Porochista Khakpour - The Last Illusion

Shame on you! Zari screamed. May you rot in hell forever for this!

Once the whispers of the neighbors had made it back to her just days before, Zari had dropped everything and grabbed a friend and sped all the way through desert highways to a place she couldn’t believe she once knew as home. Her purse was heavy with the reward for the spying neighbor who had decided enough was enough with the rumors and sounds and shadows. He had climbed the fence into Khanoom’s yard and veranda one late night and had seen that same last child — the one Khanoom had sworn was taken away to live with relatives in the city — squatting, motionless, eyes closed, suspended in a cage that was so small he looked almost bound in a wiry eggshell, like a tiny, half-dead child embalmed in a womb-jail. This neighbor had talked, and talk added to talk and Khanoom had been oblivious to it all. When Zari arrived, Khanoom was unable to fathom that these nosy neighbors had gone so far as to find her daughter in the city, fill her with their talk, infuse her with that criminal hysteria, and in effect bring about the end of Khanoom’s life — not to mention their lives, the birds’, the only lives she lived for.

Rot in hell? She managed to muster a hard laugh at her daughter. This is hell. But that’s why my birds are here — they’re the only heaven in all this hell. Except for that one, of course.

Zari’s young man was kneeling before the cage, silently taking pictures of the frightened and apparently human creature. He whipped out many other machines, too, that apparently recorded their words and their images — Khanoom was momentarily distracted by these miracles — artifacts that would forever serve as the only testament to global-phenomenon “Bird Boy’s” early existence.

Zari could not take it; she pushed her mother and her friend out of the way and took the boy out of his cage. As much as he flapped and screamed and shivered and drooled in her arms, she would not let him go. She said her name over and over: Zari Zari Zari, I am your sister, your sister, your sister, but it was no use. She cried and cried, shaking him gently in her arms, Poor baby, poor baby, poor baby. .

White Demon was at that point ten years old.

He could not talk. He could not walk. He could not identify his sister as his sister, his mother as his mother, the young man as a young man, human as human.

What he did know: the other birds, and maybe some God they believed in. What he could do: chirp, tweet, coo, shriek. He could squat and jump; flap his elbows and fingers in the air like wings; piss and shit, right there in his cage; peck at and bite into foods and water and consume them, but just in bits; sleep in that squat and perhaps even dream, but who could know but the birds.

Zari eventually bound the weeping hysterical Khanoom up in yarn — the only restraint she could conjure — bound her and bound her hard until Zari could gather her wits and find a way for them and White Demon to get out. The young man, lost in the awful poetry of the situation, said to Zari, She calls him White Demon, of all things, but this child is like the parable’s Zal. White like Zal, and raised by, well, not just by one great bird, but all birds. This is the Shahnameh’ s Zal.

He’s our Zal, yes, Zari said and turned to that thing, apparently her brother, and with her voice cracking and even crumbling, she asked him, Do you want to be Zal, love? Are you Zal?

But the boy wouldn’t look at them, any of them. He just sat there shuddering in a state of incomprehensible emergency, eyes cast to the narrow swatch of sky the window permitted.

Zari had let the young man, a filmmaker, shoot more while she made the calls. She had finally left her mother, still bound, in the hands of the police while she and her filmmaking companion took the boy and his cage — he was used to it, after all — out and into the world for the very first time.

Weeks later, a rumor: Khanoom had died in prison by her own hands. The prison refused to confirm the exact cause of death, but another prisoner said on the filmmaker’s tape, She kept claiming she was nothing without her children. We asked her, well, why did you do that to that little Zal-child? And she said, no, not him — he can go to hell, the White Demon. I mean, my real children. We told her that her children are fine and grown and she said, no, the children I have now. She had meant her birds. One day the guard told her they had burned her birds, out of cruelty and maybe he was just sick of hearing about them. The next morning we found her pulseless, with her hands still locked at her neck.

Zari took Zal to Tehran and found a sort of halfway home — part orphanage, part psychiatric ward, with a touch of juvenile detention center. It was a place where children who were beyond hope went, it seemed. There was no option to take him home with her, just blocks away — he needed constant attention: specialists, doctors, a whole team to study him and somehow envision a future for him, a miracle plot in which a child of that level of ferality could endure. She visited him daily for a while, but ultimately she could not take it.

Plus everyone’s eyes were on her. Zal was a national phenomenon, thanks to her filmmaker and other documentarians internationally as well, and many blamed Zari and her siblings for abandoning their mother but also Zari for fame-mongering. Every time a photo of Zari with that squatting bony child came out in a paper or magazine or on the news, the next day — if she happened to walk among the Tehran skyscrapers even for a few moments — without fail, she’d feel fresh spit on her hunched shoulders, her knotted back, her ever-aching head. Whoever had cursed Khanoom now cursed her.

Zari, some say, started to lose her mind and ultimately disappeared, somewhere abroad. Even the filmmaker could not find her. The other six siblings remained anonymous, discussing the issue only in phone calls, whispering as if the whole world had their ear to the wall. But no one knew they were part of the family that had created the infamous Zal. None of them could bear to imagine that child, their own flesh and blood, raised by birds, essentially a bird slowly converted to human by lab scientists. He appeared in the prayers of this silent scattered cult once in a while, but even they, with their own troubles, eventually let the horror of him fade, like an old bad dream.

The doctors who studied him claimed he had not been properly touched by a human since his early infanthood. That Khanoom had seldom spoken to him, but apparently sang to all the birds and he could sing back as much as they could. That he was only let out of his cage every few days at most, and even then likely for very limited time, and just on the veranda at most. That he had limited exposure to sunlight, just what the veranda could offer. That his skin could not endure normal clothing, and would not for many years. That he could not digest human food, only seed and water, and would not for a while. That it would take years and years to get him to walk upright, to get him to straighten his arms, to get him to hold utensils, a pen, another human. That teaching him a language would require a staff of the best language acquisition specialists in the world.

And yet as much as the country’s — and indeed parts of the world’s — hearts were with him, as much as his room in the home got filled with dolls and stuffed animals and candies and clothes that he could do nothing with, nobody was paying the medical bills. Articles did not feed Zal or his staff of scientists and doctors.

One day maybe, someone would say.