The Last Illusion Read online

  He shrugged, sighing. “If you only knew, trust me.”

  He was asked to “work the floor,” since he seemed not to understand the workings of the cash register very well, even after training. He became the one who put the puppies in the hands of the little gushing girls, who took the kittens out of their glass boxes to be pet—he did not like handling the kittens, he had to admit, but he tried to block out why. He was the one who scooped the angelfish out of their tank, and he once even had to feed the snake a microwaved frozen mouse. It was, as far as jobs went, suitable for him.

  But where he spent most of his time, as much as he tried not to, was of course Pet’s Delight’s massive bird section, the rows of cages and their squawking, squealing, singing, chirping, mocking avian life. He couldn’t help it—he was mesmerized, the way any ex-convict would be on a visit to a prison. The hours went by quickly as he stayed among them and dreamed of a final workday: when he’d open all the cages and let them all out into the Manhattan sky, free.

  As much as he tried to rationalize his choice of jobs, he knew he had nabbed the worst possible one for him. His fantasies didn’t exactly spell progress. But he had to admit there was a certain joy in knowing he wasn’t there yet, that there was still work to be done. He could still afford to mess up, despite knowing well enough how to be on the right track.

  He wondered if that was part of what was wrong with Asiya, who haunted the back alleys of his head more than he cared to admit even to himself. Maybe her problem was that simple, just the opposite of his. He could go on, in spite of everything—because of everything—because he knew for him the end was nowhere near, that he was far from done. He had nothing but a future.

  It was in those final days before 2001 that Silber remembered the name of the odd boy he had met and almost come to really know more than a year ago: Zal.

  Silber was, for the most part, okay. He had nine months to go until he took on The Illusion, as he now called it, his Illusion of Illusions. Things had moved along. Manning, the best master craftsman a man of magic could hope for, was on board and ready to build. It had taken some convincing—I don’t get it, Sil, make the thing disappear for what? Why? Silber had tried to explain, Boss, O boss, take the opposite of flying, bringing something high and proud and towering and bringing it to its knees, reducing it to dust, or worse than dust: nothing at all—and still nothing had talked louder than numbers for Manning. I can do it. I mean, I can do fucking anything, Sil, especially if the price is right—but sometimes you got to ask yourself: is it worth it?

  It felt worth it to Silber in a way he couldn’t explain. He had tried it out on everyone, especially his latest rotation of lovers, which was more robust in project time than usual. A Middle Eastern writer with an unpronounceable name who was all legs and eyes took a stab at it: What, “down with capitalism” or something? A Sarah Lawrence college girl who fit-modeled in the city on the side, with a fondness for chess, cloves, and cocaine: Artaud, plus Sartre, a dab of Derrida, and Kaczynski-Kevorkian undertones? The multi-orgasmic yoga teacher/bistro hostess, who maybe came the closest to hitting the nail on the head: Who said magic was supposed to have a purpose?

  But even if he didn’t need a purpose, he did need a narrative, and not just for the press release—which was driving all the assistants batshit, they too were so unaccustomed to Silber’s sudden inarticulacy—but for himself. He saw his life as a very expensive biography, leather-bound with gilded edges, the size of a phone book, a bible for illusionists of the future. There was not a Houdini on this earth, not a Copperfield in the crowd, not that other guy, either, who would say their feats were just because. Illusion was almost an invisible thing—almost—with its substance consisting of concept, idea, notion, thematics. Without all that, it might as well not exist. Without all that, Manning was right to ask about its worth and value.

  He knew he had to talk to people about it, more people, not just the women—whom he had already forced to sign a confidentiality contract, incidentally—but to people who didn’t even require that, who were so totally on the outside, he didn’t have to worry about their loose lips, people with out-there lives and even more out-there perspectives, who had no idea and therefore any and every idea, who could just maybe see the thing for him.

  As usual for Silber, there was only one place for answers: the extraordinary. Keep it surreal, counseled the Old English on the back of a drug dealer he used to employ for various activities, and he kept a Polaroid of it in his wallet as a reminder. Ordinary life would offer him nothing; that he had always known.

