The Last Illusion (13 page)

“Where to?”

“We have to go now,” Zal said. “Sorry. I don’t know where.”

“Right now?”

“Now! I mean, now. Yes. I mean, now would be good.”

She squinted her eyes at him. “Uh, okay.”

“It’s just that this place will be filled with .
.
. noise. And .
.
. my father.”

She nodded. “Of course, your father,” she said, in a tone he was too panicked to even attempt to read. “Well, we could walk to my apartment. It’s uptown.”

“That sounds nice!” He tried to sound very excited, but really he was panicked.

“But my little sister and brother will be there,” she said. “Definitely my little sister.”

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

He grabbed a coat and opened the door and, like the gentlemen of old movies, he said, “After you.”

He thought he heard her snort as she brushed by him and out the door. He thought he saw Hendricks—it was possible it was just another of the many Santa Claus-y older gentlemen of New York, but he could not afford to properly look—as they speed-walked to a subway going uptown. He was still in the clear, he thought: normal, or thereabouts.

She, too, gave him a disclaimer outside her door: “It’s depressing as fuck in here, know that.” He felt somehow alarmed at the word
fuck
on her
lips—it seemed too heated a word for the odd, cold girl,
fuck
having that equal and opposite effect on him as, say, laughter would have on her. She did not wear it well.

They both took a deep breath and went in.

If you asked Zal what a nice apartment was, he would have told you, well, his father’s or Silber’s. He was usually not so impressed. But this was unlike the dusty book-filled old loft of his father’s, or Silber’s ultra-edgy minimalist townhouse. This was old New York, as he had seen in photos. It was huge, a whole brownstone. Chandeliers, floral wallpaper, bits of gold and marble and pearl and shiny woods of sorts he’d never seen, sculptures and china that all looked like it belonged in a museum or on a cake.

“Depressing,” she said. “I hate it here. My parents’ since forever.” She was a bit red and suddenly seemed annoyed, possibly embarrassed to the point of irritation.

Zal felt uncomfortable. “I would rather live here,” he said, honestly.

“No, you wouldn’t.”

“I think I would. I don’t find it depressing.”

“No,” she said firmly and walked around, checking out rooms. “It’s a mess, and my brother and sister are both home, so, well, here you go. This is all so weird.”

“It is,” Zal had to agree.

“Little over four more hours,” she said, waving her watch at him. “What do you think is going to happen anyway?”

“I don’t have any idea,” Zal said. “Probably nothing, is what my father says, though.”

“A lot of shit could hit the fan,” she said, grabbing an apple from a large bowl holding apples in every color they came in, it appeared to him. There she went again—
shit
—cursing.
Shit
and
apple
contradicted each other so thoroughly, he thought he went deaf and blind for a moment. It appeared in her own home she suddenly fell into this cursing self. He tried not to be bothered by it. “I mean, I know I don’t know you, but get ready—I will probably be a pain closer to midnight.”

“A pain how?”

“OZ!!” came a shout from upstairs, echoing the way it would in a concert hall, Zal imagined.

“My sister,” Asiya explained, looking more annoyed. “One sec.” She stomped—really drove home her annoyance with that stomp—upstairs into another room.

Zal seated himself on one of the many large white couches, of a material he had never felt, the skin of something soft and almost mythical-feeling, maybe not even real, like a unicorn or pegasus or something. He felt like he was in a painting. He looked up at one of the many actual paintings, this one of a young woman in a blue dress and pearls with silver hair. It looked from another time, another place. The background was yellow and blurry. It was hard to say if she was young or old. He wondered if she had ever existed, really.

Asiya came back minutes later, still with uneaten apple in hand, and stared at Zal. “TV?”

“What about your sister?”

She simply shook her head.

“Do I meet her?”

She shook her head again. And then again. “I mean, I don’t care. You could. I don’t even know you.”

Cursing and suddenly saying that all the time. It was true, they did not know each other, but somehow the stating of it felt hostile to Zal.

“I don’t have to,” he told her, trying to say it more gently than he had ever said anything in his life. He wanted so badly—in a way that even surprised him—to get along with this abnormal, normal girl.

“I don’t care,” she said again. “You want to? You have to go to her.”

Zal nodded and did not move still.

“You know why?”

Zal shook his head.

“You been to a freak show? Like the one in Coney Island or whatever?”

Zal shook his head again.
Freak show.
He had not been, but he knew about them.
Freak
was a derisive word some had used for him in his life, and he had even been told to
go back to the freak show where you belong
by a cruel and stupid neighbor child who had caught wind of his story, back when he lived with Hendricks. It was difficult for him to hear it, ever. He worried for a moment if she suddenly knew or was somehow about to attack him.

“Well, get ready,” she said. “My sister is a fucking freak.”

Fucking.

Freak.

She did not even lower her voice, in the echoing home.

“How do you mean that exactly?” Zal said, still in a quiet voice, fighting hard not to get upset by her subtle but disturbing transformation.

“Why don’t I show you?” she snapped, loudly. She seemed angry.

“I really don’t have to meet her.”

“OZ!!” as if on cue, the freak called again.

“Just in time!” Asiya said, eyes huge, in an expression of exaggerated annoyance. “Let’s go, why don’t we!”

