The Last Illusion Read online

  There was a pause.

  Zal tried to clarify: Anything.

  Silber’s smile turned wider and wilder as he wrote, I’m really intrigued by what she saw in all this. Can we begin there? I mean, she threatened us, which is crazy and all, but why us? What did she know about this? What did she think about this? I guess I’m asking you—and don’t get me wrong, I know the answer, on my part, that is—what she thought it all meant, you get me?

  Zal nodded to no one but a dark room and tried to remember, tried to conjure every illogical word, every insane instant. And slowly, but surely, he began to type.

  But something was going to happen first, before it all came down. Zal had for days stayed inside his apartment, pacing its perimeter, contemplating his computer and cell phone at times, and usually finding solace only in naps that never quite got him to dream state. They were thick, unsatisfying, fever-like spells of sleep. He’d wake up in sheer alarm, convinced that everything was on its head again. He started to feel consumed by fear, fear not unlike what Asiya had felt those last weeks: death panics, expiration fixations, existential terrors. His own apartment started to feel foreign to him, hostile even, and he felt desperate for company.

  He felt, he imagined, the way many must have felt the night before the clock struck 2000, the year many thought they’d never live to see. And yet, back then he had been calm. Not only had he been full of life, but he had suddenly found love. The love he had lost. He had become a man, and now what was he? Not man, not bird, not . . .

  Anything?

  He just didn’t know. He was dying to call Rhodes, his father, anyone, but he couldn’t. Once in a while he’d e-mail Silber, and Silber, so overwhelmed with the labor of his upcoming miracle, could barely attend to him, even when guilt steered him to.

  Zal was destroyed by how absolutely alone he felt.

  So, still resisting the chaos that connection with his father could cause this time around, he went to that other family, never ones he could call close to his own, but they were people he knew and trusted. What was there about even Zachary not to trust? His anger was justified. Zal knew that then, and he knew it now. And especially now. It was strangely Zachary, of all people, who was on his mind when he walked over to the McDonald residence one early September twilight evening.

  When he got there, the gate was wide-open and the door was wide-open. On the couch was a woman he had never seen before, an older woman with her head in her hands, shocks of short white hair poking through her knuckles. She slowly became aware of his presence and looked up to face him. There was something a bit breathtaking about her. At first he thought it was just her eccentric appearance: she was dressed in a long black tunic, limbs wiry and lithe and white, as minimal as a one-dimensional rendering, with lips painted so red they looked black. But then he realized that what was making his heart race was her perfect resemblance to the woman he’d just lost—she was the exact reflection of an older Asiya.

  He knew at once who it was.

  “Mrs. McDonald?”

  “Shell,” she said without a smile. “Shell Hooper. And you are?”

  “Zal Hendricks. Asiya’s boyfriend.”

  She blinked, stared back blankly. It was possible she didn’t know. “Are you in touch with Daisy?”

  Daisy. Zal began to get into it, but before he got even a few words out, the woman’s face crumpled as if it were a piece of paper. A high-pitched sound came, nonhuman and unrelenting, like the scream of a smoke alarm. And he realized that this woman, Shell Hooper, was crying. She collapsed back on the couch again, and Zal almost embraced her but stopped just short of the presumption, taking a seat next to her. He told her what had happened to her daughter.

  “I’m so sorry about Asi—” he quickly caught himself—“Daisy. It’s so awful, but Willa said lawyers were looking—”

  Her sobs accumulated, grew louder, and her body shuddered harder. He noticed she was shaking her head more violently, the more he said.

  “Mrs. Shell, Mrs. Hooper, what is it, what is it . . .” he began to say, suddenly sensing something was wrong, feeling the house full of an artificial draft, as if it were museum air, as if it had long been empty, something very different from what he had known entirely.

  After several moments she looked up, met his eyes with her now red-cracked ones, and, still trembling, told him what she soon realized he did not know. “It’s not Daisy that’s . . . that’s causing this . . . It’s . . . it’s . . . her sister.”

