The Last Illusion Read online

  “I can tell,” she said, and just like that laughter that had been drawn out, something like a small smile revealed itself. She wore it much better than he guessed. With that embellishment, the stick figure became a girl almost.

  They were silent for a few more moments.

  “Well, it’s time to sleep now,” she said. “You should go home.”

  “I should go home,” Zal quickly echoed, so embarrassed he had forgotten any notion of his home. This entire milestone of a day had made him feel like he was on another planet, not just some dozen blocks from his apartment. He suddenly felt totally out of touch with himself outside Asiya and her world. He did not understand how that could be possible, how the encounter could hold such power. He did not really understand what was happening, but he thought that it was worth thinking that it may be good.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m sleepy for once. I couldn’t imagine sleeping tonight, and look. Yawning. Amazing. Thank you.” She took his hand and walked him to the door and they embraced again.

  “Thank you,” he said, but she did not know he meant for the hug, which both times had felt less bad than he would have thought from Asiya’s body, though it did make him wonder a bit how much better Willa’s might feel.

  “It’s easy to say goodbye to you, because I know I will see you again—I know things, remember” were her final words to him, final if you didn’t count the words on a scrap of torn paper: asiya mcdonald / see you soon and a phone number.

  This, he realized, was a big deal, romantic or not, though he knew it was a step toward romance for sure.

  He had a girl’s number.

  He had a human’s number.

  For the first time in his life, Zal Hendricks felt a certain coloring in of himself—a hologram being filled in to flesh; a ghost suddenly acquiring corporeality—and he thought maybe he was finally there, that this was it: normalcy.

  PART IV

  The crows like to insist a single crow is enough to destroy heaven. This is incontestably true, but it says nothing about heaven, because heaven is just another way of saying: the impossibility of crows.

  —Franz Kafka,

  The Zürau Aphorisms

  Zal saw Asiya McDonald soon indeed. He called her the next day to thank her for a nice New Year’s “gathering”—it took him more than an hour to pinpoint the best word for that strange day, that strange night. She had been quiet at first and suddenly said, “Want to come over? I mean, I want you to come over if you want to.”

  Suddenly it seemed everyone wanted him. He had an e-mail from Silber’s address, disappointing especially for its sign-off, “xoxo Indigo”: What. The. Fuck, Chuck? Too cool for school? Party was a blast. Happy 00. See u soon! He had a note from his father, who had left his apartment when he got his note: I hope you (and whoever this friend is, wow!) had a nice New Year. Happy New Year, son. Please call soon. Love, Pops.

  But all that played in his head was her silvery syllables, her wants, her “asiya mcdonald / see you soon” scrawl. She would be the only being on earth who would get his soon this time. The Silbertorium went uncalled, his father was left unheeded.

  Zal went over to her house, in an almost entranced autopilot. He never even asked her to repeat her address. He simply just knew it—subway to the park, across the park, up four blocks to that big grocery store, past the museums, and there: the red townhouse with the black iron gate in front of it, next to all the gateless white townhouses. When he got to the top of the steps just outside the door, she appeared.

  “How did you know the exact second I was coming?” was the first thing he asked her.

  She, looking as serious and as unsmiling as during their initial encounter, said simply, “I know things, Zal, didn’t I tell you? And of course, I was looking out the window. Not for you, really. I just do that.”

  She did not invite him in, just stood there in front of the door and looked him up and down.

  He looked down at his gray overcoat and gray trousers, black wool cap. He did not think he looked any different from yesterday.

  He gestured inside. “Shall I—”

  She shook her head. “Willie is being a horrible whiny pain today, and Zach has too many friends over playing awful music, and I just want to go to my studio. I thought you might want to see my work!”

  Zal nodded slowly. The birds—he remembered her words immediately: I use them. For work . . . I bring them back to life, of course. He hoped this was not the beginning of their end already.

  “You don’t want to?” She looked narrowly crestfallen.

  “I am curious,” he said quietly.

  I do art, she had said. He tried to focus on that word art, a nice clean word.

  “Oh, gosh! Zal, I totally forgot!” She put a hand over her mouth; it was unclear whether the gesture was intended to cover laughter or horror. She shook her head over and over, tragically, comically, tragicomically, it was hard to say. “The dead-bird stuff! That must have totally freaked you out!”

  Zal shrugged.

  “Oh, shoot. Yeah, well, it’s the series I’ve been working on for a while. I mean, there’s no way to sugarcoat it: they’re birds, dead ones, in various stages of decay. I mean, maybe it’s too much?”

  Zal shook his head, even though he wasn’t that sure. He just knew he wanted to be around Asiya, that somehow having a new friend—and a female one!—was good, dead-bird art or not. “You never . . . do anything to them, do you?” He didn’t know how else to say it.

  Asiya squinted her eyes. “Do anything? I do a lot of things.”

  “But,” Zal sighed, “you don’t—I mean, you’re not the one who—before they—you don’t, you know . . .”

  She did know, finally. She put an arm on his shoulder and he shuddered in joy—he hoped imperceptibly—at that exotic feeling of human-on-human contact. “Zal, I am not the one who hurts them. I find them like that; I find them dead.”

