The Last Illusion Read online

  They said he would not be capable of experiencing human emotions, but Hendricks witnessed them all: the embrace out of nowhere he once or twice got, the welling of tears during frustrated episodes, the fear the fear the fear. True, there was no laughter, there was no smile, but that would require a time machine to fix. The thing Hendricks and ultimately the therapist to whom he entrusted Zal—his colleague, the eminent child psychologist Gerald Rhodes—were most grateful for was the obvious: that Zal, in his adulthood, had lost his association with birds, that he finally did not and would not and really could not consider himself a bird, that birds and their natures were about as foreign to him as unicorns and griffins.

  The last one was not true, but only Zal knew this.

  Zal himself never saw his own reflection for too long—avoidance of mirrors was a quality he shared with all feral children, that and the failure to smile and laugh. But what he had seen of his looks, he did not object to. He was, he simply was, and Hendricks and Rhodes and scores of other people in his life had told him that was something to be proud of, considering. Always “considering,” but still. He was.

  I am a boy, he told himself, and then, I am a man, he reminded himself. He was just that and that alone, he thought over and over and over, until it all sounded meaningless.

  But he had to. And eventually he learned to keep the bird in him, any bird in him, so deep within himself that it resurfaced only rarely. Let it out and he knew he’d be back to the world of doctors and scientists, make it flutter before him and enter camera crews and a million more glossy and newsprint updates on the miracle Bird Boy of Tehran, uncage it once and for all, and break his father’s, his one and only father’s, heart. He knew enough of humankind by then to know you did not do a thing like that. The parts of him that they could not get to were perfect like that, best kept to himself.

  Because it was impossible to say how long he had—no one really knew the lifespans of ferals, he had heard Rhodes once say on the phone to someone, although, Rhodes had actually chuckled, because Zal had busted all those other feral-children “truths,” who knew what it could be. We’re writing the textbook all over again with this kid—he was not sure how quickly he should work on getting his birdness out of his system, how hastily he should outgrow it if his own growth arc was so difficult to evaluate. So far, any work he had done on it did not work, but he didn’t tell them. For instance, he could not get rid of the bird dreams, those nightmares of the small white ones—they never taught him the names of birds, and while he could recognize an astounding variety as distinct, could even tell the same type of birds apart, the way a human knows one human face from another, he could not play name-that-species—all trapped in, say, verandas with big windows that they could not recognize, fluttering about in pure panic, disorientation, and desperation, bumping into the glass over and over and over, the collision of beak and glass a thing so painful it would take pounding a human head against a sledgehammer to understand it, colliding and dizzily floating down and then coming back to sense and up in an eternity of entrapment, spiraled in the killer-without-killing loop of where where where. Those were the worst nightmares. Sometimes there were good dreams, flocks of birds in V formation in blue skies, giant fountains where some old lady god-hand made it rain birdseed for all the scrappy beggar pigeons, and his favorite of all: the dreams of sparrows and starlings, those sweet ones, and their painstaking nests, just that reel of them looking after their newly hatched young ones, enshrouding them in the heat of their wings, and most poignant of all, feeding them from their very mouths.

  Feeding. Zal had to admit that a runner-up to bird dreams was food dreams, but what foods—this he could not discuss. It was true that he had a sensitive digestive system and for years could tolerate only a bland diet of bread and rice and dull fruits and vegetables (bananas, potatoes), with no sauces or spices or sweets. As time went on, he began to indulge in the edibles of everyday life, and soon candy and junk food—explosive-tasting food that created thunderstorms in the mouth and fireworks in the stomach and all sorts of warfare on the way out. “Foods” like gum intrigued him to no end; popsicles were a preposterous game; and most surreal of all, cotton candy was something he simply could not accept people voluntarily ate—they were downright otherworldly stuff he imagined was in the cuisine of that other imaginary genus (that humans were not sure, though fairly sure, did not exist but nonetheless devoted all sorts of arts and lore to) that Hendricks had once tried to explain to him: “aliens.” But Zal had real food urges that surpassed simple fascination, hungers that could be sated only in complicated ways.

