Porochista Khakpour - The Last Illusion

“I’m having a terrible time!” Zal said.

“I thought you were doing really, really, really well?” Hendricks looked up.

Both men, on the ground, on their knees, gathering yogurt beetles, paused, looking into each other’s eyes.

Zal nodded slowly. “I’m confused, Father,” he said. “And if you want to know the truth. .” He took a deep breath.

“I do, son, trust me, I do.”

He closed his eyes as he said it. “Those, these, they’re yogurt-covered insects. Beetles.”

Hendricks didn’t say a word and just gave him a long, hard stare. He removed his hands from the candies and wiped them on his slacks.

“I eat insects, Father,” Zal confessed. “I’ve been doing it for years.”

Hendricks nodded slowly. “People do it, I suppose.”

Zal opened his eyes, but looked down. “Well, you know why I do.”

Hendricks paused and then nodded slowly. “I see.”

“But lately, I’m getting sick of it. Since I’ve been feeling, you know, more normal.” And Zal meant that — the yogurt beetles were one of only three insect snacks he had slowly reintroduced in the apartment, after a failed quit, as compared with the nearly dozen of a year ago.

“That’s good,” Hendricks said softly, a strange hurt look on his face.

Zal sighed. And if he’d gone that far, why couldn’t he go all the way?

“And one other thing,” Zal said. “Since, you know, I’m confessing.”

Hendricks held his breath for a moment. “Go ahead.”

“I’m still seeing Asiya. She’s in the bathroom. Asiya!”

For a second nothing happened, and he finally got up and knocked, and when the door opened just a sliver, he whispered something and led her out, by the wrist.

She smiled a watery, confused smile, relieved to be occupied with the mess of yogurt-coated insects on the ground.

“Hello!” Hendricks said to her, trying too hard to be cheerful. “How nice to see you!”

She said nothing, but managed a wave.

Hendricks’s eyes turned to Zal, who looked agonized.

“I just want everything in the open now, Father,” he said. “And here it all is.”

Hendricks rose to his feet and met his son’s gaze, still with a strange look.

“You’ve grown up, Zal,” he said. “That’s okay. You have your own life, things I’ll never know about.” His eyes turned to Asiya’s, which were still on the ground.

Zal nodded, more slowly, a sudden peace floating over him. “I think everything will be better from now on.”

And both Asiya and Hendricks looked to him for that promise, as if it were really true, as if it weren’t that August suddenly, as if things were really going to be different, as if he had all the answers — Zal, of all people.

Bran Silber’s phone was buzzing with calls and text messages — all Oliver Manning, of course — popping up again and again as “Papa Mans.” He did not like to be kept waiting, not now, of course, not with just a few weeks left. But Silber, as the date of the illusion got closer, was no longer one to dart up to his feet from bed after his usual 9.5 hours of beauty sleep. Instead, some days he’d linger in bed, having spent three of those 9.5 until his alarm went off fully conscious. He was wearing the same things every day, and not the metallic overalls, either, but just a black T-shirt and black jeans, his least Silberish look. He was avoiding his home and office gyms, his tanning booth, even the “products” for his hair, face, and body. He’d become one of those people who moved slowly, who took a while to answer a question if he did at all, who dreaded another day, who was often found by assistants — finally, after folks from cooks to Manning had needed him for hours, always needing something or other — hunched over his work desk, his face collapsed in his hands. When he’d finally look up, they’d shrink from the expectation of tears or some sign of anguish, but every time it would be the same: an expression of blandness, dead nothing, gold eyes that were suddenly just yellow.

Bran Silber was finally — on the verge of his most stunning spectacle — entirely depressed.

How did it happen? He didn’t know exactly. Was it when Manning started getting more and more difficult, bitching about the size of the “pillar in the pool,” the impossibility of media cooperation in airing it, his constant doubt about how to pull off the illusion perfectly? He didn’t think so. Was it the season of loneliness, now that all the lovers had been sent running by Silber’s work schedule and, worse, his lack of libido? It couldn’t be. Was it that he’d lost interest in magic, in illusion, in spectacle? He couldn’t imagine it. Was it all the interviews, the constant pressure for hints and winks and the usual Silberish razzle-dazzle drivel? Maybe, maybe not, but that felt closest. Because the one thing they — everyone who didn’t know him in particular but had followed his career — wanted to know was: So. . what does it all mean?

What did any of it mean? Silber would ask himself some nights, all alone in the Silbertorium instead of at home, just pacing the curves of the monster platform and all the mess of wires and stands and light cranes. Where it had all come from seemed a logical place to start. He tried over and over to take himself back to the season when it all began, 1999, fresh off the successes of the Flight Triptych, that triumph of theme, in the final breaths of Y2K season. Was it just the mass insanity of that season? What made him go there? What made any of them think so big, so much further than made sense, imagine it all gone, the nothing of absolutely everything, and yet live through that period, humor it, reason it out, rationalize it, expect and yet forget, cooperate with the end of ends as if it were written out in something other than fear and numbers and miscalculation and superstition, 99 + 1 = 00 = 0000 = a synonym for nothing if you wanted to be literal, everyone in the nightmare of the figurative gone literal and accepting it, as if it was not just the soapy fever of magical thinking for a season or two, as if they were not going to wake up from it and pretend it never was, like a bad one-night stand better left blamed on alcohol and filed under forgotten, like an embarrassment so grand in scale better revised and deleted if possible — better for life just to move on and away and onto bigger and better, isn’t that what they’d say, what they’d advise?

Bigger and better. In the dark, in the no-glitter of the Silbertorium, which became just what it was in the evening unlit — just a big cold Brooklyn warehouse filled with the incredibly expensive nonsense trappings of one man’s imagination — he questioned his illusion: but was it bigger and better? Why did he hear himself say over and over that this would be the one, The One, The One and Only? Did he say that every time? He didn’t, he was pretty sure. He had learned to leave them always wanting more, to exit with an open door, hinting at something more colossal to come. Maybe the bigger and better in his mind was just a substitute for something that he, at fifty-two, simply could not quite face: it was maybe the last .

At the prompting of the final press releases and several urgent major profiles in the papers, he gave the event a title before he was quite ready, a title he did not like: the Fall of the Towers. It was descriptive, yes, but, as the last interviewer asked, What is it all about?

How did he not know what the illusion meant? he wondered. And if he didn’t know, who the hell exactly was pulling the strings here?

He had laughed it off, tried to make the interviewer feel stupid for asking, a question you did not ask an artist like Bran Silber, America’s greatest illusionist. He had done all he could to hide that it was the very question he was grappling with day and night, especially night.