Porochista Khakpour - The Last Illusion

But even if he didn’t need a purpose, he did need a narrative, and not just for the press release — which was driving all the assistants batshit, they too were so unaccustomed to Silber’s sudden inarticulacy — but for himself. He saw his life as a very expensive biography, leather-bound with gilded edges, the size of a phone book, a bible for illusionists of the future. There was not a Houdini on this earth, not a Copperfield in the crowd, not that other guy, either, who would say their feats were just because . Illusion was almost an invisible thing — almost — with its substance consisting of concept, idea, notion, thematics. Without all that, it might as well not exist. Without all that, Manning was right to ask about its worth and value.

He knew he had to talk to people about it, more people, not just the women — whom he had already forced to sign a confidentiality contract, incidentally — but to people who didn’t even require that, who were so totally on the outside, he didn’t have to worry about their loose lips, people with out-there lives and even more out-there perspectives, who had no idea and therefore any and every idea, who could just maybe see the thing for him.

As usual for Silber, there was only one place for answers: the extraordinary. Keep it surreal, counseled the Old English on the back of a drug dealer he used to employ for various activities, and he kept a Polaroid of it in his wallet as a reminder. Ordinary life would offer him nothing; that he had always known.

In contemplating the outsides of every box, Silber scanned his universe for outsiders. And naturally, in his mental Rolodex of those stranger than strange, Zal figured prominently. Zal: a definite possibility. After all, Silber had been so frustrated he hadn’t met him earlier — before his Flight Triptych, at least, which, for all its genius, he knew suffered from what the critics had dubbed “the usual Silber style-over-substance razzle-dazzle.” Even that feat of theme was not enough for them.

He knew too much to make another mistake. He wanted to make magic the world could not live without! Magic to make them all live without the world! Or something like that, he thought excitedly. He was getting hotter, he could feel it.

Zal could be the key, or a key, at least, he told himself.

He had Anastasia — his new assistant, Indigo’s replacement for the few weeks in which she’d been fired for substance abusing more than was permitted on the job — call Zal up and ask him to dinner.

She returned in seconds. “He said he works evenings,” glum Anastasia declared, more glumly than usual.

“He works? Wha? No, tell him to come after, did you tell him that?”

“I did,” she murmured. “He seemed uninterested, once I convinced him he knew you.”

“Knew me? Of course he knows me, that silly billy! God, I have got to get him over here — he’s so mother-effing effity-effed up, he’s perfecto!”

“I think he was pretending not to know you. It sounds like he doesn’t want to deal with any of it.”

“Stasi, I know you’re new, but you’re gonna learn a few things: nobody says no to me, got it? It just doesn’t happen, baby!”

“I think it just did.”

“It just did! Ha! You’re such a — never mind, get him on my cell.”

When he finally got Zal on the phone, Silber put on a different voice, a muted, slightly shattered one, one he knew Zal would relate to. Need attracted need, he rationalized.

“Zal, I’m in a crisis, if you want to know the truth-Ruth,” he whispered.

“Mr. Silber, I don’t even know you,” Zal kept saying.

“You don’t know me? I’m a celebrity, baby — everyone knows me. You had dinners with me, you came to our shop, we were friends, or least friends-ish! People don’t forget celebrities, friends-ish ones! Anyway, Zal, I need you, I need your help.”

“Mr. Silber, I work now. I have a lot of responsibilities. I’m trying to turn myself around.”

“And bless your heart, too! I support it wholly! Let’s celebrate it with a dinner? Whenever you’re off work! What do you do, by the way, Mr. Man?”

Zal sighed. A huge side of him wanted nothing more than to be around Silber, his world, the everything that he had been in that little time period where they knew each other, the way he symbolized the possibility of filling the hole inside Zal. But he had gotten over Silber, he thought. And yet here the only man he had ever wanted to work for, a man who had no idea what he had meant to Zal at one point, was asking him what job he had, what miserable job he had.

“I work in a pet store,” Zal muttered. “Just for now.”

“Okay! No shame in that game! I love pets! You must love pets!”

“They’re okay. I don’t love them any more or less than most normal people.”

“I hear you, buddy! They’re neither here nor there to me, too. .”

And he went on and on, a mile a minute, Morse code in Zal’s ear. The whole time Zal wondered whether this was his chance, his one chance, his opportunity to ask something of Silber now that the illusionist wanted something of him.

Zal’s something, naturally: What if he could work for Silber?

He didn’t ask.

But a week later, when he called Silber’s most personal cell — he had graduated to getting that number — to cancel their dinner date, he decided he really had nothing to lose.

“I’m sorry, I just can’t. But maybe we could meet in a different way in the near future?”

“Is this just a rain check, then, or what? How about two Tuesdays from now?”

“Mr. Silber—”

“Bran, baby, Bran. How many times—”

“Mr. Silber, I think it’s better I call you Mr. Silber. I wanted to ask something of you actually a while ago, and I didn’t have the guts. I don’t know if I do now, either, but I noticed, since you have a new assistant. .”

“You want to fuck her? Wait, you don’t do that, do you?”

Zal groaned. “I do that — I mean, ugh, never mind. Listen, when we met a year ago, I really wanted to work for you — in any way, really. Now I have a job I don’t love, but I have some experience with jobs now and I was wondering. .”

“Oh, God!” Silber exclaimed, as if he had heard something juicy or else his tail was on fire.

“What?!”

He sighed, with exaggerated weariness. “You want a job.”

“Perhaps.”

Silber gave another theatrical sigh, trying to mask the full brunt of his annoyance. “Zal, do you think you’re the first kid asking me for a job? Can you imagine how many people want to work for the world’s greatest illusionist? I mean, it is literally a dream job, is it not?”

“It is, maybe.”

“It is, definito! But, baby, I don’t have any right now. Stasi has been a personal assistant to all sorts of people — that guy from Cheers, Lara Flynn Boyle at one point, Michael Jackson for a day! Do you get that? What if I fired her and hired you? You work at a pet store. Sure, you got a cool story, but, kiddy-kiddo, this is a hard-knock job. What could you do for me, baby?”

“I really don’t know,” Zal said, suddenly feeling small, nervous, tripping over his own stammers. “I thought maybe I could have worked with you on the flight stuff, if even on the research or construction or—”

“Baby, honeychild, homeybones, you don’t get how this industry works, do you? That’s over! I’m done with it. Fucking finito, bonito! There is no more of that — in fact, I’m working on just the opposite—”

Zal couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You just stopped working on it?”

“Do I need to send you a press kit? Have you followed me at all?! I work on something and then it’s on to the next thing—”