The Last Illusion (16 page)

Her
words, not his.

“Welcome to my little cage!” she announced as they came in. She caught herself: “See, I did it again! I’m serious, I didn’t say that on purpose. I just think that to myself because of all the birds in here, not because of you!”

Zal nodded glumly. He smelled something that did not smell right. He looked to the small wooden boxes by the open window. “Well, cages have
living
birds in them anyway.”

“That’s true .
.
. Do you really want to see this stuff, Zal? I suddenly feel weird about bringing you here. I mean, you really do?”

Really: no, Zal did not. But he didn’t want to tell her that, and he thought he could shake the feeling anyway. He wanted the girl to know that he supported what she did—after all, she had taken his story without a qualm, a judgment, without horror, disbelief. She had taken him in just as he was—he owed her the same, he felt.

“My story didn’t upset you, did it, Asiya?”

She shook her head. “Why should it?”

“It’s unusual. People don’t run into a story like mine.”

“That’s true. But it’s an interesting one.” She picked up one of the small boxes, looked inside, and quickly sprayed the contents with something chemical-smelling. “Why, have people judged you badly in the past? Freaked out?”

Zal shook his head. “I really haven’t been close to anyone after it all happened. Just my father, my doctor.”

She tried to smile and failed. She suddenly felt depressed, looking at the bird bones with bits of flesh and feather hanging on. She inspected the other boxes—they were worse, too much meat on their bones, too graphic, one even gathering some insects. “I don’t want to do this, Zal.”

She looked like she was going to cry suddenly.

“Do what?”

She pointed to the boxes. “I don’t want to show you them. I don’t even want to be here.”

He wished he could hold her, as he had done in the basement, but in the light, this next day, after that whirlwind of a day, the supposedly last day on earth, a small distance now revealed itself between them—normalcy, he guessed—and he couldn’t. “I don’t have to see the actual stuff. What about the art?”

“Some of it
is
the art,” she said. “Installation, sculpture. But I take photos of some. It’s just that they’re all pretty graphic.”

Zal suddenly felt a rush of courage bubble up inside him. The men of old movies were afraid of nothing, particularly when faced with their women’s fear. “I want to see a photo. Is there one you especially like? One you’d like to show me?”

She thought. And she thought. She paced a bit. Finally, after some minutes, she fished out a folder in which lots of oversize prints lay and she flipped through them, Zal only catching blurs of black here and there. She paused at one, looking up at Zal and back down at the photo, in a way that gave him chills. If he didn’t know better, he would have thought she was comparing him to it.

Self-conscious fallacy,
Rhodes would say,
faulty thinking rooted in insecurity alone.
Vaporize it.

He vaporized it, and so when she finally, very gingerly, brought the print over to him, he really looked at it for what it was. She began immediately to explain it, but Zal didn’t hear her words, so transfixed he was by the image: a black bird, freshly dead, it seemed, suspended by strings in a state of posed flight.

It reminded him immediately of Silber and his faked flight.

It was, he had to admit, just as Silber’s act had been, beautiful.
I bring them back to life,
she had said. She did, in a way.

“I like it,” he said in a whisper.

“You don’t have to.”

She marched to the door and hit the lights and motioned for him to come along.

“What happened? Leaving so fast?” he asked.

She didn’t say anything until they were outside, back in the bright overcast world.

“It’s nice to know everything’s okay out here. Sometimes you have to check in on the world, Zal. We’re lucky to have this.”

“This what?

“This, like,
era
.”

Zal had no idea what she was talking about. He shrugged.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I told you about these feelings. Sometimes they’re good even! They’re reminders, at the very least.”

They said nothing for a few more steps.

He was still thinking of the photo—how nice it was, in a strange way. He thought of the human version—a corpse made to act like the living, a corpse dressed for tea, a corpse propped by a tree at a park, a corpse in pajamas with a book in bed. Now,
that
was somehow bad, in a way her photo was not, not at all. It filled him with a feeling of warmth, a honey-like hope. “I liked that bird you did,” he said. She did not answer.

By the evening Zal’s answering machine was cluttered with messages from his father.

He finally called.

“So sorry,” he said. “I saw my friend again—”

“Zal, it occurs to me I haven’t had to tell you this before, but when you suddenly make friends overnight and decide to disappear for a full two days, well, fathers get quite worried. Please don’t do that again.”

“I am sorry.”

“So what happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Who is this friend?”

