The Last Illusion Page 13

  He was repulsed at first, and then he wasn’t.

  They went on like that for a while.

  When she pulled away, she spoke in an even quieter whisper than her usual and told him she had, in all her experiences over the years, never had a real boyfriend. There had been phases, men of different gods—but she stopped herself from getting into it.

  And he told her, in all his no-experience, he had never had a girlfriend.

  So, she wondered, was he?

  He paused. She was asking him but also offering, clearly.

  She told him she didn’t mind taking charge, and so she cleared her throat and just went for it.

  “Zal, do you want to be my boyfriend?”

  Zal tried to swallow the feelings of alarm and panic. It was okay, it would not hurt him. Certainly he had gone this far—he had to.

  Echo, he thought, echo. “Asiya,” he said. “I want to be your boyfriend.”

  She again did that thing she rarely did: she smiled—what a smile—and embraced him and again kissed him, wetness and all. She was so happy.

  They went on like that for a while, then ate some ant candy and talked about where to go next, until Asiya got another one of her disaster premonitions and they rushed to her home. It, like all of them, passed.

  But Asiya’s panic attack was an especially bad one for Zal, the first really bad one. On the evening of their girlfriend-boyfriend-hood, just hours after their first kiss, in the midst of her terrors, she had turned to him and said, “It’s you, isn’t it?”

  Zal had kept her close to his chest, wanting to contain her tremors somehow. He pulled back a bit. “What do you mean, Asiya?”

  He had never seen her look so frightened. “You’re going to . . . going to . . .” It seemed as if she were choking on an idea she was too scared to give life to in the open air.

  “I’m not doing anything, Asiya. I’m just here with you, trying to help you.”

  She shook her head so hard he worried she’d hurt her neck. Her face was blood red when she finally spit it out: “You’re gonna betray me, aren’t you?”

  And before either of them could say anything, she had melted that statement into an avalanche of sobs.

  “Asiya, you’re wrong!” Zal said over and over.

  “I don’t mess this stuff up. Sometimes I know what’s in your head, maybe before you even know what’s in your head. I know what could happen, what will happen . . .”

  Zal remembered something. “No, you’ve been wrong! Just earlier you were wrong. When I said I was thinking about something I knew would never happen, you kissed me.”

  For a moment, a cruel gash of a smile appeared on her face through that curtain of tears. “I kissed you because I wanted to kiss you. You, on the other hand, want to fly.”

  Zal swallowed his alarm and shook his head at her, even though they both knew she was right.

  “Make sure you’re flying, not falling, though. They’re not the same thing. The earth pulls us down, not up,” she said through clenched teeth, as if the words hurt to utter.

  The whole world filled with the rumbling of her inconsolable panic. Zal tried to focus on the ticking of the watch on his wrist.

  It would be over soon. And when it finally was, neither of them would have the courage to bring it up, whatever it was.

  PART V

  Watch out, the world’s behind you.

  —The Velvet Underground,

  “Sunday Morning”

  He developed a taste for kissing, and soon it was anything but confusing and really not even a matter of wetness but rather another way for the flesh to explore other flesh, to get deeper, almost as deep as was permitted—almost to get a hint of what was inside others. No one had access to all the real insides of anyone else, much less themselves, the network of organs and blood and cells and muscles and fats and all that other fragile machinery and their continual miracles. He felt like those movie heroes, hungry for kisses, and when he went in, he really went in, making him altogether a different kisser from most people. Who knew it could hurt, she would half-joke. If anyone could do that, it’s you, Zal.

  It was about to hurt her more than she could imagine.

