The Last Illusion Read online

  Zal and Hendricks lived in a temporary apartment in Tehran’s north side for several months. It was important to Hendricks that Zal be near his medical team and slowly get to know his homeland. They took walks together—Zal from wheelchair to walker—and sat in parks. After a while Hendricks read to him and saw glimmers of peace in the boy, peace that had to be indication of thought.

  The boy was maybe, just maybe, thinking—thinking as we do.

  A few papers called him “Zal’s Ann Sullivan,” and one cruelly printed a photo of them in the park, a hysterical Zal amidst a fit, clawing at Hendricks’s hair and beard, and Hendricks in a sort of composed agony, trying to contain the little savage of his, with apparently little luck.

  Given the nature of Zal’s nightmares, Hendricks made sure they always slept in the same room. Zal Hendricks, he would always say to his son before bedtime, with an index finger poised like a gun barrel against the boy’s heart, as he lay—finally lay!—in the twin bed that flanked Hendricks’s double bed. You: Zal Hendricks.

  In those months in Tehran, often after Zal fell asleep, Hendricks would take out his translated copy of the Shahnameh and read Zal’s namesake’s sections to himself. Who could say whose story was worse? His Zal was not exactly an albino but a white-blond child in a family of raven-haired folk, in a nation almost entirely of raven-haired folk. But in the Shahnameh, Zal grew into such a great hero that the father who had abandoned his too-white freak child in the wilderness to be raised by the giant godlike bird, the Simorgh, came back to claim him. The Simorgh reluctantly returned Zal, though forever remained his guardian angel through all his many victories and travails. And in spite of Zal’s “old man’s hair,” he was described as possessing “a body like a cypress tree,” or else a lion’s, and a “chest like a mountain of silver” and “cheeks as fresh as spring”; he evolved into “a shining star” and ultimately a ruler of a kingdom, a man—all man, a real man—whose greatest challenge in the end was capturing the most beautiful woman in the world and keeping her, against all odds.

  Of course, it was just a story, but sometimes for Hendricks it had the feel of a session with a well-reputed astrologer. It could all be—and it likely was—bunk, but what marvelous bunk. He was reminded of that old feeling he used to have—one that some hand-me-down rationality would try fruitlessly to deny—that you could wish things into being if only you tried hard enough. Of course, until Zal he had never considered that a being could be wished into being if some other source or combination of sources willed it enough. His mind ran away with glorious possibility: that darkly glittering will of the cosmos conjuring through some magical combo of, say, blood, guts, sun, sky, and spirit—and isn’t that how every human is made anyway? he tried to argue, with whom he did not know. Isn’t that how every story is created?

  Hendricks, an only child, had always wanted a child of his own. This was perplexing to those around him, even his mother, who ended up caving to her young son’s pleas and buying him doll after doll, which he’d undress, put in diapers, pretend to feed, sing to, and sleep with. He would teach walking and talking and counting and spelling, basically transferring any and all schoolwork to his own classroom of dolls. It was disturbing to Hendricks’s mother, a single mother who already had more than enough in her life to be disturbed by. She was a hard-drinking down-and-out waitress with notorious anger issues, who was left by or had left a long line of men, including Hendricks’s father, whose left/was-left-by status might as well be left to the toss of a coin, his exact identity was so foggy. More than once she did not come home in Hendricks’s early childhood, leaving him in the hands of neighbors and friends and an odd grandparent or two and, once in a while, by himself.

  So as a child, the only home Hendricks really knew was the home he was in charge of creating.

  Besides, he’s not like other kids, she said to a concerned neighbor once, who had seen him earlier peering out a window, naked, watching his mother drive off. She had claimed it was an emergency, but the neighbor could smell the alcohol on her breath. I raised my son to be better than any other kid on this earth, and so you can’t hold him to those standards. I know what he can and can’t do, and frankly, this kid can do it all, honest.

