The Last Illusion Read online

  Her eyes flashed at Zal, somehow challenging him, but he did not notice.

  He knew by now that it was not polite to stare—people had done it to him all his life, until recently, it seemed, when he appeared closer to normal—but he couldn’t help it. He had never seen a person like this, all flesh, rolls and rolls of flesh, with some amber-colored curls clinging to a huge head with two tiny eyes that were almost hidden and a tiny pair of rose lips tucked into all that slightly ruddy face. She had to be three or four times his size, he estimated.

  He reached his hand out to her, and she extended one of her giant arms, with their surprisingly little hands at the ends, pudgy but still somehow delicate fingers, with carefully pink-polished tiny fingernails.

  Her hand, unlike Asiya’s, was plentiful and hot—sweaty, in fact.

  It felt good.

  She made an expression that looked like maybe it was a smile at him, but he wasn’t sure how to look at her even. She dropped her eyes and smoothed out the huge lavender sheet that covered most of her body, under which she wore what appeared to be a white lace housedress of some sort.

  “You cold, Willa?” Asiya asked, fiddling with the thermostat.

  She shook her head, looking up again at Zal.

  Zal hadn’t broken his gaze once.

  He could not stop staring at her.

  She was the most beautiful person he had ever seen.

  Why did Zal find Willa McDonald beautiful?

  Theory no. 1: Because he didn’t know any better. Because Zal had not grown up with a mother, female relatives, female friends, even, no girlie mags, no fashion mags, no pinups or porn stars or supermodels or strippers or whores or anything to add up to any problematic image of womanhood. Hendricks and Rhodes had recommended old movie classics to him, for their proper formalities and nice manners, packaged in tidy plot arcs with easily digested moral and lesson-infused thematics—so, yes, there was that, but all the Doris Days, Betty Grables, and Marilyn Monroes even in the world could not have taught him what was really sexy, much less really beautiful, in a real woman. Zal was, as all known ferals were, asexual, they had decided. A thing of beauty was never a thing of sex—Zal was apparently missing that microchip, altogether lacking that drive that seemed to define men and their actions. At best, an apricot and Brigitte Bardot had the same appeal to him; Sophia Loren could be just as nice to watch as flamingos frolicking on a nature show; Rita Hayworth was as stunning as a Caribbean sunset, but nothing more. He would take toffee-glazed crickets any day over, say, Ava Gardner in his bed. Or even Clark Gable or Rudolph Valentino or Steve McQueen, and what was the difference actually? He was simply of a different mode when it came to sexuality, a frequency that was just about, if not exactly, nil.

  Theory no. 2: For what she was, precisely. When he saw Willa McDonald, some words that came to his mind (this was a Rhodes exercise, conveyed as usual through a mess of feral-friendly metaphorics like “watching thoughts like word-clouds” and “capturing them like butterflies in a net”): Plenty. Abundance. Luxury. Leisure. He knew those words added up to a Jaguar or Mercedes ad, but that was what he saw. He recalled Hendricks having equated fat with unhealthy many times, but for the most part, he could never see it that way. It was the skinny ones, like the dying, the diseased, like the near-proverbial children in Africa, that were sick. When he saw flesh and lots of it, he saw rest, relaxation, repose—he saw America, a rich country, a country with more than it knew what to do with. He saw something sturdy in its substance, not flesh that was fluttering, in constant burn and race and hustle, plus anxiety and panic and constant instability, like the entirety of that great American exception, his city, New York. He saw someone immovable, whole, solid, grounded. He saw solid finite earth, the opposite of impossible endless sky. He saw a woman, a superwoman, a festival of womanhood—not a girl, not a stick-figure-for-a-girl, as Asiya was, as so many of the city’s females seemed insistently to be. More than anything he saw what he imagined feeling—an all-encompassing warmth, the deepest and richest all-sheltering human warmth, a sticky warmth, a sweaty warmth, a swallowing maybe-even warmth, plus a strong accompanying smell of female human musk, the kind babies must crave when they cry.

