The Last Illusion Read online

  He ended up buying a fake pearl necklace (Willa seemed pearl-like in her luminescent roundness), a bottle of pink nail polish (he tried his hardest to match the same shade she wore), a yellow scarf with pink cupcakes on it (she, well, looked like a girl who liked cupcakes), and a giant box of diet granola bars (and, well, she looked like a girl who needed those). He didn’t have wrapping paper, so he put it all in a plastic bag and tied it with a red shoelace bow.

  Asiya saw it all and shook her head at him, with pity in her eyes. “Zal, she doesn’t need this stuff. Just give her this”—the scarf—“and maybe this”—the necklace. Eventually she conceded to the nail polish, too, begrudgingly (“I’m the one who has to polish her nails!”), but took one look at the granola and said, “No way. Do you think she got like that because diet health bars are her favorite food? But whatever; Zach and I can eat them.”

  Zal shrugged. He wanted to tell her it was the first time he had ever bought another human a gift, but he didn’t bother. She had to know; by then she had to.

  The party was just Asiya, her siblings, and their triplet sixteen-year-old cousins, whom apparently only Willa was fond of. They were shy, wormy girls, as triplets and twins often are, Zal had noticed by then, as if they were each just a percentage of a person. None of them said much, but they were the only ones who wore the birthday party cone hats.

  Willa just sat there, beaming in swirls of makeup Zal noted with some disappointment (she didn’t need it, he thought), in a pink lace dress, still on her bed, of course, but uncovered so one could see it all—all her very allness, Zal noted, a bit wistfully—topped on one end with white patent leather pumps and on the other end with a sparkling tiara that apparently had belonged to their grandmother.

  “It’s all real,” Asiya whispered as she dimmed the lights. The whole living room was rigged with tea lights, it seemed.

  Zal did not doubt the reality of it all.

  Zachary wore a T-shirt that had an illustration of a tie, collar, and buttons on the torso, in lieu of dressing up. Everyone thought it was clever.

  Mostly they sat in the living room around Willa’s bed and played music and ate food. Everyone except Asiya, that is, who prepared plate after plate for Willa but touched nothing herself.

  It occurred to Zal that he had never really seen Asiya eat much of anything—perhaps only that one café soup on their first meal out, which she had barely slurped at. But usually she just handled food, picked at it, played with it, took it with her but left it completely untouched. He could have sworn she was getting skinnier by the day.

  Zal pushed his plate full of potato chips, salsa, cupcakes, and brownies toward her.

  She looked at him, confused.

  “Eat,” he said.

  “I have been!” she cried. “Really! Plus, there’s the real”—and she mouthed cake—“coming. I will definitely have that too!”

  When it finally came—the cake—it was toward the end of the evening, and it was unveiled atop wheels, on the type of wheeled box you’d set a TV on, a three-layered double chocolate cake, enough to feed a wedding party, not just five normal eaters, including a possible anorexic canceled out by a monster overeater. The triplets applauded at its sight, and then again with everyone else after Willa made her wish, making a huge show of blowing out that one single candle, the type of candle that belonged by a bathtub, not on a cake. As the slices got passed around and destroyed by forks, Zal kept his eyes on Asiya. He saw her lick her clean fingers three times; he saw her cut the same slice again and again and again; he saw her rest the barren fork against her tongue twice; he saw her put her paper plate up and down, up and down, up and down, and up, up, up, and ­definitely down.

  What could he do? He had no right. When he would have rights to her, or what that even meant, precisely, he did not know. At some point, he would—he believed that—but he was not there yet. For now, she was happy, it seemed—as happy as a girl like that could appear—and he tried to just keep an eye on her to memorize the fit of her skinny legs in her usual dark jeans, the sliver of concave skin that peeked out from under her clingy turtleneck sweater, the angle of her sharp cheekbones, the deep craters under her eyes.

  She did not eat, but she did drink. And not just any drink—not the triplets’ soda floats—but alcohol, specifically the alcohol of choice that evening: pink champagne. All three McDonalds seemed fond of the stuff, and while she poured none for Zal initially, as the night wore on she seemed determined to get him involved.

