The Last Illusion Read online

  “Actually, Father, we have to get to a movie,” he said.

  “We do?” Asiya looked at him, unconvinced. “Really? Which?”

  “We have tickets,” he said, trying to sound calm and, he thought, frenzied, “to Casablanca.”

  “They’re showing Casablanca?” Hendricks asked. “Really? Where?”

  “In the . . . Hell . . . Hell’s Kitchen Cinema,” Zal sputtered. “The, um, new one.”

  Asiya was squinting her eyes at him, not buying a word, but finally, it seemed, getting that this was Zal’s game over.

  “It was very nice to meet you,” she said lukewarmly to Hendricks’s tie.

  “A pleasure,” he said to her shoulder, patting her on it, just once.

  He then embraced Zal as he always did—with every ounce of love in him—and whispered in his ear, “Son, make sure we talk tomorrow.” When Zal pulled away, he saw Hendricks was smiling, but he also thought he detected some genuine concern behind it all, a close cousin of the disdain he had been afraid of.

  Zal nodded, wishing he could have disappeared from the earth altogether just over a half hour ago.

  He took Asiya’s hand, a show for both of their sakes, and they darted out.

  Outside, Asiya was quiet and tense. “Why did you lie about that movie?”

  “I didn’t,” he lied again. “But I don’t want to see it anymore. I’m very sleepy suddenly. My place? Yours?”

  “It’s not even five,” she said. “He hated me.”

  “No, he didn’t,” Zal said, hoping it wasn’t a lie. “It’s all fine. Let’s eat.”

  “I thought you wanted to sleep.”

  “That would be great! Either, I mean. Let’s just go somewhere and do whatever, you know.”

  For a second, he thought he saw her lips quiver in the way they did when she was about to cry.

  “What?” said Zal.

  “Those men in there,” Asiya hissed. “They were the problem.”

  Zal tried to control himself. “They were just men! Look, I’m the one who’s supposed to see the world as something crazy and unreal and weird, not you! If I’m telling you they were just men, they probably really were!”

  Asiya stared at him, wide-eyed, a bit stunned. Zal never had outbursts like that; he seldom even talked back, much less chastised her.

  She nodded slowly. “Sometimes I know things you don’t, Zal.”

  “Asiya, just stop!” He raised his voice, measuredly, trying to control it from becoming something out of his control.

  “This was a disaster, wasn’t it?” she asked many minutes later, as the doors of their subway closed.

  Zal was still not sure where they were getting off.

  He looked down at her. Her eyes looked even more concerned than Hendricks’s had.

  By that point he had mastered it: telling her things that were not quite lies, but were very remote possibilities, possibilities he would never bet on, or infuse with faith, but still ones he wouldn’t altogether rule out, and so he looked her straight in the eyes when he said firmly, “Asiya, it was fine, everything is fine.”

  Thanks to a deep and yet unsatisfying sleep, tomorrow came all too soon. Zal was awakened by his cell phone: his father, of course. He pried himself from Asiya, who was still asleep or pretending to be, and stepped out on his fire escape for privacy.

  “How was the movie?” was Hendricks’s first question.

  “We missed it,” Zal stuttered. “We ate instead.”

  “Did she get her liquor?” he asked, joking. He sounded amused.

  Zal could think of nothing to joke back with. “No,” he replied stiffly.

  “Son, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to make fun,” Hendricks said. “It was very nice to meet Asiya.”

  “It was?” Zal asked. “I mean, she was very happy to meet you, too.”

  “Good.”

  There was some silence.

  “Zal, I am concerned a bit, though,” he said, inevitably.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. She’s interesting, but a few things seem a bit off—just a bit, but since I’m your father and all, I have to say something.”

  “Sure, Father.”

  “Zal, is she a bit paranoid? Does she think people are after her?”

  “Not really,” Zal lied. “Just that day.”

  “Okay, fair enough,” he said. “One other question . . . Why is her name Asiya? I expected her to be Middle Eastern, but I don’t think she is, right?”

