The Last Illusion Page 25

  Why are you even thinking about it? Zal would interrupt, sometimes sounding gentle but often sounding irritated, and then of course he’d almost instantly regret asking. He knew, of course. Asiya said it over and over: We’re this close. And while she seemed also to insist they’d be okay, she felt like they were on the verge of not being so. And it was as if death was a sort of great black-winged visitor that would swoop down on them suddenly and soon, and while he would miss them, possibly reject them even, he’d cause all sorts of chaos in their vicinity and have his way with their community and claim them, if not their lives, by changing everything. That couldn’t be avoided, Asiya declared. There was no getting around the fact that nothing would be the same after the first third of that month, September.

  And when the police knocked on her door—one of those nights when she and Zal were apart, a fight night, an evening when the increasing tensions of that period had come to a boil and overflowed and left Zal wordlessly, almost silently even, in the face of her screaming, walking out, seemingly never coming back, and her, as in all fights of that era, eventually numb and mute—and told her she was being arrested for threats against Bran Silber and the World Trade Center, she didn’t even blink an eye. Something had told her, even while writing the first draft of that letter, that this could come about, and that if this was all that came about, at least she’d have done her duty. The only thing that surprised her about the whole ordeal was that they kept asking her to spell her name over and over—something she was used to, to an extent, but never so many times—eventually getting to their real point, she supposed, in making her jump through those hoops: “ASS-ya? Is that right? Hispanic? Indian? A Muslim name?”

  They had done their research, clearly. And she looked in their eyes, their light-narrowed eyes, and, as she imagined many other Muslim-named men and women had done throughout history, she channeled every bit of defiance, every bit of holiness she could muster—even if that self of hers was a past self—into a few syllables and snapped: “Absolutely.”

  It wasn’t Asiya who called Zal from police headquarters, but the police. “We have your girlfriend—Miss McDonald? Ass-ya?”

  They called her “Ass-ya,” awful, was his first thought. His second thought was: Why wasn’t she calling—in movies didn’t they get a single phone call?

  “She’s debilitated,” Officer Something said, plainly. But what did he mean by that? “She’s been—she’s having a fit of some sort. We’re having her breathe into a bag. She’s been a crying wreck for the last half hour. She gave us your number. She said she has no real family.” No real family? Zal told him she had a brother and sister in the city, and parents in other states. “Well, I’d take charge, Al, and let them know. She’s probably going to be held for a while.”

  Held for a while. Zal was horrified. He recalled vaguely that they had had a fight of some sort, but he couldn’t remember what about. They were fighting all the time those days, it seemed. Or rather, Asiya was. He didn’t have it in him to put up much of a fight in return. He would simply look away, swallow a comment or two, close his eyes, tune out, walk out. On their last evening together, he had walked out on her and imagined, as he did every time he left, that it could be the last time they ever saw each other.

  And here it was. The officer had said she had made a threat against “a building.” How do you threaten a building? And then he knew, of course. The World Trade. It had to be. He hadn’t forwarded her letter, and certainly she had taken matters into her own hands. It seemed too crazy even for Asiya.

  He realized he had no cell phone number for Willa and of course not for Zachary, either. He had to do it the long way. He took a cab to their home and was met by a scowling Zachary at the front door.

  “No, Zachary, there’s no time for that—this is serious,” he said, struggling to get past his arm propped against the doorway. “Let me in now. I have news.”

  Zach shook his head, staring at the ground. He had a criminal look about him, Zal thought. He should be the one in jail if they really needed a McDonald.

  “Zach, please!” Zal cried. “It’s about Asiya!”

  “She’s not here,” he said. “Get the fuck out, before I beat you again.”

  “I know she’s not here! That’s why I came to see you guys!”

  Zachary’s hands started to ball into fists.

  “Your sister is in jail!”

  Zach looked at him and laughed, a dry bitter fake laugh. “You’re out of your mind! Get out.”

  “I need to see Willa, please! I have to tell her!” And then he remembered, with some shame, how he had been found with Willa. Zal understood anger—he’d done quite a number on Zach’s world—but now was not the time.

  Then, just like an angel answering a call for help, he heard Willa’s voice in the background.

  Zachary yelled back, “It’s nothing, Willa. Just Asshole here, saying Asiya’s in jail!”

  Willa said something else he couldn’t hear.

  “Fuck you, Willa!” Zach shouted back, and slowly backed up, letting Zal in.

  Zal nodded gratefully at Zach, but quickly got out of his sight by running up to Willa.

  There she was on her bed. It had been a while. The last several times he’d been over, Asiya had said Willa was sick or not feeling well, and he hadn’t gone up to say hello. But now he saw evidence that something had indeed been off. Willa did not look well.

  Willa had lost weight.

  Zal knew it couldn’t be that much that fast, but she really appeared to be half her old size. She was lying on a bed she didn’t seem to require. It was hard to look at her, the woman he had so adored for her abundance somehow whittled away, slowly impoverished of all that made her so much.

  His voice immediately softened as he saw her. “Hi, Willa. How are you?”