  “Willa,” Zal numbly mouthed, looking up at her room, wanting suddenly to run up to it.

  “She’s gone.” Shell gasped out the words.

  “Gone?”

  “Gone,” she whispered, as if anything louder would take her back to sobs. “She died yesterday.”

  Zal felt like the giant pendulum had swung and hit him square in the skull.

  “She did it to herself,” she went on. “Yesterday. Zach wasn’t home, of course. But he came and found that she had opened her window and jumped out.”

  “Opened her window? But she lived on that bed, she couldn’t—”

  Shell was nodding, looking a bit irked. “It was apparently her first time properly out of that bed in ages. She had made it across the room. She had lost weight, you know . . .”

  Zal nodded. “Had Zach seen her walk before?”

  Shell snorted. “He knew nothing about her or her state lately. She had the caretaker. Who had been coming less and less, due to Willa’s instructions. I don’t know what the hell happened in this goddamned house, but I have one daughter dead and another in fucking jail.”

  The profanities, especially those uttered by others, made Zal nervous, as usual—and of course reminded him of Asiya, so like Asiya she was in so many ways—but he understood.

  “Where is Zach?” Zal finally asked, when he could think of something to stay.

  “Zach is at some friend’s. Zach could never stand me. And this—he can’t deal with things. Zach is a bit off, you know.” Zal just stared at the floor, not wanting to make his agreement known. “Hell, all my children are, apparently! And, well, there’s me.”

  Zal looked at her, uneasy. She seemed capable of anything, this slight woman, raven-like almost, a shiny, glittering loose cannon amidst considerable tragedy.

  “I need something to drink,” she finally said, and went to the kitchen.

  Zal sat there, in that new air of the house, with all its doors open, Willa’s bedroom window also presumably open, this strange veranda-like museum of a home, empty and silent and cold. When she was out of the way, the enormity of the event hit him. Willa. Willa was gone.

  Willa, his secret love.

  Willa, whom he had never been able to love.

  Willa, who had never been loved.

  Zal suddenly heard himself make a high-pitched sound, unlike a human too, the sound of a bird at the end of its life, still holding on. He imagined Willa in her final moment, half her size, and yet still a thing of weight, the opposite of a bird in every way—perhaps that’s why he had loved her so, how rooted she was, how planted she was, how immovable her condition had made her—and yet her final gesture had almost been in mockery of one. He imagined her arms in a flap, futile, and the concrete below so quickly meeting all that body of hers.

  And he wondered how he couldn’t have known. How Asiya had never known, how Zachary hadn’t, how Shell hadn’t. Wasn’t it obvious that Willa was absolutely miserable? That she of all people was entitled to suicide? What had her life amounted to? Apparently only in depression was she losing the weight that had made her depressed in the first place, most likely. It was a double bind. Freedom from the thing that was killing her was the thing that killed her.

  How did they all go about living in a world like this, a world made of such hard anti-logic?

  Eventually Shell came back, with two glasses and a couple of bottles of something in her arms.

  “I know this is crazy, to drink champagne at a time like this, but this is apparently
all they have stocked here,” she sighed as she popped the cork, wincing as if it were a gunshot. She poured a glass for her and a glass for him, without even asking.

  It was the same pink champagne they had drunk on the night of Willa’s birthday, he suddenly realized. How recent that felt, how clearly he could see Willa’s soft face in the glow of candles, smiling serenely at their relentless foolishness that evening.

  “I loved her,” Zal said after his second glass.

  Shell, on her fourth, didn’t say anything, so he said it again.

  “Did she know that?” Shell muttered finally. “Don’t answer that.”

  She drank silently as the hours waned onward and the house grew dark, still all exposed to the elements, with its open windows and doors.

  “What about Asiya?” he asked when it finally occurred to him.

  “What about her?” Shell hissed, obviously drunk, her eyes rolling strangely. “Call her Daisy, please, it’s her name.”

  Zal didn’t bother to nod. “Does she know about Willa?”

  Shell didn’t answer and just lay back, her eyes barely open. He assumed not. He, like Asiya’s own mother, was suddenly disconnected from Asiya and whatever world and state she was in.

