The Last Illusion Read online

  “Yes, I’ve been drinking,” he said. “I have indeed . . . baby.”

  He couldn’t believe he had called her, a woman he did not own, baby. But it was nothing compared with what he wanted to do.

  She laughed and shook her head, amused, but only a little bit, it seemed.

  A wave of desperation and urgency washed over him. One day he would die—it could be anytime—and all they had was now, beautiful, lonely Now!

  “Willa, lovely Willa!” he said, kneeling beside her bed suddenly, level with her rainbow-stripe-socked foot. “Willa, I really like you, did you know that?”

  “Sure, I like you, too,” she said, frowning a bit for a second. “Have you heard from Ozzie? I talked to her today and she seemed almost cheerful, like kind of funny—”

  “No, I mean I like you, baby.” He’d said it again. “I like you . . . more than . . . you think.”

  “Okay, Zal,” she sighed. He noted she was self-consciously twisting her bangs, not a bad sign, he thought.

  Nervousness, he knew well, was part of the conversion into the seduction act. Awkwardness was fine, too—he and Asiya were still often entangled in endless layers of awkward. They could get around it and more.

  “I want you, Willa,” he suddenly blurted, a bit to his own horror, as he put one hand on her foot.

  Her foot jerked away, as if he had burned it. “Stop it,” she said. “Look, stop making fun of me, Zal. Go home, you’re drunk.”

  “Making fun of you?” He suddenly stood up, suddenly towering over her helpless body. “How could I make fun of you? I think I love you, Willa!”

  She scowled—a woman like that could really look menacing in a scowl, he noticed—and turned very red. “Zal, I have feelings, too! Just cause Oz treats me like shit doesn’t mean you get to, too! You leave me alone now!”

  Either she didn’t believe him or her condition made her more abnormal than he was. Or maybe it was just him.

  “You don’t believe me? Or you don’t like me? Or you don’t like any boys?” he said glumly.

  “Of course I don’t believe you! You think I’m an idiot?” She looked like she was going to cry.

  “Willa, I want to kiss you,” he said. “Can I just kiss you?”

  The scowl morphed into an expression of utter confusion. “Zal, why would you—you’re my sister’s boyfriend . . .”

  “I told her I had . . . feelings for you,” he said, getting closer, leaning over her, until he could feel her erratic breath on his face.

  “Zal, you don’t,” she whimpered.

  “Willa, I do. You don’t know me,” he insisted. “What did she call us again?”

  “Who?”

  “Your sister. Fucks? Fugs? No, freaks! Yes, we’re both freaks . . .”

  “Stop,” she said, inching her head away. “You smell so boozy.”

  “I’m sorry, baby, I’m sorry, baby Willa,” he said, cursing the Ginkgo or whatever it was that made him suddenly unappealing in this magic moment that he had so long awaited.

  “You really want to kiss me?”

  “I do.”

  “You know I’ve never—”

  “I hadn’t until recently.”

  “And my sister—”

  “I won’t tell her.”

  “But—”

  “I know it’s wrong, Willa, I know it’s wrong. But what can we do? No one will know.”

  She suddenly broke into a sob, the sweetest sob he’d ever heard, so different from Asiya’s violent heaving gasps. She looked so little, even in all that largeness, that he hushed her, held her face with both hands, and went for it, much slower, with more tenderness than he had ever approached her sister with. Willa’s tears somehow made the whole thing sweeter.

  She responded well. She did fine.

  And so, slowly, like a starving worm atop his dream apple, he inched his body onto hers and found himself in that position he had dreamed of, over and over, on and off, curled up perfectly atop the mountain of her now rapidly heaving breast. She smelled like sour milk and water crackers and wet towels, but in that moment, it was the best combination of smells in the world. She felt like a type of home he had never imagined for himself.

  He stopped kissing her altogether and just let himself lie in that easy curl on top of her, listening to the sound of her chaotically drumming heart eventually smooth itself out.

  He fell asleep.