  She smiled weakly and shrugged for a moment, and then a look of alarm darkened her face. “Zal, what is it?”

  He had momentarily forgotten. He nodded and said, with urgency once again, “It’s Asiya. They took her away. To jail.”

  “What?!”

  “Yeah. For threats. Against a building, the World Trade, I’m sure. You know her whole end-of-the-world thing, right?”

  Willa nodded, looking embarrassed, as if inheriting her sister’s shame. “I thought it was just the end of New York, but yeah, she’s said some things. How did they arrest her?”

  “I have no idea! I thought you might know. They must have come here!”

  Willa looked dazed, he realized. “I haven’t been feeling well lately. Sleeping a lot. I must have missed it. I can’t believe she didn’t make a sound, shout up to me, at least, let me know what was happening. Or even call after the fact.”

  Zal nodded, also looking embarrassed, as if inheriting her misconduct. Here they were, the two people closest to Asiya, and at a crucial moment like this they could only be embarrassed of her, embarrassed by the association even. “What do we do?”

  Willa shrugged. “I’ll call our parents.”

  “Good, good,” Zal said. Her hand was already on her cell phone, his eyes on the ground. “I guess I mean, what should I do?”

  Willa looked at him with wet eyes. When she lost it, it was always so subtle, so soft, so unlike Asiya, with all her sharp edges; Asiya the rectangle, her sister the cloud. “I think you should probably go home. And wait. What else is there?”

  Zal nodded slowly. There was nothing else.

  He left, just as Willa called Zachary up to her room. He decided not to take a cab and do the long hard work of waiting by taking long way: walking. He went the same route, that same pleasant zigzag they took the first time they came to her apartment, which Zal had since rejected for a more direct shortcut.

  He was shell-shocked. Jail. How had it come to that? Was it the only thing that could stop her? Was she a threat? How had his once beloved photographer girlfriend turned into a criminal? He tried to imagine where she was, but all he got was cartoon images, men in black-and-white-striped ju
mpsuits, clinking mugs against a row of bars. That was not it, he knew, and this was not funny at all.

  And he not only felt sorry for her but also for himself, which he knew was selfish, but still. He was without her again. And who knew for how long? He had lost his girlfriend in a way he never, ever imagined—the police had taken her away, before she could take herself away, before he could walk away, before some great big imminent unknown could close their chapter. And he had lost that thing that had made him one of them, the catalyst, the cause, and then the circumstance, the very thing that made him normal. He had lost his greatest chance at normalcy.

  Asiya = normalcy was a lunatic equation, he knew, but nonetheless he suddenly realized how much he had needed Asiya all along.

  And what was she thinking? What was going through her head right now? The final image he had of her—after the real final image of her hurling insults, many of which were made incoherent by the force of her sobs that last night—was her breathing hard breaths into a brown bag, as she so often did those days. In a way she had gotten what she wanted: something had happened, something was happening.

  Silber had mostly put it behind him, now that the illusion was in its final stages and Manning and company were finally on his team again. But the one sentence that stood out from the whole letter read, I am a friend of someone you know, who I can reveal once I meet you. Every so often, on a break from ordering and overseeing and demanding and commanding, Silber would sit back, light a Fantasia, and think of that line. Who in the world? He knew so many freaks—it would be impossible to narrow them down. And yet, he played roulette with the characters in his lifetime and eliminated them one by one, during his off-hours, of which there should have been none, but Silber was of course master of making something out of nothing.

  Indigo had seemed unwell since the letter arrived. She seemed thinner—not a bad thing, but a thing, since Indigo was a big girl and that was part of her head assistant allure: her imposing presence. She seemed wrapped up in herself, spiritually and in stature, which was all slouch, and her Silberish wordplay—previously pitched to harmonize with his—had become a watered-down version of its original incarnation. If Silber had the decency to really consider her, he’d have assumed she was depressed.

  “Indy, look, I get it—I mean, I never thought I’d recover from Ofra Haza and DJ Screw both dying last year, and here I am,” Raj tried to console. The pop singer Aaliyah had died several days before in a plane crash in the Bahamas. It was no secret that she was Indigo’s favorite chanteuse—favorite celebrity even. Indigo had for days gone on about how fitting it was that her name meant “exalted one” in Arabic and that a German newspaper had run an interview just last month in which she said, It is dark in my favorite dream. Someone is following me. I don’t know why. I’m scared. Then suddenly I lift off, far away. How do I feel? As if I am swimming in the air, free, weightless. Nobody can reach me. Nobody can touch me. It’s a wonderful feeling.

  “God,” Indigo had sighed, “I have the same exact dream.”

  Lionel, the new assistant, had almost shut her down when Raj shook his head and quickly grabbed her for a hug.

  But that had been days ago. And it had seemed like Indigo was doing better.

  “I thought I was okay,” she said to Raj that day.

  “You are. You are,” he said in that determined Raj way.

  “What are we doing here?” she whispered to Raj, conspiratorially.

  “We have the best jobs ever and you know it,” he whisper-hissed back.

