The Last Illusion Read online

  One sunny September day, a little over 250 days since their meeting on what they affectionately called the Day the World Didn’t End, Asiya woke up screaming. Zal was on the other end of the bed, mummified by her too many sheets, and he quickly embraced her and put his hand over her mouth. Stop, it’s okay, it’s okay, he said, assuming it was a nightmare, one of her many nightmares. But she bit him and got up, naked, pacing, crying.

  “Asiya, what’s wrong? Relax!”

  “It’s coming, Zal, it’s coming, it’s coming, it’s coming, it’s coming.”

  She was unstoppable.

  She flung her arms wildly, bumping into walls, doors, looking like she needed to jump out of her own skin. Once, in Hendricks’s home, to Zal’s horror, a bird had become trapped inside—confused, crazed, directionless, like the subject of his old nightmares. Asiya’s wildness resembled that bird’s.

  She fell to the floor, foaming.

  Zal gathered her as she struggled against him. She felt very hot, and her eyes were rolling wildly.

  Nine-one-one, she started hissing, through all the froth in her mouth.

  It was different from the other times, worse than the last worst time. Something was happening to her. Zal suddenly worried she was actually going to die, or kill herself, with all that frenzy.

  He dialed 911. When the operator asked him what was wrong, he said, “I’m not sure. Something is happening to my girlfriend. She might be very sick, I just don’t know.”

  He ran to Willa’s room, woke her up, and told her what was happening. Willa sighed, “Zal, do you think it’s really anything? It’s not just . . . the usual?”

  Zal shrugged. “I’ve got to go be with her. It may be worse. She looks worse, at least.”

  When the paramedics came, they had to pry her out of the tight ball she had rolled herself into.

  “Any medications?” one of them asked Zal.

  “No.”

  “History of mental illness?”

  Zal paused. “Hard to say. Not that I know.”

  “Boyfriend doesn’t know,” the paramedic scrawled, muttering the words out loud, as if to shame him, as if the paramedic could possibly know them well enough to ridicule their misery, Zal thought bitterly.

  They took her to Lenox Hill Hospital. Zal sat in the waiting room for what felt like days. He forgot himself completely and, with that, anything but total love for Asiya.

  A nurse finally called him in. “Mr. Hendricks, we think it’s best she stay here.”

  Zal nodded, mortified. It was that bad. What if the whole time he had been ignoring the signs, and she had been that bad? “What’s wrong with her? I mean, I know what’s wrong with her—”

  “You do?” the nurse looked skeptical. “Mr. Hendricks, the initial write-up—panic attack, nervous breakdown—is not why we’re keeping her here.”

  “What is it?” My God, Zal thought, something big was wrong.

  “Mr. Hendricks, do you know what anorexia nervosa is?”

  Zal felt a mixture of relief and frustration. That of all things? The most obvious? “Kind of. Eating problem?”

  “That’s it. Mr. Hendricks, have you noted your girlfriend’s dramatic weight loss?”

  Zal nodded, then shook his head. Boyfriend doesn’t know echoed through his head. “Well, she’s always been very thin.”

  “Mr. Hendricks, she is beyond thin. She’s on IV. We’re keeping her here until we know she’s not malnourished. I need you to sign here.”

  “But what about everything else she was saying? Did that come from her being thin?”

  “Chicken or the egg, Mr. Hendricks—hard to say at this point. You can call Dr. Gould at this number.”

  He went back to the waiting room until they let him see her.

  When he finally saw her, indeed looking dangerously little in her paper nightgown, stick arms attached to clear tubes, attached to clear bags of fluid, he felt that urge to cry again, to cry in a way that he might never recover from. So many troubles now. In some ways, he wished he’d never met her; in others, he felt like he would die if he lost her.

  “Asiya, are you okay?” he whispered.

  Her already whispery voice was a dead husk. “I’m okay now, Zal. I think it’s safe here.”

  “It is.”

  “They think I’m starving.”

