The Last Illusion Read online

  And there was a strange stillness, a sense that it would get even worse before it got worse.

  And as far as you ran, it felt like you were still close.

  Suddenly men and women covered in a white dust were running, too, men and women shouting and screaming. They were wearing parts of buildings, Zal realized, they were wrapped in the building’s carnage. The buildings had died on them, and they had somehow still lived.

  And Zal ran with them, fast, and he noticed that a few were not silent but shouting, and not crying but laughing. One man was pumping his fists in the air, yelling, “We made it!” And another woman was crying and grinning at the same time, hands in prayer, thanking something in the sky.

  They made Zal stop dead in his tracks, against the runners. He stopped, mesmerized by their faces, the brief moment of joy in all that world-ending clamor.

  He watched the city move in its frantic motion, away from the end of the island, away from its end, toward itself, toward its heart. And he moved with it, with them, and counted what smiles he saw among the many tears and looks of shock and defeat.

  The city was going to be plastered with the smiling faces of their family, friends, and neighbors for months. That was all that was going to be left of those unlucky ones, so frozen in their smiles.

  He did not know that. All he knew was the realness of the moment, the most alive he’d ever felt. And by the time he made it to midtown, he had his focus, the only thing he could do to save himself. He practiced over and over. And by the time he made it uptown, to the park, where there was little sign of downtown’s pandemonium, he thought he had mastered it, realized that it was no more than just a human trick—yes, trick!—a beautiful small and yet essential trick of the spirit, a simple contortion of the will. He was engaged in holding what he never imagined he could hold: Zal Hendricks was smiling.

  Acknowledgments

  What is a book but a thing that one person creates, but massive squadrons enable. I will forget people and be haunted by it, but here goes:

  Thank you to my agent, outstanding human Seth Fishman, who fell in love with this book without nudging, who refused to ever lose faith in this book even when I (almost) had. Thank you to my editor, fearless unicorn Lea Beresford who “got it” and delivered ninja edits and sweet friendship in lovely helpings; thank you to my tireless and brilliant publicist Summer Smith whose infectious enthusiasm and impeccable taste gives books a chance to really levitate; thank you to the great eyes and infinite patience of Nikki Baldauf. And a huge thanks to the entire gang at Bloomsbury and Gernert, both stellar, class-act operations.

  Thank you to my brilliant readers: my ol’ magic man Jason Leddington, Patrick Henry, Max Kortlander, Calli Ray, Paul Tracthman, and most all my brother, Arta Khakpour.

  Thank you to those whose friendship during this period kept me sane: Danzy Senna, Victoria Redel, Alexander Chee, Deb Olin Unferth, Jonathan Ames, Stephen Pierson, Matthew White, John McManus, Huey Copeland, Rick Louis, Laura van den Berg, Lauren Groff, Elliott Holt, Josh Weil, Nam Le, Edward Champion, Sarah Weinman, Dexter Filkins, Mike Scalise, Joe Scapalleto, Candice Tang, Sahra Motalebi, Jaclyn Hodes, Darcy Cosper, Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, Lulu Sylbert, Sarah Sleeper, Susan Smith Daniels, Ana Finel Honigman, Ruth Fowler Iorio, Jason Leopold, Whitney Joiner, Jon Caramanica, Emma Forrest, Pete Nelson, Nalini Jones, Margo Rabb, Matthew Specktor, Maggie Estep, Jason Mojica, Michael Rippens, Shiva Rose, Sholeh Wolpe, Tanya Perez-Brennan, Sameer Reddy, John Woods, Andy Moody, Spencer Penn, Marne Castillo, Brett Baldridge, Florian Bast, Dina Nayeri, Jennifer Sky, Kristie and Usama Alshaibi, Susan Barbour, and so many others who stood by me in all sorts of roller coaster moments with this one.

  Thank you to Chris Habib, who entered my world late in this game, but whose spirit and dedication to the other life has given me the ability to imagine an existence past this one.