  It happened one very significant early summer evening, when the first breaths of humidity were just barely giving the city a taste of what was to come and people’s thoughts were turning more and more to water and naps and sand and sun and sunblock and skin. It was the night of Asiya’s big solo art show, also a monumental night for him. He later wondered if it would be the highlight of his life, even with its mistake, and he decided maybe the mistake had been just a casualty of the night’s greatness. That night he had felt better than normal; he had felt special. He had graduated from normal so suddenly and fully that at the opening people saw him as different only because they saw him as better than all of them. All of Asiya’s dozens and dozens of fellow artists, plus gallery bigwigs, critics, and passersby, had been staring at him all night, but in a way that he knew for sure was not bad—not that old look of shock or wonder at him as the mere fruit of an unbelievable story, but instead as a pure example of unshakable freakdom. He had been Asiya’s muse for months, here and there, almost casually, when she had film to spare, but soon it became apparent he was the subject of the best work she’d ever done. Two-thirds of a show she’d thought would be all dead birds simply had to be living bird boy, as she put it. In the end, even the one-third that were bird photos were different bird photos than she had originally envisioned; they looked almost animate, beating hearts and all even. A blurry bird silhouette, a “sleeping” bird in a human-built nest, flocks of birds in various formations, and of course the bird attached to strings and posed in artificial flight. It was as if her fascination with decay had simply melted away, while her fascination with birds had only been reinforced. When she realized it was all Zal’s doing, she began to focus her lens on him. She even re-created that very bird photo Zal loved, put him in black Halloween angel wings and attached him to thin wire hung from the plant hooks on her ceiling. It was the centerpiece of nearly a dozen blown-up prints and smaller oversize Polaroids. She called Zal “Angel” in her show All My Angels.

  He was filled with pride. He had never been the most important bird. In all his time with his bird mother, Khanoom, and all her children, he was at the bottom by far.

  He was also grateful that Asiya had found a way to skirt the bird issue—his bird issue—and yet pay homage to it at the same time. He liked the idea of angels. And he loved the notion of some genuine light seeping into Asiya’s steadfast night vision. Her world of angels, with him at its core, seemed to transport her slightly outside her dreaded realm of apocalypse.

  Zal had even submitted to her styling for the show. He truthfully wasn’t that happy with the white feather boa slung around his neck—it’s angelic, not birdlike, I swear the feathers are fake, she had insisted and insisted—over the white plain shirt upon which she had scribbled a red outline of an angel with a halo, harp, wings, and all. She told him he looked edgy, hip, arty, like he was with her. An art couple, she had cooed. And for the first time, Zal saw Asiya in something other than black—she wore a white linen tunic and white flowing slacks, the outfit simple as ever but shocking on Asiya for its brightness, chosen to be in sync with her muse, her angel, her show, of course.

  That night could have been the highlight of her life, too, it occurred to him too late.

  In some ways it had all been overwhelming, the all-eyes-on-them as they walked in a bit late—Asiya had told him it was very important they be just a bit late—but once he had realized these were different looks than what he used to get, he fell in love with the attention. He was suddenly full of things to say and excited to shake hands and hug and even air-kiss and pose by his photos and even autograph one girl’s cocktail napkin.

  If he had ever had a shot at smiling, that night was it.

  And then finally there was that boy. The one with all the questions, mostly innocent ones.

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nbsp; “Who are you?” he asked, just like that.

  “I’m fine,” Zal had said, mishearing who for how, several drinks into the evening. Since the night of Willa’s birthday those many months ago, he had developed a love-hate relationship with alcohol, locked, it seemed, in a cycle of regretting and indulging over and over.

  The boy had chuckled. “Not too modest, huh?”

  Zal had blinked, confused. The boy—freckled, thin, scrawny, in a cap, tank top, and jeans—was looking him up and down, in a way that was somehow different from all the other eyes on him.

  “Is that you?” he said, pointing to one of Zal’s black Halloween wing portraits. “Are you the angel?” The boy was smiling, an oily smile; he knew the answer.

  “I am the angel,” Zal said, and tried to make a joke to tag on: “But I’m no angel.”

  The boy chuckled again, as if Zal were a masterful comic. “Oh yeah? You want to prove it?”

  Zal didn’t say anything, just tried to follow those eyes that moved from his feet to his feathered boa.