She held a hand out to him, the hand she had not held out when they hadn’t shaken before, the hand that had for a second ordered him to
relax
at the sight of the dead bird.

He took her hand.

It felt cold and bony.

They walked up a set of spiral stairs and through a hallway filled with those types of paintings of very unreal-looking people of ageless, placeless identification, and suddenly they were at a very large, dark bedroom with no door, just an empty archway where a door obviously had been removed at some point.

Inside: nothing but a very large bed. On the bed: nothing but a very large human being, the largest human being Zal had ever seen in his life, larger than he thought possible.

The freak.

“My sister Willa,” Asiya—no doubt red, though in the lack of light it was hard to tell—said, back in her usual whispery voice. She raised it a bit for the sister: “Willa, a friend I made today. Zal.”

He reached out a hand.

“No, Willa can’t get out of bed, so you have to go to her,” Asiya said. “Willa, say hello this minute, please.” She talked to this large human like a mother, an angry mother, Zal noted.

“Hello,” came a voice from all that flesh, a thick, husky voice padded by lots of heavy breathing. “Oz, can you flip the lights on? I can’t see him.”

Asiya sighed and turned the light on. “Here you are, Willa,” she said. “Or should I say here you are, Zal?”

Her eyes flashed at Zal, somehow challenging him, but he did not notice.

He knew by now that it was not polite to stare—people had done it to him all his life, until recently, it seemed, when he appeared closer to normal—but he couldn’t help it. He had never seen a person like this, all flesh, rolls and rolls of flesh, with some amber-colored curls clinging to a huge head with two tiny eyes that were almost hidden and a tiny pair of rose lips tucked into all that slightly ruddy face. She had to be three or four times his size, he estimated.

He reached his hand out to her, and she extended one of her giant arms, with their surprisingly little hands at the ends, pudgy but still somehow delicate fingers, with carefully pink-polished tiny fingernails.

Her hand, unlike Asiya’s, was plentiful and hot—sweaty, in fact.

It felt good.

She made an expression that looked like maybe it was a smile at him, but he wasn’t sure how to look at her even. She dropped her eyes and smoothed out the huge lavender sheet that covered most of her body, under which she wore what appeared to be a white lace housedress of some sort.

“You cold, Willa?” Asiya asked, fiddling with the thermostat.

She shook her head, looking up again at Zal.

Zal hadn’t broken his gaze once.

He could not stop staring at her.

She was the most beautiful person he had ever seen.

Why did Zal find Willa McDonald beautiful?

Theory no. 1:
Because he didn’t know any better. Because Zal had not grown up with a mother, female relatives, female friends, even, no girlie mags, no fashion mags, no pinups or porn stars or supermodels or strippers or whores or anything to add up to any problematic image of womanhood. Hendricks and Rhodes had recommended old movie classics to him, for their proper formalities and nice manners, packaged in tidy plot arcs with easily digested moral and lesson-infused thematics—so, yes, there was that, but all the Doris Days, Betty Grables, and Marilyn Monroes even in the world could not have taught him what was
really
sexy, much less
really
beautiful, in a
real
woman. Zal was, as all known ferals were, asexual, they had decided. A thing of beauty was never a thing of sex—Zal was apparently missing that microchip, altogether lacking that drive that seemed to define men and their actions. At best, an apricot and Brigitte Bardot had the same appeal to him; Sophia Loren could be just as nice to watch as flamingos frolicking on a nature show; Rita Hayworth was as stunning as a Caribbean sunset, but nothing more. He would take toffee-glazed crickets any day over, say, Ava Gardner in his bed. Or even Clark Gable or Rudolph Valentino or Steve McQueen, and what was the difference actually? He was simply of a different mode when it came to sexuality, a frequency that was just about, if not exactly, nil.

Theory no. 2:
For what she was, precisely. When he saw Willa McDonald, some words that came to his mind (this was a Rhodes exercise, conveyed as usual through a mess of feral-friendly metaphorics like “watching thoughts like word-clouds” and “capturing them like butterflies in a net”):
Plenty. Abundance. Luxury. Leisure
. He knew those words added up to a Jaguar or Mercedes ad, but that was what he saw. He recalled Hendricks having equated
fat
with
unhealthy
many times, but for the most part, he could never see it that way. It was the skinny ones, like the dying, the diseased, like the near-proverbial children in Africa, that were sick. When he saw flesh and lots of it, he saw rest, relaxation, repose—he saw America, a rich country, a country with more than it knew what to do with. He saw something sturdy in its substance, not flesh that was fluttering, in constant burn and race and hustle, plus anxiety and panic and constant instability, like the entirety of that great American exception, his city, New York. He saw someone immovable, whole, solid, grounded. He saw solid finite earth, the opposite of impossible endless sky. He saw a woman, a superwoman, a festival of womanhood—not a girl, not a stick-figure-for-a-girl, as Asiya was, as so many of the city’s females seemed insistently to be. More than anything he saw what he imagined feeling—an all-encompassing warmth, the deepest and richest all-sheltering human warmth, a sticky warmth, a sweaty warmth, a swallowing maybe-even warmth, plus a strong accompanying smell of female human musk, the kind babies must crave when they cry.