  Theory no. 3, therefore: She looked the part of his creator, apparently. He saw, in many ways, a mother—human mother? bird mother?—the mother he had never had.

  His eyes went to where he imagined her vast breasts lay, covered half by sheets and, under that, half by the rolls of her own flesh, and deep inside he felt a stirring, a perplexing agitation. He felt something he had rarely felt, something close to hunger, he thought—close but not quite—that strong pulsing, yearning, urgent needing of something. He felt, he thought, maybe what they called love—Theory no. 4: Love?—but of course it wasn’t, he quickly told himself, love did not come so illogically. It did not do that at-first-sight spell that was just a human joke, or perhaps—image: deflated balloon—just a wish turned joke. But it felt like it, and for the first time that day he felt a warmth like the clear goo inside an egg coat him, protect him, take over him, and he pretended—played with the idea, at most, really—that he was in love.

  He wanted immediately to be taken in by her, but he also had the urge to protect her: from Asiya, namely. From Asiya’s cold hard bones, from Asiya’s foul domestic tongue, from Asiya’s disdain, from Asiya’s freak, from Asiya’s fake but hard mother­liness, from that iron bed and that no-door, and from whatever made her look sad, for a second, whenever her eyes had to go from him to her sister. theory no. 5: Because she was different—from Asiya, from most people, maybe from everyone . . . like him. She was beautiful, he insisted to himself. The most beautiful person he had ever seen.

  This can’t be real, Asiya would have said, never in the world would someone think that, except maybe in a fucking horror story.

  But he did. He did.

  Many months later, when bored and sitting in his apartment, Zal explained to Asiya what he found beautiful, in a shorter, more bare, more awkward, more apologetic manner.

  She had shaken her head and said again and again, Freak, freak, freak, so many times and with such signature Asiya lack of clarity that he had no idea if she meant Willa or him or, most aptly, them both.

  Incidentally: many months later. As in, the world indeed did not end on December 31, 1999/January 1, 2000.

  But it was not all in vain. There was some magic with 2000, in that everyone almost instantly forgot 1999, even its final seconds, it seemed. End of the world? Please. Who had thought that?

  “One hour away,” hissed Asiya.

  They had wheeled Willa’s bed to the living room, and now Zachary, the little brother, was with them, too. Time was running out, and they were lying on couches watching television, with pretzels in their hands.

  Zachary: Zal did not immediately like him, not like Willa, of course, but not even like most people. If Willa was only a few years younger than Asiya, then he was a few years under her, probably in his early to mid-teens. But Zal could barely see him to dislike him properly: he wore a baseball cap pulled over his eyes and most of his face, a hoodie, and baggy jeans. His body was in between Asiya’s and Willa’s, though much more like Asiya’s—he was what they might call “overweight,” though it was tricky to tell in all those baggy clothes. He wore headphones most of that night, nodding along to some invisible soundtrack, as if it were rattling off agreeable commands. At one point he lit a cigarette, which made his age even trickier to pinpoint for Zal. But the cigarette smelled different from most cigarettes, and that was when it occurred to him that maybe it was that thing Hendricks had warned him about.

  “What is that?” Zal had asked, pointing to the kid’s smoking thing.

  He had to tap him and ask again, as Zachary wasn’t quite able to see from under his hat, he realized.

  “What’s what?” Zachary spoke with a slight accent, he noted, one that Willa and Asiya did not share.

  “That.”

  “It’s pot,” Asiya interje
cted. “I don’t think now is the time, Zach, although, fuck, maybe I should.”

  “Please don’t, Oz,” Willa said gently from her bed.

  “Oh, what do you care?” Asiya snapped, and turned to Zal, “She thinks it makes me mean.”

  “What is it?” Zal repeated. “It’s drugs?”

  Asiya glared at him for a second and then seemed to remind herself that he was not just another member of her family, not to be mistreated. She grunted the word “Yeah.”

  Zachary did not stop smoking his drugs, and Asiya got quiet as the minutes approached the possible end of the world and Zal snuck glances here and there at the heavily—luxuriously—breathing Willa on her bed while they watched what his father was no doubt watching: network coverage of Times Square festivities.

