The Last Illusion Page 4

  Silber was serene in his favorite workday metallic overalls, smoking a red Fantasia Light—which Manning ridiculed every time, refusing anything but his Marlboro Reds—while he admired Manning’s shrewd inspection of things Silber could not see. Suddenly, serene he was not. He looked up, squinted his eyes, and sucked hard, as if in deep concentration.

  “And he says what? The gist? C’mon, Indy!”

  Indigo waved a frustrated hand in the air as if to say Tough to paraphrase, dude. “You know how he writes. Um, checking in, heard about new, um, illusion”—Silber was sure it said trick, and Indigo caught it, good girl—“wanted to visit set, wanted to see if okay, in love, some corny shit about that and wants your help—”

  “Gist, please!”

  “—and he wants to come by. Yea or nay, hombre?”

  Silber smiled wearily and shrugged at Manning, who was tapping his cowboy boots all along the platform’s platform. “Uh, yeah, tell him he can have tickets to the show, but absolutely no BTS”—Silberish for behind the scenes—“for this one. If he comes by, tell him he has to stand outside, and that can involve waiting, but it has to be next week or the week after or something. Indigo, just make it, like, tricky.”

  “Gotcha, chief!”

  She sent just a few lines: “Monday morning or Tuesday midafternoon or Thursday dusk, 9 or 3 or 7, 45-minute slots not impossible, might involve some waits, which would be taken out of the 45-minute slot. Need some paperwork beforehand—very private here at moment. Thanks. Dream, B.X.S.”

  “These kids,” Silber sighed. Manning, a combination bored and irked, as was often the case, finally met his eye. Silber, overeager to let his partner know they were on the same page, whipped out the mantra often: “Okay, boss, so let’s M+B! Emmmm and beeeeee time!”

  Manning nodded. Move + Blind was his phrase, without the metaphorics, and the basic function of the construction behind Silber’s vision. Manning was in the business of reality, not metaphor. The audience would be moved, literally, and blinded, literally, and thus: illusion. With all the variables that could go wrong with this one—Manning made it known that while it was likely Silber’s, it was not his favorite.

  “Pillar in the pool’s gonna be a bitch, naturally,” Manning grunted. “The pool” was not a real pool, but what they called the two hundred or so feet between the two towers. To Manning’s annoyance, Silber had struggled to wrap his head around “two hundred feet,” especially in the absence of the recently often absent Floyd, assistant number 3, who worked calculations on the side. Manning, frustrated, had reduced it to something Silber could understand: You got an Olympic pool?

  In three countries at least, he had said, flashing that fluorescent white smile of his.

  Almost that, Manning had shot back, unamused.

  Huge then! Silber had exclaimed.

  Almost nothing.

  He had long explained to his wife, who was bedazzled by Silber and his tan and those “gold lion eyes,” as press folk always described them, that illusionists were basically like TV weathermen. They were pure show. A few chosen fucking mimbos, he broke it down, with some big ideas and cash to back it up. Not a thing else going on.

  If Manning had had it his way, it would have been something else altogether: Chrysler or the Empire State, even, but Silber didn’t think those had the same appeal. Plus seating in cramped Midtown would have been beyond an ordeal, and the city would have a heart attack even considering negotiations. Downtown they had the twenty-five acres of Battery Park, more or less, with little disturbance. The worst was going to be battling business—the work ethics alone—and vacating the building even at the dark hour. (Manning recalled wanting to punch Silber when he and the assistants had to explain to the illusionist, over and over, that, hell yes, some people did work past 9 p.m., some people did work before 9 a.m. Silber had shaken his head and cried, Fuck America! while Manning flooded his brain with his most potent Zen koans in order not to raise his fist to Silber’s face.)

  They went over the sketches while Indigo, heavy as she was, floated into a headstand in the corner for the sake of Manning’s boys, no doubt, who never ever raised an eye from their drills, wrenches, nails, screws.

  Then suddenly from the staircase: “The name Manhattan derives from the word Manna-hata, as written in the 1609 logbook of Robert Juet, an officer on Henry Hudson’s yacht Half Moon. Hudson came across Manhattan Island and the native people living there on September eleventh, and continued up the river that would later bear his name, the Hudson River!” It was Raj, assistant number 2, reading off piles of printouts, the fruits of his busywork of the past few weeks. “Awesome, right, Bran? I mean, it’s an honest-to-God anniversary—1609, baby!”