  “What are we doing with our lives?”

  “Indy, stop it.”

  “Just look at this place.”

  “Indy, you don’t have to be here. But it’s an honor for me, so snap.”

  She sighed, loudly, almost a groan. “This thing sucks.”

  “What thing?”

  “The Towers thing.”

  “The Fall of the Towers.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I think it’s going to be beyond.”

  Indigo tried to nod. “He got some girl arrested and everything. Thanks to me.”

  “Oh, come on! He had to. She was a maniac! Oliver says it was a terrorist letter! Did you want all those innocent people getting McVeighed all over the place? Shit!”

  “The letter was . . . confusing, but I don’t know if it was like that.”

  “I wonder what that freak is like.”

  “What freak?”

  “The girl who wrote it.”

  Indigo shrugged. “Who knows. This city is filled with crazy people. He attracts them all!”

  “Silber? Yeah.”

  “Remember Bird Boy?”

  “How could I forget?”

  And amazingly, just hours after he’d come up, “Bird Boy” appeared on Silber’s AIM screen, with the words Bran Silber, please help me.

  She had opened her mouth to call him, but then stopped herself. Did this warrant an interruption? Did this warrant a gist-ing? What would Bran, knee-deep in illusion, want her to do?

  Whattup, buttercup, she typed. Got to be quick, because I gotta be like jam on toast with this illusion, know?

  Zal, meanwhile, was amazed. Silber sounded friendlier than he had in ages. No cold shoulder, no hint of feud, no memory of a diss, it seemed.

  And Zal, who had gone a full day with Willa’s directions in mind, home and just home alone, frozen, no idea what to do, had turned to the only other authority he had ever come close to, other than Hendricks, whom he just couldn’t risk bringing into this: Asiya the criminal on top of Asiya the crazy and Asiya the anorexic—no way. A man of magic seemed like just the person he’d need. And there was always the chance he knew about this, given his proximity to the building. He wanted to at least complete the connection.

  So Zal told Silber everything.

  And the answer to her question earlier that day magically unraveled itself for Indigo. The girl was linked to Bird Boy. The freak to the freak. Holy crap, she thought, that was Bird Boy’s girlfriend.

  Just then, Silber shouted from the opposite end of the Silbertorium, “Indy, I need you to run to Brent’s for more WZ0s, please! Call Brent first for twenty yards at least, at sixty, like he promised!”

  But Indigo didn’t hear.

  Insane, kiddy-kad, insane, she was typing back to Zal.

  Zal—impatient with all the Silberisms and yet weirdly comforted by them, so alone he felt in his dark apartment with nothing but the buzz of a half-broken cheap air conditioner to console him—wrote back, You don’t even know the half of what my life’s been like this year. This is just the logical outcome of it all, you could say.

  Uh-huh. Hey, Zalz, can you hold on a sec? Indigo needed to answer Silber as much as she needed a second for her thoughts.

  “Indy, what are you, deaf, pet? I need action, girl!” Silber had been humming the theme song to Flashdance all day long, singing only the words Take your passion, and make it happen! He did it in a foreboding way as he goose-stepped his way over to her.

  “I’m sorry, so sorry,” she stammered as he walked up to her.

  “This is no time for online dating or porn or whatevs,” he snapped. “But you have more color to your face. Done mourning Queen Latifah yet?”

  She shook her head slowly, looking from laptop to Silber, Silber to laptop, gulping hard. News like this could set them back a whole day, knowing Silber’s state recently. And yet he seemed better, too. On the other hand, so much of this had started when she told him about the letter in the first place. But she’d have lost her job if she hadn’t. And yet, was that such a bad thing?

  Angels and devils danced on Indigo Menendez’s shoulders.

  Silber, weirded out by her indecision, grabbed the computer from her hand and, still humming the Flashdance song, read and read and read.

  “Holy shit,” he whispered.

  “Yeah,” Indigo said. “I didn’t want to bother you. I’m really sorry—”

  A slow smile spread across his face. “Not to
worry. This is actually kinda great news.”

  Indigo raised her eyebrows, but Silber’s eyes were still glued to the screen.

  “Zal and that Asiya girl are linked: amazing,” he said. “What could be better?”

  Indigo blinked blankly.

  Zal wrote, Are you still there? Please, I feel desperate.

  Silber told Indigo to go on the errand or make Lionel do it, but she could be excused, and he focused on the screen. Finally he wrote the words: I’m sorry for what has happened to you and your girlfriend. He realized it sounded not Silberish enough after Indigo’s perfect Silberisms. Anyway, ding-dong! (Ding-dong? Even he was surprised.) I know more about this than you think. She contacted us. We called it in. Not me so much—it’s a long story. But one I will tell you, don’t burn your lil’ bird heart out! I’ll tell you and I’ll help you . . . but I want something too.

  Zal was in shock. Could she have? Would she have? He didn’t know if he was writing friend or enemy, if she was even friend or enemy. He was so full of questions, he didn’t know where to start. Shoot, he typed.