  When he finally woke up, it was as violent as the sleep had been comforting; when he came to, it was to Willa’s scream and someone else’s fist in his face, someone with flashing eyes he knew well—and should have known to expect.

  “I’m going to fucking kill you, motherfucker!” Zachary was screaming, in a way that it was safe to say Zal had never heard anyone, in real life, scream.

  He was going to kill him, there was no doubt about that. Zal suddenly felt horribly hungover, although the digital clock seemed to imply he had been asleep for less than an hour. He had been mostly unlucky, but one small part lucky; he did a quick thanking of higher powers that Asiya’s brother had caught him in a moment of more or less genuine innocence—a mere baby asleep at the breast of a mother, almost—rather than in a more suspect-looking posture, in the less honorable state he had envisioned when he first set his eyes on her that evening.

  He was, as the saying went, dead meat.

  And he was afraid: check. Of death, truly death: check. And he did not want to die: check.

  But the blows were unstoppable. They were mostly to his face, but also his chest, his gut, his limbs, and soon he was on the floor, being kicked in all the same places, as if punches were just the first course. Zal screamed and squealed and shrieked, and when he could he tried to apologize, beg, barter, find some way out with words, but Zachary refused to respond, all sense transforming into animal warbles and wails, and soon even Willa’s pleas faded into blue muted bays in the background.

  It was no use: he was being beaten in a way he’d never experienced—his body was being shattered. He felt everything and nothing, so fast that he couldn’t even register pain from no-pain. His body felt foreign to him like all the events of that day, like Willa even, like that Upper East Side townhouse, and how the hell he had gotten there—not then, but in the first place. He tried to steady his mind, to tell himself soon it would be over, and he tried to imagine other types of overs—better ones, worse ones—and eventually his mind focused on falling, the earth coming up at him, faster and bigger and harder, and he accepted it and promised himself: soon, sooner, soonest, it would all be over.

  “Fuck, man, he’s had enough—you don’t want to go to jail!” came another voice, another male one, finally breaking Zachary’s singular focus.

  Zal, with his face now jammed under Zachary’s suddenly frozen Air Maxes, thought he recognized the voice, so he peeked up. There, under a cap like Zachary’s, in the same big clothes, was Connor, a boy he had known mostly in skin and boxers and tongue.

  “Homo say what?!” Zachary was shouting—at him or Connor, who knew—while laughing an awful, homicidal laugh that was not a good sign.

  “Seriously, bro! I mean, I don’t give a shit, but especially if he’s retarded or slow or some shit—”

  “Not too slow to come and fucking rape my whole world, the motherfucker!” Zachary’s shoe lifted and quickly came back down hard on Zal’s jaw. Zal tried to vocally gargle his blood, so he could know how far the beating had gone.

  Eventually—long after he heard Connor leave, after a few more whimpers from Willa, who put up as much of a fight as a tiny scared child—Zachary stopped. Not without a few final words, however: “Now get the fuck up. You don’t get to say bye to my sister. And you don’t get to say hi to my other sister. And you don’t get to fuck my friends. You don’t get shit, you get it? You don’t fucking get to come here anymore, do you get that, faggot?”

  Zal nodded, his everything, it seemed, gushing with blood. He noticed his briefs were wet—either with blood or, more likely, he had peed himse
lf in all that horror. He was a mess of blood and urine, tears and alcohol sweat, something he realized even Death must have found unworthy.

  “I didn’t kill you, but I will next time, got it?”

  Zal nodded.

  Zachary spit on him and Zal nodded again, as if it was the right thing to do.

  “Here,” Zal said, removing the keys to the house from his pocket.

  Zachary grabbed them without touching his hand, spit on him again, and disappeared into his own room.

  Zal left the house, without even looking back to say goodbye to Willa.

  He regretted everything that night, absolutely everything. Pain made you feel regret. That was human.

  He went to the hospital and got treated, went home and fell asleep, a long sleep that he woke from with alarm, panicked that he had died in it. Instead he had dreamt long bad nightmares that had nothing to do with anything. In one, the sky was filled with horrible pterodactyl-looking storks delivering bundles of blood and bones and dismembered rotting flesh they insisted belonged to somebody.

