My Friend, the Jinn

Turns out my classmate was planning to introduce me to a jinn. He’d been sending these long, breathless messages: “I have something huge to tell you,” “terrible things have happened,” “we absolutely have to meet,” blah blah blah. Honestly, I didn’t want to meet him at all. The last time we saw each other was last summer, and I’d promised myself I’d never see Tofiq again. Because every time we met “to talk,” we never actually talked. His idea of a conversation is this: I talk, you listen, and no matter what, you back me up in the end. In this world, only his problems matter; only he’s done military service, only he’s gone to university, only his opinions count… The second you mention something about yourself, he slaps the word “extra” in front of it and makes it his. Say your service was hard, he’ll go, “Ah, mine was extra hard”; say it was easy, his becomes “extra easy.” That’s why among friends we call him “Extra Tofiq.” But the messages he sent this time were genuinely terrifying—no “extra,” no bullshit.

“I told you about my grandmother summoning jinn,” he wrote. “You won’t believe this, but one of the ones that came never went back. We’re together right now. He sees what I’m writing to you. I want to introduce you; he’s a very interesting jinn.”

Of course, I didn’t buy it. I sent a voice note telling him to quit screwing around. He kept texting non-stop, trying to convince me, and even sent the jinn’s voice. He sounded like a perfectly normal person: “Hi, Qorqud, my name’s Mehman, I’m a jinn.” He even gave his name, for God’s sake. Who would believe that? I certainly didn’t. Then he sent a video. He’d filmed it while talking, all in one take; there was no way he could have edited it that fast. I called him right away and said we had to meet, because in the video, the jinn looked like a regular guy in the face, but underneath his clothes, there was no body.

We managed to meet an hour later. In that one hour, I strung together more curse words directed at myself than in all twenty-one years of my life combined. How could I believe Tofiq, of all people? What does “summoning jinn” even mean? And “one of them never went back”... The person who knows best that his grandmother is a fraud is his grandmother herself. She makes a living scamming folks—says she gets news from the jinn, reads fortunes, sees the future. How did I let myself fall for Tofiq’s lies? God knows what kind of trick that video was. With AI taking over everything these days, faking a video like that is nothing. He probably fooled me with some basic filter. Now I’m going to show up and Tofiq will die laughing—“Look what you’re willing to believe.” I’m such an idiot. Screw my non-existent brain.

We met down by the boulevard. The guy I’d seen in the video was walking beside Tofiq. He had on a light grey blazer, a plain black shirt, blue jeans, and white sneakers. Tofiq was calm; the guy—or rather, the jinn who looked no different from any ordinary person—looked happy. We said hello. I couldn’t help myself and asked straight out:

“Okay, we know Tofiq’s deal, but what’s your deal?”

“What is my deal?” the jinn asked Tofiq. Tofiq didn’t answer, just pursed his lips.

“I’m talking about this whole jinn thing,” I said. “If you wanted to meet up, we could’ve just met. What’s with the jinn drama? What happened?”

“I was created a jinn,” he said. He had such a nice smile, you almost wanted to believe him. Then, out of nowhere, he started yanking his cheeks this way and that, baring his teeth, popping his eyes wide and then squeezing them shut tight. When his face finally settled, he flicked himself on the temple. That’s when I got this stupid urge to laugh.

“What do you mean, ‘created a jinn,’ man? And what are you doing with your face like that in public?”

“Eh, I was extra surprised myself,” Tofiq said, taking the lead. “Come on, follow me. Let’s find a toilet, and I’ll prove whether he’s a jinn or not.”

I wasn’t thrilled about Tofiq hunting for a toilet, but in the end, my curiosity won out, and I followed them. We went into a nearby café; Tofiq sat down and said, “I’ll order; you two go and come back.”. He was so commanding and nonchalant about it that we both obeyed without a word. Honestly, even though I hadn’t believed any of it a moment before, walking toward the bathroom with a jinn sent a chill through me. I started to get scared. He, on the other hand, looked perfectly relaxed and cheerful. He stepped inside and glanced around to make sure no one was looking.

“Come closer,” he said.

I swallowed and stepped closer. He started unbuttoning his shirt, and I kept peeking out to check that no one was watching. No one was. Once I was sure, I turned back to him—and my eyes nearly popped out of my head. He’d opened his collar, and underneath, there was nothing. Just darkness, and even that was invisible. It felt like someone had pumped air straight into my heart and inflated it. I guess that was fear. Before I could stop myself, I yelled:

“Oh God, Mama, a jiiinn…”

Thinking about it now, I feel sorry for myself. First of all, why does a twenty-one-year-old guy call for his mama in a café toilet when he gets scared?. Second, how do you even know it’s a jinn? Maybe it was just a creature with no chest, that’s all?.

