Porochista Khakpour - The Last Illusion

Eventually they sat down and small-talked about the city, the subway, the weather, and all that usual stuff even Zal sometimes found himself entangled in with Hendricks. Everything was fine until the waitress came to take their order, turning to Asiya first.

“Do you have anything with liquor?” she asked quietly.

Zal immediately stiffened. That was bad. Hendricks did not know about his drinking.

“Uh, this a teahouse,” said the waitress. “Just tea.”

“We could get a drink somewhere else, if that’s what you want, Asiya,” Hendricks offered, looking only barely thrown off.

Asiya turned to Zal. “What do you—”

Zal shook his head, furiously. “I love tea! I’d like a calming one — do you have one of those?”

“Lavender Lilypad — an organic lavender-rose-chamomile blend — is a favorite,” the waitress offered.

“Perfect!” Zal cried.

“I’ll second that,” Hendricks said.

“I’ll. .” Asiya paused, red in the face still. “I’ll have your blackest black tea.”

“The Calamitea Jane?”

“Perfect,” Asiya said.

Zal noticed he was sweating. She had picked the right tea for her but, of course, the wrong tea for this. He looked to Hendricks, who was back to unfazed, still smiling at her.

Once the tea came — and a tray of little cakes Hendricks requested — things got better. Their small talk continued, and Asiya started to sound more impressive as she went on about photography and art.

And then she said the wrong thing again:

“And Zal, well, he’s my new muse, my living bird boy!”

Hendricks’s eyebrows had knotted a bit.

Zal sighed. “Father, she knows.”

“Oh? Oh, okay. That’s fine. What do you mean, your muse? You shoot, er, photograph him now?”

“I had a whole show of him!” she said. “Zal, you didn’t tell your father?”

Zal shook his head. “It was nothing.”

“It was nothing?” Asiya snapped, glaring at him.

“I mean, Father, it was really, really, really nice,” Zal quickly said, gulping at the scalding tea, gasping at the burn. “I was an angel.”

“An angel,” Asiya echoed, “not a bird.”

“I see,” Hendricks said. “You must have. . enjoyed that, Zal?”

Zal nodded, swallowing hard.

More drinking, more nibbling, some calm, and then came the next big problem point, again Asiya’s.

“I’m sorry to ask this, but do you feel like the room is getting hot?” she suddenly whispered, during a conversation about the mayor. “Those men in the corner, with the big samovar: do you feel like they are up to something?”

For a second, Zal thought she was hallucinating the men altogether, not noticing anyone had come in, but there they were, just a group of New York businessmen, chatting unsuspiciously.

Hendricks turned around and raised his eyebrows at her. “Excuse me? The men right there?”

She nodded, tugging at her blazer collar. “It’s so hot in here.”

Hendricks looked concerned. “The air is on; I feel it. Maybe you’re ill? Would you like to step outside? I think those men are fine.”

“Father, she’ll be fine,” Zal interjected. “Asiya, you know you will be okay. She gets like this sometimes.”

“Zal!” she cried. At what, he didn’t know.

“I’m sorry,” he said, for what, he also didn’t know.

“I’ll be fine,” she echoed, saying it to no one in particular.

Silence.

Zal looked at his watch — only thirty-five minutes had gone by and they had planned at least an hour. But it already felt like an eternity, and things were going badly, worse than he had thought. He thought Asiya had nowhere to go but even further down. He faked a double take at his watch.

“Actually, Father, we have to get to a movie,” he said.

“We do?” Asiya looked at him, unconvinced. “Really? Which?”

“We have tickets,” he said, trying to sound calm and, he thought, frenzied, “to Casablanca .”

“They’re showing Casablanca ?” Hendricks asked. “Really? Where?”

“In the. . Hell. . Hell’s Kitchen Cinema,” Zal sputtered. “The, um, new one.”

Asiya was squinting her eyes at him, not buying a word, but finally, it seemed, getting that this was Zal’s game over.

“It was very nice to meet you,” she said lukewarmly to Hendricks’s tie.

“A pleasure,” he said to her shoulder, patting her on it, just once.

He then embraced Zal as he always did — with every ounce of love in him — and whispered in his ear, “Son, make sure we talk tomorrow.” When Zal pulled away, he saw Hendricks was smiling, but he also thought he detected some genuine concern behind it all, a close cousin of the disdain he had been afraid of.

Zal nodded, wishing he could have disappeared from the earth altogether just over a half hour ago.

He took Asiya’s hand, a show for both of their sakes, and they darted out.

Outside, Asiya was quiet and tense. “Why did you lie about that movie?”

“I didn’t,” he lied again. “But I don’t want to see it anymore. I’m very sleepy suddenly. My place? Yours?”

“It’s not even five,” she said. “He hated me.”

“No, he didn’t,” Zal said, hoping it wasn’t a lie. “It’s all fine. Let’s eat.”

“I thought you wanted to sleep.”

“That would be great! Either, I mean. Let’s just go somewhere and do whatever, you know.”

For a second, he thought he saw her lips quiver in the way they did when she was about to cry.

“What?” said Zal.

“Those men in there,” Asiya hissed. “They were the problem.”

Zal tried to control himself. “They were just men! Look, I’m the one who’s supposed to see the world as something crazy and unreal and weird, not you! If I’m telling you they were just men, they probably really were!”

Asiya stared at him, wide-eyed, a bit stunned. Zal never had outbursts like that; he seldom even talked back, much less chastised her.

She nodded slowly. “Sometimes I know things you don’t, Zal.”

“Asiya, just stop!” He raised his voice, measuredly, trying to control it from becoming something out of his control.

“This was a disaster, wasn’t it?” she asked many minutes later, as the doors of their subway closed.

Zal was still not sure where they were getting off.

He looked down at her. Her eyes looked even more concerned than Hendricks’s had.

By that point he had mastered it: telling her things that were not quite lies, but were very remote possibilities, possibilities he would never bet on, or infuse with faith, but still ones he wouldn’t altogether rule out, and so he looked her straight in the eyes when he said firmly, “Asiya, it was fine, everything is fine.”

Thanks to a deep and yet unsatisfying sleep, tomorrow came all too soon. Zal was awakened by his cell phone: his father, of course. He pried himself from Asiya, who was still asleep or pretending to be, and stepped out on his fire escape for privacy.

“How was the movie?” was Hendricks’s first question.

“We missed it,” Zal stuttered. “We ate instead.”

“Did she get her liquor?” he asked, joking. He sounded amused.

Zal could think of nothing to joke back with. “No,” he replied stiffly.

“Son, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to make fun,” Hendricks said. “It was very nice to meet Asiya.”

“It was?” Zal asked. “I mean, she was very happy to meet you, too.”

“Good.”

There was some silence.

“Zal, I am concerned a bit, though,” he said, inevitably.

“Really?”

“Yes, really. She’s interesting, but a few things seem a bit off — just a bit, but since I’m your father and all, I have to say something.”