The Last Illusion (12 page)

If not for her voice, he may not have known she was a girl. Her small whisper of a voice was by far the most feminine thing he’d ever heard. It made him think of the sound flower petals might make rubbed against each other. There was a sibilance to everything, a delicacy and fragility that Zal was man enough to understand meant female. He liked that voice very much, loved being in the company of that sweet, wispy voice of hers. He thought about telling her how much he liked it, but he wasn’t sure if that was something normal humans did at this stage or even a thing a girl like that would like—she probably wanted to sound more like a boy, like him.

He also liked that she seemed unable to tell that there was anything off with him. When he ordered a vegetable soup and tea, she said she would like the same. He blushed when she did that, felt a great degree of pride.

He also noticed she never smiled. He found it comforting in someone who was not, say, his father, whose smile and laughter he loved and felt downright sheltered by, even if he couldn’t return it. For a moment he wondered: could she be like him?

She couldn’t. He would have known the story. Rhodes and Hendricks had filled him with all the dozens in history and around the globe—mostly, he thought, in an effort to make him feel less like an anomaly.

But he knew there was something different in her. Certainly something people would see as wrong. But he didn’t, couldn’t—how could he?

“What?” she was saying in that voice, over and over.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I was just lost in my thoughts. Did you say something?”

She shook her head. She looked down at a big black digital wristwatch.

“Six hours,” she said.

“For what?”

“
Till
what,” she corrected. “New Year’s, of course, 2000. Are you ready?”

Zal nodded. He was, he supposed. But he knew everywhere people were losing their minds over this one.

“What are your plans?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I had a party to go to, but I don’t want to go.”

She took this as a line, a flirtation, and turned a bit red. As if it were bait, she bit. “I have some parties, too. And I don’t want to go.”

Zal took this as a problem. They were both without a plan. “We could treat this as any other day. Eat, sleep, you know.”

She was almost shocked by his attitude—he seemed entirely unfazed by the possibility of the world ending, or at the very least all financial systems collapsing.

“That’s what I would like to do,” she said, sighing a bit. “But, you know, this one could be different.”

Zal paused. “You mean the world ending and all that? Computers going crazy? Bombs launched?”

He wasn’t making a joke, but it sounded like one. Asiya laughed with her eyes.

“You’re right,” she said. “It is probably silly of me. But I have to say, I’ve been having these .
.
.” She took a deep breath and stopped.

“What?” Zal asked.

When she opened her eyes—it took a second—she shook her head, gently, peacefully, as if hushing a newborn. “No, nothing. I guess I just want to do something different.”

“Really?”

She thought about it. “Yes. Even if it means hiding.”

“Hiding?”

“Yes.”

“Hiding from what? Oh, that stuff
?”

“No. But, you know. Anything. Isn’t it fun to hide? Didn’t you play hide-and-seek as a kid?”

He shook his head. “I’ve heard of it, though.”

She squinted her eyes. “Where are you from?”

He sighed. “Long story. Mostly here.”

She nodded. “You had crazy parents or at least a crazy life then too. I didn’t play hide-and-seek either, but it sounds fun.”

Zal nodded, looking down at his soup. “Yes, I had a crazy parent, I guess you’d say, and a crazy life.”

She wanted to hold his shaking white hand that was working so hard to balance the contents of his spoon on the way to his mouth. She wanted to hold it and maybe kiss it. He reminded her of something, but nothing of other men. For a second she thought maybe he reminded her of the birds she photographed, her lifelong project of birds in their various states of decay. She couldn’t tell him that, of course—
you resemble a bird in the initial stages of decomposition!
—but she thought that for a second. Or maybe they had met before. She wasn’t sure, but the anxious/clairvoyant new side of her told her he was important, that with him she’d be safe, that this meeting meant something more.

“Hiding could be fun, I suppose,” he finally said after their longest silence of the evening.

“We don’t have to hide, exactly,” she said, and she hoped it wouldn’t sound like it sounded to add, “We could do what you want.” And yet a part of her hoped it did.

He took another spoonful of soup. He couldn’t remember the last person who had said that to him, who had in fact asked that of him with a statement like that. Rhodes questioned for other reasons, and Hendricks demanded, and Silber fell in the category of those who were so awed by his freakdom that they had absolutely nothing but questions. But no one really ever asked him what he wanted.

“If you’re asking me really,” he began, “I guess I would like to go home.”

She had a fallen face already, but even a face like that had some distance further to fall. He replayed his sentence over in his head and caught himself.

“I mean, I would like it if we went to my home now that we’re done eating.”

Her eyes seemed to brighten a bit, and she turned red again. She did not expect him to be that forward. “I don’t know.”

This time he turned red. “You don’t have to. Come, I mean.”

Pause. “I’d like to,” she said slowly, after a long silence.

“Good,” he said.

“Good,” she said.

She pushed her soup toward him and he noticed it was barely touched. He finished it for her.

The bill came, and Zal put down his portion and she put down hers, and he went to the bathroom and she went to the bathroom, and they walked out.

“Nobody, other than my father, has ever been to my apartment,” he said as they walked over.

She didn’t believe him, but didn’t say a word.

“Nobody, other than my father, has ever been to my apartment,” he repeated, after the many flights up, outside his door.

