Porochista Khakpour - The Last Illusion

She was likely already drunk.

He looked at Willa, who was looking down, smiling at her palms.

“Willa, would it make you happy if I drank? Are you unhappy that I am not?” Zal, hoarse-throated suddenly, croaked.

Willa did not look up. “Well, I’d love it if you did. You don’t have to—”

“Wills!” Asiya shouted.

“—but, yes, I would be very happy if you did. Just that little bit.”

Zal looked down, nodding. She had asked something from him. His love interest’s sister, his real love interest. Or was she? Was she that other thing they always talked about, the crush? What did he want from her? He wanted to hold her hand. What else? He wanted to be buried in her. What did he mean by that exactly? He wanted to be nestled against her bosom. In what way? Like a child, he thought. Like a lover, he thought again. She confused him to no end.

He took the glass out of Asiya’s hand without glancing at her overjoyed, laughing eyes. He looked at Willa the whole time as he took the glass and drank it in one big gulp.

It felt indeed like a cross between soda and fire. It bubbled in him familiarly but also made him burn. Soon Asiya had refilled his glass and he was, as Hendricks had warned, wanting more and more and more.

He saw himself homeless on the street, lying in a puddle of his own piss, an empty bottle in one hand, rats crawling in the other.

But at the same time, he saw Willa, he swore, look at him adoringly, like he was her hero, her champagne-chugging knight. Clearly consuming something, possibly in an unhealthy manner, was the way to his princess’s mammoth heart.

His head was a mess, and as the night wore on, the world before him started to rebel: it began to sway and tilt and spin, and all he could hear was Asiya’s rapid-fire whispery hisses, Willa’s soft giggles, an occasional pipe from a triplet, and something obscene from Zachary. “No more,” he remembered Asiya saying at some point, when he tried to reach out for a new bottle, feeling very ill but somehow wanting to know more about the feeling, feeling drawn to this feeling of nothing and everything all at once.

“Am I dying, Asiya?” he remembered asking.

Before he heard her answer, he fell into what he assumed was death.

It was just twenty minutes later when he awoke, but it seemed like hours. The triplets were gone. Zachary was asleep on the corner couch. Asiya was cleaning up. Willa was sitting up in her bed, fresh-faced as ever, staring happily at the carnage from her birthday.

The room was no longer in motion, but Zal still did not feel like himself.

“Asiya, what did you do to me?” he muttered. “When does it go away?”

“Soon,” she kept saying, “soon.”

Soon was not coming.

He began to grow irritated. “Asiya, I don’t think you care about me. I don’t think you care about caring for me, like you said.”

She sighed and continued cleaning.

“Asiya, I mean it.”

Willa giggled to herself, still cradling that bottle-baby, he noted in astonishment.

Zal turned to her. “You know what she cares about really? What I’ve discovered? She cares about the opposite of what you must care about! She cares only about not-eating; she loves not-food — air with a side of air and a cup of air!” He sat back, satisfied with himself.

“Zal!” Asiya snapped. “What the hell?”

“I guess you are different from other humans,” Zal went on. “You don’t have to eat. You only have to drink! And you call us freaks!”

“I never called you a freak!”

“Well, we are! But you are a worse one!”

“How dare you—” Her voice was quaking and rising all at once, in a way he had never heard.

But he just couldn’t stop all the bubbling fire in his head. “You look terrible, not eating ever! Look at Willa: she eats, and you call her a freak! Well, she looks like a person, not a stick figure! She looks like she enjoys her life! You should really—”

“She’s the one that’s not gonna make it, Zal!” And suddenly she was gone, and all that was left of her was the sound she had made in the basement: gasps, gasps that he knew were part attack, part sob.

He did not see where she went. He did not care to follow.

His eyes instead turned to Willa.

Willa’s eyes were huge, looking right at him, as if he had suddenly transformed before her. Into what, who knew: monster, prince, specter, perhaps truly himself. She seemed the least drunk of all of them, embracing that almost empty bottle against her chest, but her eyes showed definite shock.

It was the first time she had ever registered a man talking positively about her appearance.

Clearly she did not have much interaction with men these days, but in the past she had been only an object of ridicule, disdain, horror, and disgust, whether unspoken or not.

Was he serious? Did she really look better than her sister to him? Was it just the alcohol? Was he actually ridiculing her? Did he — could he — was there any chance he liked her?

“What have I done?” he said, kneeling by her bed a few moments later. “I am so sorry. Did I ruin your birthday?”

“Oh, no,” Willa said. “You in many ways made it. . a very good one.”

“Can I. .” He paused, ashamed. “No, I can’t.”

“Go on,” Willa said, so softly.

“Can I. . can I. . can I hold your hand?”

It was at least the dozenth time that night that Willa was relieved for the candlelight that masked her blushing, or so she hoped. “You want to?” she asked.

“I do. I do.”

She paused and pried a hand off the bottle and brought it toward him, hoping he did not notice the shaking. His hand, she noticed, was also shaking.

He took it.

He felt cold, clammy, hard, little.

She felt warm, sweaty, soft, abundant.

They sat like that for a minute, each enjoying the opposite effect of the other’s touch, each filled with unquiet panic, each thinking of Asiya.

“How did you get like this, Willa?” he eventually asked, shocked at his own words — the courage or whatever it was that made his thoughts immediately exist outside of him. Like the hand-holding, there it was, to his shock. Was there nothing he wouldn’t do?

There were some things he couldn’t.

He looked into her eyes, worried, seconds after he said it.

She closed them for a long pause.

When she opened them, they glistened in a way that he knew meant one thing: tears.

My God, he thought, I have made not one but two women cry tonight. Both women I like, even.

“Forgive me,” he said. “Let’s talk about something else. .”

She shook her head, and a few tears flung loose, like diamonds off a chain. “You are right to ask. It’s okay to, I mean. You’re not the first.”

He nodded, still ashamed.

“It’s a long story,” she said. “It’s a bad story. Are you sure you want to hear it?”

He shrugged. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours. But only if you want to.”

She closed her eyes again and took a deep breath. “I do.”

Many minutes went by in silence, their hands still locked.

Zal started to see swirls in the darkness, the candlelit darkness. He worried the room was going to spiral around itself again. He looked at her and gently nudged her along. “Willa,” he said. “Once upon a time. .”

And it was a long bad story, even with Willa abbreviating its odds and ends. It was the worst he had ever heard.

Later, while he could not remember her saying it — could never re-create that setting, her weeping in the candlelight and saying all those awful, cataclysmic almost, words — he felt quite haunted by the actual story. Story, he thought, a strange thing, tales within their very tales, other lives in their lives. He didn’t want to accept it. In his head, it was just a story that he couldn’t accept as someone else’s reality; it might as well have been another nightmare-scape — his or hers, who cared, just downward-turning plot points, with the etiquette of weather, almost randomly generated for her.