Porochista Khakpour - The Last Illusion

When he got there, the gate was wide-open and the door was wide-open. On the couch was a woman he had never seen before, an older woman with her head in her hands, shocks of short white hair poking through her knuckles. She slowly became aware of his presence and looked up to face him. There was something a bit breathtaking about her. At first he thought it was just her eccentric appearance: she was dressed in a long black tunic, limbs wiry and lithe and white, as minimal as a one-dimensional rendering, with lips painted so red they looked black. But then he realized that what was making his heart race was her perfect resemblance to the woman he’d just lost — she was the exact reflection of an older Asiya.

He knew at once who it was.

“Mrs. McDonald?”

“Shell,” she said without a smile. “Shell Hooper. And you are?”

“Zal Hendricks. Asiya’s boyfriend.”

She blinked, stared back blankly. It was possible she didn’t know. “Are you in touch with Daisy?”

Daisy . Zal began to get into it, but before he got even a few words out, the woman’s face crumpled as if it were a piece of paper. A high-pitched sound came, nonhuman and unrelenting, like the scream of a smoke alarm. And he realized that this woman, Shell Hooper, was crying. She collapsed back on the couch again, and Zal almost embraced her but stopped just short of the presumption, taking a seat next to her. He told her what had happened to her daughter.

“I’m so sorry about Asi—” he quickly caught himself—“ Daisy. It’s so awful, but Willa said lawyers were looking—”

Her sobs accumulated, grew louder, and her body shuddered harder. He noticed she was shaking her head more violently, the more he said.

“Mrs. Shell, Mrs. Hooper, what is it, what is it. .” he began to say, suddenly sensing something was wrong, feeling the house full of an artificial draft, as if it were museum air, as if it had long been empty, something very different from what he had known entirely.

After several moments she looked up, met his eyes with her now red-cracked ones, and, still trembling, told him what she soon realized he did not know. “It’s not Daisy that’s. . that’s causing this. . It’s. . it’s. . her sister.”

“Willa,” Zal numbly mouthed, looking up at her room, wanting suddenly to run up to it.

“She’s gone.” Shell gasped out the words.

“Gone?”

“Gone,” she whispered, as if anything louder would take her back to sobs. “She died yesterday.”

Zal felt like the giant pendulum had swung and hit him square in the skull.

“She did it to herself,” she went on. “Yesterday. Zach wasn’t home, of course. But he came and found that she had opened her window and jumped out.”

“Opened her window? But she lived on that bed, she couldn’t—”

Shell was nodding, looking a bit irked. “It was apparently her first time properly out of that bed in ages. She had made it across the room. She had lost weight, you know. .”

Zal nodded. “Had Zach seen her walk before?”

Shell snorted. “He knew nothing about her or her state lately. She had the caretaker. Who had been coming less and less, due to Willa’s instructions. I don’t know what the hell happened in this goddamned house, but I have one daughter dead and another in fucking jail.”

The profanities, especially those uttered by others, made Zal nervous, as usual — and of course reminded him of Asiya, so like Asiya she was in so many ways — but he understood.

“Where is Zach?” Zal finally asked, when he could think of something to stay.

“Zach is at some friend’s. Zach could never stand me. And this — he can’t deal with things. Zach is a bit off , you know.” Zal just stared at the floor, not wanting to make his agreement known. “Hell, all my children are, apparently! And, well, there’s me.”

Zal looked at her, uneasy. She seemed capable of anything, this slight woman, raven-like almost, a shiny, glittering loose cannon amidst considerable tragedy.

“I need something to drink,” she finally said, and went to the kitchen.

Zal sat there, in that new air of the house, with all its doors open, Willa’s bedroom window also presumably open, this strange veranda-like museum of a home, empty and silent and cold. When she was out of the way, the enormity of the event hit him. Willa. Willa was gone.

Willa, his secret love.

Willa, whom he had never been able to love.

Willa, who had never been loved.

Zal suddenly heard himself make a high-pitched sound, unlike a human too, the sound of a bird at the end of its life, still holding on. He imagined Willa in her final moment, half her size, and yet still a thing of weight, the opposite of a bird in every way — perhaps that’s why he had loved her so, how rooted she was, how planted she was, how immovable her condition had made her — and yet her final gesture had almost been in mockery of one. He imagined her arms in a flap, futile, and the concrete below so quickly meeting all that body of hers.

And he wondered how he couldn’t have known. How Asiya had never known, how Zachary hadn’t, how Shell hadn’t. Wasn’t it obvious that Willa was absolutely miserable? That she of all people was entitled to suicide? What had her life amounted to? Apparently only in depression was she losing the weight that had made her depressed in the first place, most likely. It was a double bind. Freedom from the thing that was killing her was the thing that killed her.

How did they all go about living in a world like this, a world made of such hard anti-logic?

Eventually Shell came back, with two glasses and a couple of bottles of something in her arms.

“I know this is crazy, to drink champagne at a time like this, but this is apparently all they have stocked here,” she sighed as she popped the cork, wincing as if it were a gunshot. She poured a glass for her and a glass for him, without even asking.

It was the same pink champagne they had drunk on the night of Willa’s birthday, he suddenly realized. How recent that felt, how clearly he could see Willa’s soft face in the glow of candles, smiling serenely at their relentless foolishness that evening.

“I loved her,” Zal said after his second glass.

Shell, on her fourth, didn’t say anything, so he said it again.

“Did she know that?” Shell muttered finally. “Don’t answer that.”

She drank silently as the hours waned onward and the house grew dark, still all exposed to the elements, with its open windows and doors.

“What about Asiya?” he asked when it finally occurred to him.

“What about her?” Shell hissed, obviously drunk, her eyes rolling strangely. “Call her Daisy, please, it’s her name.”

Zal didn’t bother to nod. “Does she know about Willa?”

Shell didn’t answer and just lay back, her eyes barely open. He assumed not. He, like Asiya’s own mother, was suddenly disconnected from Asiya and whatever world and state she was in.

But she had been right: Willa had been in danger, like Asiya had said months ago. And by that anti-logic, and the very illogic in the air that season, she had to be right: it was all going to hell — that was clear.

Just as he was to never see Willa again, he never saw Shell again after that night, and he never saw Zachary after whatever that last time he saw him was. If there was a funeral for Willa, he had not been invited.

And it felt like he wasn’t going to see Asiya again, either, but he couldn’t accept that it could be true. Instead, he did what Willa had said, her final instruction to him seeming almost sacred at this point: he went home and waited for the Asiya situation to resolve itself.