The Last Illusion Read online

  To the Greatest City—and its citizens who were there, who continue to be among us

  A cage went in search of a bird.

  —Franz Kafka

  Contents

  Preface

  PART I

  PART II

  PART III

  PART IV

  PART V

  PART VI

  PART VII

  PART VIII

  PART IX

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Preface

  The Shahnameh, or the Book of Kings, is the most famous Persian work of art of all time, the national epic of Iran. Penned by Persian poet Ferdowsi circa A.D. 1000, its fifty thousand couplets chronicle Persia’s past from the creation of the world until the seventh-century Islamic conquests. Throughout the centuries, what is history and what is myth has been considered almost entirely irrelevant by Iranians.

  One of the Shahnameh’s most celebrated stories is the story of Zal. Saam, a great hero of ancient Persia, has a son, Zal, who is born an albino. The whiteness of the infant’s skin horrifies his parents, so they abandon him on the highest point in Iran, Mount Damavand. He is discovered by an enormous bird, the mythical Simorgh, whose wingspan turns the entire sky black when she takes to flight. She becomes his caretaker in the wild. Many years later, a strong, silver-skinned young man is spotted residing in a bird’s nest. Saam hears of this, and when he comes to investigate, he realizes the young man is his son. The Simorgh hands Zal over to his home kingdom, but not without a final gift: three of her own feathers. She tells Zal she will back at his side immediately if he only takes one simple action: Burn this if ever you have need of me, and may your heart never forget your nurse, whose heart breaks for love of you. Against all odds, Zal becomes one of the greatest warriors of ancient Persian legend.

  PART I

  It is this bird we want, not that one. This one not that one. Myth is the difference between birds.

  —G. C. Waldrep,

  “What Is a Soprano,” Archicembalo

  Exactly once upon a time in a small village in northern Iran, a child of the wrong color was born.

  Khanoom (the Persian word for “lady,” what everyone knew his mother as) was forty-seven when she gave birth to the boy. He was the last child of eight, his closest sibling nineteen years older and all grown. He had been a mistake from the beginning—sex being Khanoom’s least visited whim—a cursed gift from her husband as he lay on his deathbed.

  Nobody imagined a dying man could produce the seed of another child, and yet. But a child like that, sure—there should have been a cautionary tale about it, a proverb at the very least. When Khanoom had him, months after her husband was dead, she looked at that sickly yellow-white thing in her arms, and the only thing that made sense was to blame the child’s problems on the diseased seed. This tiny silently crying baby—his crying made no sound, which made her suspect he was mute—was clearly not well, having come from a half most unwell. His hair and skin were the color of—no use to sugarcoat it, Khanoom would snap—piss. He was something so unlike them, unlike all of nature. It made her miss her dead husband less, the memory of that final hard explosive orgasm—more painful and jagged and thunderous than any orgasm she recalled—an ejaculation that she imagined like a hot toxic pus, a poison that would have spawned an even more unthinkable demon, had it not been for Khanoom’s own khanoomly egg. It gave Khanoom nightmares to hold the boy even, no matter what the cousins and neighbors who visited said, trying their best to make the best of it.

  Cousin Azar: Look, babies sometimes have strange fur. You never know—in a few months he could be brown and black like he should be . . .

  Ms. Moolook, next door: And if he’s not, my God, you know in the West, those golden-haired people are in movies!

  Mansour, the midwife who delivered him: In any case, he’s your child and you must love him and remember him as a gift from your husband, someone to keep you company in your old age, something more than what you have now, just a bunch of shrieking and shitting awful birds . . .