  But she had been right: Willa had been in danger, like Asiya had said months ago. And by that anti-logic, and the very illogic in the air that season, she had to be right: it was all going to hell—that was clear.

  Just as he was to never see Willa again, he never saw Shell again after that night, and he never saw Zachary after whatever that last time he saw him was. If there was a funeral for Willa, he had not been invited.

  And it felt like he wasn’t going to see Asiya again, either, but he couldn’t accept that it could be true. Instead, he did what Willa had said, her final instruction to him seeming almost sacred at this point: he went home and waited for the Asiya situation to resolve itself.

  For things to be—if you could call it this—back to normal.

  But he always came back to the same nagging thought: what was he waiting for? What was it? What on earth was normal ? He knew he was further away from it than he had been, or perhaps thought he’d been, all along. But the times did not feel normal, even without Asiya there to highlight it all, to announce the undercurrents of bad in the air, to footnote the feeling of uneasiness he felt not just in his heart, but in the entire city’s.

  It was at this point that he caught himself thinking, like Asiya, that he knew it had gone too far. That it was time to turn himself in.

  So on September 4, he packed up more than just a week’s stuff. He took almost everything, in fact, and showed up at the doorstep of the only thing he still had in this world—not a small thing, either, but the man who had saved him from some other abnormal once upon a time and who had promised a life that would get as close to normal as possible, and had delivered, until Zal had wrecked it back to anything but. He went to his father.

  Hendricks had been more than worried, but since he himself had been counseled by Rhodes again lately, he had realized that it was essential that he let Zal live his life. He would make mistakes, but everyone did—it was not just part of growing up, but of being human. So in spite of the bad feeling he got every time Zal grew more and more distant, left calls unanswered and e-mails hanging, he decided to honor his son’s autonomy. He considered that it might just be hard for him. That perhaps Zal was out having the time of his life, his days so filled to the brim with happiness that there was no room to remember his father. After all, even if Asiya had been a badly bruised girlfriend, his son had managed to find one. And jobs. And he’d maintained his own apartment. He had gone to Vegas and back by himself, gone out, met celebrities, done things maybe that Hendricks couldn’t imagine. He had to be first and foremost proud of Zal’s independence, and he had to assume that the freedom equaled happiness.

  Hendricks struggled, of course, to take it all in properly when Zal appeared without warning that evening, with several bags, looking as though he hadn’t had rest in weeks.

  “My boy!” he exclaimed, and immediately Zal dove into his arms. It was less an embrace than a need to be hidden inside someone else’s flesh, shielded from this wretched place they all had to inhabit.

  When they went inside, Hendricks made Zal some tea and toast, and there they were again. Stories to tell, truths to divulge, much that had been concealed to reveal. Just as Zal had explained Asiya’s theories on the forthcoming end to Silber, there he was explaining all that and its parallel real-life narrative to his father. It was exhausting, all this storytelling, all these men to unload his life upon, his larger-than-life life, on to all these nodding and hmmming patriarchs, whom he adored and worshipped and truly loved. The only thing he had left.

  Hendricks mostly said nothing. He shook his head at points, he sighed at points, he rubbed his eyes at other points, and once—at the news of Willa’s suicide, even though he never knew of her—he put his hand over his mouth. When Zal was done, he just gathered his son in his arms and rocked him back and forth.

  “My, what you’ve been through,” he finally said. “What a life you’ve lived in just this year and a half. What an entry into adulthood, what a coming of age. I’m so sorry, Zal.”

  Zal shrugged. “I don’t know what it’s like for other people,” he said, a sentence he used to utter when Hendricks would express some sort of pity over the limitations of his condition, back when his entire existence was a conglomeration of his limits.

  Hendricks nodded. “It’s not like that, not quite like that. It doesn’t have to be so hard, Zal. You got involved with the wrong person.”

  Zal shrugged again. “I felt love with her. I miss her, and that. That feeling.”