  “Well . . .” Zal paused. It was something they had never discussed, he realized. “I think she was a Muslim at one point.”

  “Well, that’s nice. But she wasn’t born Muslim, was she?”

  “No. I mean, I’m not sure.”

  “Well, never mind. But I was curious. I just didn’t know if she was open to me asking about it. You know I wouldn’t mind if she was Muslim, of course. It was just surprising, since her last name is McDonald.”

  “She’s definitely different,” Zal quipped, trying to sound cheerful. “A good thing for me, no?”

  “I suppose, Zal,” he muttered, with a slow carefulness. “While I’m at it, another question then.”

  “Shoot, Father.”

  “Her physique . . . Why on earth is she so thin? She doesn’t have an illness?”

  Zal sighed. “I know,” he said. “She’s fine, but she eats almost nothing. It’s weird.”

  “That’s not good, Zal. Does she have an eating disorder? No drugs, right?”

  “Oh, no. I think she just is picky with food.”

  “Well, son, help her out,” he said. “She looks ailing. Her skin, I noticed, was doing that thing, that feathering thing—lanugo, I think it’s called—that happens to the skin of the eating-disordered.”

  That feathering thing, as if it was indeed a thing skin could do. He thought to ask further about it, but shelved it for another time. “I know.”

  “Well, that’s a bad sign.”

  “I’ll talk to her, Father.”

  “Okay, good.” He paused again. “Zal, I want you to know that you shouldn’t feel like you have to have a woman in your life to be a man, okay?”

  “I know that,” he said.

  “Zal, do you love her?”

  “Father,” he groaned, channeling some rascally teenage son, annoyed at his prying dad, in a TV show.

  “Okay, Zal, okay,” Hendricks said. “I think I should meet her again then.”

  “You’re not sure about her, are you, Father?” Zal asked, sighing.

  “Well,” Hendricks began, and sighed too. “You know, I’m not, Zal. But that doesn’t mean anything. I just care about you. But I’m not sure of lots of things, even when it comes to you. And that hasn’t always been a bad thing. We’re all learning, Zal, we’re all learning.”

  Zal said nothing.

  “Anyway, when do you see Rhodes?”

  Zal scanned his mental calendar. “In a few days.”

  “Good. Talk to him about everything. About her. He can help. See what he thinks.”

  “What he thinks about what, Father?”

  “About everything that’s happening, Zal. There are some things a father has no right to know, that your therapist can help you with.”

  And because lies had become part of his new default setting—what a villain he was becoming, he thought, shuddering with disgust—he told one to his father even: “Well, there’s nothing I wouldn’t tell you, Father.”

  Rhodes knew more than he had told him—that Zal could tell. Rhodes had long ago told him what he shared would remain confidential and never divulged to his father, but Zal didn’t altogether buy it. Rhodes and Hendricks were old friends, colleagues from way back when, and they still talked sometimes. Zal could very well have casually entered a recent conversation. In any case, the moment he walked into Rhodes’s office, Zal felt certain Rhodes and his thick, clear-framed glasses were beholding him in a slightly different way.

  “Am I a new man or something?” Zal joked.


  “You tell me,” Rhodes said and smiled, a bit sinisterly. He wrote down immediate levity à intro, comic greeting, a new thing.

  “Well, whether you know it or not,” Zal began, “there are some things to tell.”

  “I know nothing, but I don’t doubt it,” said Rhodes, looking at his folder of notes. “It’s been a while, Zal. Almost a month. Not good. You’ve been canceling and changing times all over the place. This, I take it, is still because of Miss Austria?”

  “Asiya,” Zal snapped. Rhodes had to be doing that on purpose, he thought, at this point. He must have brought her up a hundred times at least.

  “Oh, my bad again! AWE-see-ya.”

  Zal rolled his eyes, and Rhodes wrote it down: eye-rolling. He had never seen that either. “Look, shall I just spit it out?”

  “Sure, a good use of our time,” Rhodes egged him on, scribbling annoyance markedly heightened, bantering abilities also up.