  “What is that? Sixteen-oh-nine is how many years ago?” Silber—numbers!—called without looking up, suddenly beet in his bronzed cheeks. He had not seen Raj since the party last weekend, where he had not only made out with Raj but, if drunken memory served him right, also balanced a dirty martini on his own possibly rock-solid crotch. Silber, contrary to what many speculated, he knew, always maintained his heterosexuality, and he had an army of lingerie models to prove it anyway—am I right, ladies? They’d smile, purr, coo—pros.

  “Three-hundred-so-not-a-round-number years ago. Yeah, sorry!” And Raj disappeared into the staircase again, suddenly also with memory.

  Before Manning left Silber and his boys that afternoon, Manning admitted, for the first time ever in a Silber stunt, he had qualms.

  Silber: “We’re ahead of sched—how bad can it be? Tii-ii-ii-ime is on our side, daddy.”

  “It’s a lot of bullshit to float this boat,” Manning said. “And I’m not even talking about your need for a theme, a meaning, all that anniversary crap—I’m just talking straight logistics. You need the public, the press, everyone co-piloting. Even the helicopters got to respect angles. Camera tricks and everything. People aren’t as dumb as they used to be, Sil. I’m just saying. The thing will be done, but this is even more eye trick than your eye tricks.”

  He had purposely said trick.

  Silber’s eyes closed in the face of tension, and possible disrespect. “Well, we’re ahead, so we can work it out. Make it better. Make it happen.” He opened his eyes to meet Manning’s, but the engineer’s were already rolled and to the ground again. “Look, pops, no losing faith. We got some millions on this one. Nobody’s letting nobody down, am I right?”

  Manning nodded, reluctantly, imagining the zeroes on his paycheck.

  “They are going to love it!” Silber cried. “Hello, NYC, USA . . . and goodbye! Center of World Trade, USA, North America, Earth, Milky Way: bye, bye, Mister American pie!”

  Last Days of 1999.

  The first time Zal—Bird Boy, as the Silberites, but rarely Silber, called him—went to the Silbertorium, the illusionist’s grand warehouse in Brooklyn, where all the magic happens, baby (spray-painted in gold by an old assistant just outside the entrance), he had spent forty-five minutes in the Mirror Room, mostly alone. The assistants in the other room were chatting loudly about what was on everyone’s minds: Y2K. They popped in and out of the Mirror Room, one after another, and beheld the boy, offered him water—flat or sparkling, iced or room temp—wine, beer, tea, espresso, anything, and he had not said a word or even turned his head. They just saw a slight albino-pale blond boy in unfashionably short green slacks and an orange sweater staring at the mirror. It was as if he were in a trance. By then they knew the Bird Boy story but not all of its implications. Later it would make sense—like many of his kind, as studies had indicated, he had a thing for mirrors. A thing, but not a good thing, really. A day without seeing his reflection was a perfect day, or an uncomplicated day, rather, but put him in front of that everyday plane of molten aluminum under a thin layer of glass and the lost feelings surfaced. Dissociation, his doctor had called it, entirely normal. Normal considering, that is.

  Silber had eventually broken Zal’s Mirror Room trance, but just for a second, and then he’d
resigned himself to sitting back and sipping a flute of champagne with strawberries while watching Zal watch himself. The men had been silent for more than half an hour, Silber and Zal’s eyes both locked with Zal’s in the mirror. Finally, Silber had grown restless and interjected, “Well, you should see my other Mirror Room!” to which Zal had snapped back to life. Silber led him out into the main loft and gestured toward the large white couch by the windows. Zal had looked at him blankly. “No other Mirror Room, sorry,” Silber said slowly, assuming Zal was slow at the very least. “Change of setting, you know.”