  He was failing, somehow, and he knew this was what people did, all the time. In some way, human life could be seen as one big long fail. But his failure was starting to bother him, starting to get in the way of his doing things, things that were sometimes as elemental as getting up to see the light of day.

  It was getting so bad that one day when Hendricks called as usual to check on him, Zal could not pretend anymore. He told Hendricks everything that he had ever left out, which he realized had really added up.

  Hendricks basically only knew a Zal of the twentieth century, Zal realized.

  “Zal, why didn’t you tell me this when it was happening? I thought Asiya was in Europe, that her show had gone well, that everything was fine . . . But that boy at the show, the beating—my God, Zal! How long had you and Asiya been . . . you know, intimate?”

  “Father, please,” he snapped.

  “Okay, Zal, okay, I appreciate your honesty, even if a bit late, and the boundaries that come with honesty. But you’ve been through so much, my boy—I want to help. How much does Rhodes know?”

  Rhodes, always Rhodes. “He knows enough,” Zal said, testily. “I didn’t call you for help. I just somehow wanted it . . . out there.”

  “Zal, I want to be there for you. Already I feel like I’ve failed you. A father is supposed to be there for his son. I should be giving you talks about women—women and men maybe—and sexuality, and we should be talking about Asiya and her problems and everything.”

  Zal groaned. “I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want to get into it. I still don’t. I don’t need your answers, Father. I’m learning them myself. I can do that, you know. It’s going fine. I’m alive.”

  “How bad are your injuries?”

  “They’re nothing, some bruises,” said Zal. There were indeed bruises, cuts, swollen limbs, wounds that kept bleeding, new scabs, and then of course the more gory ones, held together by stitches he had received promptly, once he had walked himself straight to the hospital where Asiya had been treated. Hendricks would get the hospital bill soon enough; there was no need to get into it now.

  “Son, you’re calling me, telling me these things, and you just expect me to hear it and offer nothing?” Hendricks finally asked, raising his voice.

  “It’s over, Father. I know now how to make love to a woman. I know now not to cheat on her, with women or men. I know—”

  “Zal, are you still with Asiya?”

  “With?”

  “You’ve broken up, I hope, by now?”

  “Why?” Suddenly it was Zal’s turn to be shocked.

  “Zal, there’s no other way to say it: the girl is a mess. She’s too much for you, and frankly anyone! For you of all people, to have her as your first girlfriend—”

  You of all people, thought Zal. If anything kept him in a cage nowadays, those sentiments were it, he wanted to say. “I love her,” he said instead, automatically, as if it was programmed in him like an autopilot. He didn’t know anymore if he meant it; he was just following the boyfriend script, what he imagined Humphrey Bogart would say in his shoes. “And I’ll have you know, people would have said the same thing about me being a mess. As if I’m—or was—so normal! And yet I’m doing fine—I’m doing better than anyone ever thought was possible. Isn’t that what you, Rhodes, everyone always said?”

  It was true. Zal knew that; Hendricks knew that.

  There was silence. Hendricks was making sounds that Zal thought sounded perhaps like sniffling, like a cold, like a cry—he didn’t want to know which.

  “I don’t need you anymore,” Zal said, partly because he believed it, partly because being cruel felt right at that moment. “You must know that.”

  “Zal, son, please don’t talk like that.”

  “You can’t control how I talk anymore. I’m totally free, freer than you ever thought possible.”

  “Okay, Zal, that’s fine, but you have to understand I still know things—”

  I know things. He thought of Asiya and her madness and her knowledge. “I do, too, Father. And I don’t want a father right now. I was rid of a mother; now I want to be rid of a father. I’m letting myself out this time.”

  “Zal Hendricks!”

  “I don’t want you to call me. I won’t call back,” Zal told him, his foreboding voice almost unrecognizable in its assurance and its girth and its volume, almost as if it took all those bruises and blows to get to the man inside, a real man. “This, by the way, is a normal response, what some normal people might do. Goodbye.”

