The Last Illusion Read online

  The woman laughed. “Lucky a hostess found you! I don’t know if a lot of the old gals in there would have noticed. But in any case, glad you’re well. And happy birthday, geez! It can only go up from here, right?”

  Asiya nodded, without a smile. The woman went away, and Zal took her shoulder.

  “Asiya, I was scared to death,” he said. “Please don’t slip away like that. You could have told me, you know.”

  “I didn’t want to make a big thing. I didn’t want to ruin this. And, I know, I ruined it anyway. I’m so sorry.”

  Zal felt bad for her. She looked like she was shivering. “You didn’t ruin a thing. Let’s just move on. Do you feel okay enough to stay?”

  She nodded quickly. “I’m fine.”

  Zal nodded back, believing her. “Let’s get some food in you.”

  They focused on their menus—Zal insisting on a huge array of appetizers: a meze platter, guacamole and chips, bruschetta, wild tomato soups, on top of their entrées, which were butternut squash risotto for her and eggplant alla siciliana for him—and after they placed their orders, Zal took her hand, gazing at her until she met his eyes as well.

  She looked embarrassed.

  “What is it? It’s your birthday, don’t worry. I’m not mad. Don’t be ashamed. It’s really okay! You can do no wrong.”

  She shook her head. “That’s not it. It’s just that . . .” And she turned red, beet red, something startling on a girl that pale.

  He braced himself, ready for anything. “Yes?”

  “I got really mad in there. At the hostess.”

  “That lady who brought you out?”

  “No, the first lady. The hostess with the red glasses. The lady who found me.”

  Zal shrugged. “Okay. So why did you get mad?”

  “She was shaking me so hard, and I was suddenly awake and I guess out of it or, who knows, just speaking suddenly, and really fast, all these thoughts coming right at me, that I needed to get out, and she was shaking me harder and harder and asking me if I was on drugs!”

  Zal sighed, relieved. “Well, I could see why she’d think that, I guess.”

  Asiya glared for a second. “It was none of her business.”

  “She rescued you, Asiya.”

  She made a sour face and shook her head, imperious again. “Well, I rescued her, too.”

  Zal was about to ask but instead let go of her hand, wanting to change the subject, wanting to remind himself that tonight of all nights he just couldn’t go there.

  But she answered it for him: “I got her fired.”

  “What?”

  “I told the manager she’d accused me of being on drugs and shaken me so hard I had a panic attack, and the manager yelled at her right in front of me, and said she was done. I saw her leave and everything.”

  Zal groaned, trying to control himself. “That’s awful.”

  Asiya made that old snort of hers. “Whatever.”

  Their appetizers came soon enough, and they ate silently.

  “In any case,” she said, nibbling at the bruschetta, many moments later, “I rescued her. You just wait and see. She’s the lucky one, trust me.”

  For a second Zal thought to ask what she was talking about, but then got the gist of it. Something apocalyptic. Fine, whatever. He shook his head at nothing in particular and looked out the window, trying to find a moon or even a star, but just saw helicopter and airplane lights. For a moment he wished that when he turned back to the table, Asiya would be gone again.

  In the days that followed, Asiya was in bad shape. Her panic attacks occurred daily, and this time, especially debilitated, she took Zal’s advice and lined up doctor appointments. The worst part for Zal was feeling like her latest theory had everything to do with his birthday surprise—though she denied it, insisting that she’d marked the map because she was suspicious all along. It was not just a discovery made at the birthday dinner. She was convinced the World Trade Center had everything to do with the end.

  “I can’t hear it anymore,” Zal told her over and over, but with a new gentleness. They were in too deep at that point. There was no use losing her—they were a unit, whether he liked it or not. He was convinced that there was nothing left to do but keep her sane until it passed. And luckily, it was passing soon: she was convinced it would all come to a head in the weeks—from a few to many, it was always unclear to him—to come.

  Zal started to think it was time for a job again. He looked at online sites, scanned the classifieds, even asked his father at one point—and made sure to cut the conversation short when it came to anything but jobs. Part of him worried about actually landing something and then leaving Asiya—who had basically resigned herself to living at Zal’s—alone. She had even, at Zal’s prompting, hired a caretaker/housekeeper to tend to Willa and the uptown house daily.

