Porochista Khakpour - The Last Illusion

“Hi!” Zal raised a hand in the pose of American Indians trying to assert their peacefulness.

“Oh God, it’s Zal! Hey, stalker!” Indigo laughed and glared at the same time.

“I really was not stalking. I was just—” Zal began.

Indigo: “Jo-king, nerd!”

Silber smiled at him, a big smile, a smile he thought was real. “I didn’t see you at the show—”

Indigo: “He was at the show—”

Silber clapped his hands together. “Oh, mental! Was it something or was it something?”

Zal nodded quietly.

“Bran, it was phenom,” Indigo overcompensated, unconvincingly. “People can’t stop talking about it. And tonight!”

“I am so excited about tonight,” Zal quickly interjected, breathlessly.

Silber took off his sunglasses as if to survey that strange little blank pale smile-less face. Zal was struck by how gold his eyes were — not hazel, not yellow even, but pure gold. The color had to be fake. “ You should be!” And he winked, a wink that was like the flash of a gold coin tossed in the air.

Zal nodded slowly. What did he mean? Did he mean — oh, God. He bit his lip, so as not to ask. He wanted to respect the surprise, the potential even of the surprise. He looked to Indigo, who was genuinely grinning — happy, actually, it seemed, though not enough to stop managing her boss: “Eh, Bran, we have to bounce in negative two min, so chop-chop.”

“Thank you,” Zal inserted quickly. “See you backstage then?”

“Count on it!” Silber said. “Worth the ol’ wait! Sayonara, baby!”

Zal, of course, had not forgotten what everyone in the audience had not forgotten, having read up on this widely talked-about stunt, the crowning glory of the Flight Triptych: an audience member’s flight with Silber. And apparently, if he could interpret Silber’s comment correctly, he stood a very decent chance of being that audience member.

Zal made himself throw up twice before the show. He was feeling sick with anxiety, plus all the minibar odds and ends inside him made him feel heavy and slow and unable to even fathom taking to the air. He put on his suit and tried to remember what Dr. Rhodes always said: When in doubt, just breathe.

He breathed. He breathed; he breathed; he breathed; he breathed.

The usher took him to his seat — this time, front row. Of course . He spotted Indigo, dressed up this time in a ruffly shirt and with what appeared to be lipstick, several aisles back, and she waved more warmly than usual. Signs. People seemed to be looking at him. The usher had said My absolute pleasure, not just plain My pleasure . “This is gonna be something tonight!” the older woman in the glimmering green dress next to him suddenly hissed his way. He nodded long and hard. Signs.

He prayed his asthma, hypoglycemia, prolapsed mitral valve, migraines, thyroid, gallstones, pinched nerves, carpal tunnel, chronic anxiety, panic disorder, etc. wouldn’t act up tonight — just not tonight, of all tonights.

Darkness; lights. There was a golden glow in the audience. The curtains were drawn, revealing a screen the blue of a spring sky. Suddenly across it: the image of a bird, blacked by the distance. Zal felt his hands grow cold and wet. Suddenly more silhouettes of birds flapping, here and there and everywhere. For a moment he had to close his eyes. In the living room of his mind, echoes of his heart, knocking, knocking. He focused on the sound: piano music of an abstract sort he could not recognize. He was determined not to lose it.

He heard a breath next to him quicken and he opened his eyes. On the stage, the dancers wore masks, black masks of bird faces, all beak and glassy eye. They were wingless. Zal could feel the migraine coming on, the heart condition. This was not what he had imagined, but if anything was a sign, this was it.

They danced to the manic offbeat upward and downward whims of the weird piano. This was less accessible than Silber’s usual stuff, definitely avant-garde, and yet for Zal, way too close for comfort. Of course, knowing his role now, he wondered to what degree this was all about him. If the whole audience knew. If this was all tied to his presence, his history, his story. He was not one to be self-centered, ever — in fact, he was mostly self-un-centered — but he had to wonder if the whole thing was about him.

Off and on he closed his eyes.

Finally Silber appeared — no bird mask, thank God — in a black cape that he supposed could resemble wings, over black leather pants and boots. He swayed from one side of the stage to the other, staggered almost, like a drunk, like someone on strings, helpless, confused, maybe even horrified. He did not smile.

Zal swore Silber met his eyes at least twice.

This bizarre dance, an alarming tarantella, went on and on, until finally the music shifted into something far more orchestral and majestic. An orb of light — no doubt a symbol of the sun — appeared blindingly bright in the far left corner of the stage. Silber turned to it as if in worship, and without any notice, suddenly he rose and rose and rose.

Silber was more than levitating this time. Silber — no matter how you saw it, you had to admit — was flying.

Applause! Applause! Applause! Immediately the specter of string-cynicism was butchered as the bird dancers came out with giant hoops of gold and ran them over and around him and he jumped — soared — through hoop after hoop without a hitch.

When he came down, he came down on his back, as if in collapse, and was scooped up by a bird woman. The lady next to Zal knowingly whispered, to seemingly nobody, the word “Icarus.” Zal knew the story and shrugged back at the same seemingly no one. Then there was an apparently erotic dance, during which Zal mostly lowered his eyes.

But the music crescendoed again, as it always did in a Silber production when things were going to get good again. The blue of the background darkened into the deep violet of twilight, stars speckled the background, and the sun sank into a huge full moon. With a few flourishes of his black cape — now glittering, apparently bejeweled with black sequins this whole time, which required only moonlight to illuminate — Silber rose up again and into the “night sky” and eventually over the MGM Grand audience.

Silber received the most thunderous applause of his career as the audience clapped on and on, looking up and back and around and side to side, waiting for the inevitable: one of them would not only be touched by Silber — a thing in itself, to be touched by magic, real magic, in the flesh, and what flesh — but really and truly (well, “really and truly” to most) fly .

Zal gripped his seat, both in fear and anticipation — he imagined springing out of it and into a real night sky, by the real moon. As his eyes followed Silber and his teasing swirls, like the circling of vultures over prey, his whole body began to shake in a sort of rhythm, and for a moment he had the irrational worry the bird in him was bursting out.

No. I am not a bird, he told himself, as he had told himself several thousand times before. I am a man. Not a bird not a bird not a bird. .

And he knew no part of him wanted to be back with the birds, back in the cages, back to the birdseed and the beaks and the water feeders and the messes. No. The part of him he missed the most was the part he never possessed: wings.

Zal wanted to fly more than anything. And apparently Silber shared this longing. And here they were.

Silber came lower and lower, swooped toward them, in and out, while Zal tried to meet his eyes — at one point he even reached a hand out. He was not the only one. The audience was filled with longing — it was in the gasps, the moans, the nervous giggles, the idle chatter. Everyone was suddenly incredibly audible, everyone involved, everyone implicated.