“Easy, shhh, don’t be scared,” he said, moving toward me. I got even more terrified, backed away, and then threw myself out the door.

When I burst out, my heart was pounding in my throat, my legs were shaking. I wanted to run, but Tofiq grabbed my arm:

“Hold on! Where are you going? You’re embarrassing us.”.

“Let me go!” I yanked my arm back. “Are you sick? What is that thing? He has no insides!”.

Tofiq looked at me with complete indifference.

“You are so, so… you know, extra cowardly. You’ve thrown the whole place into chaos. Get back inside, it’s shameful, people are staring.”.

“I am not going back in there.”.

“You are. We’ll sit, drink our tea quietly, then get the hell out. If you run now, I’ll tease you about it for the rest of your life—how you freaked out over a cheap trick and practically soiled your pants. You’ll be extra humiliated.”.

Tofiq’s words hit home; the emptiness inside me felt heavier than the emptiness inside the jinn. And the fresh air had cleared my brain a little. Maybe I’d just imagined it? Maybe the bathroom smell had made my vision swim?. The human brain is prone to explaining away what it fears with logic, after all. So, at Tofiq’s insistence, I dragged my feet back to the table.

The creature sat there leafing through the menu as if nothing had happened. His collar was buttoned. There was a guilty-child look on his face, but that eerie smile still hadn’t faded.

Our tea arrived. The three of us sat in silence. I couldn’t even get my spoon into the glass; my fingers wouldn’t stop trembling. The clinking against the glass broadcast my disgrace to the whole room. I was waiting for Mehman to drink his tea. I wanted to see if he could actually drink. I felt horribly tense and uncomfortable.

“I understand you,” the jinn said. “Tofiq was scared the first time too.”

“I was extra scared, maaaan, you’re doing fine,” Tofiq chimed in.

“First of all, calm down. There is nothing to fear. That jinn exist is hardly in doubt. You are such interesting creatures, you humans—you act as if God created only you.”

“Is your name Mehman?” I asked. Then I turned to Tofiq. “And why did you want to introduce him to me?”

“You’re the one who’s into this kind of stuff,” he said. “Didn’t you use to read the Qur’an?”

“I did, but I wasn’t into jinn.”

“Same difference. Do I know anyone else who reads the Qur’an besides you?”

“What’s the Qur’an got to do with it?”

“I don’t know, I figured you’d be interested,” he said, then went right back to fiddling with his phone as if nothing had happened. “Have you seen this? Turns out Lady Gaga is a reptilian,” he added, shoving the screen toward me. Tofiq’s sense of “current events” changed at internet speed.

The jinn, who had been baring his teeth nonstop, suddenly turned serious. He opened his mouth wide and smoothed his forehead with his hand.

“It’s so strange,” I said. “I look at you and you seem like an ordinary guy. But there’s nothing inside you. How does that work?”

“In fact, I have everything. You simply do not see it. The light of your world was created for you; it does not affect me, that is why this jinn looks dark to you.”

“So in your own world you look normal?”

“Undoubtedly!”

“But your head, your face, your hands and all that—we can see those.”

“These are all mask.” He paused. Then added: “Is.”

“Is?”

“Mask is.”

“Ah, so that’s why you’ve been pulling your face around all morning?”

“Undoubtedly!”

I didn’t know which was harder to believe: that the young man sitting in front of me was a jinn, or that this jinn had managed to find a mask indistinguishable from human skin. There was so much not to believe that I just let it go. Maybe the real issue wasn’t believing or not believing, but accepting reality as it was. I slowly drank my tea. Mehman drank his too. As I calmed down, the questions started coming.

“Do you have your own language?”

“Undoubtedly!”

“How do you say, ‘my name is Mehman’?”

He said something, but I didn’t catch it. I thought he was just making things up, so I opened the recorder app on my phone, fired more questions at him, and recorded his voice. At one point, the translation for “I am a jinn” caught my attention:

“Amira jinn.”

“So jinn is just jinn? Did we take the word from you, or you from us?”

“Undoubtedly, from us to you!”

“And do you grant wishes? How’s your relationship with lamps?”

“Beneficial wishes are always granted. Jinn have existed long before lamps... you were,” he paused, “they were.”

“And how did you learn our language?” I was bombarding him with questions, trying to catch him in a lie, to prove he wasn’t a jinn—as if a jinn, of all beings, couldn’t be a liar.

“The same way you do,” he said. “We live with you, we see you, we hear you, but we cannot touch or communicate. Sometimes mediums call us, and then we cross into your world. Then we can touch. We memorize the repetitions of your language.”