  Hendricks shook his head. “No, that needs to stop, Zal. You need to let go of that. I demand that.”

  Zal was shocked to hear Hendricks demanding anything, and in that tone. “I’m an adult—we just said that. And you never got to know Asiya. There are things I could tell you that might make you think twice. The world just might not be what it seems, you know!”

  “I don’t want to hear it. I’m stepping in, Zal. You’ve come here, and I’m giving you the help you need. You are never to see that woman again.”

  Zal squinted his eyes, as if suspecting that it was his sight that was failing, not his hearing. “You can’t tell me that. I can’t promise you things like that. And I didn’t come here to be given demands.”

  “I’m stepping in, Zal,” Hendricks kept saying, red in the face now. “There is no way. I will not allow it. I won’t let you kill yourself. You mean the world to me. I simply love you too much. I will not allow you to see that woman anymore. If I have to keep rescuing you from insane women my whole life, I will.”

  And they argued back and forth and Zal made decent points and Hendricks repeated the same I will not allow you over and over, even as Zal tried different angles. Zal cried and Hendricks shouted and Hendricks cried and Zal became silent and Hendricks became silent as well.

  And finally Zal realized it was no use anyway—he didn’t need Hendricks to approve. He had become a man, a human man. Men could do anything they wished if they weren’t afraid of the consequences.

  And so the next day he took a cab to the Bryant Hill Correctional Facility for Women. It was a huge white sprawling building not unlike some college campuses he’d seen.

  He was, luckily, there within visiting hours. He went through a large metal detector with a few other visitors, and a gum-smacking officer who smelled strongly of tobacco received him on the other side. He demanded Zal’s ID and presented him with papers to sign and a stern list of rules. Only a few stood out to Zal: An inmate has a right to refuse a visit. It seemed unlikely to Zal that Asiya would deny him, or so he hoped. A visitor and inmate may embrace and kiss at the beginning and end of any contact visit—brief kisses and embraces are also permitted during the course of the contact visit—however, prolonged kissing and what is commonly considered “necking” or “pett
ing” is not permitted. It depressed Zal, though he doubted he had it in him. This made him saddest of all: A visitor and an inmate may hold hands as long as the hands are in plain view of others. All he wanted was to not just hold Asiya’s hand, but to hold her out of the view of the overbearing, hypervigilant world, if only for a minute.

  The officer told him he’d be taken to a visiting room when she was “located.”

  “But I want to see her room.”

  “Her room?”

  “Her . . . lodging?” Zal didn’t know the word.

  “Her cell,” the officer corrected. “You ever seen movies with jail in them?”

  Zal thought about it and realized he hadn’t, actually. He shook his head, which the officer just ignored.

  “It’s like that. Cell blocks, cells. Nothing to see.”

  But when he turned to open the door and get another officer to then, presumably, get Asiya, Zal saw down the hall.

  He was horrified at what he saw.

  Row after row of cages.

  His heart began to race and his body began to tremble. He glanced back at the entrance, which was also an exit. He realized he couldn’t do this; he felt paralyzed by his allegiance to both her and his oldest fears.

  When the officer came back, he had on a small smile—a pitying smile more than anything. “She’s not taking visitors.”

  “You told her my name?” Zal stammered.

  The officer nodded.

  “Can you tell me what she said? Please?” Zal’s voice was quivering and raising at the same time.

  “She said something about how you don’t want to be here—you know where you need to be. I take that to mean out, right, buddy?” The officer pointed to the door.

  Zal nodded slowly, his body still shaking. He knew it would be some time before it would be still again.

  That week, neither Zal nor Hendricks brought Asiya up. They did not fight anymore. They pretended it was like old times when they lived together: Zal the child and Hendricks the father. He made the old meals he used to, and Zal once again camped out on the couch and watched television. Both men, even though they were going through all sorts of chaos, never let on that anything was bad. They both suspected the other was disintegrating a bit, but they chose not to go there. They could afford nothing but expressions of optimism at that point, the balance was so thrown off, so close to the edge they were. There could be no rocking of boats—that they both knew.