Porochista Khakpour - The Last Illusion

Since then, Asiya had tried every few weeks, but every time it went much like that, sans petals. He had started to feel panicked at the very idea of her advances, just as he was alarmed by the idea that he would never be free of their relationship, something he had at first thought of as an experience yet was now looking like a condition.

And now that condition was gone. And yet Zal, sitting in his dark bedroom, utterly doghoused by her and by the world, suddenly realized: That’s it. Sex was the key. She wasn’t really upset about him with another human, but she was upset about him still not wanting to have sex.

What if he could?

What if sex was the physical manifestation of saying I love you ? And once consummated, might as well be topped off with the oral confirmation?

What if it was that easy?

What if it was that hard?

Well, he thought, it could not be impossible.

In his head he heard Asiya’s black laughter at the phrase he considered forbidden for its ugliness, but which was, he had to admit, here quite apt: killing two birds with one stone .

He had no choice, anyway; he suddenly did not know how to live without her.

He spent hours practicing in the bathroom. He knew how people did it — he was not that naive — but he had never seen the point. Yet there he was frantically working at himself and at the same time trying to remain calm and in a pleasant mind-set to make the thing work, something he had only curiously tried abortively once or twice and abandoned. It took ages, but in the end he did get over that edge they talked about, felt his heart race to near explosion, it seemed, felt his body spasm, his insides burst and recoil. He sat there, in his mess, so proud. It had been a struggle, but he had done it. He had done it for his, yes, girlfriend.

Because outside of Asiya, he reminded himself, he would never be there, pawing at himself. He felt dirty. He felt animal. He felt more feral than feral. He felt so human. It disgusted him, and yet he did find it to be an accomplishment — another accomplishment-rung on the long ladder of Normal Human Behavior.

Plus he had figured out the equation, the one simple variable that could make it work. To function properly, he needed to meditate on a single notion, because the idea of Asiya was like an amalgamation of notion-hoods of sorts. It was, of course, almost ironic, almost cruel, and perhaps in the wrong spirit. But there was no other way. He, and Asiya, if she were ever to find out — and this time, no way in hell, he promised himself — would have to live with it: to have sex with his girlfriend, he would have to be thinking of her sister.

He finally turned to the computer and did that thing he never thought he’d have a reason to do, but which was the obvious final step in preparation: he began watching pornography to memorize the steps, the very complicated and yet apparently Human 101 steps, the means to that same end he was sitting in.

When he showed up at Asiya’s door, he presented her with a saran-wrapped paper plate of beetle cookies. She shook her head at it, looking so pale and exhausted. It relieved him to see her look so unhappy alone; it somehow meant they still had a chance, that she had not found a happiness outside of him.

“Asiya, please let me come in,” he said. “I am so sorry. I really am. I have something more for you, too.”

Nothing in her eyes changed, but she let him in. Her gaze looked dead, and her voice had no emotion. “Let’s go to my room. Zach might be home any sec.”

In her room, he immediately, without missing a beat, got to it — undressing himself — since he could see he had to make her better ASAP, not a minute to lose. He was already late.

When she saw him naked, she just blinked a couple of times. “I don’t have the energy to take photos of you, if that’s what you mean.”

He shook his head. “You do the same now.” He pointed to her body.

She squinted. “No?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

He thought he saw the flicker of a smile on her face. Carefully, she started removing articles of clothing, not for a second breaking eye contact, still searching his eyes to see if he was really and truly serious, if this could actually be the it she thought it was.

Suddenly they were naked, both of them, with all the space in the world, it seemed to both of them, between them.

Zal knew he had to make all the moves. He stepped up to her and pressed his body against hers. He thought of the porn scenes; he thought of Willa.

They kissed with a wildness he hadn’t experienced since. . since nothing. He let her go wherever she wanted with her hands, and he did the same. He eventually, like one porn guy, threw her on the bed. He tried to say the things the guy had said to the woman he was having sex with, but the words were getting scrambled in his head, threatening to distract him, and he could not, would not, no way in hell, let himself lose it, lose this. He focused, he breathed, he thought of her, that other her, and he moved in and in and in. She moaned in the way the girl in the porn scenes did, and he thought that was good. He moaned, too, like the man had, and he thought maybe it helped, those sounds.

The funny thing was that they did not sound human at all, even less so than the humans in pornography.

At one point, she stopped and he worried and she quickly assured him it was nothing, she just had to get something, and then she went to a drawer and came back with a small square of plastic, which she opened, and he recognized it: so this was a condom. She handed it to him, and he worried and he quickly asked her to do it and she smiled, turned on by that, it seemed. She put it on and he thought it didn’t feel too bad.

He went back inside her and thrust and thrust and let all the productive thoughts take him over — he was reminded over and over how the best part about living was that others could not know your thoughts — and finally, he exploded into that little thin bag of plastic that covered him.

She took it off for him, tied it, and tossed in the trash.

They lay together.

He was more exhausted than he had been in ages.

She seemed fine, happy. He heard her breathe hard for a second and then giggle.

“Tornado!” was the first word she said after it all.

He thought to ask what that meant, but he recalled that in porn the women said all sorts of things before and after. None of it was supposed to make sense.

She nodded at him. “Really.”

He nodded back, with a wink.

He had one more thing to do, he realized.

He suddenly said, without even opening his eyes, without even moving her or a muscle in his own body, so very exhausted he was: “Asiya, I have to tell you something.”

She made a sound that implied exhaustion, too, but also curiosity.

He said — even though nothing about what had happened right then or anytime before made him sure of this—“Asiya, I love you, too.”

And she smiled and smiled wider and was relieved he could not know her thoughts, which were elsewhere, outside, entrenched in anomalies. The world was becoming an increasingly odd place, capable of all sorts of impossibilities.

All that mattered was that he was in a heaven of sorts: problem of problems solved. He had done well as a human man. When he finally got up and left her, he was so immersed in replaying what had just happened and what that had done to him that he neglected to notice the strangely solemn carnage of uprooted trees and their leaves all across her block, and the surly blinks and shrieks of speeding ambulances, and the eerily beautiful bouquets of broken glass from sources no one could quite pinpoint. New York was New York — what was there to notice? — and besides, he was the first bird to have made love to a woman on earth.