Porochista Khakpour - The Last Illusion

Later, in evaluating his first time, he thought it had not been too bad. He didn’t yet have the taste for it that he had for simple kissing, but all in all, it had those glimmers of wildness and ferocity, abandon and liberation, ecstasy and fury that he had heard of, that made it certainly worth returning to. His first time, he knew, could definitely have been worse. It could have, for instance, not been his choice.

One of the things that he did not reveal to Asiya, that he had found mildly disconcerting and, for a second, slightly arousing — sex was interesting that way; the grotesque could also double as the sublime, any evaluation and subsequent judgment best left to after the fact — was Asiya’s skin. He didn’t know how he hadn’t noticed before, but as he ran his hands all over her, he could have sworn all sorts of parts of her felt like they had patches of a disturbed sort of skin, of something that was not skin and yet not quite hair or fuzz or even fur. If he had to be altogether accurate, he’d have to employ the word feathers.

Love: check! Sex: check! Zal thought. That has to be everything! But of course, as he was discovering, it was never so easy with what he thought they must have ironically dubbed “the fairer sex.” In fact, many of the problems he attributed simply to the pitfalls of human social conditioning were actually of a subset of that: female human social conditioning.

For a day or so, it seemed as if he had handed Asiya the world, that all wrong had been erased forevermore, that there was nothing but happily-ever-afterings for them — but then, like a rubber band rebounding off a sling, the spell disintegrated and Asiya had more demands than ever. Perhaps she had come to realize that, given time, he would always come around and do anything she asked; perhaps the last two gestures double-knotted their souls for eternity so that she was entitled to ask for anything. And so she began her campaign for The Next Thing, something she had asked for before but had simply shelved in that past era of uncertainty and frustration in their relationship.

Zal missed that era.

The request was another big one that made Zal queasy with anxiety: Asiya wanted to meet his father.

Why? he had asked her again.

Because I love you and I want to love what made you.

He didn’t, Asiya, not technically, you know.

I know! I meant, I love you and I want to love what loves you, too.

What if you don’t?

I have no doubt I will. He sounds amazing.

But what if you don’t, then what?

She assured him then that nothing would happen. But what Zal really meant to ask was: what if he doesn’t love you? In all his years with Hendricks, he had rarely known his father to dislike anything, but something told him that Asiya would not be an easy sell for anyone, much less the man who loved him most in the world. More than anything, he worried that since Hendricks sometimes knew him better than he knew himself, he would be able to see through to the side of Zal that was terribly ambivalent about and perhaps even slightly trapped by Asiya’s love. Hendricks, after all, was his savior, the bearer of freedom. He would perhaps see Asiya as Zal sometimes saw her, like that old birth mother of his: another crazy woman nature had thrust Zal under the jurisdiction of, for no good reason.

But because this was the season of his guilt, his regret, the season of his Mistake, because he never forgot the dead look in Asiya’s eyes right before their first time, because of that highlight-of-their-lives night, because she was all he had and he was stuck with her, he could not bear to hurt her anymore. He promised her they would meet, and soon.

Hendricks, of course, was elated, as Zal had predicted — of course he would be elated before he met her. The idea of his son beating all the odds that mandated a lifelong loneliness was of course good, if not downright miraculous. Hendricks would kiss Asiya’s hand, thank her, embrace her, praise her, and then he would get to know her.

What made Zal feel downright ill was the very plausible possibility that the only two people he had in the world would not get along. There would be no choosing — though their contributions to his life were not, of course, equal in any way — because the Zal he was today depended on the pieces they each had installed in him, and without one or the other, he would be nothing all over again, back to just a boy in a birdcage, back to just a boy out of a birdcage.

They settled on tea at a teahouse Hendricks liked. He had sensed Zal’s stress and decided that a simple tea hour would be the least committal, the lowest-impact, the very least obtrusive way to deal with the young couple in their season of hurdles he could only guess at.

T Is for Tea was a quaint little café, all deep rose walls with mahogany floors and chairs that probably, at best, sat twenty. They were the only patrons there, Zal noted upon entering, somehow feeling more alarmed at their aloneness, as if the three of them were the sole human survivors of the end of the world — everyone knew how that story ended. Hendricks, always early, was already there, and when Zal finally saw him face-to-face, after some weeks, he immediately felt panicked. To see his father, someone he had made a near stranger, for an occasion of monumental strangeness and strange monumentalness — he was sure he wouldn’t be able to endure it. His father was in his best suit, a dapper yellow tweed, the one he wore for special occasions only. Zal knew he knew he knew that, and it filled him with guilt. Perhaps he should have warned him. Perhaps he should have explained that Asiya was no normal girl. Perhaps he should have made it sound like she was just a phase.

Zal quickly glanced at Asiya and tried to see her as if he was seeing her for the first time. Her most notable feature was her extreme boniness and her pallor — as thin and as white as human beings could get, he wagered. All of her features were dark and resolute in their bold plainness: eyes that were impenetrably black and appeared unblinking, hair in the austere black bowl worn by certain little boys. She had worn a blazer and a skirt for the occasion, a simple black pencil skirt, which just made her stick-legs look all the more stick-figured. She looked as if she were going to a funeral or a job interview. She looked utterly negligible and yet unlike anyone in the world at the same time.

He supposed he looked the same way, though, and maybe Hendricks would note that, see that as a plus. Hendricks couldn’t have expected a Barbie doll, an old movie ingenue, a porn actress, just any normal perfect girl on the street, could he have?

“Hello, hello!” It was the usual Hendricks boom, the usual Hendricks-bolting-up-with-an-outstretched-hand. Zal noticed happiness in his father’s eyes, true joy, and felt relieved that the first hurdle — the sheer visual one — appeared to have been at least somewhat cleared.

Asiya, with the tiniest-biggest smile she could muster for a stranger, took his hand gingerly, as if it could be a trick hand. “Asiya McDonald. Nice to meet you.”

“Asiya!” he pronounced perfectly. “Yes! An absolute joy to meet you. I’ve heard so much.”

“Same with me, so much,” she muttered back.

For a moment, they just stood there suspended in natural discomfort, Hendricks still frozen in a monster smile, Asiya deeply immersed in floor-tile evaluating and lip biting.