  “Oh, come on, Zal!” Asiya’s voice was, as ever, wrapped in gauze, tangled in netting, but this time pangs of excitement pealed through. “Just a bit! I swear, I was five when my mother let me have a sip, isn’t that right, Willie?”

  “Well, our mother had a drinking problem,” giggled Willa, who got her very own bottle, and drank out of it like it was water from a thermos, somehow still with a delicate dignity, Zal noted. He wondered if she was drunk, if any of them were really and truly that thing, drunk.

  He had learned about drunkenness. Long ago, when Zal had inquired about the homeless people sleeping in the streets, Hendricks had explained drugs and alcohol to him. He knew this much from that: they were poisons, they could kill you in large doses; often they did not, but they could lead to addiction, a state where you had to have more and more of the same stuff every day to keep your normal life going along, until more was never enough and then you’d lose things: people you loved, your job, your home, your possessions, and, worst of all, your mind. It could transform you, Zal recalled—even a small dose could make you feel unlike yourself. You could lose control. It was nothing to take lightly.

  “I really can’t,” Zal said, and added the truth in lie’s clothing—or vice versa, hard to say, since it had never been put to the test—that Hendricks had told him to use for almost anything he didn’t want to do: “I have a lot of health issues. Who knows what can happen?”

  “Who told you that? Your father?” Asiya glared.

  Zal shrugged.

  “How old is this dude?” Zach muttered, disgusted, motioning to his little glass for more. He was taking what he called “shots” of the champagne, apparently another way to drink.

  “It’s really not bad, if you just have a little! Just a taste! It tastes almost like . . . soda!” Asiya insisted.

  “I’ve tasted it,” one of the triplets whispered, conspiratorially. “I wasn’t supposed to. But I did. I didn’t get drunk. But it did taste like soda.”

  “You did?” another triplet gasped. The other one was sleeping on her lap.

  “Look,” Asiya said, pushing a glass with about half an inch of golden bubbling liquid in it. “That’s barely anything. Trust me, Zal. I promise nothing will happen to you, and if it does—it won’t!—I will personally take you to the hospital and sit up all night and help you write your will and everything! Zal, I’m joking . . . Zal, do it for Willa! It’s her fucking birthday!”

  She had said the magic words—along with the one unmagic one, of course—do it for Willa. He wondered if she could tell. She must. But he had been so discreet. He looked at Willa, who was blushing a bit, smiling that almost farm-animal smile of hers, an oblivious-to-life’s-problems gentle easy smile.

  Asiya, aware of his shift, went on: “It’s really rude not to partake on someone’s birthday. Look at silly Willie: she’s more than halfway through a bottle. And if you don’t think she has health issues, you must already be drunk!”

  She was likely already drunk.

  He looked at Willa, who was looking down, smiling at her palms.

  “Willa, would it make you happy if I drank? Are you unhappy that I am not?” Zal, hoarse-throated suddenly, croaked.

  Willa did not look up. “Well, I’d love it if you did. You don’t have to—”

  “Wills!” Asiya shouted.

  “—but, yes, I would be very happy if you did. Just that little bit.”

  Zal looked down, nodding. She had asked something from him. His love interest’s s
ister, his real love interest. Or was she? Was she that other thing they always talked about, the crush? What did he want from her? He wanted to hold her hand. What else? He wanted to be buried in her. What did he mean by that exactly? He wanted to be nestled against her bosom. In what way? Like a child, he thought. Like a lover, he thought again. She confused him to no end.

  He took the glass out of Asiya’s hand without glancing at her overjoyed, laughing eyes. He looked at Willa the whole time as he took the glass and drank it in one big gulp.

  It felt indeed like a cross between soda and fire. It bubbled in him familiarly but also made him burn. Soon Asiya had refilled his glass and he was, as Hendricks had warned, wanting more and more and more.

  He saw himself homeless on the street, lying in a puddle of his own piss, an empty bottle in one hand, rats crawling in the other.

  But at the same time, he saw Willa, he swore, look at him adoringly, like he was her hero, her champagne-chugging knight. Clearly consuming something, possibly in an unhealthy manner, was the way to his princess’s mammoth heart.