  It was true: Khanoom was known for her veranda and its menagerie, almost notorious for it. She had two dozen at its peak, a commune of canaries and doves and little white parrots that were indigenous to the area. Since her youth, Khanoom had an obsession with catching birds in her butterfly nets and making little cages out of wire for them. They were her children first, she claimed, her parandeh-children, the children before her children. She could speak to them, she could read their minds. They loved her, she insisted, they preferred her cages to their rightful outdoors. Her husband had tolerated them for the sake of her happiness—Khanoom could be very, very melancholy, and truthfully he had always feared for her life should the birds escape or die somehow—as long as he did not have to feed and clean them. Khanoom, who trusted no one with them, no one at all, assured him and everyone that the birds were her responsibility.

  They are everything, she’d say—to them, to it, to the walls, since no one outside of their world knew of them. They are all there is.

  So Khanoom did not need this horror child like it needed her. She began calling it “White Demon,” like one of those monsters of the Shahnameh myths who stalked the mountains Alborz and Damavand, challenging warriors. She refused to breast-feed and clothe the demon, and eventually she withdrew it from all the concerned eyes and voices who wanted to watch the old lady and her freak spawn endure this life.

  She prayed for its death—how could it live like that, after all?—or her own. It was an omen, a bad luck charm. Those things don’t get futures.

  But death did not come soon for either of them.

  So, Khanoom’s solution: she built it a cage. At first she called it a crib—the only crib she knew how to make, she told herself, as she was a builder of cages, after all, done with the world of toys and baby clothes almost two decades ago—and what exactly was the difference anyway? If it’s good enough for my angels, it’s good enough for my demon, Khanoom thought, and so she carpeted its foundation with the same straw the birds got, equipped it with water and seed, and, as the child grew older, she only added on to its cage and gave it more food and cleaned after its more substantial droppings. She dealt with White Demon like the rest of them, but with less adoration, because all the pretending in the world wasn’t going to turn it beautiful like the rest of her fluttering brood. She went on and on like this, shielding it from the few humans close to her, who soon enough dwindled down to none.

  Hundreds of miles away, the country was swept up in considerable revolution in the capital. But the dozen or so families that lived in Khanoom’s village did not speak of the uprising. They knew of it, heard whispers here and there—sometimes someone would have a paper, a city cousin, a phone call from friends—but they were largely untouched by it. The women sat by their looms when not in their kitchens, the men out in fields with their crops when not in nearby factories or mines, and the children huddled restlessly in the one classroom the village had when they weren’t out in the streets, chasing the innumerable dogs and occasional cars, the only uproar a village like that knew. They had nothing, nothing to revolt for or against.

  Life might have gone on this way had Child Number Seven not come to town. It was Zari’s first visit in years. None of Khanoom’s children ever bothered anymore, disturbed no doubt by their mother’s disintegration into a crazy bird lady. But Zari burst in armed with a young man who was clearly not her lover (the daughter no man would take, Khanoom secretly considered her too-thin and too-arrogant child) and clenched fists.

  Shame on you! Zari screamed. May you rot in hell forever for this!

  Once the whispers of the neighbors had made it back to
her just days before, Zari had dropped everything and grabbed a friend and sped all the way through desert highways to a place she couldn’t believe she once knew as home. Her purse was heavy with the reward for the spying neighbor who had decided enough was enough with the rumors and sounds and shadows. He had climbed the fence into Khanoom’s yard and veranda one late night and had seen that same last child—the one Khanoom had sworn was taken away to live with relatives in the city—squatting, motionless, eyes closed, suspended in a cage that was so small he looked almost bound in a wiry eggshell, like a tiny, half-dead child embalmed in a womb-jail. This neighbor had talked, and talk added to talk and Khanoom had been oblivious to it all. When Zari arrived, Khanoom was unable to fathom that these nosy neighbors had gone so far as to find her daughter in the city, fill her with their talk, infuse her with that criminal hysteria, and in effect bring about the end of Khanoom’s life—not to mention their lives, the birds’, the only lives she lived for.

  Rot in hell? She managed to muster a hard laugh at her daughter. This is hell. But that’s why my birds are here—they’re the only heaven in all this hell. Except for that one, of course.