  In contemplating the outsides of every box, Silber scanned his universe for outsiders. And naturally, in his mental Rolodex of those stranger than strange, Zal figured prominently. Zal: a definite possibility. After all, Silber had been so frustrated he hadn’t met him earlier—before his Flight Triptych, at least, which, for all its genius, he knew suffered from what the critics had dubbed “the usual Silber style-over-substance razzle-dazzle.” Even that feat of theme was not enough for them.

  He knew too much to make another mistake. He wanted to make magic the world could not live without! Magic to make them all live without the world! Or something like that, he thought excitedly. He was getting hotter, he could feel it.

  Zal could be the key, or a key, at least, he told himself.

  He had Anastasia—his new assistant, Indigo’s replacement for the few weeks in which she’d been fired for substance abusing more than was permitted on the job—call Zal up and ask him to dinner.

  She returned in seconds. “He said he works evenings,” glum Anastasia declared, more glumly than usual.

  “He works? Wha? No, tell him to come after, did you tell him that?”

  “I did,” she murmured. “He seemed uninterested, once I convinced him he knew you.”

  “Knew me? Of course he knows me, that silly billy! God, I have got to get him over here—he’s so mother-effing effity-effed up, he’s perfecto!”

  “I think he was pretending not to know you. It sounds like he doesn’t want to deal with any of it.”

  “Stasi, I know you’re new, but you’re gonna learn a few things: nobody says no to me, got it? It just doesn’t happen, baby!”

  “I think it just did.”

  “It just did! Ha! You’re such a—never mind, get him on my cell.”

  When he finally got Zal on the phone, Silber put on a different voice, a muted, slightly shattered one, one he knew Zal would relate to. Need attracted need, he rationalized.

  “Zal, I’m in a crisis, if you want to know the truth-Ruth,” he whispered.

  “Mr. Silber, I don’t even know you,” Zal kept saying.

  “You don’t know me? I’m a celebrity, baby—everyone knows me. You had dinners with me, you came to our shop, we were friends, or least friends-ish! People don’t forget celebrities, friends-ish ones! Anyway, Zal, I need you, I need your help.”

  “Mr. Silber, I work now. I have a lot of responsibilities. I’m trying to turn myself around.”

  “And bless your heart, too! I support it wholly! Let’s celebrate it with a dinner? Whenever you’re off work! What do you do, by the way, Mr. Man?”

  Zal sighed. A huge side of him wanted nothing more than to be around Silber, his world, the everything that he had been in that little time period where they knew each other, the way he symbolized the possibility of filling the hole inside Zal. But he had gotten over Silber, he thought. And yet here the only man he had ever wanted to work for, a man who had no idea what he had meant to Zal at one point, was asking him what job he had, what miserable job he had.

  “I work in a pet store,” Zal muttered. “Just for now.”

  “Okay! No shame in that game! I love pets! You must love pets!”

  “They’re okay. I don’t love them any more or less than most normal people.”

  “I hear you, buddy! They’re neither here nor there to me, too . . .”

  And he went on and on, a mile a minute, Morse code in Zal’s ear. Th
e whole time Zal wondered whether this was his chance, his one chance, his opportunity to ask something of Silber now that the illusionist wanted something of him.

  Zal’s something, naturally: What if he could work for Silber?

  He didn’t ask.

  But a week later, when he called Silber’s most personal cell—he had graduated to getting that number—to cancel their dinner date, he decided he really had nothing to lose.

  “I’m sorry, I just can’t. But maybe we could meet in a different way in the near future?”

  “Is this just a rain check, then, or what? How about two Tuesdays from now?”

  “Mr. Silber—”

  “Bran, baby, Bran. How many times—”

  “Mr. Silber, I think it’s better I call you Mr. Silber. I wanted to ask something of you actually a while ago, and I didn’t have the guts. I don’t know if I do now, either, but I noticed, since you have a new assistant . . .”

  “You want to fuck her? Wait, you don’t do that, do you?”

  Zal groaned. “I do that—I mean, ugh, never mind. Listen, when we met a year ago, I really wanted to work for you—in any way, really. Now I have a job I don’t love, but I have some experience with jobs now and I was wondering . . .”

