The Last Illusion Read online

  “Don’t worry, Zal,” she said when she finished. “He died in prison.”

  Zal could not say a word. He had only one question, which he asked her after many minutes of silence. “What was the story you told him?”

  She smiled and shrugged at the familiar question. “That I can’t tell you. I really don’t remember. His face and the story: the only things missing. I wish the whole thing were missing, to tell you the truth.”

  “I know what you mean,” he muttered.

  “Zal, I do therapy. A therapist comes here.”

  “I do therapy, too.”

  “You do?!”

  “I do.”

  “I’m pretty much better,” she said, sniffling. “I’m not so afraid. But over the years, I stopped leaving the house. I stopped moving. I got very sad. I hated my body that that man had owned. I hated my story, all stories. I turned to the most simple things. And soon, before I knew it, I, well, got like this.”

  Zal couldn’t raise his eyes to hers, with all those tears streaming down her cheeks over and over. He wished she could go back to being that dumbly smiling angel of the moments before. Now, on her birthday, to bring back all that, to make her cry like that! He wanted to disappear.

  “Don’t feel bad for me,” she later whispered. “I’m better, I really am. It’s Asiya you should worry about—she’s never forgiven herself.”

  He sighed, nodding. “I should never mention it to her.”

  “Yes, she won’t talk about it. Poor thing.”

  Zal got up and went to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. He looked strange; he felt strange. The story had sobered him, he felt, suddenly noting the strangeness of normalcy seeping in. The strangest part of all was that the story had a familiar ring somehow to Zal. Something about it felt ancestral, ancient, but very much a part of him, like when Hendricks read him those bedtime stories of the great bird and its human son, the young albino, the story that had given him his name. In spite of Hendricks, he’d always found that a horror story of sorts, until he heard Willa’s.

  The world, thought Zal, was such a very bad place.

  When he came out, she looked exhausted, and so he wheeled Willa to her room and covered her with blankets. She insisted on sleeping in her tiara and party dress and all; Zal imagined it was because she didn’t want him to see her undressed, but whatever it was, he respected it.

  “Good night, Willa, sleep well,” he said, echoing his father, squeezing her hand very briefly, as if holding on to it too long would start the whole cycle of the story and the tears all over again. “One question: is there any more of that alcohol anywhere?”

  There was, and plenty of it. He took another bottle of champagne to Asiya’s room. Asiya was, as he expected, not sleeping, but sitting on the ledge of the window, peering into the sky.

  She looked at him, clearly annoyed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t seem to open this bottle. Could you help me?”

  Asiya snorted and took the bottle. Zal was startled by the pop and fizz and overflow, in spite of beholding it all night.

  They passed the bottle back and forth mostly in silence.

  He started to feel that fire-blooded lunatic eclipse him again, words and actions all a chore, and yet endless and essential in their chaotic flow.

  “You look very nice,” Zal said, lying on her bed as she still sat perched on her sill. “Right now, you look so nice. And always. I didn’t mean what I said completely, you know.”

  She shook her head at him.

  “I have to tell you something, Asiya.”

  He suddenly felt like crying.

  “What’s wrong?” she said, sounding concerned. She got up from the sill and sat next to him on the bed, searching his eyes. “What is it, Zal?”

  He closed his eyes and all of Willa’s story came back to him, and he thought how much she deserved everything in the world—Willa, not Asiya—how he could never care for her enough, how he could never, ever risk enough for her. Nothing would ever be big enough to make it better, so what the hell was he afraid of in speaking the truth anyway?

  Asiya: he was afraid of Asiya. He somehow belonged to her already. He had never felt so close to someone so fast, but he felt trapped. He could not believe the power she held over him.

  “Zal, you have to tell me now . . .” she was saying.

  He was owned by her, trapped, behind her bars completely.

  “Why did you give me this?” he moaned, pointing to the bottle and then quickly taking a big sloppy gulp from it, half of which he spit out.

  Asiya grabbed the bottle and put it behind her back. “No more. Zal, tell me.”

  He suddenly started laughing at the whole situation, what madness it all was. Where was his father, where was his home, where were his candied bugs, his computer, his bed, his health problems? What a long endless wicked date it had been since the moment they had met over the body of a dead bird.

  When he finally told her, it came out with a startling simplicity:

  “Asiya, I have feelings for your sister.”

  She looked at him, confused for a second. Then she snorted. Then she shook her head. Then she did the thing he almost never saw her do, the thing he could not do and always found surprising in others—she broke into a massive grin and eruptions of the deepest sort of laughter.

  “Oh, Zal! Oh, Zal, oh, Zal, oh, Zal! God, you worried me there! Shit! Great! Well, that’s very nice, Zal! Okay, next topic!”

  And she kept going like that, laughing bottomlessly in huge heaves, as if she were about to throw up or become very ill. She did not think he was serious, he eventually realized, or so she was pretending. His interest in Willa, at least on some level, was not real to Asiya at all.

