The Last Illusion Read online

  What did any of it mean? Silber would ask himself some nights, all alone in the Silbertorium instead of at home, just pacing the curves of the monster platform and all the mess of wires and stands and light cranes. Where it had all come from seemed a logical place to start. He tried over and over to take himself back to the season when it all began, 1999, fresh off the successes of the Flight Triptych, that triumph of theme, in the final breaths of Y2K season. Was it just the mass insanity of that season? What made him go there? What made any of them think so big, so much further than made sense, imagine it all gone, the nothing of absolutely everything, and yet live through that period, humor it, reason it out, rationalize it, expect and yet forget, cooperate with the end of ends as if it were written out in something other than fear and numbers and miscalculation and superstition, 99 + 1 = 00 = 0000 = a synonym for nothing if you wanted to be literal, everyone in the nightmare of the figurative gone literal and accepting it, as if it was not just the soapy fever of magical thinking for a season or two, as if they were not going to wake up from it and pretend it never was, like a bad one-night stand better left blamed on alcohol and filed under forgotten, like an embarrassment so grand in scale better revised and deleted if possible—better for life just to move on and away and onto bigger and better, isn’t that what they’d say, what they’d advise?

  Bigger and better. In the dark, in the no-glitter of the Silbertorium, which became just what it was in the evening unlit—just a big cold Brooklyn warehouse filled with the incredibly expensive nonsense trappings of one man’s imagination—he questioned his illusion: but was it bigger and better? Why did he hear himself say over and over that this would be the one, The One, The One and Only? Did he say that every time? He didn’t, he was pretty sure. He had learned to leave them always wanting more, to exit with an open door, hinting at something more colossal to come. Maybe the bigger and better in his mind was just a substitute for something that he, at fifty-two, simply could not quite face: it was maybe the last.

  At the prompting of the final press releases and several urgent major profiles in the papers, he gave the event a title before he was quite ready, a title he did not like: the Fall of the Towers. It was descriptive, yes, but, as the last interviewer asked, What is it all about?

  How did he not know what the illusion meant? he wondered. And if he didn’t know, who the hell exactly was pulling the strings here?

  He had laughed it off, tried to make the interviewer feel stupid for asking, a question you did not ask an artist like Bran Silber, America’s greatest illusionist. He had done all he could to hide that it was the very question he was grappling with day and night, especially night.

  Had he ever, in the time span of a stunt, outgrown it? Never, he thought. In his early days, when he was more of an endurance artist, the relentless preparation for a stunt would often leave him demoralized, doubting, or simply exhausted. But he was younger then, and he was the whole act, nothing more. He could control it, he could convey it, he was it. If anyone was to ask what it all meant, all he had to do was point to himself, his body, him. There were no further questions—just held breaths followed by a whole lot of relief: Bran Silber had survived again.

  And then he outgrew simple survival. He suddenly had more wealth than he knew what to do with, and just making it for the masses seemed cheap, indulgent, and, of course, though he admitted it to no one, dangerous, especially as he grew older. He had to become an illusionist, even if it was less real, even if the stakes—no longer life or death—were not as high. He was not Houdini. And there was another layer to illusion—there was the outside world, the suggestion that the external universe was not what it appeared it to be, the notion that it could all be taken away, all gone at his whim, vision, insistence.

  The Fall of the Towers: it was he, the god of this disaster, who was wishing them gone. No one had asked for it, no one had even thought of it. Why would the imagination go there, of all places?

  What does it mean, Bran Silber? What is the meaning of all this?

  Bran Silber found himself that season in a situation he never imagined he’d be in. He found himself absolutely inconsolably distraught. He found his mind wandering as he watched the businessmen, janitors, restaurant workers, and shopkeepers file in and out of work at the WTC, with a sense of purpose. He wondered what their world was really like, and he concluded that he envied them. After this last stunt, he would have to find the daily purpose illusion could no longer afford him. How could he go further? There had to be some other world.