We talked at length. We left the café and strolled along the boulevard while he told me about his own realms. He said living there was terribly boring. Communication among jinn was very weak. He, on the other hand, loved communication. Every time he was summoned, he would come and stay in our world for a while, until finally, he decided to move here for good.

As we walked and chatted, I suddenly realized Tofiq was no longer with us. I called him; at first, he didn’t pick up, then the calls stopped going through. Mehman said Tofiq wasn’t sociable, that he hadn’t warmed up to him.

“What are you talking about? Tofiq lives to talk.”

“Only to talk.”

A little later, a message came from Tofiq: “Saw you two were having an extra good chat, so I bailed.”

That evening, when I came home, a strange smile was plastered on my face. My mother noticed immediately.

“What’s happened? Why are you grinning like that?”

“Nothing… Everything’s fine,” I said, as if I weren’t the same person who had been yelling “Oh God, Mama, a jinn!” and summoning her to a café toilet just hours before.

The interrogation resumed over dinner.

“No, there’s something going on with you. Come on, for your mother’s sake, what is it?”

My smile widened; I couldn’t help it.

“I met someone today.”

“Aha. So that’s it. Who is it, what do they do?” my mother asked, her smile matching mine.

“No one you know.”

“A foreigner?” She gestured with her eyes toward some vague “abroad.”

“Yeah, from far away,” I said, pointing toward the nearest version of “far away.”

“Hmmm.” She smirked again. “Very good. At least you’ll finally learn English.”

My mother had sent me to language courses several times so I would properly learn the most useful language in the world, and here I was, rushing to master the one language I would never need in this life—the language of the jinn. After dinner, I went to my room and listened to the recordings on my phone. I asked the questions; he gave the answers.

The next day we met again; Mehman was beaming. Our topic was, once more, jinn. Their lives, it turned out, were truly dull. Just to have some kind of interaction, they would give humans bits of news about the future, or entangle themselves with sorcerers. What was the point? All for the sake of a few minutes where someone would ask them something, someone would actually believe them—so they answered the mediums’ calls.

“They’re all frauds,” I said.

“I know,” he replied. “All jinn know that. There are some who won’t admit it, but in truth, everyone here purely for the sake of contact—”

“—comes,” I finished his sentence.

“What?”

“Nothing, go on.”

“And then there are runaways like me,” he said. “We escape our realm and live in this world.”

“Here’s what I find interesting,” I said. “If there’s no real communication in your world, why didn’t they create you as beings who don’t care about communication?”

“They?” he cut in, leaving my plural hanging in the air.

“He,” I corrected myself.

“How should I know? For the same reason He didn’t create you as people who don’t want to know the future. Apparently, we are meant to need each other.”

“So you know the future?”

“Not when I am here. But from our side, the future of your world is quite clear.”

No one could improvise that quickly, and yet I still couldn’t believe him. That was my problem. I doubted anything that was too convincing. If he was a jinn, that meant he wasn’t a jinn; if he wasn’t a jinn, that meant he was. That’s why he could never quite win my trust. I don’t even know what he would have had to do for me to be absolutely certain. I don’t, in fact, know what a real jinn is supposed to be like. By what standard was I supposed to test him?

Once, I asked his gender. He said there was no such thing in their realm. After that, my trust dipped even further. I had no idea whether he was a girl or a boy.

“So you’re neither a girl nor a boy?”

“Correct.”

“You’re homosexual?”

“No.”

“So what, then?”

“Neither homo, nor hetero. Nor sexual. I—in fact, jinn in general—did not have gender. Gender is... a yours thing. A belonging-to-you thing.”

“So how do you multiply?”

“We are not born. We simply occur.”

He talked and explained, but it still didn’t sit right in my mind. Supposedly there was some single, spirit-like Entity, and these others broke off from it and, when they died, went back and rejoined it…

I was hesitant to be alone with him. He wanted to come over to our place; I wouldn’t agree. True, when we were together we had a really good time, and when I talked, he actually listened. The stories about Zefiras—his own world—were mostly interesting too, but the question of whether he was truly a jinn never left my mind. And aside from lacking a body, he had no proof. He had exactly one piece of evidence, and even that was non-existent. I couldn’t tell if he was telling the truth or just bullshitting. Plus, standing next to him was freezing cold; apparently, to stay in this world, he had to drain all the energy from his surroundings. I could feel myself growing cold toward him, getting fed up. As his body cooled the air, I cooled off our conversations.

“There’s that saying,” I said, “that the Whispering Satan is of the jinn and of humankind. Which one are you? One of those whispering devils?”

“Undoubtedly, there is a translation error,” he said. “The way we say it is: one must seek protection from the Whispering Satan, whether it be jinn or human. Meaning, both humans and jinn need protection from the Whisperer.”

