Porochista Khakpour - The Last Illusion

Asiya: he was afraid of Asiya. He somehow belonged to her already. He had never felt so close to someone so fast, but he felt trapped. He could not believe the power she held over him.

“Zal, you have to tell me now. .” she was saying.

He was owned by her, trapped, behind her bars completely.

“Why did you give me this?” he moaned, pointing to the bottle and then quickly taking a big sloppy gulp from it, half of which he spit out.

Asiya grabbed the bottle and put it behind her back. “No more. Zal, tell me.”

He suddenly started laughing at the whole situation, what madness it all was. Where was his father, where was his home, where were his candied bugs, his computer, his bed, his health problems? What a long endless wicked date it had been since the moment they had met over the body of a dead bird.

When he finally told her, it came out with a startling simplicity:

“Asiya, I have feelings for your sister.”

She looked at him, confused for a second. Then she snorted. Then she shook her head. Then she did the thing he almost never saw her do, the thing he could not do and always found surprising in others — she broke into a massive grin and eruptions of the deepest sort of laughter.

“Oh, Zal! Oh, Zal, oh, Zal, oh, Zal! God, you worried me there! Shit! Great! Well, that’s very nice, Zal! Okay, next topic!”

And she kept going like that, laughing bottomlessly in huge heaves, as if she were about to throw up or become very ill. She did not think he was serious, he eventually realized, or so she was pretending. His interest in Willa, at least on some level, was not real to Asiya at all.

Zal still felt better having said it. He had done his part. Plus, what more could he do? How much further could it go with Willa? He was already Asiya’s, more than he ever thought possible, whether he liked it or not.

They went to bed only many hours later, when the sun came back up, lying in bed without touching each other at all, side by side, like two scared children. Before sleep overtook them — a bad sleep of low quality, Zal recalled, a thin fizzy champagne-coated sleep that felt entirely unrestful — Asiya grew nervous again.

“It’s those feelings I get, Zal. .”

“Not the good ones?”

“No. Really bad ones sometimes. Like something bad is about to happen. It’s always a little different, but this one I’ve had a lot lately. I don’t know what to make of it, but basically I feel like the ground beneath us is burning, like the earth is caving into itself or something. Like the only thing someone could do is the impossible: like just shoot into the air, like a rocket, fly into the air, like a fucking bird.”

Zal nodded, sleep sneaking in here and there. “I think about that, too.”

“You do?!” Asiya exclaimed, but Zal’s eyes were closed, and she assumed it was pure sleep talk.

That night, like lovers in a myth, they shared their dreams: big black birds hovering in an endless sky, in his over everything, in hers over nothing.

Only a few blocks from them, Silber was rising from a sleep that was mostly just lying supine, eyes closed, mind engaged in a hysterical triathlon, every conceivable worry rushing in and out, all concerns gathering at a pinnacle — like devils, not angels, at the head of a pin: the last illusion. The one that was the opposite of flying, taking down something high and proud and towering, and reducing it to dust, or worse than dust: nothing at all.

He had a Fantasia cigarette — special-ordered as usual, only in red and gold — on his rooftop. A weekday morning and the city was as still as it could be, no trace of it yet being the city where everything on earth always happened. He tried to count the seconds of silence between the low hums of traffic, a stray honk here and there, the sounds of people underneath him, shop gates opening, perhaps the rattle of the subway.

What did it mean, he thought, to take it all away? That he was missing. In every stunt, Silber had a theme, a concept, some sort of meaning. This one, just like a nightmare, dangled before him, brazen, meaningless, naked, unblinking.

He was in constant pursuit of its link to something else. On that particular morning, one he hadn’t thought of in quite a while came in and then quickly out of his head — it made no sense; he was getting desperate, he knew it, but he suddenly thought there might be a connection between the stunt and the boy who had been raised in a birdcage.

What was his name? Silber was amazed: he had forgotten the boy’s name. That was what celebrity had done to him, he realized: he would quickly forget people — even women sometimes! — even those who had so captured his interest, so urgently, just, it seemed, weeks ago.

He went inside and paused by his desk to snort the line of white powder on his mouse pad, the single, fat line waiting for him all night. He was thirsty, so he took a shot of his beloved British-department-store-bought “absinthe,” or so it promised — it was, in any case, strong. He felt better, good enough to return back to his sleepless sleep, his bed rest, he supposed. In this phase of his, Bran Silber sometimes went on like that for ages. Life and its increments slipped by, and he did not mind. Incubation, he thought. Men of magic require it, especially when sorting the greatest stunt of one’s life . He put no pressure on himself.

“Zal”: the very name did not come back to him for many months.

“Zal,” his father said to him gently, more gently than ever, on the phone one winter night — the phone being their prime mode of communication now that live contact was impossible, with Zal’s schedule suddenly all hers . “It sounds to me like she has become almost like a. . well, girlfriend .”

Zal thought about it. “I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t think so.”

“I mean, son, you’ve never felt this way about another woman, have you?”

He wanted to say yes, yes and more, but how could he get into that impossible thing, all the everything he felt for Willa?

“I guess not, Father.”

“So you like her? You maybe even love her?”

He was silent.

“I’m sorry, son. Maybe that’s not appropriate. I will let that be yours. It’s just, I am surprised.”

“I understand.”

“This is an important development.”

“Why?” And then Zal knew why. “Oh, because I am supposed to be of no. . sexual persuasion?” Sexual persuasion had to be a Rhodes-ism, he thought.

“Well, yes. But, look, you’re growing up. Am I even entitled to ask? This is all new for me, too, son.”

Before Zal could tell him that nothing, even after all these weeks, had gone sexual, that he did not perceive any sex in him — at least not yet — Hendricks had stopped himself from asking and had said he had to go. There was a distance, Zal began to realize, growing between them. It worried him. He was, in many ways, content with the surprising-indeed way that the universe was shaping itself for him, but sometimes all he wanted was for Hendricks to come and save him from his destiny for the second time.

And yet there were other times when Zal swore she was the best thing that had ever happened to him. How, he wondered, day after day, did Asiya McDonald remain the same person and yet also manage to grow more and more beautiful in his eyes?

Theory no. 1: He became more beautiful as well. He soon became her muse. Asiya began shooting Zal like crazy, one of the first human subjects she had ever taken on.