  The boy finally went for the least innocent question of all. “Do you want to go in there,” he asked, pointing to the restroom across the hall, “and kiss me?” Only one aspect of it had shocked Zal: the very idea that you could kiss someone other than the one you were supposed to kiss. The notion was absolutely revolutionary, and of course appealing—he had recently felt just a touch enslaved by Asiya and his boyfriendhood, and of course, at the same time, he had become such a kissing enthusiast that the idea of a new set of lips was stupefying. Before he could make a decision—after all, he knew giving in was the wrong thing to do, and, should Asiya find out, which he suspected she would, suspected in fact he might be the one to tell her, if not that night, well, one day, everything could very well be ruined—the boy had led him by the hand to the bathroom and gone in first. A few seconds later, through just a crack, he motioned Zal in with a big smile, and all that beautiful hell had broken loose.

  They went in and stayed there for what felt like an eternity. He lost all sense of himself, but gladly somehow. There he found himself kissing as if his life depended on it. The alcohol in his system was suddenly overwhelming him, so his technique (slow, circular, searching, whipping, flicking, thrusting, backing off, thrusting harder, and harder and harder, in that order) was sloppier than usual, but it didn’t hinder his desire to take that mouth in, take everything he had, and employ the hands, face, neck, ears, shoulders, arms, just short of another place he knew people went but he still felt too on the fence to introduce now, or anytime, for that matter. This was making out, and Zal thought he was good at it, maybe even better with the boy than with Asiya. So in the bathroom of the gallery where Asiya was having her first solo art show, he gave it everything he had, let the alcohol coat his conscience, and allowed himself to enjoy every bit of the very eager body before him, without a second’s second thought—

  “Fuck!” The door opened, and both of their heads ripped apart from each other and turned to it, the source of the Fuck.

  It was, of all people, Zachary, to Zal’s horror—one of two people it was paramount not be privy to this spectacle.

  Zachary slowly shut the door, as if his eyes couldn’t believe what they were seeing, but not without a few words, dripping with disgust: “Fucking piece-of-shit faggots.”

  It was like waking up from a dream. Zal suddenly looked at his partner as if for the first time.

  It was not Asiya.

  It was not even a woman.

  It was a man. That, he knew, was what had made Zachary say it. Plus the fact that this man, or perhaps boy, this much younger male, Zal suddenly noted, was Zachary’s very close childhood friend from next door.

  The boy, whose name Zal had suddenly forgotten, pulled Zal back close to him. “Who fucking cares anyway. Come back to me.”

  And for a second Zal tried to, but the kiss had suddenly become the way it was that first time, foreign and confusing and wet.

  He pulled away. “I’m sorry.”

  The boy sighed. All they were wearing was their underwear—the boy his boxer shorts and Zal his briefs—their other clothes in one collective pile in that enormous bathroom. The boy got dressed, glaring at Zal.

  “See you never, neighbor,” he said, before flicking off the lights and slamming the door on him.

  Zal sat on the floor of the dark bathroom, his heart racing. He felt sick; he felt terrified.

  It was nothing compared with the hell he felt when he got the courage to rejoin the party at the gallery, where of course Zachary and Asiya, in perfect nightmare form, were huddled in a corner gesticulating conspiratorially.

  He had messed up with everyone.

  Asiya didn’t say a word to him until the opening was over, when they were outside the gallery space, alone. She was smoking, something she did only when she was very mad or stressed, something she had begun doing more and more lately, it seemed.

  “I’m sorry, Asiya,” he mumbled.

  It took her red face to remind him of that sentence from the night of their own first kiss: You’re gonna betray me, aren’t you? And what had he said? He couldn’t remember, but he was sure it wasn’t yes.

  She snorted and sucked on the cigarette for what seemed like ages, the longest drag he’d ever seen anyone take. “Tell me . . . are you, um, gay?”

  Another drag, shorter. She said, “And don’t tell me you don’t know what that is.”

  He did know. He thought about it. He couldn’t be of that sexuality if he had no sexuality whatsoever, he wanted to tell her, but he couldn’t.

  She said, “I can’t believe at my first fucking show, my special fucking night, you’d cheat on me.”