Asiya nodded. “Extraordinary day for extraordinary moves.” She was being sarcastic, but he didn’t get it.

Zal opened the door and looked at it with her, as if for the first time; he had no idea what an outsider would think, but consoled himself with the idea that his father had set it all up and hung out there and certainly would not have created an abnormal environment for Zal, his son, whom Hendricks so badly wanted to grow up as normal as he could,
considering.

It was a studio, almost a perfect box, he thought, with one wall that had two large windows, with the shades drawn as they faced out just over the other shades-drawn windows of another apartment just some feet away. It was a little dark, maybe just a little too dark, maybe. There was a bed—made, thank goodness, he thought, as recently he had skipped a day here and there in spite of what Hendricks had always reminded him about proper grown men and made beds. The sheets were dark blue and plain—a reasonable choice, he thought. There was a desk, bare except for a computer and an alarm clock and, it appeared, some receipts—the true extent of disarray, really. Of course, underneath it and the bed were those coffee tins with the insect snacks, but they were not visible, he thought, not in a way to arouse suspicion anyway. There were small weights and physical therapy resistance bands lying in one corner of the room, a boom box, a small chest of drawers, and a trash can. There were two plain plastic chairs and a matching coffee table, enough really for one. The walls were bare except for two framed photos Hendricks had put up—one of Hendricks and his wife, Nilou, when they were very young, smiling hard, in a way that Zal often thought must hurt the face to do. The other was of Zal, young, in the arms of Hendricks—it was one of those very early ones, but, unlike some of them, one in which he did not look so deformed at all. He looked half his real age and pale and skinny, but nothing he thought that would look abnormal to this stick figure black-and-white girl.

“You just moved here, right?”

“Sort of,” Zal said, which wasn’t entirely untrue.

She was looking at the photos. “You are very close to your father.”

He nodded.

“I’m not,” she said, “close to my father. What does your dad do?”

“He’s an analyst,” he said. “Specializes in children.” He thought of Hendricks—was
he
abnormal in any way? Behavioral analysts everywhere had to have kids, he thought.

There was silence. What did Rhodes say to do when silence makes you feel bad?

Echo
.

“What does your dad do?” he asked her.

She sighed, very audibly. She shook her head. She sighed again. She sat on a plastic chair. “I don’t see him at all. But he works for Boeing.”

He nodded absently. It meant nothing to him.
There is nothing wrong with asking questions, though,
Rhodes would also say. “What is that?”

“What’s what?”

“Bing, did you say?”

“Oh, Boeing. You don’t know? Oh, um, they make planes.”

They make planes.
Airplanes, he thought, the giant roaring aluminum-alloyed birds that he did not like one bit. “Oh, I don’t know about those.”

She looked at him funny. “You’ve flown.” It refused to be a question.

He shook his head. “No.” He paused. “Actually, once, when I was little. But I don’t remember.”

She nodded. “I don’t know how I knew that, but I somehow knew you had never really flown. I mean, I know you didn’t know Boeing, but that’s not really a tip-off. Lately I just know things.”

Zal nodded. He had no idea what she meant. “What would you like to do?” he asked. “And how do you say your name again?”

“I don’t know what,” she said. “
AWE-see-ya.
”

“
AWE-see-ya.
” He pretended to dust his counters with his hand, as Hendricks sometimes did.

She was bored. “I don’t know what we could do. Weird day. Probably will be crazy out there. We could
?
.
.
.”

And just then he saw it on the fridge: a note.
Z—Must have missed you, will be back later, will bring the TV, we can watch the pin drop at Times Square—happy 2000! Love, Pops

Zal immediately panicked. Any minute his father could come home and see him with this strange woman whose name he could barely say. And on the flip side, any minute this woman could meet his strange father who held the keys to his entire strange past, that he would no doubt somehow manage to unload on her, not considering Zal’s investment or feelings or anything, just thinking Zal probably hadn’t done it, just thinking it was probably best he do it, that it would be best to have all the facts, the whole damn story, out in the open, so she could go ahead and treat Zal the way everyone else did: extremely carefully. He would once more find himself in one of those special-considerations relationships, where his story would eclipse him—and them, even—swallow them up and spit them out, and once again leave Zal the loneliest man on earth.

He could not allow the two of them to meet. Not yet, at least. He would maybe have to have a talk with Hendricks soon—if, that is (and he knew he was jumping all guns), she or any girl, really, was going to be in his life, but if she wasn’t, he had no idea why she was there, why she was tolerating him, why for hours—had it really been hours?—she had followed him and asked what he wanted and mirrored his food selections and not made him feel stupid for not knowing the B-something name of airplanes and still didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to leave, wouldn’t want to leave, until of course the thing to end all dates—what was a date exactly?—would burst through the door: a parent.

“We have to go,” he said as he crumpled the note. He quickly uncrumpled it and desperately grabbed a pencil on his desk and wrote on the back:
No, Father
—Hendricks alone called himself “Pops,” and only in those notes he left—
I cannot do that. With a friend. Will be back at a later time. Do not worry.
He paused and added, for extra normalness, since he knew his father would be suspicious something bad-extraordinary had happened,
Happy 2000 too.