  What he wanted more than anything was painfully obvious and horribly cliché, considering. He wished it didn’t exist, that very typical craving, that Circumstances 101 urge, that forbidden and yet certainly understandable hunger. He tried to block it out, and really sometimes he was very good at resisting caving in, but the quintessential forbidden fruit was more than just a hunger of the stomach. It was a hunger of the heart.

  For what Zal wanted to eat more than anything was, of course: insects.

  Earthworms, budworms, mealworms, army worms, ants, wood borers, weevils, mosquitoes, caterpillars, houseflies, moths, gnats, beetles, grubs, spiders, crickets, grasshoppers, termites, cicadas, bees, wasps, any larvae—for starters. While Zal didn’t know the labels affixed to different birds, he sure did learn the names for insects. At bookstores, he flipped through The Field Book of Insects of North America and other giant picture reference books as if he were looking at the world’s most illustrious epic menu. The things it did to him; Zal was relieved no one could possibly know what he was up to when he was heatedly scanning the pages as though they were a cross between food porn and, well, porn.

  But what could he do? He—not a bird not a bird not a bird, sprinted the voice in his head—what could he do? He had once heard Hendricks comment that drug addicts—apparently humans chained to the ingestion of reality-altering chemicals—even when broke or absolutely dirt-poor, could always find a way to afford drugs, and even very expensive ones. Their addiction turned into a lethal combination of boundless creativity and unshakable will. If you want something bad enough, he had heard Hendricks say, you will get it.

  So once in a while Zal wanted it bad enough and he got it—all the many its and their odds and ends. And he didn’t even need to get creative or exercise much will when he had the one thing that made him like everyone else, that gave him access to a world he could navigate as well as Hendricks or any other human, the beloved equalizer of his life: the computer. (Hendricks and Rhodes had, at first, both marveled at his ease with the device, an ease that very rapidly became aptitude, an accomplishment they would have declared miraculous if it weren’t for the fact that elementary school kids of the same generation were also that savvy.) All he had to do that first time was type “insect eating” into the search engine and a whole world unveiled itself.

  What he found:

  I) First, the Word:

  Entomophagy. It was a word that, as much as he tried, he could not say. Appropriately impossible, he thought.

  II) The Numbers:

  1,462 recorded species of edible insects. The possibilities, he thought.

  III) Where to Get Them:

  There were three options, apparently: catching insects in the wild, buying them from pet stores or bait shops, or raising one’s own. But there were problems with the first two: in the wild there could be pesticides, and the ones in pet stores or bait shops have often been fed on newspapers and sawdust, so one had to put them on a diet of grains first. The best option was raising one’s own. (The idea put Zal in a cold sweat. Hendricks had always worried about Zal living on his own, and imagine if his apartment soon became an insect farm—an insect farm for eating.)

  IV) Benefits for the Self (Nutritional Facts):

  • Grasshoppers have six times the protein of cod or lean ground beef.

  • One cup of crickets contains 250 calories and only six grams of fat.r />
  • 100 grams of silkworm larvae provide 100 percent of the daily requirements for copper, zinc, iron, thiamin, and riboflavin.

  • A single honeybee larva may contain 15 times the recommended daily allowance of vitamins A and D.

  • Etc., apparently. The health benefits had the potential to hold the key for acceptance—this and the next—but the minute he imagined himself arguing his case before father and therapist and whoever else would listen, the curtain would fall on the act. No applause.

  V) Benefits for the World:

  Some humans did eat insects, and in fact did it for good reason: eating insects was good for the environment, efficient, ethical. Most insects’ energy-input-to-protein-output ratio = 4:1, while raised livestock = 54:1. Insects don’t need to use much energy to stay warm, and they reproduce at a faster rate than beef animals (a female cricket can lay from 1,200 to 1,500 eggs in three to four weeks). They also require very little food or water to raise, he saw himself pleading in the spotlight, the final words before the lights went out.