  Zal nodded, a bit ashamed at how it might have seemed: an accusation perhaps. “I didn’t think you did, Asiya.”

  “But you don’t know me at all, really. That’s okay.”

  “That’s true.”

  “It’s funny, you got so upset yesterday when I said we were strangers,” she said, nudging his arm along as they walked toward wherever in that city her studio was, Zal in total blissful blindness.

  “But yesterday was so strange,” Zal muttered. “I mean, I never had a day like that. By the end, I really felt like I had known you my whole life. I forgot what my actual life looked like.”

  Asiya nodded. “I know. But you were right. I think we have known each other longer than we think.”

  Zal looked at her to see if she was somehow joking or even being completely serious, but her eyes were turned upward, lost in apparently nothing but overcast city sky.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, and she quickened her stride.

  Zal quickened his.

  They watched the city pass them by without seeing it at all, like characters in a dream, everything familiar just an irrelevant frame of motion picture passing along.

  She finally said something at a crosswalk where a red flashing hand warned them against moving on. “People are always forgetting with you, aren’t they?”

  “What?”

  “The bird stuff. Like when I mentioned my art. I had forgotten already. People must forget.”

  “No one knows. Or, few people. Well, I only know a few people.”

  “But even them. It’s easy to screw up.”

  “For some people it’s the first thing they think when they see me.”

  She shook her head emphatically, furiously even. “Not me, Zal. I had forgotten already. I almost don’t believe it.”

  “It’s true.”

  “I know. I almost can’t believe it.”

  “Well, okay.”

  “There must be people like me, who come to care very much about you, who forget the whole thing and sudd
enly shove it in your face without knowing.”

  Zal shrugged. He wanted to change the subject, but he didn’t. “It comes up less than you think. Lucky for me, the whole world is not a mess of birds, dead or whatever.”

  People like me, who come to care very much about you.

  He had heard that right, he thought, he had heard that exactly.

  My God, he thought as the light turned green. Something was happening.

  A few years ago, when Hendricks had finally sat him down to explain how human life was created, he had begun like that: When two people like each other, who come to care very much about each other . . .

  Her studio: it was the second studio he had seen in the past few weeks, if the Silbertorium could be called a studio, if his work could even be seen as a sort of art. This studio was very different, all the way at the end of the island—though only a sliver of water away from BXS’s—and very small, very simple: one large drawing table, another type of table, two counter stools, one small window. In some ways it looked like a cell, in others like a—dare he say it—cage.

  Her words, not his.

  “Welcome to my little cage!” she announced as they came in. She caught herself: “See, I did it again! I’m serious, I didn’t say that on purpose. I just think that to myself because of all the birds in here, not because of you!”

  Zal nodded glumly. He smelled something that did not smell right. He looked to the small wooden boxes by the open window. “Well, cages have living birds in them anyway.”

  “That’s true . . . Do you really want to see this stuff, Zal? I suddenly feel weird about bringing you here. I mean, you really do?”

  Really: no, Zal did not. But he didn’t want to tell her that, and he thought he could shake the feeling anyway. He wanted the girl to know that he supported what she did—after all, she had taken his story without a qualm, a judgment, without horror, disbelief. She had taken him in just as he was—he owed her the same, he felt.

  “My story didn’t upset you, did it, Asiya?”

  She shook her head. “Why should it?”

  “It’s unusual. People don’t run into a story like mine.”

  “That’s true. But it’s an interesting one.” She picked up one of the small boxes, looked inside, and quickly sprayed the contents with something chemical-smelling. “Why, have people judged you badly in the past? Freaked out?”

  Zal shook his head. “I really haven’t been close to anyone after it all happened. Just my father, my doctor.”

  She tried to smile and failed. She suddenly felt depressed, looking at the bird bones with bits of flesh and feather hanging on. She inspected the other boxes—they were worse, too much meat on their bones, too graphic, one even gathering some insects. “I don’t want to do this, Zal.”

  She looked like she was going to cry suddenly.

  “Do what?”

  She pointed to the boxes. “I don’t want to show you them. I don’t even want to be here.”

  He wished he could hold her, as he had done in the basement, but in the light, this next day, after that whirlwind of a day, the supposedly last day on earth, a small distance now revealed itself between them—normalcy, he guessed—and he couldn’t. “I don’t have to see the actual stuff. What about the art?”

  “Some of it is the art,” she said. “Installation, sculpture. But I take photos of some. It’s just that they’re all pretty graphic.”

  Zal suddenly felt a rush of courage bubble up inside him. The men of old movies were afraid of nothing, particularly when faced with their women’s fear. “I want to see a photo. Is there one you especially like? One you’d like to show me?”

  She thought. And she thought. She paced a bit. Finally, after some minutes, she fished out a folder in which lots of oversize prints lay and she flipped through them, Zal only catching blurs of black here and there. She paused at one, looking up at Zal and back down at the photo, in a way that gave him chills. If he didn’t know better, he would have thought she was comparing him to it.