  Zal had confessed to Silber that he simply couldn’t, and Silber had not believed him. The illusionist had downed his champagne and dragged Zal back to the Mirror Room again in spite of Zal’s protests this time—It’s useless, and remember what a mess it is to get me out of there, Mr. Silber!—and demanded he try. Zal had cringed, Zal had grimaced, frowned, scowled, pouted, kissy-faced, even silent-scream-faced, but no smile. Silber had looked at his own reflection, tapped the mirror before him, and, like an exasperated old ballet teacher, shrieked, “Look like this—cheeeeese! Like this, see! Cheeeeeeeese!” Cheese. Zal had shook his head over and over, and here and there would try again, but it was useless. This went on for a while. Finally, Silber noticed Zal’s eyes were filled with tears. “May I?” he had asked finally. Zal, ever resigned to nothing-to-lose anti-logic, nodded, dumbly. He winced just a bit at first as Silber stepped behind him—disappearing except for his tufts of amply moussed hair, which created a wild halo above Zal—and took hold of his face. With the ease of a lover, Silber gently, ever gently, as if kneading a very delicate and expensive dough, peeled back the thin, scant flesh of Zal’s bony face. It was a strange sort of smile that in the real world would never pass for a smile; instead it was as an emblem of a very dark farce, an absurdist black comedy, mime eyes in a grotesquely stretched inhuman mask. What does it mean? Zal thought. Nothing. But Silber, in a grand-finale-like gesture, only crept closer and eventually took his index fingers and pulled up the corners of Zal’s exhausted mouth, as if once again performing a feat of illusion. He held it there and chanted, There, there, there! Magic, baby, magic!

  He eased his fingers off, and Zal’s face fell. Back to reality. They tried and tried again. By the end of it Silber had teared up and quickly ordered a car home for Zal.

  Zal hadn’t minded. He was relieved to be out of the Mirror Room. Against all odds, Zal thought, he and Silber became friends that evening. They had met before, but Zal’s visit to the Silbertorium was different. Maybe friends was too strong a word. But there was a bond, and, whether on Silber’s end it was rooted in pity or wonder and on Zal’s end in wonder or desperation, they had made some sort of a connection. When Silber e-mailed him a few days later, he signed off, “Remember, always, try: J Dream, B.X.S.”

  Zal had then stumbled on his own signature sign-off: “J, Zal.” He would come to sign off all his e-mails to Silber and Silber only with a happy face—their inside joke.

  Zal knew why he had connected with Silber, but he always wondered why Silber had to him. He had seemed less busy in those early days—between miracles, honey, he’d snap when people asked what he was up to. But before he knew it, he’d be invited to dinners, private ones where Silber, like a spider on a web, would ever so gingerly pry into the details of his life. Zal thought maybe this was yet another case of research. He had been used to it by then.

  At their first dinner at Silber’s Manhattan townhouse, just days after the Mirror Room episode, Zal had simply asked him why—why him, why then, why?

  Silber, without meeting his eyes, said simply, quietly, Because you are muse-worthy.

  Zal had misheard it as newsworthy, something he had been conditioned to hear his whole life, his ear tricking him by habit, and he had grown sullen. Until he saw it in an e-mail later that night from Silber: Forgive me for so many things tonight! And if muse-worthy was a bit much, Zal dear. I am legitimately intrigued by you and enriched by our interaction. Your experience is out of this world—how can an illusionist not be dazzled? I mean only well. Sorry sorry! Trust trust! Dream, B.X.S.

  It had been a tough dinner to sit through. Roksana, Silber’s cook, had just cleared the appetizer—a most refreshing gazpacho—and had brought Silber his Spanish potato salad with a side of mixed greens—salads, the only thing he ate for dinner—and then brought a bigger dish for Zal and Zal alone. She had, with a flourish, lifted the silver display cover on the tray and unveiled, as she announced, “Andalusian chicken with tangerines, sir.”

  Zal, naturally paler than paper, turned gray. Hand to mouth, eyes closed, shoulders quivering, he whispered, “No, no, please—I mean, I’m full.”

  Roksana and Silber had exchanged baffled expressions, until Silber, having connected the dots, popped out of his seat and threw his hands in the air.

  “Oh my fucking God!”

  Zal, with his napkin at his mouth, eyes averted to the plasma TV, at least two-thirds his height, far off in the living room, said nothing.

  “Zal, baby, I cannot believe it. Roksana—well, Roksi didn’t know. Don’t worry, Roksi, just make it go away, please, thank you, I’ll explain later, thank you—I just cannot believe I did that. And I’m a vegetarian! You are, too, certainly!”

  Zal shrugged. “More or less. But, yes, I don’t eat . . . that.”

  Silber had insisted they share his salad, while Roksana made even more salad.

  Zal was not the same after that. But it was not quite what Silber thought—simple offense at the bird flesh. For Zal it was the after-effect of news-worthy, and now, in his reaction, he had been forced to act the role of freak fully. He might as well be a talking, walking, man-charading bird.

  “Do you feel,” Silber had begun, and then lowered his voice, as if Roksana, far off in the kitchen, was poised with glass against door, “that you are like that?”

  Zal had looked at him blankly. “Like what?’”