  He was his own mother. He knew how to clean a house by age four. He could cook by age five—eggs, cookies, pastas. He was riding the subway alone at age six. He was reading Shakespeare by seven and playing chess in Washington Square Park with old men by age eight. By age nine he’d had his first kiss, and by age ten and a half he had had something that resembled sex (both with the same neighbor girl, who was three years older). By the time he entered college—age fifteen—Hendricks knew his path: he wanted to study developmental psychology.

  He was interested in children like himself: children who were different, children who were raised without parents, children who never quite got to be children, children who had made it. At first that was all. Then a story appeared in the newspaper: a girl in a remote part of Appalachia had been raised by horses. The abandoned girl, whose old parents were both too sick to take proper care of her, slept in a stable, galloped on all fours, whinnied, and ate only hay, apples, carrots, and sugar cubes. In the news they referred to her as “feral” and briefly talked of other children through history—fewer than a hundred, it was claimed—who had gone through the same: children raised by wolves and foxes and dogs and chimps. A month later, scientists found out the Appalachian horse girl was a hoax—a ploy by her impoverished farmer parents to get money for the media attention—but Hendricks had already stepped through the door the story opened: feral children. Fewer than a hundred, but still, they had existed.

  Hendricks was in awe; this would be his subject, a subject no doubt few had wanted to take on. But it was immediately near and dear to him. After all, they were a science experiment science could never embark on, for one.

  And—without getting into it all—and I know how this sounds—there’s something at the essence of their stories that I just-so-barely relate to, he told a professor once, who had tried to nudge him onto more traveled paths.

  He went to Columbia University to live and breathe this, to take in what little there was to learn, and was amazed at how much one could make of so little, how brashly the most obscure exceptions spoke about the world and human nature. He never imagined being so seduced, so haunted, so moved, by something he was simply to study.

  There was one other exception. It was during his senior year, while he feverishly wrote an honors thesis on feral children and furiously applied to graduate school for child psychology, that he met his future wife, a woman known as “Professor Batty,” a visiting poet, Nilou Batmanghelidj. He had decided to take her poetry class and had finally found something he was not good at.

  What will it be this week, Tony? A girl raised by a unicorn? A boy raised by a griffin? she’d jab at him.

  He spent way too much time in her office hours, agonizing about the form she preached—villanelles, sonnets, odes, sestinas. And she had relegated him to a B– student, the only B of his career. He knew he had to fight the grade, but not because of the usual.

  Because of her.

  She was beautiful. A tiny, sprightly woman, her frame was the only part of her that fit in at the college, as she was no bigger than a freshman really—otherwise her foreign name, her accent, even how she wore her jewelry and some of her clothes worked very much against that universe. Her face was all eyes, and what eyes, he marveled—pupil-less black globes surrounded all the way around by white, giving her the look of constant childlike surprise. She wore no makeup but the most perfectly lined red lipstick, and her long hair always hung in a tight braid down her back. She gave off the smell of honeysuckle and was always drinking tea, but a particularly fragrant tea, cup after cup, with cube after cube of sugar, which she often stirred with a thin delicate finger. She would wink at him to diffuse her eye rolls and smirks as he struggled, and she’d laugh a sort of husky schoolgirl laugh. Once she even threw a pen at him
in part mock frustration and part frustration.

  She was thirty-six. She did not know he was only nineteen, the youngest senior in the university’s history.

  The one thing they worked on, really worked on, for extra credit, was a ghazal. He begged to know of poetry from her country one day, and she tried to laugh it off, Tony, why would the most American of American boys like you care? But she finally agreed (maybe, Hendricks thought, because she already knew why).

  There was form involved with ghazals, lots of form, but also theme: love. His eyes brightened. She said, No, not just the kind you are thinking, but more than that. A love you can’t have. A love where the object of love is one you can never have. A love that is impossible.

  His eyes lowered.

  Well, you can imagine, with these Islamic mystics, the subject is obvious. Come on!

  He looked up.

  Ever heard of God, Tony?