  “Oh, God!” Silber exclaimed, as if he had heard something juicy or else his tail was on fire.

  “What?!”

  He sighed, with exaggerated weariness. “You want a job.”

  “Perhaps.”

  Silber gave another theatrical sigh, trying to mask the full brunt of his annoyance. “Zal, do you think you’re the first kid asking me for a job? Can you imagine how many people want to work for the world’s greatest illusionist? I mean, it is literally a dream job, is it not?”

  “It is, maybe.”

  “It is, definito! But, baby, I don’t have any right now. Stasi has been a personal assistant to all sorts of people—that guy from Cheers, Lara Flynn Boyle at one point, Michael Jackson for a day! Do you get that? What if I fired her and hired you? You work at a pet store. Sure, you got a cool story, but, kiddy-kiddo, this is a hard-knock job. What could you do for me, baby?”

  “I really don’t know,” Zal said, suddenly feeling small, nervous, tripping over his own stammers. “I thought maybe I could have worked with you on the flight stuff, if even on the research or construction or—”

  “Baby, honeychild, homeybones, you don’t get how this industry works, do you? That’s over! I’m done with it. Fucking finito, bonito! There is no more of that—in fact, I’m working on just the opposite—”

  Zal couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You just stopped working on it?”

  “Do I need to send you a press kit? Have you followed me at all?! I work on something and then it’s on to the next thing—”

  “No more flying stuff ?”

  “The opposite, angel!”

  Zal was amazed at how much anger he felt over this. He wanted to shout, but instead he just spit out what he hoped would hurt him: “It wasn’t real anyway.”

  Silber did not sound even mildly hurt, throwing a stray chuckle at that. “What is this?! You want to have a philosophic debate on the nature of reality, or do you want to talk illusion and showtime? My time is more money than money, honey . . .”

  “I can’t help you,” Zal grumbled.

  “Set me free, why don’t you, babe. Get out of my life, why don’t you, babe!” Silber sang obnoxiously, a song Zal did not recognize. “Terrif! Have a nice life—kiss the pets for me then!”

  Zal dropped his head into his hands. “Yeah. Okay. One last question, may I?”

  “Shoot, shitcake.”

  Shitcake, Zal thought. It had come to that. Knowing he’d never have to speak to Silber again gave him even more courage. “So what’s the opposite?”

  “The opposite? Oh, the new illusion?”

  “I guess so.”

  He cackled like a cartoon witch. “Dine with me and find out!”

  Amazing, thought Zal, amazing, the man’s shamelessness. He stood his ground. “I won’t do it. What do you want from me anyway?”

  “You want to know what I want? I want to pick your brain! Give me the fucking electric chair now! Crime of crimes!”

  Zal snorted, like Asiya used to, the most perfect expression of human disdain, he thought. “The thing is, Bran, I’ve grown up a lot since you’ve last seen me. It’s not my story that defines me anymore.”

  Silber punched his empty dartboard, which hurt more than he thought it would. “Swell!” he shouted, sucking his knuckles. “Okay, see you never, baby!”

  “I mean, what is this new illusion, that you’d need my help for it? All about birds and cages? People raised by wolves? Snakes? Rats?”

  “Ew, no,” Silber said. “It has nothing whatsoever to do with you, if you want to know the truth. Nothing! I wasn’t trying to use you or your precious story, kid. Look, I really got to go . . .”

  Zal let him go. He was part stunned, part gutted, part infuriated. Nothing whatsoever to do with you. Why would Silber want his help, his brain to pick, on something that had nothing to do with his story? Zal felt as though he’d made a mistake and insulted someone possibly not deserving of it at all. What if Silber simply wanted to know what he thought, man to man—normal man to normal man?

  But why now, so long after they’d met? Why out of nowhere? Why was Zal connected to him anyway? Zal had sought him out, but, as was confirmed in that phone conversation, he had no future with Silber; he would never be able to be that right-hand man. Plus, Silber had moved on. He was not the guru of flight Zal had taken him for—flight had been a phase for Silber, apparently. And Zal was one of Silber’s phases, too, and didn’t feel the need to stick around for the guy’s roller-coaster ride, just a bag of tricks—yes, tricks—that added and subtracted nothing to the world but a moment, just a moment when things looked different than they truly were. Zal was—he had to be—done with Silber.