  She said, “And, yes, especially considering we haven’t done anything else, that counts as cheating.”

  She said, “Maybe you would have gone further with him, who knows? Maybe that’s more your thing.”

  She said, “It’s one thing to hurt your fucking girlfriend, but Zachary? What has he ever done to you? Connor has been his dear friend since they were toddlers. How dare you? How dare Connor, too.”

  Connor, he thought. Connor.

  She said, “Don’t you have anything to say?”

  She went on, “And don’t even try to make excuses or put it on him or say it was the booze. Zachary said you guys had no clothes on. You just barely started doing that with me!”

  She said, “When the hell were we going to fuck? Did you even want to?”

  She said, “Get the fuck out of my life.”

  Drag, drag, drag, drag.

  And, crumbling finally to the sidewalk, she whispered, “Oh my God, please don’t leave me, Zal. I fucking love you, that’s all.”

  He did not say it back, not then. He had betrayed her, and in more ways than one, it seemed. The world Asiya lived in was primarily dark—People fuck up, she thought, cheat, hurt each other, behave like animals, stomp on each other’s hearts. That was to be expected. But that lack of reciprocity—her I love you, even if there was a fucking in the middle, was left dangling indefinitely, as if off a cliff, after all that they had gone through then, and in general even—that was just cruel.

  She stopped talking to Zal, but not without telling him to steer clear of Zachary, because he had been saying over and over he wanted to kill Zal, for making a faggot of my homey Con.

  That was no problem for Zal. He found Zachary distasteful, and Connor just some mistake. His newfound interest in making out + alcohol + art show, where he had been the star, had all equaled one giant mistake. Plus now that he knew the boy was Zachary’s friend, he was downright disgusted with himself. He hoped he’d never see either of them again.

  But without Asiya, whom he often took for granted—he admitted it—his life was back to an unbearable bleakness. He could not believe he had endured all those years without her. There he was back at home, by his computer, eating honey-glazed moth wings, staring at the walls, talking to his father again all the time, feeling like a freak.
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br />   Was he another type of freak now? He didn’t think so. He did not consider this an act of homosexuality, he wanted to tell Asiya. In some ways, his no-sexuality made him pansexual. It shocked him less, he wagered, than most humans to imagine, say, having sex with an animal, especially, predictably—sometimes he hated himself—a bird. What difference did gender really make? Was it Asiya’s low-grade femaleness that kept him with her? It was absurd.

  And kissing and sex felt worlds apart, somehow, so it stunned him to hear Asiya complain—so vulgarly in the awful aftermath—about their not having sex. It had first come up that winter, on Valentine’s Day, in fact, a day he’d often noticed but had never thought to observe. It was the day that Asiya—ever unsentimental Asiya, and yet!—had decided was to be their First-Sex Day. He had come to her place after therapy and found her on her bed, lying naked on some almost black petals. He had worried she had lost her mind and asked her what was wrong. She had laughed bitterly and reminded him what day it was. He had simply blinked. She had pulled him close to her and he had closed his eyes, as he often did when Asiya was nude—somehow her nudity was too much, although he had no problem showing her his. They had made out for a while, and Asiya had, over his clothes, sought parts of him, parts of him that were simply just confused. Eventually she had given up. You’re not into it, are you? she had asked, knowing the answer. He had apologized, explaining this was all happening very fast for him. He had reminded her he was not like other people and had almost cried from shame. And then she, too, had felt ashamed, and they had embraced. She put her clothes on, and they had had a decent enough dinner together.

  Since then, Asiya had tried every few weeks, but every time it went much like that, sans petals. He had started to feel panicked at the very idea of her advances, just as he was alarmed by the idea that he would never be free of their relationship, something he had at first thought of as an experience yet was now looking like a condition.

  And now that condition was gone. And yet Zal, sitting in his dark bedroom, utterly doghoused by her and by the world, suddenly realized: That’s it. Sex was the key. She wasn’t really upset about him with another human, but she was upset about him still not wanting to have sex.