  It looked to Zal like any other year. People wore silver glittery-framed glasses made of the numbers 2000, with lenses at the middle zeroes; there was that. Maybe there were more people. Maybe there were fewer. But it was more or less the same madness.

  Not long after she had announced forty-five more minutes, Asiya darted up and ran to, not the bathroom, but some other room, Zal noticed. She seemed rushed, maybe in trouble. Zal thought maybe he should get up, but Zachary and Willa did not seem to register it.

  But then he thought he heard a gasp echo through the house, and so he too darted up and headed in her direction, into another beautifully decorated room with a door that opened on a staircase to a lower floor. “Asiya, are you down there? Are you okay?”

  He heard more gasps, gasps that did not sound unlike sobs but were more animal somehow.

  He carefully climbed down the stairs, which led to a very large, dark room. He recognized this as a “basement,” something Hendricks’s cousin, whom they visited from time to time, had in her Long Island house. It was so dark he could see nothing, but the gasp-sobs grew louder.

  She was there.

  “Asiya, what are you doing?”

  “Nothing—I’m fine. You should—should go back up.” Her words were broken with heavy heaving.

  “You’re sick.”

  “No.”

  “What is that then? You are . . . crying?”

  “I’m having—having an attack,” she whispered in more of a whisper than her usual.

  “An attack?”

  “Panic—panic attack.”

  Panic attack: Zal knew those. He had had those on the subways and other closed windowless spaces where no sky could be seen. He was told he was prone to them.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Here, hold on to me, can you see me? . . .”

  After a few moments, a cold bony shaking hand was feeling for his shoulder. He knew it helped when Hendricks held him, so he did the same. And he channeled again Hendricks when he said, “Imagine an open sky, so blue, cloudless, breezy, air and air and air, so open. Be in it, high above everything else, everything that bothers you, too . . .” He wanted her to imagine what Hendricks never said but Zal had always annexed in his mind: wings, his, the spreading of his wings, cutting through that air, so cleanly, so crisply, with so much energy and grace and speed and strength. But he stopped himself in time.

  Her panic attack stopped suddenly and broke instead into a steady conventional sobbing.

  “Did that not help?”

  “It reminded me of my father,” she slurred through sobs.

  Planes, Zal thought, her father, the plane maker—that was what flying meant to her.

  “Look, it’s okay, I’m sorry,” he said. He suddenly felt the strong urge to take care of her, as if she were his little girl—the opposite of how Willa made him feel, like he was her little boy needing to be taken care of. “I want to take care of you, Asiya.”

  “Zal,” she suddenly said, sobs melted a bit. “This morning I didn’t even know you.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  He said nothing. She wasn’t asking for his life story, but instead of hiding it—his original M.O.—suddenly he wanted so badly to tell her. This is where I come from, he wanted to say. It’s a long, long, long story. He knew somehow that with this house of hers, those siblings, her own strangeness, his story had a chance of being safe here, at least more than it would anywhere else.

  She went on, “I mean, I am so scared right now, I’ll admit it. I’ve been dreading this night for months, maybe years.”

  “You think something bad is going to happen?”

  “No, but, I mean, it could. It won’t, though, I know. It doesn’t happen like that, I know, not on holidays especially. Bad things come when we don’t think they’re coming. But it’s coming, Zal.”

  He didn’t know what to say, really. Rhodes: echo, question. “Why do you think a bad thing is coming?”

  “I can feel it. Zal, if I tell you something, don’t think I’m crazy. I mean, fine, do—I don’t even know you.”

  “Please stop saying that.”

  “What?”

  “That we don’t know each other.”

  “But—” she stopped and adjusted her tone. “Okay. Well, it seems crazy, but . . . I’ve been having these visions about something happening, something bad happening, and I’m not on drugs, Zal, not even prescription anymore, and I really have no diagnosis, nothing like hallucinations or delusions or anything. It’s something outside of me that I’m sensing, not something wrong inside of me. Does that make sense?”