  “Rhodes, I did it,” Zal blurted out. “I did it with her. You know what I mean by that. And also I told her I loved her.”

  “Is that all?!” Rhodes could not believe what he was hearing. He scribbled it in all caps, underlined. “I’m gonna use the recorder today, Zal, okay?”

  “And she met my father.”

  “Well, well,” Rhodes said. “That is a lot. Last time we met, you were being photographed by your girlfriend for her show. You had already kissed her, something you were participating in but only maybe enjoyed, but you were still ambivalent about furthering physical contact, and in fact the notion of lovemaking seemed a bit repulsive to you, which of course I assured you was more than normal, of course, considering.”

  Of course, Zal thought. He did not want to deal with Rhodes today.

  “And now you’ve done that, and also you’ve told her you love her. Last time, remember, I asked if you loved her, and you said you were not sure, but you did not think so. So what changed, Zal? Tell me, what happened?”

  Zal paused. It was his tradition, almost, to tell Rhodes everything and anything. It was easy with Rhodes, a person he never really cared about, a person hired to serve him, he realized. And yet now the Lying Zal was born, and he didn’t believe he owed him the whole truth if he didn’t owe it to his father and his girlfriend.

  “I changed how I felt,” Zal said, slowly. “That’s pretty human, last I checked.”

  More sarcasm, Rhodes jotted, without looking at his sheet. “Sure, Zal, sure. But it doesn’t mean there is no root cause. Perhaps you did just, over time, fall in love?”

  Zal shrugged.

  “Or perhaps she demanded your love and wanted to make love and you gave in to it all?”

  Zal tensed up. “Look, Rhodes, this is not a problem for therapy. It’s not even something I want to discuss today.”

  “Okay, Zal. What would you like to tell me?”

  Zal searched his head, his month, for something to eclipse any judgment of Asiya and their escalated status. All he thought of was the Mistake. Rhodes would be all over that, but what else did he have? “Do you want to know about the show?”

  “Oh, certainly. How was it?”

  “It was a wonderful night. One of the best of my life.”

  “Tell me about it, Zal.”

  Zal told him about it. “Really, a highlight, if not the highlight, of my life,” he said. “I was so normal, Rhodes.”

  “Good. I’m amazed, Zal. Not at you being normal, of course, but your enjoyment of the event. I remember you had some dread surrounding it.”

  “Well, it was all great. Almost all. And then I did something bad, something I suppose normal people might do in a night like that, but a bad thing nonetheless.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I made out with a man—a boy, really—in the bathroom of the gallery.”

  “You did. I see . . .”

  “And the boy was Asiya’s brother’s friend.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve been drinking here and there still, Zal? No more than that?”

  “I was a little drunk,” Zal admitted sheepishly.

  “Any drugs?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Any chance anyone drugged you?”

  “Rhodes.”

  “Any chance you had a dream or daydream?”

  “Rhodes, this happened! I wouldn’t make it up!” Zal had noticed that since he had told Rhodes a while ago about kissing Asiya, Rhodes had acquired a new suspiciousness about his words. He jotted more things down, too. He had been so reluctant to believe Zal had even acquired a girlfriend; maybe suddenly he was wondering if the sex was made up, too.

  For a moment, he was. “Zal, it’s just that I have to make sure. I have to admit to you that this is all very much above and beyond what I would have thought possible. Zal, tell me, how does making out make you feel?”

  “Well, it’s great. I like it, I really do. Don’t you want to know about the sex?”

  “Zal, I need to just make sure: how do you know it’s sex? Are you sure you’re having intercourse?”

  Zal turned red, and Rhodes wrote registers significant embarrassment at idea of sex. “Look, I know some things! And so does Asiya, you know. If you don’t believe me, you should at least believe she’d know a thing or two.”

  Rhodes sighed. “Zal, is she still having delusions about hellfire and all that?”

  “No. I mean, sometimes. She is. But she’s not crazy, not crazy about everything, at least. She knew I’d betray her, for instance. Don’t ask me, but she did.”