  Before he ever finished a ghazal—he started at least a half a dozen—he asked her out. Tony, you’re a child, she said, not even knowing how young he was, but she quickly corrected herself: Tony, I’m an old lady. What could a boy like you want from me?

  He explained that when he was ten he could do things twenty-year-olds could. That put him at a much more acceptable age, he said, without saying what age exactly.

  All he got back was a head shake and some nervous laughter that sounded like fine china chipping.

  He had pointed out that she wore no ring. Perhaps there is someone, though?

  She had denied it. And yet she had resisted, for several meetings, until the following fall, when, after he’d graduated but without fail still made regular appearances at her office hours, abruptly she gave in. Just so you know, your professor does not approve, she said, more soberly than she had intended.

  They went to see Ben Hur. Afterward they had wine at her place. After many hours of arguing about the movie, politics, current affairs, history, Christianity, Islam—he leaned in to kiss her. That night, he told her his real age and she threw a fit, a huge fit, before melting into his kisses again and again. By the end of the night they were joking about it, in bed.

  After a year of that they were engaged. After another year, they eloped. Hendricks was twenty-one.

  They started trying to have children immediately, Nilou already thirty-eight. But as much as they tried, instead of a baby came pains, deep gripping pains throughout her body that were, she claimed, unlike any she had ever had. Something is wrong, Tony. Something is wrong, I know it.

  And of course, he said what every lover would: he insisted everything was fine. He denied her concerns and yet encouraged her to go to a doctor, and when they went still he denied it, until the doctor spoke those words Hendricks replayed over and over from then onward, hoping to have them refiled and reassigned, so certain they were intended for someone else’s story: ovarian cancer.

  She did not cry about the cancer—not once—but what she did cry about was what it precluded: children. She had waited her whole life—waited way too long, that I knew, but what can you do, a stranger in a new land—and now this.

  She told him to leave her. That she would go back to Iran, be with her family, get help there. But he did not, and she did not.

  Instead she lived as best she could, longer than anyone guessed, on loan with five-year extensions that started to look like forever, if it weren’t for the fact that evidence of decline, slowly but surely, was creeping in. When her end came, even though they had been prepared for it for years, it felt every bit as absurd and unjust. In her final days, she said to him, I only regret one thing, and it’s something you did. You never let me go back to Iran when I first got sick. And not so much for me—I mean, I left that damn place—but you. I would have loved to go to Iran with you, to show you everything.

  He had thought about it for a moment and then said, Well, I will go then. I will promise to go.

  But there was more: And, Tony, have a child. You of all people should have a child. You’ve always wanted one, and I can’t imagine a better father. Please marry. Please have one.

  He shook his head. Now that, darling, I will not promise.

  She had rolled her eyes at him, like he was the student again, struggling over a sestina or pretending to.

  She was fifty-two when she died. He thought of her every day after that, often many times a day, determined not to let the image, sound, smell, feel of her slip at all, in a land where nobody ever reminded him of her.

  And then years later, there in that other land, the minute he got to the Tehran airport, he saw bits of her everywhere. Previously, in New York, all he could do was make the routine visit to Great Neck, the Iranian enclave in Long Island, to get certain Persian groceries she would buy—saffron, sumac, a certain type of walnut cookie, Persian tea, yogurt soda—and would often eat alone at a Persian restaurant. It was painful—it would take him back to her, to them, and at some point he’d realized it had become a part of his culture, too, this other world of hers. Now at the airport, here it all was, all of it—hers: her people, her land, vibrant to him in spite of the chadors and pollution and mostly foreign chatter. When he saw the filmmaker come toward him, his camera in hand, he looked like more than a middleman—he was almost a relative. After all, what do you call a man who brings you to your son?