Zal paused. How to explain this. Even he didn’t fully grasp it. “Well, her name is Asiya.”

“A girl?”

“Yes,” Zal said, and added, just to hear himself say it, really, “I met a girl.”

Rhodes denied it was possible. Hendricks called him that next day to ask again what he had asked several times, and again he heard what Rhodes had always maintained.

“There hasn’t been a single case of a feral child having romantic, erotic, sexual, et cetera impulses towards the opposite sex—you know this, Tony,” Rhodes said, removing and then playing with his clear plastic-framed eyeglasses, watching the world go from outlines to nebulae, utterly bored by the question. “Or the same sex, for that manner. Or toward an animal even. Ferals, it seems—as you know—are apparently asexual.”

“But—”

“But, Anthony, what if a meteor struck my office right now? What if God is a megacomputer in the future? What if life actually
is
a dream? What if one day you could take a pill to live forever? Sure, sure, sure, anything is possible, right? What did Kafka say about that?”

“I don’t know, but—”

“You know, the thing about possibility and impossibility. My point is, sure, Zal may be the most successfully adaptive feral case in history, but please consider why you’re placing bets on that. Do you think it’s you who is special, not Zal?”

Hendricks could almost envision him twirling his clear frames by their stems. “Gerald, there is no need—”

“Look, I know all these feral cases are so unique and so unresearched and, yes, what you and I do is guesswork—”

“Gerald!”

“But really, Anthony—”

“Gerald!!!”

“To actually consider—”

“GERALD!!!”

His glasses fell out of his hand. “What?”

“What you and I do is very, very different, Gerald. My purpose with Zal is clear. I do one thing: love him.”

Rhodes picked the glasses up and placed them on the bridge of his nose, and the world came back into focus. “Ah, lovely! And I love working with him—and you, Anthony. But it’s work. I study this. You’ve studied this. And love him all you want, Anthony, but you have to put him in context. You can fill him with love, but can he turn that love back around to you or anyone else? Anthony, you know this, you knew this at least. He can only be so much. And for now, my educated yet humble opinion leads me to believe this: wish as we may, hope as we will, today, at least, Romeo he is not. Don’t worry about him in all this; worry more about that girl—if she indeed exists—and what the hell she is thinking.”

Zal and Asiya went on like that for a while, short meetings that he did not dare to call what they did in the movies, what his father joked about on yet another day when Zal was suddenly unavailable:
dates.
They never touched each other more than on the shoulder, on the back—a nudge, a bump, a brush. They had barely ever held hands. He didn’t understand why, but he badly wanted to.

There was only one woman’s hand he wanted to hold more badly, that he knew he couldn’t—well, or else shouldn’t—and that was Asiya’s sister’s.

Willa.

Soon after they met, it was Willa’s twentieth birthday, and Asiya invited Zal, telling him that she knew it was a bit awkward, but, well, believe it or not, Willa had absolutely no friends.

“I believe it,” said Zal. “I have absolutely no friends.”

So he went. Asiya had told him
No presents,
but just the mention of it reminded him he had to. All day he searched and searched. He was grateful he had saved up some money from his allowance—it seemed much nicer to be able to spend it on Willa than on insect treats. He had exactly $56.13.

He ended up buying a fake pearl necklace (Willa seemed pearl-like in her luminescent roundness), a bottle of pink nail polish (he tried his hardest to match the same shade she wore), a yellow scarf with pink cupcakes on it (she, well, looked like a girl who liked cupcakes), and a giant box of diet granola bars (and, well, she looked like a girl who needed those). He didn’t have wrapping paper, so he put it all in a plastic bag and tied it with a red shoelace bow.

Asiya saw it all and shook her head at him, with pity in her eyes. “Zal, she doesn’t need this stuff. Just give her this”—the scarf—“and maybe this”—the necklace. Eventually she conceded to the nail polish, too, begrudgingly (“I’m the one who has to polish her nails!”), but took one look at the granola and said, “No way. Do you think she got like that because diet health bars are her favorite food? But whatever; Zach and I can eat them.”

Zal shrugged. He wanted to tell her it was the first time he had ever bought another human a gift, but he didn’t bother. She had to know; by then she had to.

The party was just Asiya, her siblings, and their triplet sixteen-year-old cousins, whom apparently only Willa was fond of. They were shy, wormy girls, as triplets and twins often are, Zal had noticed by then, as if they were each just a percentage of a person. None of them said much, but they were the only ones who wore the birthday party cone hats.