  “There are only wrong things inside of me,” Zal thought out loud, “so, no.”

  “Time is running out right now, Zal.”

  “Is it? I thought you said you didn’t believe it.”

  “I did, didn’t I?” She paused. “I don’t know what’s happened to me, Zal. I mean, I’ve been a strange bird all my life . . .”

  Strange bird. He had heard that expression before. It was a saying. He loved that saying. He was a strange bird, too.

  “You are, Asiya,” he said, matching her whisper, “but, you know, so am I. More than you. More than anyone.”

  And there in the darkness he heard it, like peals, a skipping bell-toned vocalization, that thing he could not do, as much as he tried: a true laugh.

  “Oh, yes, you are!” she said, laughing.

  “You laughed.”

  “So?” she said.

  “I can’t,” Zal said.

  “Oh, stop!”

  “I’m serious.”

  “What the fuck?” she snapped, and Zal knew the only way to melt her effing hardness again was to give in to that darkness and safety that this abnormal world of theirs had suddenly inspired in him and tell everything, right then and there.

  “I was a bird.”

  Asiya took a step back, as if bird were a synonym for serial killer.

  He cleared his throat and started over. “I mean, I was raised among birds. I was raised as a bird. It’s a long story.”

  For a while she just blinked, silent. Finally she said, “I have all the time in the world,” without, for once, thinking that she might not.

  The story lasted that eternity between life and the possibility of no-life. It was his second time telling the story, and he felt it unravel less clumsily than it had with Silber. The off feeling was always there, but he had struggled to bury some of the odds and ends of the narrative so deeply that he was surprised to hear it all come together. There was something about the power of recollection that seemed to blur the lines—story became cinema became existence. There he was in a foreign dry heat, a land yellow and black, the mother country he got only a window’s view of, his eyes with nowhere to look but at his own kind—what he knew as his own kind—and their motionless marble bead-eyes that had nothing for him but cold empty allegiance to some god of oblivion. And there he was, his body just a mass of bones held together by broken filthy skin, squatting against walls of twisted wire that his limbs would fight against with each passing year, his bare feet only able to shuffle here and there on the mess of shredded newspaper and straw—always damp from urine and
sweat and feces and blood—and the only nice thing in there, the one thing he could never have, feathers, that glorious evidence of wings from the many around him, from all around him, that somehow swirled through the dead air like the fresh flurries of an early New York winter.

  Her arms broke the spell he felt, indeed, encaged by; she held him and held him and held and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed—but not in the panicked way; in the moved way, he thought, he hoped. And when they left that dark basement finally (a “wine cellar,” she clarified later), Willa and Zachary met them with looks even he could tell were funny.

  “What?” Asiya: instantly annoyed when confronted with them.

  Willa let out a soft husky giggle; Zachary a sort of disgusted groan.

  Willa pointed to the television. On TV, a sitcom Zal vaguely recognized played, the old one with the stand-up comedian and his short bald neighbor and tall crazy neighbor and that girl, all in New York. The characters were all arguing in the comedian’s giant apartment, interrupted here and there by recorded laughter.

  “Oh my God, what time is it?!” Asiya’s voice suddenly broke into a violent exclamation, her whisper altogether gone.

  “Game over a while ago, Oz,” Willa said, just as Asiya shoved her watch at Zal.

  12:37 a.m.

  Zachary got up, still in headphones and with his smoking drug, and went to his room, slamming the door behind him. They rolled Willa into the elevator and up to her floor and exchanged good nights, Zal lingering just a bit at the door, to try to etch her form and all its infinite comforts in his mind.

  In the empty living room, they stood in silence, not sure what to do with each other now. Zal tried to read her, but she seemed every instant to be made up of a different emotion: annoyance, fury, relief, euphoria.

  “Zal, thank you,” she said in the ecstatic mode.

  “For what?”

  “For making the time pass, I guess,” she said. “For sharing your story.”

  “We’re alive.”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you for hearing it. I have never told anyone, really. I mean, the people that know know, but no one else. I don’t know many people.”