  He ignored the buzzing and ringing of his phone that seemed to go off all the time, at all hours, in those days, and he slowly, with much trepidation, walked into the room that had now become as much a torture cell as a meditation room for him: the Mirror Room. And he looked at himself and he looked at himself. What is the meaning of this, Bran? But he got nothing back. Just dead yellow eyes and a tired man in all black in his fifties. And he tried again to see himself as he had just weeks earlier, he tried his hardest to flash that insignia of his, his unforgettable blinding white-hot smile. And he couldn’t.

  He remembered Bird Boy and his inability to smile. He had become like that, like a bird boy of sorts, with no joy, no connection to this world. The Bird Boy who had turned his back on him months ago and then come back recently with that e-mail, wanting to visit, wanting to see if he was okay, wanting to let him know he was in love, wanting his help even. My God, he thought, even Bird Boy, smileless Bird Boy, has love in his life.

  Bran Silber saw something he rarely saw in the mirror: tears. They would not come out, however, as if even that was too much effort. He was, he had to admit, not just depressed but, in a way, its opposite: he was very, very afraid. And he could not even begin to acknowledge the feelings—so deep, so strange, so almost mystical—that those fears stirred up. All he focused on was the problem most obviously before him, the surface issue: he thought, My God, maybe there is no meaning. Maybe for once all I have in my hands is just a big fucking trick.

  In the end, Zal had spared Asiya—rather, he’d looked at Asiya’s long rambling deliriously typoed e-mail drafts, declaring an apocalypse that only Bran Silber could avert for all of their sakes, and realized there was no way he could admit to Silber that he was associated with that girl—and deleted it all and written Silber himself. It was a short e-mail, an icebreaker of sorts, he hoped, something casual and easy, as if their break had never happened, as if they sent e-mails like that to each other all the time, old friends that they were. And he had gotten back the e-mail he deserved, also casual and easy, also pretending, also reeking of old times and bonds: Tricky week, even trickier week. If you come, just a whole lotta waiting. I could see you after but hard to know when it all wraps up. Very private here at moment. But if you don’t mind waiting . . . Dream, B.X.S.

  He read it out loud to Asiya.

  “What’s the point of that?” she said. “We don’t need to hang out with him! We need his help.”

  Zal almost corrected the we, and said, “But I thought if we went there, he could introduce us to the illusion and that would be the perfect opportunity to explain your . . . your feelings on it.”

  Asiya was pacing, disturbed. “We don’t have time for stuff like this, Zal! We’ve got to move.”

  Zal groaned. “Asiya, I know you think there’s a deadline—”

  “And it’s not like he’s exactly inviting us anyway! He’s saying it’s always inconvenient, but if we go over there, maybe there’s a slight chance—”

  “He just talks like that!”

  “Look, Zal, I’m willing to go there, but we can’t waste any time. I need him to know beforehand why we’re there. Then he’ll definitely meet us first thing, make the time for it urgently, you know.”

  Zal tried to imagine the Silber he knew in confrontation—he could just see him in his deep tan and silver overalls, hands on his hips, poking fun at Bird Boy and his freak girlfriend, waving them off ultimately with a wail of a laugh, pawning
them off on assistants while he argued with his illusion-engineering team. He then tried to imagine the Silber Asiya was seeing—a man in a black suit and top hat, like those real magicians of the past, or, better yet, a fortune-telling gypsy with a crystal ball who’d hear them with closed eyes and a grimace, who’d nod when they were done and make promises, ones he’d guarantee he could keep, ones that would, as Asiya said, with no irony whatsoever, save the world.

  “Asiya, I do love you,” Zal began, trying to pump his voice full of patience, “but I need you to understand something.”

  She looked at him pleadingly, as if to say her heart was in his hands—her heart and mind.

  “There is no way I’m taking you to meet him, I’m sorry. I’m not going there, and neither are you. I agreed to give a letter, but that’s it.” He left his changed mind bare, unadorned, simple, naked; it was all he had.

  Asiya ran her hands through her hair, tugging chunks in her fist along the way. “I can’t believe this! Do you know how irresponsible you’re being? We’re on the verge of an emergency here, Zal! Fuck you and your limits! I don’t need you, you know that?”

