Porochista Khakpour - The Last Illusion

“Zach, please!” Zal cried. “It’s about Asiya!”

“She’s not here,” he said. “Get the fuck out, before I beat you again.”

“I know she’s not here! That’s why I came to see you guys!”

Zachary’s hands started to ball into fists.

“Your sister is in jail!”

Zach looked at him and laughed, a dry bitter fake laugh. “You’re out of your mind! Get out.”

“I need to see Willa, please! I have to tell her!” And then he remembered, with some shame, how he had been found with Willa. Zal understood anger — he’d done quite a number on Zach’s world — but now was not the time.

Then, just like an angel answering a call for help, he heard Willa’s voice in the background.

Zachary yelled back, “It’s nothing, Willa. Just Asshole here, saying Asiya’s in jail!”

Willa said something else he couldn’t hear.

“Fuck you, Willa!” Zach shouted back, and slowly backed up, letting Zal in.

Zal nodded gratefully at Zach, but quickly got out of his sight by running up to Willa.

There she was on her bed. It had been a while. The last several times he’d been over, Asiya had said Willa was sick or not feeling well, and he hadn’t gone up to say hello. But now he saw evidence that something had indeed been off. Willa did not look well.

Willa had lost weight.

Zal knew it couldn’t be that much that fast, but she really appeared to be half her old size. She was lying on a bed she didn’t seem to require. It was hard to look at her, the woman he had so adored for her abundance somehow whittled away, slowly impoverished of all that made her so much.

His voice immediately softened as he saw her. “Hi, Willa. How are you?”

She smiled weakly and shrugged for a moment, and then a look of alarm darkened her face. “Zal, what is it?”

He had momentarily forgotten. He nodded and said, with urgency once again, “It’s Asiya. They took her away. To jail.”

“What?!”

“Yeah. For threats. Against a building, the World Trade, I’m sure. You know her whole end-of-the-world thing, right?”

Willa nodded, looking embarrassed, as if inheriting her sister’s shame. “I thought it was just the end of New York, but yeah, she’s said some things. How did they arrest her?”

“I have no idea! I thought you might know. They must have come here!”

Willa looked dazed, he realized. “I haven’t been feeling well lately. Sleeping a lot. I must have missed it. I can’t believe she didn’t make a sound, shout up to me, at least, let me know what was happening. Or even call after the fact.”

Zal nodded, also looking embarrassed, as if inheriting her misconduct. Here they were, the two people closest to Asiya, and at a crucial moment like this they could only be embarrassed of her, embarrassed by the association even. “What do we do?”

Willa shrugged. “I’ll call our parents.”

“Good, good,” Zal said. Her hand was already on her cell phone, his eyes on the ground. “I guess I mean, what should I do?”

Willa looked at him with wet eyes. When she lost it, it was always so subtle, so soft, so unlike Asiya, with all her sharp edges; Asiya the rectangle, her sister the cloud. “I think you should probably go home. And wait. What else is there?”

Zal nodded slowly. There was nothing else.

He left, just as Willa called Zachary up to her room. He decided not to take a cab and do the long hard work of waiting by taking long way: walking. He went the same route, that same pleasant zigzag they took the first time they came to her apartment, which Zal had since rejected for a more direct shortcut.

He was shell-shocked. Jail. How had it come to that? Was it the only thing that could stop her? Was she a threat? How had his once beloved photographer girlfriend turned into a criminal? He tried to imagine where she was, but all he got was cartoon images, men in black-and-white-striped jumpsuits, clinking mugs against a row of bars. That was not it, he knew, and this was not funny at all.

And he not only felt sorry for her but also for himself, which he knew was selfish, but still. He was without her again. And who knew for how long? He had lost his girlfriend in a way he never, ever imagined — the police had taken her away, before she could take herself away, before he could walk away, before some great big imminent unknown could close their chapter. And he had lost that thing that had made him one of them, the catalyst, the cause, and then the circumstance, the very thing that made him normal. He had lost his greatest chance at normalcy.

Asiya = normalcy was a lunatic equation, he knew, but nonetheless he suddenly realized how much he had needed Asiya all along.

And what was she thinking? What was going through her head right now? The final image he had of her — after the real final image of her hurling insults, many of which were made incoherent by the force of her sobs that last night — was her breathing hard breaths into a brown bag, as she so often did those days. In a way she had gotten what she wanted: something had happened, something was happening.

Silber had mostly put it behind him, now that the illusion was in its final stages and Manning and company were finally on his team again. But the one sentence that stood out from the whole letter read, I am a friend of someone you know, who I can reveal once I meet you . Every so often, on a break from ordering and overseeing and demanding and commanding, Silber would sit back, light a Fantasia, and think of that line. Who in the world? He knew so many freaks — it would be impossible to narrow them down. And yet, he played roulette with the characters in his lifetime and eliminated them one by one, during his off-hours, of which there should have been none, but Silber was of course master of making something out of nothing.

Indigo had seemed unwell since the letter arrived. She seemed thinner — not a bad thing, but a thing, since Indigo was a big girl and that was part of her head assistant allure: her imposing presence. She seemed wrapped up in herself, spiritually and in stature, which was all slouch, and her Silberish wordplay — previously pitched to harmonize with his — had become a watered-down version of its original incarnation. If Silber had the decency to really consider her, he’d have assumed she was depressed.

“Indy, look, I get it — I mean, I never thought I’d recover from Ofra Haza and DJ Screw both dying last year, and here I am,” Raj tried to console. The pop singer Aaliyah had died several days before in a plane crash in the Bahamas. It was no secret that she was Indigo’s favorite chanteuse — favorite celebrity even. Indigo had for days gone on about how fitting it was that her name meant “exalted one” in Arabic and that a German newspaper had run an interview just last month in which she said, It is dark in my favorite dream. Someone is following me. I don’t know why. I’m scared. Then suddenly I lift off, far away. How do I feel? As if I am swimming in the air, free, weightless. Nobody can reach me. Nobody can touch me. It’s a wonderful feeling.

“God,” Indigo had sighed, “I have the same exact dream.”

Lionel, the new assistant, had almost shut her down when Raj shook his head and quickly grabbed her for a hug.

But that had been days ago. And it had seemed like Indigo was doing better.

“I thought I was okay,” she said to Raj that day.

“You are. You are,” he said in that determined Raj way.

“What are we doing here?” she whispered to Raj, conspiratorially.

“We have the best jobs ever and you know it,” he whisper-hissed back.