  VI) One God’s Thoughts:

  In the Bible’s Book of Leviticus, it outlines acceptable food for the Israelites: “These you may eat; the arbeh after his kind, the sal’am after his kind, the chargol after his kind, and the chagav after his kind . . .” which apparently all refer to the locust. In the Book of Matthew, John the Baptist survived on locusts and wild honey—and when did you start thinking about God? he imagined Rhodes interjecting.

  VII) Bonus: A Recipe!

  Chocolate-Covered Crickets

  Ingredients: 25 adult crickets; 3.5 oz (100 g) semisweet chocolate

  Place crickets in a colander and cover quickly with a piece of wire screening or cheesecloth. Rinse them, then dry them by shaking the colander until all the water drains. Then put the crickets in a plastic bag and put them in the freezer for about 15 minutes (until they are dead but not frozen). Then take them out and rinse them again. Remove crickets’ heads, hind legs, and wings according to personal preference.

  Bake at 250 degrees until crunchy (the time needed varies from oven to oven). Heat the chocolate in a double boiler until melted. Dip the dry-roasted crickets in the melted chocolate one by one, and then set the chocolate-covered crickets out to dry on a piece of wax paper. Enjoy! it said, the word and its punctuation and that curly font possessing some intensely moving power for Zal, who would never allow himself to make his own.

  VIII) Eating Out:

  He couldn’t find any restaurants in New York at the moment that specialized in entomophagic cuisine, but he did notice that some restaurants had insect dishes here and there. Several Japanese restaurants, for instance, featured boiled wasp larvae appetizers. One place had Stir-Fried Manchurian Ant Tostada. Another: White Sea Worm Lettuce Wraps. Another: Burmese Chile Water Bugs with Rice. Termite Egg Soup. Wax Worm California Rolls with Tamari Dipping Sauce. Mexican Fried Butterfly Larvae Tacos. Cricket Flour Naan. And many types of Mealworm Cookies and Chocolate-Covered Anything, it seemed. He made a list.

  IX) The Best of Online Snacks:

  Ant Candy, Preserved Weaver Ant Eggs, Canned Curry-Flavored Mole Crickets, Bacon & Cheddar Cheese–Flavored Crickets, Canned Soy Sauce–Flavored Pregnant Crickets, BBQ-Flavored Bamboo Worms, Roasted Silkworms, Preserved Black Scorpions in Salt Water Brine, Scorpion Amber Candy, Spicy Giant Bug Paste. He bookmarked and bookmarked.

  It was all there, and probably much, much more.

  So what did he do, but with Hendricks’s allowance, start to covertly spend and spend. First came the online snacks. Then the lone lunches out, which proved so divine, so downright sensual, that he turned them into lone elaborate dinners that he’d even dress up for. He began going to the pet and bait stores and cooking his own. He thought about raising them, but worried about Hendricks or, say, a landlord dropping by and noticing somehow. He thought about joining the Entomophagical Society, the premier national club for insect cuisine fetishists, but then worried about having to explain his story to the other members.

  What he did do he did on the low, of course, with considerable shame and angst, horrified when Hendricks asked, So where is all the money going? Computer games? More clothes, though I haven’t seen you in a new thing in ages? Food? What is it, Zal?

  He could not say a word. He shrugged. And it was yet another thing Hendricks dismissed out of consideration, because that was just Zal, and considering, considering it all, anything could make sense.

  Zal, out of respect for Hendricks and the allowance, and the fact that his little obsession could turn into one of those addictions he was warned about, did not go too far. He kept it for special occasions. For times when he needed a boost. For times when he felt alone and wanted to give in to that loneliness completely. For times when he couldn’t stand it anymore. For days when he woke up from one of those nest dreams, those beautiful warm nest dreams, and wanted nothing more than to be fed.