  Zari’s young man was kneeling before the cage, silently taking pictures of the frightened and apparently human creature. He whipped out many other machines, too, that apparently recorded their words and their images—Khanoom was momentarily distracted by these miracles—artifacts that would forever serve as the only testament to global-phenomenon “Bird Boy’s” early existence.

  Zari could not take it; she pushed her mother and her friend out of the way and took the boy out of his cage. As much as he flapped and screamed and shivered and drooled in her arms, she would not let him go. She said her name over and over: Zari Zari Zari, I am your sister, your sister, your sister, but it was no use. She cried and cried, shaking him gently in her arms, Poor baby, poor baby, poor baby . . .

  White Demon was at that point ten years old.

  He could not talk. He could not walk. He could not identify his sister as his sister, his mother as his mother, the young man as a young man, human as human.

  What he did know: the other birds, and maybe some God they believed in. What he could do: chirp, tweet, coo, shriek. He could squat and jump; flap his elbows and fingers in the air like wings; piss and shit, right there in his cage; peck at and bite into foods and water and consume them, but just in bits; sleep in that squat and perhaps even dream, but who could know but the birds.

  Zari eventually bound the weeping hysterical Khanoom up in yarn—the only restraint she could conjure—bound her and bound her hard until Zari could gather her wits and find a way for them and White Demon to get out. The young man, lost in the awful poetry of the situation, said to Zari, She calls him White Demon, of all things, but this child is like the parable’s Zal. White like Zal, and raised by, well, not just by one great bird, but all birds. This is the Shahnameh’s Zal.

  He’s our Zal, yes, Zari said and turned to that thing, apparently her brother, and with her voice cracking and even crumbling, she asked him, Do you want to be Zal, love? Are you Zal?

  But the boy wouldn’t look at them, any of them. He just sat there shuddering in a state of incomprehensible emergency, eyes cast to the narrow swatch of sky the window permitted.

  Zari had let the young man, a filmmaker, shoot more while she made the calls. She had finally left her mother, still bound, in the hands of the police while she and her filmmaking companion took the boy and his cage—he was used to it, after all—out and into the world for the very first time.

  Weeks later, a rumor: Khanoom had died in prison by her own hands. The prison refused to confirm the exact cause of death, but another prisoner said on the filmmaker’s tape, She kept claiming she was nothing without her children. We asked her, well, why did you do that to that little Zal-child? And she said, no, not him—he can go to hell, the White Demon. I mean, my real children. We told her that her children are fine and grown and she said, no, the children I have now. She had meant her birds. One day the guard told her they had burned her birds, out of cruelty and maybe he was just sick of hearing about them. The next morning we found her pulseless, with her hands still locked at her neck.

  Zari took Zal to Tehran and found a sort of halfway home—part orphanage, part psychiatric ward, with a touch of juvenile detention center. It was a place where children who were beyond hope went, it seemed. There was no option to take him home with her, just blocks away—he needed constant attention: specialists, doctors, a whole team to study him and somehow envision a future for him, a miracle plot in which a child of that level of ferality could endure. She visited him daily for a while, but ultimately she could not take it.

  Plus everyone’s eyes were on her. Zal was a national phenomenon, thanks to her filmmaker and other documentarians internationally as well, and many blamed Zari and her siblings for abandoning their mother but also Zari for fame-mongering. Every time a photo of Zari with that squatting bony child came out in a paper or magazine or on the news, the next day—if she happened to walk among the Tehran skyscrapers even for a few moments—without fail, she’d feel fresh spit on her hunched shoulders, her knotted back, her ever-aching head. Whoever had cursed Khanoom now cursed her.