  The doctors gave her all sorts of diagnoses: anxiety disorder, panic disorder, depression, agitated depression, unipolar depression. It was nothing she hadn’t heard before.

  One suggested schizophrenia and she walked out. Zal had to admit that once he looked it up, he saw where the doctor was going. But Asiya wouldn’t hear it and was quick to remind him, and that doctor, apparently, that the difference between a schizophrenic and herself was the line between delusion and real life. In the end she shrugged it off, assured that there was just a little time left for them to think she was crazy—soon, dangerously soon, it would be clear to them all.

  Zal nodded and nodded and looked for more jobs, proofreading his CV over and over, even making his résumé less impressive, wondering if he had the body for manual labor. He desperately needed some other dimension to his life.

  And they did what they could, given their situation that summer. They took walks in the park, on the promenade, in most boroughs. They went to outdoor movies at Bryant Park. They went to concerts in Central Park. They ate ice cream, ices, gelato. They went to Jones Beach and Long Beach for sunbathing and swimming. They kissed and had sex and kept each other busy with their very presences. Some days, it even seemed like things were all right in their world.

  On such a day, a very hot day, when they were lazily lounging to escape the relentless heat, watching TV in Asiya’s central-air-conditioned townhouse for once, she suddenly let out a gasp.

  Zal didn’t turn from the paper. She was watching the news, something that never interested him much. “Hmmm?”

  “Zal, it’s your magician! Hurry!”

  Zal turned to look. Indeed, it was Bran Silber, in those ridiculous silver overalls he loved to wear at the Silbertorium, gesticulating wildly about something. “Oh, God. What is it now?”

  “His new stunt!” Asiya’s voice sounded uncharacteristically excited.

  And then he saw why. The program flipped to footage of the World Trade Center, gleaming in the summer sunlight, then back to Silber still gesticulating, hands webbed widely as if to say WHOOSH!

  Zal was curious. “Turn it up, Asiya.”

  Silber was saying, “You know, it was like a dream or something. It just came to me at the end of 1999, right in the whole Y2K thing! I was doing this whole Flight Triptych bit”—cut to footage from the finale of the Triptych, socialite in arm, flying through the New York auditorium, a painful sight still for Zal—“and then I thought, I want to do something totally different, but that’s still me, you know? Something so different that it’s like the opposite! And then it was like, uh-oh, spaghetti-o, sister, here we go! It’s the biggest one yet. Just so much bigger than me, so much bigger than any of it, ever.”

  The news anchor, smiling and nodding frantically, asked, “Any worries about pulling it off ?”

  “Usually I say no—Bran Silber is Mr. Cool-as-a-Cucumber-oso, right? But I have to be honest: I’m worried. My whole staff is worried. This one is a bit of a killer. I’m keeping my fingers crossed—my everything crossed, to be honest.”

  And for a moment the fluorescent-white smile was gone. Zal thought he saw actual wrinkles on Silber�
�s forehead. And, as if his moment of pensiveness was too much for the anchor, the interview was cut short and it was back to the news desk.

  “Zal, isn’t that crazy? He’s making the World Trade disappear in just a few weeks! Can you believe it?”

  Zal shrugged. “Yeah, I guess we were just there recently.” He saw what was coming and refused to go where she was going with this.

  “This is it,” she said. “My God, this is it. Maybe there’s hope. Maybe we don’t have to move by then . . .”

  He raised an eyebrow. He had forgotten about her desire to move before the disaster hit.

  “He can help. I know it! Maybe he already is helping. Zal, your friend can maybe make this all right again!”

  He shook his head. “He’s not my friend. I just knew him at one point, but actually we kind of fell out many months ago.” Still, he was relieved something was giving her hope.

  She shook her head right back at him. “I know what I have to do. I’m going to write it all down. Then just do me one tiny favor, Zal, because you love me and because I love you and because it’s almost over and really and truly we might have a chance at living through this and being happy—”

  “Asiya—what?” he asked wearily.

  “I want to write it down and have you give it to him.”

  Zal sighed. “Write what? Never mind, but I’ll read it first, of course.”