  Zal sighed. “Great, well then do whatever you have to do yourself. Leave me out of this.”

  “You are so, so, so selfish!” she snapped. “I’m disgusted! I’m horrified! I’m just—” and then she stopped, a pale hand coming up to meet her pale mouth. “My God.”

  Zal looked up and away. Not again.

  “Oh my God, Zal, I get it, I get it.”

  Zal tried to fill his mind with other thoughts, to drown her out.

  “Holy shit, Zal . . .”

  But it was hard to ignore her in general, much less when she got like that. “What, Asiya, what?”

  She was backing up as if he were holding a weapon, as if he was out to get her, shaking her head, muttering something unintelligible, just barely mouthing whatever unutterable it was.

  “Asiya, I need you to speak to me. What is it?”

  And he asked it over and over, until she hit the wall behind her—he didn’t warn her, didn’t think she’d actually back into it—and crumbled, as if it had swatted her to the floor, and began crying, deep panicked sobs.

  Zal crouched down and just watched her, without touching her. When he finally got up, his legs cramped, her sobs grew softer, until she could finally squeeze some words out.

  “Zal,” she gasped. “You. Don’t. Believe. Me.”

  And Zal shook his head, not sure at what exactly.

  It was in this period that Zal started closing himself off from the world. He found himself avoiding the computer—the world seemed bleaker than ever, bad politicians, missing girls, shark attacks everywhere. He started avoiding his father and Asiya, the only two people who consistently demanded his attention. His excuse: he wasn’t feeling well.

  And it was true: in August 2001, Zal found himself consistently not feeling well. Whether physiological or psychological, he did not know. He just knew that every morning he rose, he regretted it.

  And so his solution was to simply not rise. When Asiya or Hendricks would come in or call or want him in some way, Zal would tell them, I don’t feel well. I need to rest today. Over and over. He’d insist it was nothing and yet it was enough to prevent him from participating.

  In those last few weeks of summer, Zal simply dropped out: blank page.

  Except that dropping out of one world meant dropping into another: the world of his fantasies, from heavy, sickly-sticky dreams to gauzy, easily puncturable, lucid ones. Except for trips to the bathroom, water and some granola for meals, an occasional step or two out the door, he began living exclusively in the attic of his head. And his head was a strange place that season, even he had to admit.

  Zal began dreaming in bird again. There he was in the tangles of a nest, his wings tucked against him, waiting with an open mouth for a bigger one bearing small squirming worms. There he was soaring through the scorching summer atmosphere or cutting through sheets of relentless rain. There he was perched on a windowsill, watching human life and all its mundane oddities, big people sitting and standing and lying down and eating and smiling and fighting and just staring. There he was in their garden, on their roof, in their tree, on their steps, with others of his kind but all alone—or with humankind, trapped again, in those airless cubes called rooms, waiting for one of them to carve a square into a wall and open a dimension into the natural world, the real one they barely lived in.

  But sometimes the dreams were not so far-fetched—they were not the daily life of an actual bird, but that of a bird boy. There he was in that other world, the old world, that other climate that was his native one, dry and dusty and hot, the country of his ancestry, the village of his family, his homeland. But what did he know of that place, any of it, beyond a single veranda, occupied by others of what he imagined were his lot: the commune of canaries and doves and little white parrots that the older woman, Khanoom—a name he never learned—kept in a wide variety of homemade cages. There he was in his own, a badly bent cylindrical wire tower padded with straw—and damaged, it seemed, bent from his own doing, the nudging and hitting and pushing for things that could never come soon enough: more food, more water, the cleaning up of his space. How she would dwell on all the others, nestle the canaries against her bosom until they’d reanimate with joyous song, line the parrots up on her arms as she flapped them, as if she was Mama Parrot, giving them a playful hurtle up and down. How she filled their cages with worms and bugs and then threw the dregs to him: wet seeds, stale rice, uncooked beans, all sorts of food that was neither, not in that shape at least, for man or bird. He’d envy the others so much, knowing that although he was one of them, he was also somehow different, something more even than just bigger, less feathery, without beak, without claw. He was, after all, familiar with the one name she called him: White Demon.