  Zari, some say, started to lose her mind and ultimately disappeared, somewhere abroad. Even the filmmaker could not find her. The other six siblings remained anonymous, discussing the issue only in phone calls, whispering as if the whole world had their ear to the wall. But no one knew they were part of the family that had created the infamous Zal. None of them could bear to imagine that child, their own flesh and blood, raised by birds, essentially a bird slowly converted to human by lab scientists. He appeared in the prayers of this silent scattered cult once in a while, but even they, with their own troubles, eventually let the horror of him fade, like an old bad dream.

  The doctors who studied him claimed he had not been properly touched by a human since his early infanthood. That Khanoom had seldom spoken to him, but apparently sang to all the birds and he could sing back as much as they could. That he was only let out of his cage every few days at most, and even then likely for very limited time, and just on the veranda at most. That he had limited exposure to sunlight, just what the veranda could offer. That his skin could not endure normal clothing, and would not for many years. That he could not digest human food, only seed and water, and would not for a while. That it would take years and years to get him to walk upright, to get him to straighten his arms, to get him to hold utensils, a pen, another human. That teaching him a language would require a staff of the best language acquisition specialists in the world.

  And yet as much as the country’s—and indeed parts of the world’s—hearts were with him, as much as his room in the home got filled with dolls and stuffed animals and candies and clothes that he could do nothing with, nobody was paying the medical bills. Articles did not feed Zal or his staff of scientists and doctors.

  One day maybe, someone would say.

  Perhaps possibly, someone else would say.

  But the odds, another would say.

  Meanwhile, they tracked the boy’s descents and ascents—shriek to song, grimace to bawl, cuddle to hurl, off and on and on and off—as if there were even logic in this world.

  “Zal’s Crisis,” a headline in the Tehran Times declared. The story featured ample speculation from the doctors who worked with him daily and who were growing more and more concerned for the boy as he aged. It also featured the young filmmaker who had first seen the boy, who had done more than anyone to spread Zal’s story beyond the border of Iran, whose three-hour documentary Zal Lives had won awards around the world and broken the hearts of many a man and woman who could not locate Iran on a map.

  It was the filmmaker who first got the letter from Anthony Hendricks, a New York child psychologist and feral children researcher who was interested in coming to Iran to set up a meeting with Zal.

  The young filmmaker, with little connection to Za
l and his world, had simply relayed the number of the home and said it was all he could do really.

  But by the time Hendricks came to Tehran three months later, something inside the filmmaker—perhaps some indebtedness to this story that had catapulted him from mere student of film to one of the world’s most sought-after documentarians, this link to a life that he had barged in on and frozen and capitalized on like an earnest but profiting almost-Audubon, this bond that would be in some ways a forever-connection to everything Zal—all this had prompted him to be there at the airport to greet Hendricks, one hand extended in a shake, the other perched on his camera, about to film what was effectively the sequel.

  In the film he comes out of customs, a giant man with white beard, big belly, laughing eyes, in a too-tight beige tweed suit and bow tie, all Santa-Claus-gone-professor pleasant looks. The sound of the filmmaker’s chuckles at his image are caught on the film, and then Hendricks himself laughing, and then saying, “Well, adventure of adventures! Tony Hendricks here! Salaam, chetori?”

  The filmmaker had lowered his camera, shocked by the man’s pitch-perfect Persian salutation.

  He had been married to an Iranian woman who years ago had died, Hendricks explained, his eyes still laughing.

  “I am so sorry,” the young filmmaker said. “No children of your own?”

  Hendricks had shaken his head. “She couldn’t. She was sick since I met her. A long struggle.”

  “I am even more sorry,” the filmmaker said. “You are so kind to come see this child that nobody can care for anymore. It’s such a tragedy. He has family, but none of them will claim him. They are too ashamed. I would take him if I could.”

  “Don’t worry,” Hendricks said, with real confidence. “He will be taken care of, that I promise.”

  But the filmmaker did not imagine Hendricks meant he would care for the boy himself. In fact, when the papers reported this American scientist Hendricks was adopting Zal, nobody believed it. They thought the home had simply paid him to take the kid, not the other way around.