  “You might be, Asiya.”

  “Zal, you know that’s not why I am here.”

  “Why don’t you eat more, Asiya? What if I snuck you those chocolate grasshoppers you were eating so happily that one time—”

  “You know that’s not it.”

  He could feel frustration take over his insides, callusing what just a minute ago was impossibly soft. “What is it then, Asiya? Tell me what it is.”

  “You know,” she said, as if in accusation, except her voice was as weak as broth and her smile strong—the wildest smile he’d ever seen on her, a look that made him, for the first time, for just a second, ally himself with the two men in his life, the men and all their reservations about her, his life. And then she added the words, the ones he had heard all too many times but that still managed to confirm the worst for him: “It’s coming, Zal. It’s coming for all of us.”

  PART VI

  How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?

  —Cormac McCarthy,

  No Country for Old Men

  Zal Hendricks stood at the open door of an airplane exit and watched the young woman drop, like any material object with some weight, completely at the mercy of gravity, thirteen thousand feet above land. It was his first flight since the one when he was a child, the first airplane he had entered, the first airplane he would exit—and exit midflight—but suddenly it became grave, chilling, almost wrong, when he saw the girl go down so speedily, so heavily, looking so the opposite of how they said it would feel. They had said again and again that the minute-long free fall would feel like floating, but this girl, strapped to an instructor in a jester’s hat—like the saying, a monkey on her back—dropped like a dead weight, as if she was already dead, not actually suspended in a state of animation. That was all skydiving was, Zal decided as he looked down: just another trick.

  He turned to his own back-monkey, a man who went by Spike who was already latched on to him by four hooks, who moments ago had been straddling him on the plane floor as, two by two, the others went down. They saved the lightest for last, Spike had told him, grinning wildly the whole time, giving him the rock on hand signal one minute, the hang loose one the next. “Listen, Spike!” Zal had to shout over the roars of the doorless, propellered Twin Otter. “Can’t do this! Thought I could! But can’t!”

  “Dude!” Spike was shaking his head, still grinning through disapproval. “No way! You’ll love it!”

  Zal had been sure he’d love it. He’d looked it up on the Internet, seen celebrities, ex-presidents, scientists, models, everyone doing it. It had been his dream, he had told himself. It had been his only choice. It was the closest anyone ever got to flight, real flight. And it was the closest he could let himself get—after all he’d been through, after all the many changes—to himself, his old self.

  And now he saw that it was the opposite of flying; it was actually falling.

  Zal thought about Silber’s second act of the Flight Triptych. Maybe there were strings there, too. Maybe not. But Silber was, had proved himself to be, a man of tricks, something Zal had no interest in.

  “I don’t want to, Spike!”

  “Don’t think it! Just do it!” Spike shouted, mantras he seemed used to pulling out at moments like this.

  “I just can’t,” Zal said, too softly for Spike to hear him. He was thinking about it: the girl become rock; the four-page Assumption of Risk agreement and its all-caps Because this document will drastically affect your legal rights, you must read it carefully; the guys in the instructional video from the seventies who had said, “There is not now nor will there ever be a perfect parachute, a perfect airplane, a perfect pilot, a
perfect parachute instructor, or, for that matter, a perfect student”; his jumpsuit that felt too big to protect his skin and the primary chute that could maybe fail him and the reserve chute that could also maybe fail him. He thought about all the things to remember without margins of error: the chute knob to pull at the altimeter’s 5,500 feet, which he could forget about, which Spike would remember if he forgot, although Spike could die or go insane or just be an asshole or turn suicidal and also “forget”; the five to seven minutes to the landing knoll, where more things could go wrong than during the minute-long free fall; the $189 that he had thrown away to experience an exalted ascent, which, like much of life, turned out to be its crummy opposite, a lowlife descent.

  He was suddenly faced with that most humbling feature of human normalcy: he was paralyzed by his fear of death.

  What. The. Hell. Was. He. Doing. Here?!

