Porochista Khakpour - The Last Illusion

Next thing: horror.

He couldn’t remember what sound he made, but he knew he made some sound; Asiya, on the other hand, never forgot it: the highest-pitched scream she had ever heard a human let out, something that suited an animal almost.

It had made her do something she didn’t do much: raise her voice.

She had gone from a decorous “relax” to a volcanic “RELAX NOW! IT’S ALL RIGHT!!!”

Her hand on his sleeve had silenced him. This woman, not Hendricks, not a Vegas usher, not Silber or even Indigo, but a total complete stranger, a total complete stranger woman, had made contact with him.

When he appeared to truly relax, nodding away as if in acquiescence as well as apology, she had reached into the black backpack that was casually slung over one shoulder, removed a Tupperware container, and proceeded, with a plastic fork, to push the tiny black bird in there.

Zal had immediately closed his eyes, lest he should lose control again. “Are you done?” he asked. “Are you done yet?”

“Yes,” she said. “I should explain: I use them. For work.”

Zal had paused — a million sentences ran through his head — and then proceeded to blurt: “And what is that. . work?” He was terrified to know the answer.

She had looked down at the sidewalk where the bird had been, where not even its blood marked where its body had been, not a trace of it at all. “I do art.”

“I hate art,” Zal had immediately said, for reasons he could not understand. It was a pure lie, and maybe one of those instances Rhodes spoke of, a moment without impulse control, words that came not from his conscious mind but from something connected to something only Rhodes knew about. “I mean, I’m not good artist. I’d probably like it. I would like to do it. Maybe one day. It sounds interesting, I think.”

She had shrugged. This girl was not so friendly, he was realizing. But then again, he had probably insulted her.

But her mind was elsewhere. “It’s weird,” she said, “that bird fell out of nowhere — not a tree, not a shrub even, just a Duane Reade awning and a newsstand, overhead. I wonder how it got here. There wasn’t any blood.”

“Maybe it was just sleeping?” Zal suggested.

And that made her snort, the closest she came to laughter those days. “Maybe! Well, not anymore!”

Zal gulped — in his mind, he imagined one of those horror movies where a man is buried alive. He blinked it away and focused on her unblinking dark eyes.

“What do you do with them in your art?” Zal asked, again not at all interested in the answer. There was nothing else to talk about but the worst things, it seemed.

She had rolled her eyes, at herself mostly, but to Zal it seemed aimed at him, and so he looked down, ashamed.

“I bring them back to life, of course.”

She had something like a smile on, if a girl like that could even smile.

His eyes grew wide at that, his heart raced. You have no idea what that means to me, he wanted to say, if you’re serious . She probably wasn’t, he thought, but what if. He nodded, trying to stay composed. Words went through his head — for a second zombie, quickly replaced by prophet. He imagined her with a halo and thought it would suit her.

He felt compelled to know her. “My name is Zal. Nice to meet you,” he muttered, as he always did when in one of those rare circumstances of people meeting, mimicking the niceties of people in old-fashioned movies.

“Asiya,” she said, also not offering her hand. “Nice to meet you too, I guess.”

Zal did not meet people. Assuming Rhodes was right and Zal was just barely teenage when he entered his twenties, Hendricks did not want to take many risks, so he had just barely in the past few years begun to give Zal his own life. He had set up Zal with his own apartment — even though he slept there a few times a week at first — and started letting him go places alone, like that Vegas trip. Outside of Hendricks, Zal knew almost no one. At that time, he and Hendricks had just been discussing his getting a job.

Asiya also did not meet people — mainly because she didn’t like to.

And so Asiya never quite figured out why she did it — it was a crazy time, the last day of the millennium; that could be her excuse, or perhaps her newfound fear that felt almost like a clairvoyance, an anxiety that felt almost psychic in frequency, pushed her to it, who knows — but she said, “Would you like to take a walk?”

Zal had nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to badly. He was going absolutely nowhere.

So much had happened in that end of the millennium, that insane Y2K season: Silber, for one thing. He had come within inches of something called flight, something called magic, or riffs on them at best, total shams at worst. He had nonetheless made a friend, managed to make something like a friendship with someone whom most people would have no access to. His story had done it.

And here was a human with no idea of his story. It was his first pure contact with a person ever.

thin. She looked sick. Her skin was very white, like his, but in a way that implied maybe she had not been born like that; it also looked sick. Her eyes were small, black, and beady and her face oval and austere, almost entirely androgynous. Her hair, jet black, was cut like a boy’s, and her curves nearly nonexistent.

If not for her voice, he may not have known she was a girl. Her small whisper of a voice was by far the most feminine thing he’d ever heard. It made him think of the sound flower petals might make rubbed against each other. There was a sibilance to everything, a delicacy and fragility that Zal was man enough to understand meant female. He liked that voice very much, loved being in the company of that sweet, wispy voice of hers. He thought about telling her how much he liked it, but he wasn’t sure if that was something normal humans did at this stage or even a thing a girl like that would like — she probably wanted to sound more like a boy, like him.

He also liked that she seemed unable to tell that there was anything off with him. When he ordered a vegetable soup and tea, she said she would like the same. He blushed when she did that, felt a great degree of pride.

He also noticed she never smiled. He found it comforting in someone who was not, say, his father, whose smile and laughter he loved and felt downright sheltered by, even if he couldn’t return it. For a moment he wondered: could she be like him?

She couldn’t. He would have known the story. Rhodes and Hendricks had filled him with all the dozens in history and around the globe — mostly, he thought, in an effort to make him feel less like an anomaly.

But he knew there was something different in her. Certainly something people would see as wrong. But he didn’t, couldn’t — how could he?

“What?” she was saying in that voice, over and over.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I was just lost in my thoughts. Did you say something?”

She shook her head. She looked down at a big black digital wristwatch.

“Six hours,” she said.

“For what?”

“ Till what,” she corrected. “New Year’s, of course, 2000. Are you ready?”

Zal nodded. He was, he supposed. But he knew everywhere people were losing their minds over this one.

“What are your plans?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I had a party to go to, but I don’t want to go.”

She took this as a line, a flirtation, and turned a bit red. As if it were bait, she bit. “I have some parties, too. And I don’t want to go.”

Zal took this as a problem. They were both without a plan. “We could treat this as any other day. Eat, sleep, you know.”