Porochista Khakpour - The Last Illusion

A week later, he marched into Rhodes’s office at their normal time, feeling bizarrely cheerful, equipped with the armor of premeditation, a man with a mission, his final mission, feeling the way he imagined school shooters must, their final goal before them, all nothing-to-lose vigor, all there’s-nowhere-to-go-but-nowhere force, finally all-powerful, finally afraid of nothing.

Rhodes met his smileless smile — he could tell by then when Zal wanted to smile — with a smile of his own.

Zal put his hand up as if to silence him.

“Rhodes, I’ve come to say your final check will be mailed by my father as usual, but that’s it. I will no longer be needing you.”

Rhodes didn’t change his expression. He was a man who was used to pretty much anything from patients, even the most extraordinary, Zal told himself.

“Zal, sit down. Let’s talk about this—”

“I don’t want to talk about this or anything else with you, ever. It’s over, Rhodes. I’m not ungrateful. But goodbye.”

“Zal, you came here to tell me this?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you come at all? You could have phoned—”

Zal wished he could answer in a laugh, in that ugly, tarry laugh of the worst villains. He wasn’t sure what to say. The best he could come up with, he supposed, was okay: “I wanted the satisfaction of walking away from you forever.”

But it wasn’t entirely true.

“How about just a few minutes, Zal? So we can wrap things up?”

Zal shook his head. He had to be firm. He turned around to face the door and said, “I am saying goodbye to my past. I’m done with you, with all of it. It’s time for the future!”

The best part of all was what he had forgotten to say. He had rehearsed telling Rhodes about the job he had gotten yesterday: Oh yeah, and thanks, Rhodes, for one thing: telling me to get a job. Bet you didn’t think I’d actually get one! In hindsight, Zal thought it was even better that Rhodes would never know; that the satisfaction was again all Zal’s, every last bit.

Of his constant hurdles, Zal Hendricks felt the easiest had been the one most people would have assumed would be the most challenging, at least for him, considering ! But somehow — maybe as a cosmic reward for all the rapid-fire hardships of the era — it came easily. In the winter of 2000, Zal Hendricks suddenly found himself in the possession of a real live job, at a pet store.

It had come from a single decision: that he was done with humans for the moment — at least until Asiya got out of the clinic — and that animals were better. He reminded himself this was not the step backwards that it might have seemed to anyone who knew his story and had spied him lingering at the glass window of a pet store, eyeing tiny canaries rapidly darting in a giant golden cage. Skydiving, too, had seemed like another step backwards, a way to get in the sky, to make a bird out of himself, but in the end it had taught him that he feared death. Beyond the shady impulses that might have led Zal to this particular job, it was really and truly just another way for him to make something of himself, as they said, in a way that was most feasible, a way to get a job for which he didn’t need a diploma or a college education or any expertise.

He told the manager simply, I feel a deep connection with animals.

And there he was, with job. In actuality, it took a few more steps, and first and foremost courage: asking for a job application, which they didn’t have, but just give us your résumé and we’ll call you, since we maybe could use some winter work. He looked up résumés online and found some and he cut and pasted various items and changed a few others so that he had what they said was good: a single sheet with the most important items, never mind that they were not really his. Zal knew it was wrong, and probably illegal, to lie on a job application, but what could he do? He had nothing. And his next step was to get a job. A job was not possible for someone like Zal Hendricks, who had nothing, absolutely nothing, in the way of life experience. So he’d have to pretend to be someone else, a combination of someone elses, and pray.

“Wow, we don’t get many pilots with culinary backgrounds who went to Yale here. Interesting!” the old man who ran the place said. “What a life!”

He shrugged, sighing. “If you only knew, trust me.”

He was asked to “work the floor,” since he seemed not to understand the workings of the cash register very well, even after training. He became the one who put the puppies in the hands of the little gushing girls, who took the kittens out of their glass boxes to be pet — he did not like handling the kittens, he had to admit, but he tried to block out why. He was the one who scooped the angelfish out of their tank, and he once even had to feed the snake a microwaved frozen mouse. It was, as far as jobs went, suitable for him.

But where he spent most of his time, as much as he tried not to, was of course Pet’s Delight’s massive bird section, the rows of cages and their squawking, squealing, singing, chirping, mocking avian life. He couldn’t help it — he was mesmerized, the way any ex-convict would be on a visit to a prison. The hours went by quickly as he stayed among them and dreamed of a final workday: when he’d open all the cages and let them all out into the Manhattan sky, free.

As much as he tried to rationalize his choice of jobs, he knew he had nabbed the worst possible one for him. His fantasies didn’t exactly spell progress. But he had to admit there was a certain joy in knowing he wasn’t there yet, that there was still work to be done. He could still afford to mess up, despite knowing well enough how to be on the right track.

He wondered if that was part of what was wrong with Asiya, who haunted the back alleys of his head more than he cared to admit even to himself. Maybe her problem was that simple, just the opposite of his. He could go on, in spite of everything — because of everything — because he knew for him the end was nowhere near, that he was far from done. He had nothing but a future.

It was in those final days before 2001 that Silber remembered the name of the odd boy he had met and almost come to really know more than a year ago: Zal.

Silber was, for the most part, okay. He had nine months to go until he took on The Illusion, as he now called it, his Illusion of Illusions. Things had moved along. Manning, the best master craftsman a man of magic could hope for, was on board and ready to build. It had taken some convincing— I don’t get it, Sil, make the thing disappear for what? Why? Silber had tried to explain, Boss, O boss, take the opposite of flying, bringing something high and proud and towering and bringing it to its knees, reducing it to dust, or worse than dust: nothing at all— and still nothing had talked louder than numbers for Manning. I can do it. I mean, I can do fucking anything, Sil, especially if the price is right — but sometimes you got to ask yourself: is it worth it?

It felt worth it to Silber in a way he couldn’t explain. He had tried it out on everyone, especially his latest rotation of lovers, which was more robust in project time than usual. A Middle Eastern writer with an unpronounceable name who was all legs and eyes took a stab at it: What, “down with capitalism” or something? A Sarah Lawrence college girl who fit-modeled in the city on the side, with a fondness for chess, cloves, and cocaine: Artaud, plus Sartre, a dab of Derrida, and Kaczynski-Kevorkian undertones? The multi-orgasmic yoga teacher/bistro hostess, who maybe came the closest to hitting the nail on the head: Who said magic was supposed to have a purpose?