  Spike inched him up to the door; he could feel Spike’s body, like a mollusk’s shell covering him, coating him almost, moving for him, making slight pushing thrusts that were causing Zal to lose control.

  “I’m sick, Spike! I’m sick!” Zal screamed as a last resort.

  “C’mon, Zed!” He didn’t even know his name. “You can do it!”

  Zal pulled his goggles off and yelled louder than he thought was possible. “NO! I am sick! Get me down now, fucker!”

  It was the first time in his life that he had said it, the awful F-word. It felt, of course, awful.

  But it worked: Spike shook his head and yelled something to the pilot and they made the landing in silence. On the ground, the jumpers were gushing and gasping and giving each other hugs and high-fives and taking photos with their undone parachutes.

  The girl before him was crying, he noticed.

  He went up to her. “I’m sorry you went through that. I actually didn’t do it.”

  She looked up at him, laughing through her tears. “What?”

  “I’m sorry they made you do it . . .”

  She laughed harder. “They didn’t make me! Oh, no, these are happy tears! It was the most amazing thing of my life!”

  Happy tears. Zal nodded, embarrassed.

  The girl skipped away to her man waiting for her, and Spike came back with a form. “I just need you to sign this to say you didn’t jump but you know you still owe us the money,” he said gruffly, not looking him in the eye, no hand signals, no grins, nothing.

  Zal signed. “I wanted to fly, not fall,” he tried to explain. “That was just falling.”

  “Whatever, man,” said Spike, and he walked away. Zal stood on the empty knoll and stared at the sky. A group of divers were coming down from another plane, just little black dots in the sky, like a flock of birds, looking not like bodies dropping with no choice but like floating—indeed, flying—things.

  He had learned a lesson, he supposed: things were not as they seemed. What seems one way might actually be the opposite. What a human he was becoming, he thought. What a stupid human.

  Plus, with Asiya now condemned to months in the clinic—on a whole special program, with special foods and special medications and special exercises and special counseling, what her mother, wherever she was, had demanded when she had gotten word from the hospital—what else did he have to do but court death? He had passed the test: he was afraid of it. Normal. He knew that was true because he had concluded one amazing thing recently, which even Rhodes couldn’t have said better: it wasn’t Asiya’s fear that she was going to die that made her insane—everyone feared that and, of course, it was ultimately a true thing—It was her fear that they all were, together, in the very near future.

  It was time to move on to the next thing, he thought, what the closest he had to a wise man had once suggested. It was time for a job.

  He talked to Asiya a few times a week when she was allowed to take phone calls. Every time, he could barely hear her whisper versus the loud clangs of that clinic in New Jersey that sounded more, he imagined, like a soup kitchen than a hospital. He had asked if he could visit her and she had said no, that she didn’t want anyone to see her while she underwent “the phony transformation.”

  “What do you mean by that, Asiya?” Zal would ask. “That they make you eat?”

  “Zal, they can change my body, but they can’t change my mind,” she would often say.

  One day, sounding more “meds-y” than usual, she told him, “Okay, they are changing my mind—I’m all mixed up, Zal—but it’s temporary. When I come home, I’m off this stuff.”

  “You won’t want to be,” Zal said. “They’re fixing you. Just do what they say.”

  “You don’t even know,” she shot back—a common line in that phase that he just ignored.

  “Trust me,” he said. “In a lot of ways, they fixed me, baby.”

  Baby: he had started calling her what men called their women. Baby was a normal thing to call a woman you loved, he knew this. In her absence, he possessed her more wholly than ever.

  For that reason, he was happy she was there. He was also happy for other reasons. It wasn’t like the time she was mad at him; this time her absence gave him space to breathe and think and remember himself without her. He started to remind himself of things he liked to do, and he thought of others he could grow to like to do as well. He decided he’d use this time to complete any final steps to normalcy, while Asiya completed hers.