  His head was a mess, and as the night wore on, the world before him started to rebel: it began to sway and tilt and spin, and all he could hear was Asiya’s rapid-fire whispery hisses, Willa’s soft giggles, an occasional pipe from a triplet, and something obscene from Zachary. “No more,” he remembered Asiya saying at some point, when he tried to reach out for a new bottle, feeling very ill but somehow wanting to know more about the feeling, feeling drawn to this feeling of nothing and everything all at once.

  “Am I dying, Asiya?” he remembered asking.

  Before he heard her answer, he fell into what he assumed was death.

  It was just twenty minutes later when he awoke, but it seemed like hours. The triplets were gone. Zachary was asleep on the corner couch. Asiya was cleaning up. Willa was sitting up in her bed, fresh-faced as ever, staring happily at the carnage from her birthday.

  The room was no longer in motion, but Zal still did not feel like himself.

  “Asiya, what did you do to me?” he muttered. “When does it go away?”

  “Soon,” she kept saying, “soon.”

  Soon was not coming.

  He began to grow irritated. “Asiya, I don’t think you care about me. I don’t think you care about caring for me, like you said.”

  She sighed and continued cleaning.

  “Asiya, I mean it.”

  Willa giggled to herself, still cradling that bottle-baby, he noted in astonishment.

  Zal turned to her. “You know what she cares about really? What I’ve discovered? She cares about the opposite of what you must care about! She cares only about not-eating; she loves not-food—air with a side of air and a cup of air!” He sat back, satisfied with himself.

  “Zal!” Asiya snapped. “What the hell?”

  “I guess you are different from other humans,” Zal went on. “You don’t have to eat. You only have to drink! And you call us freaks!”

  “I never called you a freak!”

  “Well, we are! But you are a worse one!”

  “How dare you—” Her voice was quaking and rising all at once, in a way he had never heard.

  But he just couldn’t stop all the bubbling fire in his head. “You look terrible, not eating ever! Look at Willa: she eats, and you call her a freak! Well, she looks like a person, not a stick figure! She looks like she enjoys her life! You should really—”

  “She’s the one that’s not gonna make it, Zal!” And suddenly she was gone, and all that was left of her was the sound she had made in the basement: gasps, gasps that he knew were part attack, part sob.

  He did not see where she went. He did not care to follow.

  His eyes instead turned to Willa.

  Willa’s eyes were huge, looking right at him, as if he had suddenly transformed before her. Into what, who knew: monster, prince, specter, perhaps truly himself. She seemed the least drunk of all of them, embracing that almost empty bottle against her chest, but her eyes showed definite shock.

  It was the first time she had ever registered a man talking positively about her appearance.

  Clearly she did not have much interaction with men these days, but in the past she had been only an object of ridicule, disdain, horror, and disgust, whether unspoken or not.

  Was he serious? Did she really look better than her sister to him? Was it just the alcohol? Was he actually ridiculing her? Did he—could he—was there any chance he liked her?

  “What have I done?” he said, kneeling by her bed a few moments later. “I am so sorry. Did I ruin your birthday?”

  “Oh, no,” Willa said. “You in many ways made it . . . a very good one.”

  “Can I . . .” He paused, ashamed. “No, I can’t.”

  “Go on,” Willa said, so softly.

  “Can I . . . can I . . . can I hold your hand?”

  It was at least the dozenth time that night that Willa was relieved for the candlelight that masked her blushing, or so she hoped. “You want to?” she asked.

  “I do. I do.”

  She paused and pried a hand off the bottle and brought it toward him, hoping he did not notice the shaking. His hand, she noticed, was also shaking.

  He took it.

  He felt cold, clammy, hard, little.

  She felt warm, sweaty, soft, abundant.

  They sat like that for a minute, each enjoying the opposite effect of the other’s touch, each filled with unquiet panic, each thinking of Asiya.

  “How did you get like this, Willa?” he eventually asked, shocked at his own words—the courage or whatever it was that made his thoughts immediately exist outside of him. Like the hand-holding, there it was, to his shock. Was there nothing he wouldn’t do?

  There were some things he couldn’t.

  He looked into her eyes, worried, seconds after he said it.

  She closed them for a long pause.

  When she opened them, they glistened in a way that he knew meant one thing: tears.