  Rhodes was silent, nodding away, writing things down, feeling very, very distant from Zal, even though just a desktop separated them.

  “Tell me, did you feel real desire for the boy?” he finally said.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Do you feel real desire for your girlfriend during sex?”

  “Maybe. Yes. No.”

  “Which is it, Zal?”

  He was starting to feel upset—at what exactly, he didn’t know, but the past few Rhodes sessions, sessions that used to seem essential to him, now seemed more and more like something he longed to skip, and did. “Can we stop talking about this?”

  “Zal, you do understand that you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to? You can still be normal, still be a man.” His words echoed Hendricks’s, from his debriefing phone call.

  “I know that.”

  Rhodes’s face softened a bit, and he put down his pen. Zal could feel his eyes, intense with scrutiny, intense with concern, drilling at Zal’s forehead. “Zal, you also know this: that you are asexual.”

  He had known it was coming—it had come the last time, the time before that, and the time before that, when he had first mentioned Asiya and his newfound boyfriendhood. “I really am done talking about this.”

  “Zal, you know you have to face that.”

  “Things can change. You know that’s possible,” Zal murmured. “I’ve become things people thought were impossible.”

  Rhodes nodded furiously. “You really have, Zal. But sexuality, that’s a tough one. You can’t face it. Tell me, how does it make you feel, making love?”

  “I really can’t discuss this today. Maybe another time.”

  “Did you tell your father?”

  “No. Please don’t.”

  “I don’t tell him things, Zal. What did your father think of her?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose he was concerned.”

  “Zal, would it surprise you to know I am concerned?”

  “About what?”

  “About your involvement with that girl. I’ve known you for a long time, Zal.”

  “What’s so wrong with her?” He wondered what he had said to Rhodes to make him think Asiya was off. Or was it what Hendricks had said to him? All along, foolishly, Zal had thought Rhodes would have rejoiced—selfishly or for science—at these major developments in his life.

  “Zal, I, too, am human. I don’t know ev
erything—I only have my theories. You are welcome to bring her. I do couples therapy too.”

  “We don’t need that.”

  “She might need help herself.”

  “You don’t think I should have a girlfriend, Rhodes—that’s the bottom line.”

  No inhibitions, straightforward anger, Rhodes quickly scribbled. “Zal, I am concerned about you having that particular girlfriend.”

  Zal dropped his head in his hands. “I suppose you want me to ask what you would do in my position, like we always do, right, Rhodes?”

  “Zal,” he said, pen down again, eyes like lasers. “I would isolate the problem, as we always do. If it were me, I would leave her, for a time, at least. But you are not me.”

  Not normal yet, in other words, Zal thought glumly. But he knew he was getting warmer as the troubles, the offenses, the complications, the anxieties were appearing one by one, on top of each other, like bubbles in a pot of boiling water. It was something like he used to imagine life would be.

  Their session had ended and picked up the next time with the suggestion Rhodes thought was the antidote to all this: a job. He rationalized that if Zal was ready for a relationship, then certainly he was ready for a job. Now, that is progress towards normalcy, with minimum chance of hurt, he had said.

  Hurt. It was a strange sensation, that feeling—a very real feeling. The more normal he became, the more he felt it, as if it were some raw throbbing glistening organ inside him, something between heart and stomach, a type of core, but a vulnerable fragile one that could become easily swollen, irritated, wounded. He felt softer and softer as days went by. Sometimes he found himself uncovering mirrors and really looking at himself and really seeing himself and weeping. Other times, he thought he was so close to smiling, so filled with joy, that he worried the hurricane of happiness inside him would cause his body to shatter, and he wondered if laughter was like that—violent like the worst weather, like the best orgasm, and as brawny and urgent as anger, an eruption that could hurt as well as heal.

  And the more Rhodes and Hendricks and even strangers in the street, it seemed, worried about him because of Asiya, the more he felt he loved her. Poor Asiya, who grew less normal by the day, who started to need him far more than he did her.