  Of course, with any journey to enlightenment, one falls here and there. The skydiving, with its giving in to old bird fantasies, was one fall—but he had managed at the last minute to escape it. The insect candies were another—he tossed a large bag of them all out one day, swearing to never order a single treat box again. The bird dreams were another, and of course the hardest to control, so he started watching horror movies and porn—what normal men did, he knew—so they’d seep into his dream life. They hadn’t, but he knew that with enough consumption, they would.

  He started wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap. He started to curse more. He started to look no one in the eye. He started to stare at women in the chest or ass and tell himself to imagine them naked, underneath him. He started to watch the news, keep up with the weather, even watch an occasional sports game. He started to do push-ups and sit-ups more and more. He started to feel insecure, depressed, horny, irrational, frustrated, reckless. He started to focus on cultivating it all, consciously, fully, wholeheartedly—feeling like a man, and not just any man: an American man.

  On a particularly gray and dull late autumn afternoon, he decided to do something he’d never done before: he went to a bar alone, a little Irish pub on a corner that boasted with its chalkboard sign, happy hour daily, 2 for 1 complete menu.

  By that point Zal, whether nervous or not, had learned how to learn things. One way was simply coming up with savvy ways to ask.

  “So, guys,” he asked the two men, also in caps, behind the bar. “If there was one drink guys like me—regular guys—order the most at this bar, what would it be?”

  One of the guys laughed. “What, you doing research?”

  “Just wondering, guys!” Zal said, trying to push his face into a grin, something he’d been practicing lately, but put his hand over it quickly. He was still wary of displaying the fruits of his efforts, as they often looked more like an expression of horror. “I’m sick of my usual and wondering if my usual is usual, you know?”

  The other guy snorted. “They get a beer, smart guy, maybe a Guinness.”

  “Oh, it’s been a while since I had that,” Zal shot back. “I’ll have that.”

  “You’ll have what?”

  “That!” He didn’t want to fumble the pronunciation.

  “Smart guy wants a Guinness?”

  Zal nodded, trying hard to make the nod casual.

  When the tall foamy dark drink in the pint glass was set before him, he drank it quickly. It was indeed good; he felt seduced by its creaminess. He finished it fast. “Another,” he said, making a thumbs-up sign.

  He drank four pints
of Guinness in an hour, left what he hoped was a great tip, and stumbled onto the street, which was still too light for him to give up on the day.

  He began to automatically head uptown, without thinking where, and minutes later he realized he was on Asiya’s doorstep. Where Asiya wasn’t. Where her brother who still hated him lived, where just next door lived Zachary’s friend who had made out with him and probably hated him, too, where a very large beautiful woman who made his heart race in a way he couldn’t even begin to explain sat on a bed with wheels, day after day, waiting for nothing. He had no place there.

  He—drunk as he had ever been, but no drunker than he had ever been—suddenly knew what he had to do. He took his set of keys that Asiya had made—expressly for the reason of getting in and out without needing Zachary, should she not be there—and tiptoed inside.

  Zachary’s door was closed, which meant he was gone.

  He sighed, relieved, but also suddenly nervous. There was no turning back then, no good reason to.

  He looked up and over at Willa’s doorless room, which was, of course, wide-open as ever.

  “Hey, Zal, what are you doing here?” she asked the minute she saw him. She was not in her usual nightgown, but in a gray T-shirt that had the words new yorkers do it better on it. He realized it must be Zachary’s duty to get her in and out of clothes these days, an idea that somehow made him feel uneasy.

  “I was just in the neighborhood!” he said, breathless with excitement, suddenly filled with energy at the sight of her. He couldn’t remember the last time it was just the two of them in that house.

  “Okay,” she nodded, with a small smile. “I was just reading. Zachary might be home any minute, though.”

  He nodded. He suddenly didn’t care at all about Zachary or his wrath. He was going to let the Ginseng, or whatever it was called, do the quelling of all that for him.

  “Make yourself at home then,” she said. She seemed slightly tense, perhaps noticing his drunkenness.