  Zal still felt better having said it. He had done his part. Plus, what more could he do? How much further could it go with Willa? He was already Asiya’s, more than he ever thought possible, whether he liked it or not.

  They went to bed only many hours later, when the sun came back up, lying in bed without touching each other at all, side by side, like two scared children. Before sleep overtook them—a bad sleep of low quality, Zal recalled, a thin fizzy champagne-coated sleep that felt entirely unrestful—Asiya grew nervous again.

  “It’s those feelings I get, Zal . . .”

  “Not the good ones?”

  “No. Really bad ones sometimes. Like something bad is about to happen. It’s always a little different, but this one I’ve had a lot lately. I don’t know what to make of it, but basically I feel like the ground beneath us is burning, like the earth is caving into itself or something. Like the only thing someone could do is the impossible: like just shoot into the air, like a rocket, fly into the air, like a fucking bird.”

  Zal nodded, sleep sneaking in here and there. “I think about that, too.”

  “You do?!” Asiya exclaimed, but Zal’s eyes were closed, and she assumed it was pure sleep talk.

  That night, like lovers in a myth, they shared their dreams: big black birds hovering in an endless sky, in his over everything, in hers over nothing.

  Only a few blocks from them, Silber was rising from a sleep that was mostly just lying supine, eyes closed, mind engaged in a hysterical triathlon, every conceivable worry rushing in and out, all concerns gathering at a pinnacle—like devils, not angels, at the head of a pin: the last illusion. The one that was the opposite of flying, taking down something high and proud and towering, and reducing it to dust, or worse than dust: nothing at all.

  He had a Fantasia cigarette—special-ordered as usual, only in red and gold—on his rooftop. A weekday morning and the city was as still as it could be, no trace of it yet being the city where everything on earth always happened. He tried to count the seconds of silence between the low hums of traffic, a stray honk here and there, the sounds of people underneath him, shop gates opening, perhaps the rattle of the subway.

  What did it mean, he thought, to take it all away? That he was missing. In eve
ry stunt, Silber had a theme, a concept, some sort of meaning. This one, just like a nightmare, dangled before him, brazen, meaningless, naked, unblinking.

  He was in constant pursuit of its link to something else. On that particular morning, one he hadn’t thought of in quite a while came in and then quickly out of his head—it made no sense; he was getting desperate, he knew it, but he suddenly thought there might be a connection between the stunt and the boy who had been raised in a birdcage.

  What was his name? Silber was amazed: he had forgotten the boy’s name. That was what celebrity had done to him, he realized: he would quickly forget people—even women sometimes!—even those who had so captured his interest, so urgently, just, it seemed, weeks ago.

  He went inside and paused by his desk to snort the line of white powder on his mouse pad, the single, fat line waiting for him all night. He was thirsty, so he took a shot of his beloved British-department-store-bought “absinthe,” or so it promised—it was, in any case, strong. He felt better, good enough to return back to his sleepless sleep, his bed rest, he supposed. In this phase of his, Bran Silber sometimes went on like that for ages. Life and its increments slipped by, and he did not mind. Incubation, he thought. Men of magic require it, especially when sorting the greatest stunt of one’s life. He put no pressure on himself.

  “Zal”: the very name did not come back to him for many months.

  “Zal,” his father said to him gently, more gently than ever, on the phone one winter night—the phone being their prime mode of communication now that live contact was impossible, with Zal’s schedule suddenly all hers. “It sounds to me like she has become almost like a . . . well, girlfriend.”

  Zal thought about it. “I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t think so.”

  “I mean, son, you’ve never felt this way about another woman, have you?”

  He wanted to say yes, yes and more, but how could he get into that impossible thing, all the everything he felt for Willa?

  “I guess not, Father.”

  “So you like her? You maybe even love her?”

  He was silent.

  “I’m sorry, son. Maybe that’s not appropriate. I will let that be yours. It’s just, I am surprised.”

  “I understand.”

  “This is an important development.”

  “Why?” And then Zal knew why. “Oh, because I am supposed to be of no . . . sexual persuasion?” Sexual persuasion had to be a Rhodes-ism, he thought.

  “Well, yes. But, look, you’re growing up. Am I even entitled to ask? This is all new for me, too, son.”

  Before Zal could tell him that nothing, even after all these weeks, had gone sexual, that he did not perceive any sex in him—at least not yet—Hendricks had stopped himself from asking and had said he had to go. There was a distance, Zal began to realize, growing between them. It worried him. He was, in many ways, content with the surprising-indeed way that the universe was shaping itself for him, but sometimes all he wanted was for Hendricks to come and save him from his destiny for the second time.

  And yet there were other times when Zal swore she was the best thing that had ever happened to him. How, he wondered, day after day, did Asiya McDonald remain the same person and yet also manage to grow more and more beautiful in his eyes?