  Self-conscious fallacy, Rhodes would say, faulty thinking rooted in insecurity alone. Vaporize it.

  He vaporized it, and so when she finally, very gingerly, brought the print over to him, he really looked at it for what it was. She began immediately to explain it, but Zal didn’t hear her words, so transfixed he was by the image: a black bird, freshly dead, it seemed, suspended by strings in a state of posed flight.

  It reminded him immediately of Silber and his faked flight.

  It was, he had to admit, just as Silber’s act had been, beautiful. I bring them back to life, she had said. She did, in a way.

  “I like it,” he said in a whisper.

  “You don’t have to.”

  She marched to the door and hit the lights and motioned for him to come along.

  “What happened? Leaving so fast?” he asked.

  She didn’t say anything until they were outside, back in the bright overcast world.

  “It’s nice to know everything’s okay out here. Sometimes you have to check in on the world, Zal. We’re lucky to have this.”

  “This what?

  “This, like, era.”

  Zal had no idea what she was talking about. He shrugged.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I told you about these feelings. Sometimes they’re good even! They’re reminders, at the very least.”

  They said nothing for a few more steps.

  He was still thinking of the photo—how nice it was, in a strange way. He thought of the human version—a corpse made to act like the living, a corpse dressed for tea, a corpse propped by a tree at a park, a corpse in pajamas with a book in bed. Now, that was somehow bad, in a way her photo was not, not at all. It filled him with a feeling of warmth, a honey-like hope. “I liked that bird you did,” he said. She did not answer.

  By the evening Zal’s answering machine was cluttered with messages from his father.

  He finally called.

  “So sorry,” he said. “I saw my friend again—”

  “Zal, it occurs to me I haven’t had to tell you this before, but when you suddenly make friends overnight and decide to disappear for a full two days, well, fathers get quite worried. Please don’t do that again.”

  “I am sorry.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Who is this friend?”

  Zal paused. How to explain this. Even he didn’t fully grasp it. “Well, her name is Asiya.”

  “A girl?”

  “Yes,” Zal said, and added, just to hear himself say it, really, “I met a girl.”

  Rhodes denied it was possible. Hendricks called him that next day to ask again what he had asked several times, and again he heard what Rhodes had always maintained.

  “There hasn’t been a single case of a feral child having romantic, erotic, sexual, et cetera impulses towards the opposite sex—you know this, Tony,” Rhodes said, removing and then playing with his clear plastic-framed eyeglasses, watching the world go from outlines to nebulae, utterly bored by the question. “Or the same sex, for that manner. Or toward an animal even. Ferals, it seems—as you know—are apparently asexual.”

  “But—”

  “But, Anthony, what if a meteor struck my office right now? What if God is a megacomputer in the future? What if life actually is a dream? What if one day you could take a pill to live forever? Sure, sure, sure, anything is possible, right? What did Kafka say about that?”

  “I don’t know, but—”

  “You know, the thing about possibility and impossibility. My point is, sure, Zal may be the most successfully adaptive feral case in history, but please consider why you’re placing bets on that. Do you think it’s you who is special, not Zal?”

  Hendricks could almost envision him twirling his clear frames by their stems. “Gerald, there is no need—”

  “Look, I know all these feral cases are so unique and so unresearched and, yes, what you and I do is guesswork—”

/>   “Gerald!”

  “But really, Anthony—”

  “Gerald!!!”

  “To actually consider—”

  “GERALD!!!”

  His glasses fell out of his hand. “What?”

  “What you and I do is very, very different, Gerald. My purpose with Zal is clear. I do one thing: love him.”

  Rhodes picked the glasses up and placed them on the bridge of his nose, and the world came back into focus. “Ah, lovely! And I love working with him—and you, Anthony. But it’s work. I study this. You’ve studied this. And love him all you want, Anthony, but you have to put him in context. You can fill him with love, but can he turn that love back around to you or anyone else? Anthony, you know this, you knew this at least. He can only be so much. And for now, my educated yet humble opinion leads me to believe this: wish as we may, hope as we will, today, at least, Romeo he is not. Don’t worry about him in all this; worry more about that girl—if she indeed exists—and what the hell she is thinking.”

  Zal and Asiya went on like that for a while, short meetings that he did not dare to call what they did in the movies, what his father joked about on yet another day when Zal was suddenly unavailable: dates. They never touched each other more than on the shoulder, on the back—a nudge, a bump, a brush. They had barely ever held hands. He didn’t understand why, but he badly wanted to.

  There was only one woman’s hand he wanted to hold more badly, that he knew he couldn’t—well, or else shouldn’t—and that was Asiya’s sister’s.

  Willa.

  Soon after they met, it was Willa’s twentieth birthday, and Asiya invited Zal, telling him that she knew it was a bit awkward, but, well, believe it or not, Willa had absolutely no friends.

  “I believe it,” said Zal. “I have absolutely no friends.”

  So he went. Asiya had told him No presents, but just the mention of it reminded him he had to. All day he searched and searched. He was grateful he had saved up some money from his allowance—it seemed much nicer to be able to spend it on Willa than on insect treats. He had exactly $56.13.