The more my doubts grew, the more I looked for excuses to cut ties. Finally, I actually got into trouble because of him. It was nighttime. In the metro. Because he kept looking around and laughing, baring his teeth, yanking at his ears, wiggling his eyebrows, and gaping his mouth open and shut, I got beaten up. Two hulking guys came at us:

“What’s with the faces? Who are you winking at?”

I had no idea what to say. How do you explain that this poor bastard is a jinn adjusting his mask?..

“Brother, listen, I’m sorry,” I said. “He’s sick.”

“If he’s sick, take him to a hospital,” one of them barked. “He’s standing here ogling people's women.”

“He’s not, I swear to God, he’s not.”

“I am not sick,” Mehman called out from behind.

I turned and saw him pulling both ears outward, clamping his mouth shut tight, brows knotted, eyes bulging. I thought, My jinn is angry now, he’s going to turn this place into hell for these two brutes, pull some wild stunt. I puffed out my chest and said:

“Who are you trying to intimidate, huh? Yeah, that’s right, you’d bet—”

They wiped the platform with me. By the time the police showed up, the two who’d been dragging me were long gone. I looked over and saw the jinn I’d been counting on standing off to the side, smiling.

“What are you laughing at? Can’t you see I’m fighting here? Do something—aren’t you a jinn?” I was furious.

“If they touch me, my mask will fall,” he said.

Actually, he was right: if the skin on his head came off, there’d be nothing but darkness underneath, and being known as the friend of a blazer-wearing black shadow in the middle of the subway would be worse than getting beaten up. Still, if he’d looked even a little worried, I’d have felt better. Instead, he just stood there watching, smiling, grabbing the hair at the crown of his head and pulling it back.

“Your blood is such a bright red,” he said. “It is blinding.”

“A person could at least have the decency to look upset,” I muttered, and headed for the exit.

He followed behind me, talking.

“You are expecting me to treat you like a human.”

“Like a human, yes, like a person! Like a man!” I snapped, glancing back at him.

“But I am not a person. I am a jinn. Amira jinn.”

“Get lost!” I snapped. “You’re a whisperer, just a damn whisperer!”

We came out of the metro. I bent down, brushed the dust off my clothes, and waited a bit for him to apologize. When I lifted my head, he was smiling.

“What are you laughing at?” I wanted to fight him now, take my anger out on him.

“Not laughing. Holding mask. When I shut, mask-mouth slips,” he said. The way he tangled his words irritated me even more.

“Human mask is impractical,” he went on. “You are a very inefficient design. Change the angle of impact and blood comes out. System returns error.”

The jinn’s words hit me harder than the punches I’d just taken; they shattered the illusion of friendship I’d been constructing in my head. I had expected warmth, closeness, some kind of bond, while he was busy marveling at the structural weakness of my design. I didn’t even have the strength left to argue. I turned away and walked off. I thought he would follow me. When I’d gone a distance and looked back, he wasn’t coming. We never saw each other again after that.

Honestly, I kept expecting him to call so we could reconcile. So what if he was a jinn? Even a jinn should be capable of companionship. Maybe we wouldn’t have become best friends, but at least we could have remained good company. But he never called.

Little by little, I started to miss him. The truth is, he’d never actually done me any harm. On the contrary, spending time with him had been quite interesting. After a while, I wrote to him myself, called him. But my messages never delivered, and my calls never connected. It was as if I’d broken up with a lover. I felt like a forgotten boy, an abandoned girl. I missed him. A month ago, this jinn hadn’t existed at all, yet now his nonexistence hurt as if it had always been there. The invisible darkness was gone, leaving behind a visible void.

I called Tofiq. When he started in with, “You think you have it bad? I’m extra mis—” I hung up on him mid-sentence and blocked his number on the spot.

One evening, when I went to take out the trash, I saw something head-shaped by the bins. My heart seized up at first; when I got closer, I recognized it. It was Mehman’s mask. Maybe my rough behavior had struck a heavy blow to his heart within the darkness, causing his mask to slip. His clothes were on the ground too. I touched them—they were ice cold. He couldn’t have gone far. I looked around, but I couldn’t see him. Yet, I knew for certain that my friend was standing in some patch of darkness, watching me and smiling. He’d told me once that going back to Zefiras was no longer possible. That is why I am sure he is still around me. Especially at night, I feel him watching from the shadows. I talk; he doesn’t answer. But I don’t let him get lonely—whenever I’m by myself, I strike up a conversation. Now and then, strange creatures flicker at the edge of my vision and vanish. They show up in my dreams too; I see vivid, colorful dreams. I know they are all my friend’s doing.

Last night, I even saw Extra Tofiq’s grandmother in a dream, beckoning to me to “come, come”. I doubt anything good will come of it, but I’m going.