Porochista Khakpour - The Last Illusion

He dialed 911. When the operator asked him what was wrong, he said, “I’m not sure. Something is happening to my girlfriend. She might be very sick, I just don’t know.”

He ran to Willa’s room, woke her up, and told her what was happening. Willa sighed, “Zal, do you think it’s really anything? It’s not just. . the usual?”

Zal shrugged. “I’ve got to go be with her. It may be worse. She looks worse, at least.”

When the paramedics came, they had to pry her out of the tight ball she had rolled herself into.

“Any medications?” one of them asked Zal.

“No.”

“History of mental illness?”

Zal paused. “Hard to say. Not that I know.”

“Boyfriend doesn’t know,” the paramedic scrawled, muttering the words out loud, as if to shame him, as if the paramedic could possibly know them well enough to ridicule their misery, Zal thought bitterly.

They took her to Lenox Hill Hospital. Zal sat in the waiting room for what felt like days. He forgot himself completely and, with that, anything but total love for Asiya.

A nurse finally called him in. “Mr. Hendricks, we think it’s best she stay here.”

Zal nodded, mortified. It was that bad. What if the whole time he had been ignoring the signs, and she had been that bad? “What’s wrong with her? I mean, I know what’s wrong with her—”

“You do?” the nurse looked skeptical. “Mr. Hendricks, the initial write-up — panic attack, nervous breakdown — is not why we’re keeping her here.”

“What is it?” My God, Zal thought, something big was wrong.

“Mr. Hendricks, do you know what anorexia nervosa is?”

Zal felt a mixture of relief and frustration. That of all things? The most obvious? “Kind of. Eating problem?”

“That’s it. Mr. Hendricks, have you noted your girlfriend’s dramatic weight loss?”

Zal nodded, then shook his head. Boyfriend doesn’t know echoed through his head. “Well, she’s always been very thin.”

“Mr. Hendricks, she is beyond thin. She’s on IV. We’re keeping her here until we know she’s not malnourished. I need you to sign here.”

“But what about everything else she was saying? Did that come from her being thin?”

“Chicken or the egg, Mr. Hendricks — hard to say at this point. You can call Dr. Gould at this number.”

He went back to the waiting room until they let him see her.

When he finally saw her, indeed looking dangerously little in her paper nightgown, stick arms attached to clear tubes, attached to clear bags of fluid, he felt that urge to cry again, to cry in a way that he might never recover from. So many troubles now. In some ways, he wished he’d never met her; in others, he felt like he would die if he lost her.

“Asiya, are you okay?” he whispered.

Her already whispery voice was a dead husk. “I’m okay now, Zal. I think it’s safe here.”

“It is.”

“They think I’m starving.”

“You might be, Asiya.”

“Zal, you know that’s not why I am here.”

“Why don’t you eat more, Asiya? What if I snuck you those chocolate grasshoppers you were eating so happily that one time—”

“You know that’s not it.”

He could feel frustration take over his insides, callusing what just a minute ago was impossibly soft. “What is it then, Asiya? Tell me what it is.”

“You know,” she said, as if in accusation, except her voice was as weak as broth and her smile strong — the wildest smile he’d ever seen on her, a look that made him, for the first time, for just a second, ally himself with the two men in his life, the men and all their reservations about her, his life. And then she added the words, the ones he had heard all too many times but that still managed to confirm the worst for him: “It’s coming, Zal. It’s coming for all of us.”

Zal Hendricks stood at the open door of an airplane exit and watched the young woman drop, like any material object with some weight, completely at the mercy of gravity, thirteen thousand feet above land. It was his first flight since the one when he was a child, the first airplane he had entered, the first airplane he would exit — and exit midflight —but suddenly it became grave, chilling, almost wrong, when he saw the girl go down so speedily, so heavily, looking so the opposite of how they said it would feel. They had said again and again that the minute-long free fall would feel like floating, but this girl, strapped to an instructor in a jester’s hat — like the saying, a monkey on her back — dropped like a dead weight, as if she was already dead, not actually suspended in a state of animation. That was all skydiving was, Zal decided as he looked down: just another trick.

He turned to his own back-monkey, a man who went by Spike who was already latched on to him by four hooks, who moments ago had been straddling him on the plane floor as, two by two, the others went down. They saved the lightest for last, Spike had told him, grinning wildly the whole time, giving him the rock on hand signal one minute, the hang loose one the next. “Listen, Spike!” Zal had to shout over the roars of the doorless, propellered Twin Otter. “Can’t do this! Thought I could! But can’t!”

“Dude!” Spike was shaking his head, still grinning through disapproval. “No way! You’ll love it!”

Zal had been sure he’d love it. He’d looked it up on the Internet, seen celebrities, ex-presidents, scientists, models, everyone doing it. It had been his dream, he had told himself. It had been his only choice. It was the closest anyone ever got to flight, real flight. And it was the closest he could let himself get — after all he’d been through, after all the many changes — to himself, his old self.

And now he saw that it was the opposite of flying; it was actually falling.

Zal thought about Silber’s second act of the Flight Triptych. Maybe there were strings there, too. Maybe not. But Silber was, had proved himself to be, a man of tricks, something Zal had no interest in.

“I don’t want to, Spike!”

“Don’t think it! Just do it!” Spike shouted, mantras he seemed used to pulling out at moments like this.

“I just can’t,” Zal said, too softly for Spike to hear him. He was thinking about it: the girl become rock; the four-page Assumption of Risk agreement and its all-caps Because this document will drastically affect your legal rights, you must read it carefully; the guys in the instructional video from the seventies who had said, “There is not now nor will there ever be a perfect parachute, a perfect airplane, a perfect pilot, a perfect parachute instructor, or, for that matter, a perfect student”; his jumpsuit that felt too big to protect his skin and the primary chute that could maybe fail him and the reserve chute that could also maybe fail him. He thought about all the things to remember without margins of error: the chute knob to pull at the altimeter’s 5,500 feet, which he could forget about, which Spike would remember if he forgot, although Spike could die or go insane or just be an asshole or turn suicidal and also “forget”; the five to seven minutes to the landing knoll, where more things could go wrong than during the minute-long free fall; the $189 that he had thrown away to experience an exalted ascent, which, like much of life, turned out to be its crummy opposite, a lowlife descent.

He was suddenly faced with that most humbling feature of human normalcy: he was paralyzed by his fear of death.

What. The. Hell. Was. He. Doing. Here?!