  He swept the floor of the pet store and locked up, his most recent rank-risen duty for good work. For a while he just stood there on the sidewalk, in the dark, the big New York City bright darkness, and thought about what it meant to have no one, no one at all.

  Meanwhile Silber, shaking off the shock of that bird boy getting so crazy with him, summoned Anastasia again.

  “In my Rolo, there’s a bearded lady under b—or maybe under l: lady, bearded, whatevs—I forget her name. See if she’ll do dinner a week from Tuesday. Tell her Bran Silber loves her work and wants to connecticate! Then I think under lenny—or maybe lenny cruz?—there’s the Coney Island midget dude—maybe under coney—call him, too, and schedule something a week from then . . . Then just go through the whole thing and see what there is. I want the wildest folks we got to have dinner with me, okay? And there is no no with me, Stas, got it?!”

  In her head, Anastasia thought smugly, The wild women weren’t enough?

  To her horror, he shot back as she walked out, “Keep it up and you might be next!”

  He was done, truly done with everyone, every last man in his life: his father, Rhodes, and now Silber. Silber was, sure, barely physically in his life, but he had never left Zal’s thoughts. He was on a roll of shooting down every man that had meant something to him at some point. He had nothing, suddenly, but a woman who was locked up a hundred miles away, whom he wasn’t even sure he could handle.

  He had received an e-mail from Willa letting him know Asiya would be back for the holidays, but she’d be with her mother first and then her father—her abandoners suddenly recognizing her on the brink of total disintegration, as good abandoners often redeem themselves—and then just in town for New Year’s.

  Zal realized it was their one-year anniversary, her homecoming. How the hell had it been a year? He tried to see the poetry in that, some bit of beauty, and yet could not get over the big side of him that dreaded the whole thing, the very idea of her, ­especially now.

  What would she be like? A medicated robot with no worries, b
ut no feelings, either? A presto-chango overfed Willa-esque entity, but without the lovely, indescribable Willa-ness to pull it off ? Or, worst of all, maybe herself, just herself, the self she promised she’d return to once she was back with him? That was, by far, the thing that scared him the most.

  She had hit the bottom of the well, he had thought, which was, for the most part, considering everything, a relieving thought. But the possibility that her breakdown and hospitalization were not the bottom, or that the well was bottomless, made him feel like he couldn’t go on. Couldn’t go on with her, at least.

  So he decided to immerse himself more fully in that soothing, dumbing thing: work. He paid attention to the store more than ever, compulsively asked patrons if they needed help—until one old lady complained, swearing she’d been asked at least a half-dozen times in the half hour she was there—swept, cleaned, folded, washed, and tended to every animal or human that he was supposed to tend to. He became a superworker of sorts and found a surprising amount of pleasure in that. It was simple, he was good, the contract was clear, the end.

  There was one creature he took a special interest in, more and more so as Asiya’s return began to nag at his very soul. She was a tiny blonde, tiny but still voluptuous, round in all the right places. She was particularly feisty, quick, hot-tempered, and sassy. He was around her all day—she never left his sight. She’d sing once in a while, and it was the sweetest singing he thought he’d ever heard.

  She was, he hated—downright detested, resented, abhorred—to admit, a bird. A canary, to be exact.

  He. Could. Not. Help. Himself. Zal saw those words on his tombstone. And he knew it was certainly time to quit his job when he started to develop feelings for, of all things, a canary.

  Luckily, he didn’t have to quit. He was fired, just ten days after he confronted his infatuation. He was given a warning for taking the bird out of the cage for no one but himself, then for unsuccessfully sneaking her in his pocket during his lunch break, then for attempting to take her with him to the bathroom. Zal, I don’t know what’s going on here, the manager had said, but I need your hands off the goddamn bird. If you want to buy it, it’s one thing . . . He had considered it, of course, but he knew, like a former junkie before a free bag of heroin, that if he went there, it really would be the beginning of the end—Goodbye normalcy, goodbye new life, hello yesterday and all its infinite sicknesses. He said it would never happen again.