  She nodded. “Of course. But just give it to him.”

  He nodded slowly. What did he care. He wasn’t the one sending him a letter; it was her. He had nothing to do with it. If that alone was going to give her something to live for, then why not? Who was he to rob her of any hope, even if it was hope that involved the bullshit arts and its master of nothing but dead tricks? Even if it was the most hollow kind of hope?

  PART VIII

  With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.

  —Jorge Luis Borges,

  “The Circular Ruins”

  Augusts were always bad, he thought, and he couldn’t quite remember what Septembers were like, only that August felt endless and relentless, uniform and merciless, all one killer weather, all orange and black, all sweat and salt, and fire and mirage—so one could only assume the same for September, or at least the part of it that claimed to be related to summer. But in August he gave up hope the way he did in February, when everything turned white and freezing and indifferent. August was burning and overzealous, and there was no room in either of those months to count on anything. They were exhausted by everything all over again—too exhausted to eat, to sleep, to have sex, to talk, to fight, to think, to imagine, to dream. The world felt unquiet, but in a familiar way.

  One day, Hendricks knocked on his door. He knew it by the knock—who else wouldn’t have to buzz? Without asking, Asiya rolled her eyes and retreated to the bathroom—what she had done the other two times he had visited in the time she had been back with Zal, who was still not ready to reintroduce that element to their relationship, and still not ready to trust Hendricks with Asiya in that most fragile state, further than ever, it seemed, from health.

  Zal had been lying on the couch, snacking idly, pretending to read a magazine but overwhelmed by the ninety-degree heat all the air in the world couldn’t make up for. A jar of yogurt-covered beetles lay innocently on its side atop the coffee table—evidence he had always remembered to hide before his father visited.

  Hendricks had immediately, after his routine bear hug, taken a seat on the couch, not even registering Zal’s usual antsiness with Asiya in the bathroom.

  “It’s just relentless, isn’t it?” he was saying. “I understand why so much of the city gets out in August. I’ve had I-don’t-know-how-many Augusts here, and it still gets me every time. Anyway, how are you, my boy?”

  Zal shrugged and nodded at the same time and sat on the floor. Suddenly his eye fell on the jar. He felt a beehive tip over inside him. There was nothing he could do now: reach out for it and Hendricks would notice; move him away from the table and Hendricks would notice; say anything, nothing, and Hendricks would notice.

  “I’m doing really, really, really well,” Zal stammered, his eyes glued to Hendricks’s, which were already on the table and quite possibly right on target.

  For a moment, everything was still. The air conditioner whirred obliviously, and Zal imagined he could hear Asiya’s quickened breaths behind the bathroom’s closed door.

  Finally Hendricks leaned in and squinted a bit. He reached over and Zal nearly screamed, wondering if a seizure would be enough to distract his father. But it was too late: Hendricks’s hands were on the jar, the jar was being picked up, inspected, and, horror of horrors, unscrewed.

  “Father, what are you doing?” Zal exclaimed as one of Hendricks’s fingers went in.

  “What is this, pastilles of some sort? White chocolate?”

  Zal shook his head, gulping furiously. “Yogurt,” he said. “Just yogurt.”

  “Oh, nice,” Hendricks said, reaching in deeper.

  “No! Not nice. They are quite gross!” Zal tried to grab the jar.

  But Hendricks was already holding it up to his nose. “Strange smell.”

  Zal nodded. “See! They are terrible!”

  Hendricks smiled, amused. “Worth a try,” he said, and again he reached in.

  Zal had had it. At that moment, he leapt up and karate-chopped the jar out of his father’s hands, the yogurt beetles skittering all over the floor. It was a small disaster compared with the one that had been averted, he thought.

  “Zal, what on earth is the matter with you?” Hendricks began to pick them up.

  Just the sight of his hands on the coated insects reminded Zal that he ingested, daily, insects. He shuddered.

  “I’m having a terrible time!” Zal said.

  “I thought you were doing really, really, really well?” Hendricks looked up.

  Both men, on the ground, on their knees, gathering yogurt beetles, paused, looking into each other’s eyes.