  And he had accepted it.

  Sometime he saw her coming in and opening all the cages except his, letting them loose in the covered veranda that they knew so well they bumped into nothing, just spun through the air at top speeds, relishing the rare opportunity at unfettered abandon, in their element, doing what they were born to do, the makers of tornadoes yellow and white, with her, the older woman, in wonder at its axis. She’d look up at them, laughing almost deliriously, holding out her arms as if in a gesture of mass embrace, just enjoying her place at the center of their world. And he’d watch, behind his own bars, neither theirs nor hers, not of that element, but not of this, either. He was doomed to be outsider and observer, sibling to those who even in captivity enjoyed freedoms he thought he’d never come close to knowing. He knew that, and he watched, and he watched, and he watched. And when they complained, as she tucked them back into their cages and hushed them to submission, he bowed his head down, as if not minding them out of respect. In certain ways, he did not envy them—he didn’t know what it was like, after all, had no clue what in the world it would be like to be let out to fly, to be loved like that. He felt related to the concepts, in close reach somehow, and yet ultimately alien.

  And he saw her anger and her insanity and her desperation and her depression over and over, up close, her face popping up at his cage at unlikely times: in early dawn, in the middle of the night, more and more so toward the end of his time there. She’d come in sometimes in a rage, eye the others and then glare at him, throw sticks, throw spoons, throw food, and, once, his own feces right back at him, pieces pelting his face and landing in his hair. She’d look deep in his eyes and he’d look back: that wrinkled face the color of the cage’s copper, those steel eyes the color of the metal water dish, and the white of her hair not unlike his—which he could see only when he felt compelled, out of boredom or agitation or, who knows, to pull some out.

  He never for a moment thought, This is my mother. He had no such concept.

  And yet that was the way the story went. That the dung-­flinging, screaming, White Demon–calling old woman was his mother.

  In
one dream/fantasy/recollection—he did not know what name to give these sessions, that August, when waking and sleeping seemed so hopelessly incestuous—she came in the middle of a particularly bright day, when the sky was bluer than what was normal for that season and even that climate, and she came with a blow at his cage, which at that point was getting too small for him, bent in places that molded the outline of elbows and knees and the back of his head. The cage, precariously propped on concrete blocks, teetered, and he braced himself for more blows. But instead she opened the door of his cage—usually a sign that it was to be cleaned or refurbished or fixed—and, with an expression of disgust, she reached out to his dirty naked body and grabbed him. Her hands felt clawlike with their long nails and dry skin, and for a moment he considered she too may be more bird than he had originally thought, underneath those layers of draped cloth on her body and head. In her hands, he shook quite violently, afraid of what it could mean. She was speaking rapidly, whispering without pause, a coarse hissing that would not end. It had an unpleasant sound. He remembered being so afraid, and then suddenly her grasp softened, her hands became more palms than claws, and his head nestled, like those canaries would get to nestle, against the ample warmth of her bosom that still radiated through those layers of soft cloth. He took hold of her, grabbed on to her fleshy body, so much more abundant than his, which was just, it seemed, a collection of brittle bones under the thinnest layer of skin. She smelled unnatural, not of dirt or food or feces or feathers, but of something crisp and chemical and yet pleasant, a smell that he’d always associate with those perfect blue-sky summer days. And he just lay there, very still so as not to disturb her, letting himself enjoy this most unusual experience of being rocked in that woman’s arms, the woman he never knew he had come from. That was the greatest joy he recalled in those early years, the only memory he was sure of, it was so vivid: the peace he felt, the gentle shaking, his and hers, the sound of her whispery chants, the smell of cleanliness, which he did not know was a thing called cleanliness, the feeling that this could, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, last forever . . . though of course it didn’t. He didn’t remember how the episode ended except that it surely must have culminated in the removal of the embrace and the opening of his cage and then the closing, with him in it. He never felt anything quite like that again.