  Thank you to Valerie Plame for boundless wisdom and generosity—especially for giving me shelter during the most critical months of writing and editing.

  Thank you to everyone who doled out so much support, financial and emotional, to get me out of the dismal rock-bottom of Lyme Disease, and my amazing Santa Fe doctor Russ Canfield for saving my life so I could go back to writing. Thank you to my other doctor and friend, Voyce Durling-Jones, the only mystic I’ve ever believed in, whose bees brought me back to life. And dear healer Charles Yarborough, whose joy and intuition was always my light in my hardest California returns.

  Thank you to my students, past and present, always my community and often my friends. Thank you for being my motivation to practice what I preach. Thank you for your openness and enthusiasm. I feel lucky to have crossed paths with so many good citizens of our future.

  Thank you to my canine companions during this time: Apollo and Bakiri (RIP), beloved old salukis, and now Cosmo the poodle. How people write without dogs is a mystery to me.

  Thank you to writing residencies, where this was mostly penned: VCCA, Yaddo, and most of all, Ucross, two stints under the thrilling open skies of the Wyoming countryside, where I began and ended the writing of the novel.

  Thank you to Bucknell University, the College of Santa Fe, Fairfield University’s low-res MFA, the University of Leipzig, Columbia University, Wesleyan University, Fordham University, and the Bruce High Quality Foundation University for employing me during this time.

  Thank you to the Asian American Writers Workshop, PEN, Guernica, and Canteen families for their support and recognition.

  Thank you to Simon Prosser at the UK’s Hamish Hamilton for being the first to believe in this book, whose words gave me courage for quite a long time.

  Thank you to New York Times op ed editors David Shipley and Mark Lotto for giving me a new voice and allowing me the opportunity of a lifetime, the gift of column inches over and over. Thank you for believing I was worthy of an audience.

  Thank you to the NEA for championing this book and making it possible with their generous grant.

  Thank you to Dick Davis for his intelligent translation of the Shahnameh, which allowed me to fill the too-many holes of my rusty Persian.

  Thank you to Ali Banisadr—one of our greatest living painters and my dear friend —who shares my dreams and nightmares, my history and blood. I can never thank you enough for so allowing us to use your glorious masterpiece “Fravashi” for the cover.

  Thank you to haters and lovers alike whose pushes and pulls, equal and opposite energies, only got me towards the bigger and better.

  Thank you most of all to my father, Asha Khakpour, for reading me stories from the Shahnameh for all of my childhood. And to him and Manijeh Khakpour, my mother, for tolerating more eccentricity, antics, hijinks, and nonstop mayhem than any creators should.

  A Note on the Author

  Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran, Iran, and raised in the greater Los Angeles area. She has been awarded fellowships from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, Northwestern University, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ucross Foundation, Djerassi, and Yaddo. She is most recently the recipient of a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing (Prose). Her debut novel, Sons and Other Flammable Objects, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, one of the Chicago Tribune’s Fall’s Best, and the 2007 California Book Award winner in First Fiction. Her nonfiction has appeared in or is forthcoming in Harper’s, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Daily Beast, the Village Voice, the Chicago Reader, Spin, the Paris Review Daily, Granta.com, Slate, Salon, and many other magazines and newspapers around the world. Khakpour has taught creative writing and literature at Johns Hopkins University, Hofstra University, Bucknell University, Santa Fe University of Art and Design, Fairfield University’s MFA program, and the University of Leipzig (where she was a Picador Guest Professor). She currently teaches at Columbia University’s MFA program, Fordham University, and Wesleyan University. She lives in New York City.

  By the Same Author<
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  Sons and Other Flammable Objects

  Copyright © 2014 by Porochista Khakpour

  Excerpt from “What is a Soprano,” Archicembalo, published by Tupelo Press,

  copyright © 2009 G. C. Waldrep. Used with permission.

  Text ornament © Alexander Potapov / Fotolia.com

  Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

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  eISBN: 978-1-62040-305-1

  First U.S. Edition 2014

  This electronic edition published in May 2014

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