  Zal nodded slowly. “I’m confused, Father,” he said. “And if you want to know the truth . . .” He took a deep breath.

  “I do, son, trust me, I do.”

  He closed his eyes as he said it. “Those, these, they’re yogurt-covered insects. Beetles.”

  Hendricks didn’t say a word and just gave him a long, hard stare. He removed his hands from the candies and wiped them on his slacks.

  “I eat insects, Father,” Zal confessed. “I’ve been doing it for years.”

  Hendricks nodded slowly. “People do it, I suppose.”

  Zal opened his eyes, but looked down. “Well, you know why I do.”

  Hendricks paused and then nodded slowly. “I see.”

  “But lately, I’m getting sick of it. Since I’ve been feeling, you know, more normal.” And Zal meant that—the yogurt beetles were one of only three insect snacks he had slowly reintroduced in the apartment, after a failed quit, as compared with the nearly dozen of a year ago.

  “That’s good,” Hendricks said softly, a strange hurt look on his face.

  Zal sighed. And if he’d gone that far, why couldn’t he go all the way?

  “And one other thing,” Zal said. “Since, you know, I’m confessing.”

  Hendricks held his breath for a moment. “Go ahead.”

  “I’m still seeing Asiya. She’s in the bathroom. Asiya!”

  For a second nothing happened, and he finally got up and knocked, and when the door opened just a sliver, he whispered something and led her out, by the wrist.

  She smiled a watery, confused smile, relieved to be occupied with the mess of yogurt-coated insects on the ground.

  “Hello!” Hendricks said to her, trying too hard to be cheerful. “How nice to see you!”

  She said nothing, but managed a wave.

  Hendricks’s eyes turned to Zal, who looked agonized.

  “I just want everything in the open now, Father,�
� he said. “And here it all is.”

  Hendricks rose to his feet and met his son’s gaze, still with a strange look.

  “You’ve grown up, Zal,” he said. “That’s okay. You have your own life, things I’ll never know about.” His eyes turned to Asiya’s, which were still on the ground.

  Zal nodded, more slowly, a sudden peace floating over him. “I think everything will be better from now on.”

  And both Asiya and Hendricks looked to him for that promise, as if it were really true, as if it weren’t that August suddenly, as if things were really going to be different, as if he had all the answers—Zal, of all people.

  Bran Silber’s phone was buzzing with calls and text messages—all Oliver Manning, of course—popping up again and again as “Papa Mans.” He did not like to be kept waiting, not now, of course, not with just a few weeks left. But Silber, as the date of the illusion got closer, was no longer one to dart up to his feet from bed after his usual 9.5 hours of beauty sleep. Instead, some days he’d linger in bed, having spent three of those 9.5 until his alarm went off fully conscious. He was wearing the same things every day, and not the metallic overalls, either, but just a black T-shirt and black jeans, his least Silberish look. He was avoiding his home and office gyms, his tanning booth, even the “products” for his hair, face, and body. He’d become one of those people who moved slowly, who took a while to answer a question if he did at all, who dreaded another day, who was often found by assistants—finally, after folks from cooks to Manning had needed him for hours, always needing something or other—hunched over his work desk, his face collapsed in his hands. When he’d finally look up, they’d shrink from the expectation of tears or some sign of anguish, but every time it would be the same: an expression of blandness, dead nothing, gold eyes that were suddenly just yellow.

  Bran Silber was finally—on the verge of his most stunning spectacle—entirely depressed.

  How did it happen? He didn’t know exactly. Was it when Manning started getting more and more difficult, bitching about the size of the “pillar in the pool,” the impossibility of media cooperation in airing it, his constant doubt about how to pull off the illusion perfectly? He didn’t think so. Was it the season of loneliness, now that all the lovers had been sent running by Silber’s work schedule and, worse, his lack of libido? It couldn’t be. Was it that he’d lost interest in magic, in illusion, in spectacle? He couldn’t imagine it. Was it all the interviews, the constant pressure for hints and winks and the usual Silberish razzle-dazzle drivel? Maybe, maybe not, but that felt closest. Because the one thing they—everyone who didn’t know him in particular but had followed his career—wanted to know was: So . . . what does it all mean?