  And he hung up, something he’d never done to a person, a thing he knew was not honorable but was, here and there in bad times, done, and he thought to himself what he couldn’t bring himself to utter to his father—Goodbye, yesterday—and he closed his eyes and thought of everything that was to come, a future he couldn’t imagine—a healthy sign, he decided, the opposite of Asiya’s suicidal clairvoyance.

  A week later, he marched into Rhodes’s office at their normal time, feeling bizarrely cheerful, equipped with the armor of premeditation, a man with a mission, his final mission, feeling the way he imagined school shooters must, their final goal before them, all nothing-to-lose vigor, all there’s-nowhere-to-go-but-nowhere force, finally all-powerful, finally afraid of nothing.

  Rhodes met his smileless smile—he could tell by then when Zal wanted to smile—with a smile of his own.

  Zal put his hand up as if to silence him.

  “Rhodes, I’ve come to say your final check will be mailed by my father as usual, but that’s it. I will no longer be needing you.”

  Rhodes didn’t change his expression. He was a man who was used to pretty much anything from patients, even the most extraordinary, Zal told himself.

  “Zal, sit down. Let’s talk about this—”

  “I don’t want to talk about this or anything else with you, ever. It’s over, Rhodes. I’m not ungrateful. But goodbye.”

  “Zal, you came here to tell me this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you come at all? You could have phoned—”

  Zal wished he could answer in a laugh, in that ugly, tarry laugh of the worst villains. He wasn’t sure what to say. The best he could come up with, he supposed, was okay: “I wanted the satisfaction of walking away from you forever.”

  But it wasn’t entirely true.

  “How about just a few minutes, Zal? So we can wrap things up?”

  Zal shook his head. He had to be firm. He turned around to face the door and said, “I am saying goodbye to my past. I’m done with you, with all of it. It’s time for the future!”

  The best part of all was what he had forgotten to say. He had rehearsed telling Rhodes about the job he had gotten yesterday: Oh yeah, and thanks, Rhodes, for one thing: telling me to get a job. Bet you didn’t think I’d actually get one! In hindsight, Zal thought it was even better that Rhodes would never know; that the satisfaction was again all Zal’s, ever
y last bit.

  Of his constant hurdles, Zal Hendricks felt the easiest had been the one most people would have assumed would be the most challenging, at least for him, considering! But somehow—maybe as a cosmic reward for all the rapid-fire hardships of the era—it came easily. In the winter of 2000, Zal Hendricks suddenly found himself in the possession of a real live job, at a pet store.

  It had come from a single decision: that he was done with humans for the moment—at least until Asiya got out of the clinic—and that animals were better. He reminded himself this was not the step backwards that it might have seemed to anyone who knew his story and had spied him lingering at the glass window of a pet store, eyeing tiny canaries rapidly darting in a giant golden cage. Skydiving, too, had seemed like another step backwards, a way to get in the sky, to make a bird out of himself, but in the end it had taught him that he feared death. Beyond the shady impulses that might have led Zal to this particular job, it was really and truly just another way for him to make something of himself, as they said, in a way that was most feasible, a way to get a job for which he didn’t need a diploma or a college education or any expertise.

  He told the manager simply, I feel a deep connection with animals.

  And there he was, with job. In actuality, it took a few more steps, and first and foremost courage: asking for a job application, which they didn’t have, but just give us your résumé and we’ll call you, since we maybe could use some winter work. He looked up résumés online and found some and he cut and pasted various items and changed a few others so that he had what they said was good: a single sheet with the most important items, never mind that they were not really his. Zal knew it was wrong, and probably illegal, to lie on a job application, but what could he do? He had nothing. And his next step was to get a job. A job was not possible for someone like Zal Hendricks, who had nothing, absolutely nothing, in the way of life experience. So he’d have to pretend to be someone else, a combination of someone elses, and pray.

  “Wow, we don’t get many pilots with culinary backgrounds who went to Yale here. Interesting!” the old man who ran the place said. “What a life!”