  My God, he thought, I have made not one but two women cry tonight. Both women I like, even.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “Let’s talk about something else . . .”

  She shook her head, and a few tears flung loose, like diamonds off a chain. “You are right to ask. It’s okay to, I mean. You’re not the first.”

  He nodded, still ashamed.

  “It’s a long story,” she said. “It’s a bad story. Are you sure you want to hear it?”

  He shrugged. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours. But only if you want to.”

  She closed her eyes again and took a deep breath. “I do.”

  Many minutes went by in silence, their hands still locked.

  Zal started to see swirls in the darkness, the candlelit darkness. He worried the room was going to spiral around itself again. He looked at her and gently nudged her along. “Willa,” he said. “Once upon a time . . .”

  And it was a long bad story, even with Willa abbreviating its odds and ends. It was the worst he had ever heard.

  Later, while he could not remember her saying it—could never re-create that setting, her weeping in the candlelight and saying all those awful, cataclysmic almost, words—he felt quite haunted by the actual story. Story, he thought, a strange thing, tales within their very tales, other lives in their lives. He didn’t want to accept it. In his head, it was just a story that he couldn’t accept as someone else’s reality; it might as well have been another nightmare-scape—his or hers, who cared, just downward-turning plot points, with the etiquette of weather, almost randomly generated for her.

  He was amazed the memory was contained inside her, even in that enormous inside of hers, bigger than any outside could possibly hint at. How could anyone be big enough for that; how could that person find a way to smile?

  The Story. When they had been young—very young; she did not say exactly how young—Asiya used to be in charge of babysitting her when their mother was out, usually with men, usually i
n bars. They were often alone, as Zachary had a best friend one house down, where he spent most of his time. Asiya eventually got bored with the responsibility and started acting in many ways like their mother, running loose through the city, with men, in bars, and worse, though who knew the extent of it. Eventually it was just Willa. This was before she was bedridden, before she was fat, even, when she was at most a slightly chubby girl, made of the same type of chub of normal little girls. She started liking being alone, talking to herself, playing with imaginary friends, making up story after story after story. She began to live in her imagination, almost solely. On one of these afternoons, when she was imagining being a princess in a tower, thin with long blond hair, so long that it spanned miles, across the hilltops and meadows of a magical little village on another planet—Zal wished this was the story, that the story ended there, capped with a final happily ever after, but no—the house was broken into. A man in dark clothing suddenly appeared, darting from room to room, knocking things over, packing things in dark suitcases, whispering things to himself that she did not understand, until finally he found her, sitting in a pile of Legos in her room. He told her he would kill her if she made a sound, that she was going with him and they were going to take a ride. So she cried, but silently. He threw her in the back of the van. It was dark. Time went by. When she was let out, they were in a cabin, and outside the one window there was just night and wilderness, nothing else, no sign of city. (“What did he look like?” Zal had interrupted, his body growing hot with fear and anger, wanting both to visualize the demon and to ID him, so he could punish Willa’s attacker forever, not knowing if the story ended with the law doing that or not. But she said she could not remember. All she knew was that he was old and there was some facial hair and that was it; time and perhaps sanity had rendered the man faceless.) And the story grew even blurrier—Zal did not know whether it was for his sake or if she couldn’t bear to utter it or if she simply had blocked it all. (“I couldn’t tell you so much about my life at that age, either,” he assured her.) But this is what she knew: he had hurt her again and again, she had been hurt in ways she had never imagined possible, over and over, until she began to do whatever the man said, until she began to never cry, until she began almost to accept him as her keeper, until she accepted that life, until she began to almost—“and I say this word and I know it’s so weird, don’t judge me,” she cried—love him. She found a purpose in all those weeks with him, a way to stay alive. It was the one thing she knew how to do at that age, a way that caught the man’s interest, that had him keep her just-so intact, that preserved her to this day: she told him stories. Every night before the man went to bed—and he had trouble going to bed, she recalled—she told him a part of one long, continuous story, each night saying she’d tell the rest tomorrow, to-be-continuing the thing for months, until the police finally broke in one night and found a naked little girl perched atop the stomach of the psychopath, telling stories as if she were a mythological fairy and he was the luckiest monster on earth.