  Otherwise he ate normal foods, too. He liked grilled cheese and certain salads with creamy dressing and all pies and mac ’n’ cheese and rice pilafs and lentil soups and all sorts of things normal people liked. And of course, birds didn’t eat just insects. Zal always felt very enamored of dried berries, nuts, and sunflower seeds. That stuff especially was an ingenious indulgence, where the two worlds overlapped—he could consume as much as he wanted, without raising any suspicion or evoking any taboo. He could be himself with trail mix in a way that was so profound, he once thought to himself, a thought he was sure had never been thought in the history of man or bird.

  If there was any chance of smiling or laughing and beating those odds as well, he wished he could say to Hendricks, it would be through all this, through the complete succumbing to this most protected passion of his, who and what he really was and continued to be on some level, deep down inside.

  He was not, in spite of their wishful thinking, what they considered well. Not yet.

  PART II

  The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

  —Douglas Adams,

  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

  Summer 2001. Hello, New York City, USA, went the voice-over in the illusionist’s head—sealed with the biggest smile he could muster straight into the relentless reflections of the Mirror Room—and goodbye!

  It was still early—Bran Silber was not married to his words. There were months still left, but the illusion, the illusion was doing itself, whether he liked it or liked it. From the moment he chose it, he knew there were no outs.

  He preferred that word: illusion. In the warehouse bathroom, there was a torn magazine photo of Heidi Fleiss’s mug shot with a Post-it placard that read tricks apply here only.

  They didn’t use words like [trick] here, Oliver Manning had been huffily reminding himself for years. Today Manning—fifty-nine, industrial engineer, known for creating the greatest large-scale illusions in history, known for creating them mostly in severely reluctant partnership with Bran Silber—was on-site. He was chain-smoking pensively and occasionally whispering orders to a group of bespectacled yet steroidal young guys, interns who were already ahead of deadline on Silber’s latest stunt.

  They were going as close to real as illusion could afford. Not a single stooge would be planted, Silber’s first time stoogeless since Manning had years ago tipped him off to the talk. They think you’re stooge-y, he had said, straight, Manning-style. And you are. But stooges are out. You don’t have to keep it real, but at least keep them real. Leave the fucking plants to the dirt.

  And that was that. Silber called Manning “boss,” not the other way around, even though Silber Inc. supplied the engineer’s paycheck. Silber was always a bit terrified of losing Manning, especially now that he had a new burst of midlife ambition. He had just turned fifty-two. This was a big year for an illusionist: Houdini had died at fifty-two, after all. Silber was not afraid to say he loved Houdini.

  He was nothing like Houdini. Hands too soft, chemically peeled face mostly unli
ned, eyes always Visine clear. Love of spectacle, hatred of sweat. Color: rose or maybe bronze. Women: models, preferably super, and young leggy actresses, and an occasional burlesque dancer of the more petite variety. He did not shoot blanks; he had many children he did not know but paid for. Vegetarian, except for lobster and prosciutto and sea urchin and oysters—he had taught himself to love oysters, somehow necessary for a man like him. He’d adopted eight silken windhounds whose names he could never get straight—they did not live with him—a beloved Asian leopard cat named Philomene who slept with him once a week, and a boa constrictor he had personally never handled named “X.O.” City: New York, New York, but he also owned homes in five different countries and a small island in the Caribbean that he had been to only twice. He hated numbers; he had a staff of people who could tell him how much money he had in the bank.

  Manning, on the other hand: all nuts and bolts, piston and steel. He worked, breathed, even appeared metallic, with his silver hair, platinum skin, and wolf eyes. He was a hard man; you had to be a rock to weather Silber, that was for sure.

  Silber’s first assistant, Indigo—her real name, although people usually thought it was a Silberism—who was always lethargically perched on his BlackBerry, was suddenly animated out of her underpaid still life with some news. “Yo, Bird Boy is back, Bran!” she called. He would want to know about Bird Boy.