Silversmith gives up his wealth and joins Maginnis

Silversmith gives up his wealth and joins Terence Maginnis after discovering that possessing anything he wants cannot deliver the happiness he seeks. His change of course begins amid extravagant wishes and mounting boredom, and ends with a comic reversal: what Silversmith believes is a request to join an organization becomes an unknowing, unconditional gift of his worldly goods, which Maginnis identifies as the act that welcomes him to heaven.

From wishes to abundance

Maginnis first secures Silversmith a spacious rent-controlled triplex on Patchen Place for $102.78 a month, utilities included, and adds five bonus wishes. He praises Silversmith as a good wisher whose tastes are rich without being outrageous. The arrangement expands quickly. One month and fourteen wishes later, the two are seated on the lawn of Silversmith’s estate at Juan-les-Pins on the French Riviera, with a string quartet playing as Silversmith drinks a Negroni and Maginnis gulps whiskey and soda. The new setting makes their unequal moods visible: Silversmith has acquired a life of ease, while Maginnis appears harried.

When Silversmith asks whether there is a catch, he imagines that he might lose his soul and go to hell. Maginnis laughs and dismisses that fear, then leaves for an appointment in Damascus concerning an Arabian stallion Silversmith wants. He also tells Silversmith that five more bonus wishes are coming that week. The answer offers no warning about the actual cost of the arrangement; instead, Maginnis’s casual departure and promise of further wishes extend the pattern of effortless acquisition.

The diminishing returns of luxury

Two months later, Silversmith has twenty-seven wishes still coming to him, yet cannot think of anything to request and is unhappy. In Rome, alone in an emperor-sized bed in his eighteen-room apartment on the Pincio, he reaches for the glass of seltzer kept on his night table and finds it empty. Although he has ten servants, pressing the button summons a long chain of service: three minutes and thirty-eight seconds pass before the butler’s second assistant arrives, and twelve minutes and forty-three seconds elapse before the glass is finally filled and returned. The abundance surrounding Silversmith has not removed ordinary inconvenience; it has given it an elaborate, measurable scale.

His dissatisfaction reaches beyond the delay. Silversmith broods over the gap between obtaining something good and obtaining the perfect version of it. A ten-dollar steak, a hundred-dollar Porterhouse, and a thousand-dollar kilo of Kobe beef prepared by a genius chef mark increasing expense, but each step brings less progress toward an imagined ideal. The more he spends, the less the improvement seems to justify its cost. This is not simply a complaint about bad service or imperfect food: even the finest attainable pleasure falls short of the absolute satisfaction he expects possessions to provide.

The same pattern governs his sexual and social pleasures. Maginnis has supplied him with a succession of beautiful women, sometimes singly and sometimes in groups, but Silversmith’s appetite has quickly faded. The stream of new encounters comes to feel abrasive rather than exciting, as individual personalities and their press clippings blur together in his memory. He can still recall particular scenes—a Miss Universe winner whose hair carries the judge’s cigar odor, and a gum-chewing scuba instructor from Sea Isle, Georgia, in a black rubber wet suit—but most of the encounters collapse into a comic procession of performed expressions and bodies. Even the three Cambodian temple dancers, whom he remembers as strikingly beautiful, cease to hold his interest for long; he keeps them around to play bridge with in the evenings.

The turn toward giving things up

Silversmith’s immediate crisis is small: after drinking his seltzer, he finds the glass empty again and gets out of bed to cross the room to the servant’s bell. With his finger poised over it, enlightenment comes. The scene turns on an ordinary gesture inside a world where nearly every want can be met by a servant or a wish. Rather than ask for another comfort, Silversmith recognizes that ownership has not made him happy.

When Maginnis finds him ten days later, Silversmith is in a broken-down hotel on 10th Avenue and 41st Street in New York. The insecticide-stained, cockroach-haunted room is a stark contrast to his estate on the Riviera and his eighteen-room apartment in Rome. Yet Silversmith does not present poverty as the solution. He tells Maginnis that he wants to be happy but now understands that he cannot achieve happiness by owning things; when Maginnis asks whether he is choosing poverty instead, Silversmith rejects that alternative too. His conclusion is not that deprivation is better than luxury, but that neither possession nor its absence can by itself provide what he wants.

Silversmith proposes a third alternative: joining Maginnis’s team. He admits that he does not know what Maginnis does and has reservations about the organization he assumes Maginnis works for, but he has noticed that Maginnis seems happier than he is. His decision is therefore grounded in comparison, not knowledge of the work or its rewards. When Maginnis asks whether he will give up all his remaining wishes and everything else for the chance, Silversmith says he will do whatever it takes.

The gift and the reversal

Maginnis accepts Silversmith, who responds with excitement and assumes they can move on to disrupting someone else’s life. The assumption exposes the misunderstanding at the heart of the offer: Silversmith expects to enter an organization with a mischievous or harmful purpose, while Maginnis explains that there is no organization at all. Instead, by giving up his worldly goods without expectation of reward and from a desire to serve, Silversmith has endowed Maginnis and his companion with everything he owns. Maginnis calls that gesture the reason Silversmith is welcome to heaven.

A rosy cloud forms around them, through which Silversmith sees a vast silver gate inlaid with mother-of-pearl. He protests that Maginnis has deceived him. Maginnis answers that the other organization has been doing that sort of thing for so long that his side thought it should try it too. The ending makes the apparent bargain turn inside out: Silversmith expects to exchange his remaining wishes for membership, but the decisive act is a selfless transfer made without understanding its destination. His escape from the cycle of acquiring and discarding pleasures is not another wish granted, nor a retreat into poverty, but a willingness to give everything away. The revelation gives the episode its final irony: the man who feared that Maginnis might take his soul reaches heaven through a choice that he makes freely, even though Maginnis has concealed what that choice means.