  When he saw Zal at the special care home the next day, he had to literally clamp his teeth down hard on his tongue to prevent himself from crying out and gasping. It wasn’t just his twisted posture, his tiny bones, the eerie otherworldly sounds he immediately hurled at his intruder. It wasn’t the atrocity, but the beauty: his eyes. Was it a trick of memory, a trick of one type of love now overlapping and overwhelming another type of love? Was it the emotional overpowering the optical, or was it actually the truth, reality plain and simple—that Zal’s eyes were Nilou’s eyes? And the frame: in his little face, they were it—he was all eyes, just like Nilou, eyes that were mostly whites, eyes set upon devouring the world, eyes that were perpetually in wonder, and maybe, now that he was seeing it properly, some horror. If he had any doubt before, the doubt was gone.

  It had been twenty-five years without her, and yet who would have believed in a million years, much less twenty-five, that he would actually be able to claim this fully Iranian child after all, a child so like the hero of the old epic poem she once introduced him to—a boy who had come to life by bird and almost bird alone. After all, he thought, Zal was also their child, their broken child, the fruit of their long-gone selves, forever bantering in the dim orange light of those endless office hours where lyric and stanza were twisted and turned and torn and reattached.

  It’s the most beautiful allegorical tale I’ve heard, he had said to her that evening, when she read until her voice began to crack. Finally done, she had triumphantly slammed the thick, worn, old Iranian hardcover on her desk. It had the weight of a phone book and the look of a Bible, he remembered thinking.

  Allegory! she had cried, her laughter more disdainful than ever. Try telling that to any self-respecting Iranian! She had made Hendricks promise that he wouldn’t try to write about it—I don’t think you’re there yet, not sure you’ll ever be—and he had, with some will, allowed it to fade away from his consciousness.

  And now here he was, as if he’d never left it. It was like a fairy tale, a thing for novels, the type of turnaround you’d read in romantic epics, poetry of another time altogether.

  Hendricks courted skeptics from around the world—those who doubted a feral child could grow into a functional human, as well as those who questioned just how feral Zal had been to begin with. The idea that Hendricks’s love alone had caused the miracle, the very miracle of his son’s endurance, floated precariously—and while no one would call it a recovery, per se, they allowed these as advancements of an unheralded magnitude.

  There were times Hendricks wondered to what degree Khanoom really had come in contact with Zal. Was it possible it was more than Zari had said on film? Was he really fu
lly feral? Was it more than the doctors wanted to believe? To what degree had their imaginations filled the holes, and to what degree did his reality challenge them?

  There were some things they would never know. Ask Zal about Khanoom and he would look blank, blinking neutrally. He would not recognize the name, not even understand the reference. Sometimes not knowing and not understanding would make him scared. Hendricks would simply hold him and let him know that it did not make him any different from many people, people like himself even, who had in some ways also been raised without a parent.

  You are all right, son, Hendricks would always tell him, over and over. As all right as any of us.

  Little by little, Zal began to surprise them. They said language would not come to him, would never come to him; by the time Zal was fifteen he could speak and read on the level of a ten-year-old.

  I am all right, he eventually said back, and eventually even fully understood.

  They said his body would forever remain deformed—but nine surgeries later, Zal went from a walker to standing upright on his own, with aches and pains and inflammations not so different from those of someone with MS.

  So, unlike his infinitely masculine namesake, he did not resemble a cypress, he was not capturing beauty queens, and he was not saving the world, but if you looked at him for the first time, you’d have to be awfully tipped off to find something amiss. Here stood Zal of just over two decades—a man, finally a man—Hendricks thought, never mind how badly circumstances had distorted his age. He was five feet seven inches, not horribly short, though they all assumed even getting to such a height meant that if he had grown up under normal conditions he’d be well over six-two. He was thin but not emaciated, definitely too thin, but not in a way that disgusted. His skin was pale and was prone to irritations—burns, eczema, acne, the works—but nothing so different from the usual blemishy human. And his hair was still fair, still blond, but the white blond had, thanks to sun exposure, faded a bit more into a dull brass. His eyes were black and still huge, still like Nilou’s wonderful dreamer eyes, though they revealed nothing—and in some ways Hendricks preferred them to hers, in that strangely sincere blankness. Hendricks imagined Zal was what some wandering poet girl, some eccentric artist with a romantic edginess, might consider good-looking.