t know what to say.”
    â€œWell, you were a theatre critic in the 1950s, right? I guess it was a different era.”
    â€œI don’t think that’s the problem,” Richard said. “It just sounds sort of … misanthropic. Or actually woman-hating. With a slight veneer of irony. I don’t know. Maybe that’s the sort of thing everybody is into these days—or was into, before the world ended yet again. This is something like the fifth or sixth time the world has ended. I am losing count, to be quite honest.”
    Marisol was put out that this fossil was casting aspersions on her play—her contest-winning play, in fact. But the longer she kept him talking, the more clues he dropped, without costing her any wishes. So she bit her lip.
    â€œSo. There were half a dozen apocalypses,” Marisol said. “And I guess each of them was caused by people trying to prevent the last one from happening again, by making wishes. So that white stuff out there. Some kind of bioengineered corrosive fungus, I thought—but maybe it was created to prevent some kind of climate-related disaster. It does seem awfully reflective of sunlight.”
    â€œOh, yes, it reflects sunlight just wonderfully,” Richard said. “The temperature of the planet is going to be dropping a lot in the next decade. No danger of global