Alias Aladdin

In a glittering cathedral of baubles and refractions, Eddie—marooned in the tepid domesticity of a wife whose silhouette the camera greets with polite indifference—drifts among glass vitrines until a sylph-like clerk levitates an oxidized lamp before his eyes, whispering that the dented brass once brushed the palms of Aladdin himself. One idle caress of metal and the jewelry mart’s mirrored universe implodes into a chromatic vortex: suddenly Eddie reclines on bolsters of imperial silk, ringed by odalisques whose laughter shivers like scalding sherbet, while fountains spurt rosewater and the night air is braided with lute strings. He tastes anise and pomegranate, negotiates the perilous etiquette of eunuch-guarded corridors, learns that desire in the Orient is a coin with two faces—rapture and beheading—then plummets back beneath the department-store chandeliers, the clerk’s smile now a sales-counter simulacrum of the harem’s conspiratorial grins. The lamp is only a lamp, the register rings, and the dream evaporates like attar under neon fluorescence, leaving Eddie blinking at the marital mirror, his pocket watch ticking louder than any scimitar.