Porochista Khakpour - The Last Illusion

She didn’t say a word — just looked down at her palms, nodding slowly, trying to just focus on the present, trying to go back to the very joy of wondering what in the world was in store for them, just that night and that night alone.

When they were a block away, Zal ordered her to close her eyes. She did so with a big smile, her heart pounding with anticipation. She had no idea, no idea at all, she swore to him. “Right here is fine,” Zal said to the cabdriver, and he paid and got up and opened the door for Asiya, who was still blind.

“I have to open my eyes now, Zal!” she cried.

There in the dark blue of it all, he took her face and kissed each lid, just as he’d rehearsed, and, as if on cue, she opened her eyes. For a moment she didn’t recognize it, a patch of Manhattan she didn’t frequent, even though it was just a few blocks from his apartment — too close for a cab ride, though she assumed he did it so he could surprise her. She was indeed surprised, shocked even. She looked at them all the way up, the evening breeze whipping between their impossible height, all the way down to them.

“The World Trade,” she whispered, her smile suddenly gone.

“Yup! Dinner reservations up at the top!” Zal announced proudly.

“The World Trade,” she uttered again, as if in disbelief. “Zal, why. .? Why?”

“I saw that you’d marked it on the map,” he said, his pride making him blind to her sudden unmistakable uneasiness. “And I heard it was a really nice dinner-and-drinks spot, really special, and you know how much I love being high up, and I thought. . I don’t know. I just thought it would be something nice to do.”

He searched her eyes, which were squinting up at the towers, suspiciously.

“Oh, Zal, thanks,” she tried to gush, but it was easy to read the trouble in her voice.

“What, you’re disappointed? I built it up too much, didn’t I? Or did you guess?”

She shook her head and swallowed hard. “No, that’s not it. It’s just, I’ve never been there. Never really imagined it, especially tonight.”

“But you marked it — didn’t you? What did the mark mean?”

She looked at him, imploringly. You don’t want to know the answer to that, Zal, her eyes said, not tonight of all nights. She was determined not to ruin anything.

Perhaps he got the message — in any case, he gave his watch one more look and finally said, “Look, we’re officially late. We’ve got to go. I don’t want to blow this. I really want to do this for you — just enjoy it, okay?”

Again she let her wrist be taken and her feet nudged along. By the time they got to the great big lobby with its hallway full of elevators, she told herself it would be fine. They were cutting it close, but whatever was coming wasn’t going to get them for a little while anyway, that much she knew.

The elevators opened on the top of the building, the 106th floor, and Asiya felt the ground beneath her give a little. She stumbled, and Zal caught her just in time.

“Whoa, not used to heels, are you?” he said, trying to make a joke as he held on to her shoulders. “You okay?”

She looked very pale. She nodded anemically as she peered over the hostess booth to the room beyond it.

“Windows on the World,” Zal declared. “Great name, right? It sounds like we’re at the top of the world, and we kind of are!”

She nodded again, wiping her forehead. She was sweating, a cold sweat. “Is it harder to breathe up here? Air thinner or something?” She was using her hands to fan herself, as if egging on the air to rush into her system.

Zal motioned to the hostess, who was busy with two other couples in front of them. “It’s going to be fine, Asiya. Come on, it’s your birthday and this is a nice place. Just enjoy it. Everyone can breathe here, see? It’s all okay.”

She nodded. She tried to shake the anxious thoughts away and focused instead on Zal, his pride, his glowing handsomeness, him in his suit and her in her dress — how far they had come. “I’m so sorry, Zal. Just some vertigo. I’m fine. This is all so lovely.”

He gave her that look she knew would have been a smile if he had been able.

The hostess, a pretty girl in fashionable red-framed glasses, smiled and winked, not minding “Mr. Hendricks’s” lateness, which Zal profusely apologized for, and she led them through the large bar and dining area to a small intimate table by the window.

It was actually hard to avoid a window, as the place, true to its name, was surrounded. It was a massive space, with a multi-tiered, winding bar area, red-lit and packed with groups of men in expensive suits and smaller groups of younger women in short dresses, everyone drinking a martini or cosmopolitan or something that required a long stem and an olive or a cherry, Zal noted. Along the windows there was the dining area, darker, quieter, more intimate, but still prime for people-watching. It was a place to see and be seen, Zal thought, a place that was all about spectacle, a place he’d normally never care for. He thought neither would Asiya, but this was a special occasion, and so certainly they could both appreciate the otherworldliness of their experience. When else would they get to do this?

Zal focused on what interested him more than people-watching: what was outside the window. On eye level there was just the sky, a perfect black sky. It was hard to imagine they were rooted in the ground, he felt so suspended. And then just below, all the lights: light upon light upon light, networks of Christmas-light-like tangled incandescence netted New York and Brooklyn and some of New Jersey and who knew what more. He felt like he could indeed see the whole world, that it was actually a window on the world. He felt like he was perched on a narrow branch and that with just the slightest inclination he could be up and away, into the dark everlasting heavens above New York.

He snapped out of his fantasy in time to remember why they were there, and he immediately apologized for the long silence. Just barely prying himself from the view, he moved that they order drinks while they decided on what they wanted to order. “How’s that sound?” he asked the empty chair in front of him.

Asiya was gone.

Zal panicked, dashing around the entire circumference of Windows on the World, scanning everyone several times, tapping several wrong women with bare shoulders (he wasn’t used to seeing Asiya dressed up, so he’d already forgotten what the dress was like, except that it was strapless), and finally getting to a waitress who got to a manager to whom he reported his missing girlfriend—“she just vanished in thin air,” the manager repeated and pretended to write down verbatim, nodding calmly all the while. The manager, who was not happy Zal was creating such a scene and was not even entirely convinced there was a girlfriend until the hostess backed him up, assured Zal he was alerting WTC security. Zal blamed himself over and over for ignoring Asiya’s ill health, for ignoring her rushes of discomfort, for ignoring that maybe they weren’t ready to be that star-and-starlet couple of the movies who could do nights like this, until finally a female employee of the restaurant came dashing to him with a big smile and news: “Your girlfriend is okay!”

“She is?!”

“Well, not really, actually. The good news is she’s here; the bad news is she’s been in the bathroom the whole time and she’s a bit shaken up. She appears to have fainted and is now having a bit of a panic attack—”