Porochista Khakpour - The Last Illusion

“Sure, Father.”

“Zal, is she a bit paranoid? Does she think people are after her?”

“Not really,” Zal lied. “Just that day.”

“Okay, fair enough,” he said. “One other question. . Why is her name Asiya? I expected her to be Middle Eastern, but I don’t think she is, right?”

“Well. .” Zal paused. It was something they had never discussed, he realized. “I think she was a Muslim at one point.”

“Well, that’s nice. But she wasn’t born Muslim, was she?”

“No. I mean, I’m not sure.”

“Well, never mind. But I was curious. I just didn’t know if she was open to me asking about it. You know I wouldn’t mind if she was Muslim, of course. It was just surprising, since her last name is McDonald.”

“She’s definitely different,” Zal quipped, trying to sound cheerful. “A good thing for me, no?”

“I suppose, Zal,” he muttered, with a slow carefulness. “While I’m at it, another question then.”

“Shoot, Father.”

“Her physique. . Why on earth is she so thin? She doesn’t have an illness?”

Zal sighed. “I know,” he said. “She’s fine, but she eats almost nothing. It’s weird.”

“That’s not good, Zal. Does she have an eating disorder? No drugs, right?”

“Oh, no. I think she just is picky with food.”

“Well, son, help her out,” he said. “She looks ailing. Her skin, I noticed, was doing that thing, that feathering thing — lanugo, I think it’s called — that happens to the skin of the eating-disordered.”

That feathering thing, as if it was indeed a thing skin could do. He thought to ask further about it, but shelved it for another time. “I know.”

“Well, that’s a bad sign.”

“I’ll talk to her, Father.”

“Okay, good.” He paused again. “Zal, I want you to know that you shouldn’t feel like you have to have a woman in your life to be a man, okay?”

“I know that,” he said.

“Zal, do you love her?”

“Father,” he groaned, channeling some rascally teenage son, annoyed at his prying dad, in a TV show.

“Okay, Zal, okay,” Hendricks said. “I think I should meet her again then.”

“You’re not sure about her, are you, Father?” Zal asked, sighing.

“Well,” Hendricks began, and sighed too. “You know, I’m not, Zal. But that doesn’t mean anything. I just care about you. But I’m not sure of lots of things, even when it comes to you. And that hasn’t always been a bad thing. We’re all learning, Zal, we’re all learning.”

Zal said nothing.

“Anyway, when do you see Rhodes?”

Zal scanned his mental calendar. “In a few days.”

“Good. Talk to him about everything. About her. He can help. See what he thinks.”

“What he thinks about what, Father?”

“About everything that’s happening, Zal. There are some things a father has no right to know, that your therapist can help you with.”

And because lies had become part of his new default setting — what a villain he was becoming, he thought, shuddering with disgust — he told one to his father even: “Well, there’s nothing I wouldn’t tell you, Father.”

Rhodes knew more than he had told him — that Zal could tell. Rhodes had long ago told him what he shared would remain confidential and never divulged to his father, but Zal didn’t altogether buy it. Rhodes and Hendricks were old friends, colleagues from way back when, and they still talked sometimes. Zal could very well have casually entered a recent conversation. In any case, the moment he walked into Rhodes’s office, Zal felt certain Rhodes and his thick, clear-framed glasses were beholding him in a slightly different way.

“Am I a new man or something?” Zal joked.

“You tell me,” Rhodes said and smiled, a bit sinisterly. He wrote down immediate levity à intro, comic greeting, a new thing.

“Well, whether you know it or not,” Zal began, “there are some things to tell.”

“I know nothing, but I don’t doubt it,” said Rhodes, looking at his folder of notes. “It’s been a while, Zal. Almost a month. Not good. You’ve been canceling and changing times all over the place. This, I take it, is still because of Miss Austria?”

“Asiya,” Zal snapped. Rhodes had to be doing that on purpose, he thought, at this point. He must have brought her up a hundred times at least.

“Oh, my bad again! AWE-see-ya. ”

Zal rolled his eyes, and Rhodes wrote it down: eye-rolling. He had never seen that either. “Look, shall I just spit it out?”

“Sure, a good use of our time,” Rhodes egged him on, scribbling annoyance markedly heightened, bantering abilities also up.

“Rhodes, I did it,” Zal blurted out. “I did it with her. You know what I mean by that. And also I told her I loved her.”

“Is that all?!” Rhodes could not believe what he was hearing. He scribbled it in all caps, underlined. “I’m gonna use the recorder today, Zal, okay?”

“And she met my father.”

“Well, well,” Rhodes said. “That is a lot. Last time we met, you were being photographed by your girlfriend for her show. You had already kissed her, something you were participating in but only maybe enjoyed, but you were still ambivalent about furthering physical contact, and in fact the notion of lovemaking seemed a bit repulsive to you, which of course I assured you was more than normal, of course, considering. ”

Of course, Zal thought. He did not want to deal with Rhodes today.

“And now you’ve done that, and also you’ve told her you love her. Last time, remember, I asked if you loved her, and you said you were not sure, but you did not think so. So what changed, Zal? Tell me, what happened?”

Zal paused. It was his tradition, almost, to tell Rhodes everything and anything. It was easy with Rhodes, a person he never really cared about, a person hired to serve him, he realized. And yet now the Lying Zal was born, and he didn’t believe he owed him the whole truth if he didn’t owe it to his father and his girlfriend.

“I changed how I felt,” Zal said, slowly. “That’s pretty human, last I checked.”

More sarcasm, Rhodes jotted, without looking at his sheet. “Sure, Zal, sure. But it doesn’t mean there is no root cause. Perhaps you did just, over time, fall in love?”

Zal shrugged.

“Or perhaps she demanded your love and wanted to make love and you gave in to it all?”

Zal tensed up. “Look, Rhodes, this is not a problem for therapy. It’s not even something I want to discuss today.”

“Okay, Zal. What would you like to tell me?”

Zal searched his head, his month, for something to eclipse any judgment of Asiya and their escalated status. All he thought of was the Mistake. Rhodes would be all over that, but what else did he have? “Do you want to know about the show?”

“Oh, certainly. How was it?”

“It was a wonderful night. One of the best of my life.”

“Tell me about it, Zal.”

Zal told him about it. “Really, a highlight, if not the highlight, of my life,” he said. “I was so normal, Rhodes.”

“Good. I’m amazed, Zal. Not at you being normal, of course, but your enjoyment of the event. I remember you had some dread surrounding it.”

“Well, it was all great. Almost all. And then I did something bad, something I suppose normal people might do in a night like that, but a bad thing nonetheless.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I made out with a man — a boy, really — in the bathroom of the gallery.”