  Theory no. 1: He became more beautiful as well. He soon became her muse. Asiya began shooting Zal like crazy, one of the first human subjects she had ever taken on.

  “Trust me, you’re not just another dead bird,” she’d joke, and take photo after photo, Zal feeling nearly blinded, focusing so hard on not blinking that every shot featured a certain tension in his face that she found fascinating.

  Theory no. 2: Because she was the first person open to all of him, even the sides of him he’d hidden the longest. One particularly intimate day, Zal had brought her a gift of white-chocolate-covered ants with a great deal of trepidation, finally wanting to expose this last demon to her and feeling safe enough to do so. She had loved it, she claimed, and, in spite of her eating issues, consumed at least three or four little pieces, more than he’d ever seen her do with candy. Later she asked him to take his clothes off. She had blushed a great deal as she said it. But to her shock, he did it without a hesitation, a blush, a protest, not even a pause. The word boyfriend overshadowed the word art in her head those days; boyfriend was in constant play, and it was something she had, in spite of her age, never managed to possess fully.

  A body = a body, Zal thought, registering her embarrassment, knowing why her request made her that way, but also feeling protected from her embarrassment by something barely there and yet there, that flimsy membrane that separated her sexual persuasion from his non-sexual persuasion.

  She was almost disappointed. There was something entirely unsexy about his standing there, unaroused, that pale thin body not altogether unlike hers, save a few minor additions and subtractions.

  She shot away.

  He looked beautiful behind the lens. She told him so.

  He said nothing, bored, longing for the sweet ants, for the flashing to stop, to be alone again.

  Theory no. 3: Because she, too, was vulnerable, in a way he understood. And in moments when she was clearly hurt, when he saw her go soft and quiet like that, pity overwhelmed him, as if he were staring at gentle tender Willa, and he really felt something he thought might be a close relative of love.

  And so he told her, too. That she was beautiful and—Theory no. 4—maybe anything could become the most beautiful thing in the world if you gave in fully, let it take you over, let it be all you had.

  “Pose like you’re hugging yourself,” she told him. He did it, and she said he looked like he was suffocating himself. She asked him what pose he would most like to be in.

  He asked her if impossible ones counted.

  She shrugged. What was possible, what was impossible?

  He went right ahead and told her—he was feeling so bold, bolder than ever, with her eyes all over him, all of him, a man, yes, he was a man, not a bird not a bird not a bird—he told her he would like to fly. And if he couldn’t exactly fly, he wanted the next closest thing. And not in one of those planes of her father’s, either. Real flight. But if it was indeed out of the realm of possibility, then maybe something like that photo of hers, the one with the dead bird suspended by string.

  She blushed, happy. She told him she was the wrong person to ask, clearly, but that she thought that was not impossible. She told him to hold out his arms, his wings. She tried to show him how.

  Theory no. 5: Because she took him there. He told her he didn’t need direction; he knew how. He’d grown up with it. He’d watched them circling the veranda like it was a ballroom and they were debutantes, showing off for the old lady, round and round, to her laughter and applause. He was the only one who couldn’t fly, the impostor bird, the Bird Boy, the White Demon bound by hard skin, dull hair, and heavy muscle and bone in their world of light, air, and feather.

  And yet, beheld by Asiya, he was suddenly back in that dream, that dream that was reality, but this time one of them, the biggest bird of all, the most incandescent twinkle in Khanoom’s wide eyes. If there had to be an analogy, this Zal was as far from demon as possible. At the very least, he was a winged human: an angel.

  She asked for one more shot. He didn’t move, not quite hearing her.

  Eventually she took his hands and tried to read his eyes.

  He told her—he meant this—that so many things felt possible with her.

  She, so happy, said she felt the same way with him.

  He told her more, everything that was left. He told her about Silber and the Flight Triptych and all his dreams for it.

  Her mouth dropped at the story. She told him maybe that was it, maybe there was a way.

  He told her it was not real. He told her: strings, wire, smoke, mirrors.

  She told him he shouldn’t think negatively. All the craziest things happen. If we can think it, it can happen. She told him she could read
his mind, right then.

  He told her he was thinking something right now that he knew would never happen.

  She went over to the naked Zal and put her lips on his.

  That’s not it, he thought frantically, sure he was dying, that he was being choked to death, that she was sucking the oxygen out of him. Then he remembered all those movies, Casablanca and the others: the men always went for it like they were hungry, like the women were food on a plate that they were going to devour, how they took charge of it, swooped down and pressed their mouths against the woman’s, tightly closed and long and hard, arms all over what was theirs.

  He tried it.

  She seemed to respond. Then she pulled back and put her finger in his mouth, as if prying it open, and told him to keep it that way.

  He gasped for air as her open mouth closed on his.

  She laughed softly as she pulled away. She demonstrated on his hand.

  It felt good. He could tell it would feel good.

  Inside his mouth, an explosive wetness suddenly existed; a searching, writhing, assured wetness worked some magic.