  “You know, an actual . . .” and this time, resisting miming wing-flap, he mouthed it: bird.

  Zal paused and slowly opted for a shortcut: he shook his head.

  Silber smiled. “Good. Because, as if that wasn’t bad enough already, imagine how much worse.”

  “I’m not crazy, Mr. Silber. I know who I am. I’ve learned. I get it. There’s still . . . stuff . . . but I’m pretty much normal.”

  They both knew that wasn’t true. But they made it through dinner, both a bit gloomy with bursts of forced levity, forcing their way through their salads and leaving the orange blossom flans mostly untouched. Silber had taken a phone call, a long one, and ducked into his bedroom. Eventually Zal had grown tired of waiting and left.

  He had received Silber’s e-mail hours later, while surfing the Net, unable to sleep. He had written back, Thanks, Mr. Silber. No need to be sorry. I do trust. I trust everyone. I have no reason not to. I know you did not mean to hurt me. “Muse-worthy” is an honor, but not fitting, as I am not worthy of that. I am just an abused child with a particularly, I suppose, intriguing story to people. But it’s just my life. I have to confess that perhaps I lied when I said I was normal. I know I am not. But I think I can be helped. This may sound strange, Mr. Silber, but I believe you may be able to help me. I know by now that it could be unrealistic, that it is actually, as you end with, just me dreaming. And I do dream, in case you were wondering, and because I know you will further wonder, even though I do not speak of this to anyone really: yes, at times I have dreamt, as you might say, “in bird.” , Zal.

  It wasn’t until many visits to the Silbertorium that Zal realized its backyard was essentially an aviary, a garden of trees and shrubs and bushes crowned with ornate-looking cages, all with open doors and easy outs, to Zal’s relief. It was a world bound up in delicate netting, punctuated strangely by two large fountains—a young boy whose mouth spouted water, another young boy whose penis spouted water—and statues of lions and monkeys and cherubs and elephant gods. Beautiful as it was—and Silber did what h
e could to emphasize that: a sanctuary, not a jail—Zal would not enter. I understand, of course, Silber said, but doesn’t a side of you, well, feel at home there, sugar pie? Zal said it did not. But he watched, a big step. He stayed behind the glass doors and stared at Silber’s showoff antics with his birds, who swooped down on his blazer and swooped off, as if used to meeting-and-greeting distant shy bird boys for the sake of their god Silber. Silber went further for Zal, went through the whole round of Dove Tricks 101, as if he were a birthday party magician. He whipped out silk handkerchiefs of all colors from his every pocket and put them over cages and did a sort of silly semi-pirouette and tada, he mouthed: bird gone! Then he leapt onto a bench, in one movement whipped off his blazer and put it back on, and then shook his blazer sleeves: dove after dove after dove came flying out. He tossed another gold handkerchief in the air, caught it, turned once, then twice, and waved it in the air: a tiny canary fluttered into thin air. Zal looked on like his little son, reluctantly mesmerized but only partially disturbed. After a half hour or so of this, Silber left his little courtyard of flying creatures, looking a bit embarrassed, like old money suddenly revealed to be very, very new. He put a hand on Zal’s shoulder. Anyway, I don’t do that shit for anyone, kiddo! That’s it!

  Zal nodded. Fine with him.

  Those were not the acts Zal was interested in, not the ones where Silber resorted to his slave birds and their sleazy relationship with sleight-of-hand games of animation and inanimation; his aerial cousins’ unabashed fragility, their barely there magnitude, their no doubt compressible constitution, was heaven for those slave masters of unreality: magicians. But this was not how he saw Silber, this was not what brought him, like they were brought, to Silber’s lair.

  Until the end of his life, Zal kept the newspaper clipping that had drawn him to Silber in the first place, the one that announced “Master of Illusion Takes to the Skies.” The daily paper had announced a series of shows Silber was going to do in Las Vegas in early December 1999, for a tribute to the first millennium’s aeronautical innovations in the final countdown to the twenty-first century: “The Flight Triptych.” It was going to be Silber’s tribute to flight, past, present, and future. The article gave the skeleton of the acts: the first would celebrate ancient Persia and the Thousand and One Nights and end in a magic carpet ride, a levitation act of sorts; the second, a multistory free-fall descent from a high tower, in which he’d land on his feet; the third, Silber’s own ascension into flight, at the end of which a lucky audience member would join him in the high skies of a Vegas amphitheater.