The Last Illusion (21 page)

It was, of all people, Zachary, to Zal’s horror—one of two people it was paramount not be privy to this spectacle.

Zachary slowly shut the door, as if his eyes couldn’t believe what they were seeing, but not without a few words, dripping with disgust: “Fucking piece-of-shit faggots.”

It was like waking up from a dream. Zal suddenly looked at his partner as if for the first time.

It was not Asiya.

It was not even a woman.

It was a man. That, he knew, was what had made Zachary say it. Plus the fact that this man, or perhaps boy, this much younger male, Zal suddenly noted, was Zachary’s very close childhood friend from next door.

The boy, whose name Zal had suddenly forgotten, pulled Zal back close to him. “Who fucking cares anyway. Come back to me.”

And for a second Zal tried to, but the kiss had suddenly become the way it was that first time, foreign and confusing and wet.

He pulled away. “I’m sorry.”

The boy sighed. All they were wearing was their underwear—the boy his boxer shorts and Zal his briefs—their other clothes in one collective pile in that enormous bathroom. The boy got dressed, glaring at Zal.

“See you never, neighbor,” he said, before flicking off the lights and slamming the door on him.

Zal sat on the floor of the dark bathroom, his heart racing. He felt sick; he felt terrified.

It was nothing compared with the hell he felt when he got the courage to rejoin the party at the gallery, where of course Zachary and Asiya, in perfect nightmare form, were huddled in a corner gesticulating conspiratorially.

He had messed up with everyone.

Asiya didn’t say a word to him until the opening was over, when they were outside the gallery space, alone. She was smoking, something she did only when she was very mad or stressed, something she had begun doing more and more lately, it seemed.

“I’m sorry, Asiya,” he mumbled.

It took her red face to remind him of that sentence from the night of their own first kiss:
You’re gonna betray me, aren’t you?
And what had he said? He couldn’t remember, but he was sure it wasn’t
yes.

She snorted and sucked on the cigarette for what seemed like ages, the longest drag he’d ever seen anyone take. “Tell me .
.
. are you, um, gay?”

Another drag, shorter. She said, “And don’t tell me you don’t know what that is.”

He did know. He thought about it. He couldn’t be of that sexuality if he had no sexuality whatsoever, he wanted to tell her, but he couldn’t.

She said, “I can’t believe at my first fucking show, my special fucking night, you’d cheat on me.”

She said, “And, yes, especially considering we haven’t done anything else,
that
counts as cheating.”

She said, “Maybe you would have gone further with him, who knows? Maybe that’s more your thing.”

She said, “It’s one thing to hurt your fucking girlfriend, but Zachary? What has he ever done to you? Connor has been his dear friend since they were toddlers. How dare you? How dare Connor, too.”

Connor,
he thought.
Connor
.

She said, “Don’t you have anything to say?”

She went on, “And don’t even try to make excuses or put it on him or say it was the booze. Zachary said you guys had no clothes on. You just barely started doing that with me!”

She said, “When the hell were we going to fuck? Did you even want to?”

She said, “Get the fuck out of my life.”

Drag, drag, drag, drag.

And, crumbling finally to the sidewalk, she whispered, “Oh my God, please don’t leave me, Zal. I fucking love you, that’s all.”

He did not say it back, not then. He
had
betrayed her, and in more ways than one, it seemed. The world Asiya lived in was primarily dark—
People fuck up,
she thought,
cheat, hurt each other, behave like animals, stomp on each other’s hearts.
That was to be expected. But that lack of reciprocity—her
I love you,
even if there was a
fucking
in the middle, was left dangling indefinitely, as if off a cliff, after all that they had gone through then, and in general even—
that
was just cruel.

She stopped talking to Zal, but not without telling him to steer clear of Zachary, because he had been saying over and over he wanted to kill Zal,
for making a faggot of my homey Con.

That was no problem for Zal. He found Zachary distasteful, and Connor just some mistake. His newfound interest in making out + alcohol + art show, where he had been the star, had all equaled one giant mistake. Plus now that he knew the boy was Zachary’s friend, he was downright disgusted with himself. He hoped he’d never see either of them again.

But without Asiya, whom he often took for granted—he admitted it—his life was back to an unbearable bleakness. He could not believe he had endured all those years without her. There he was back at home, by his computer, eating honey-glazed moth wings, staring at the walls, talking to his father again all the time, feeling like a freak.

Was he
another
type of freak now? He didn’t think so. He did not consider this an act of homosexuality, he wanted to tell Asiya. In some ways, his no-sexuality made him pansexual. It shocked him less, he wagered, than most humans to imagine, say, having sex with an animal, especially, predictably—sometimes he hated himself—a bird. What difference did gender
really
make? Was it Asiya’s low-grade femaleness that kept him with her? It was absurd.

And kissing and sex felt worlds apart, somehow, so it stunned him to hear Asiya complain—so vulgarly in the awful aftermath—about their not having sex. It had first come up that winter, on Valentine’s Day, in fact, a day he’d often noticed but had never thought to observe. It was the day that Asiya—ever unsentimental Asiya, and yet!—had decided was to be their First-Sex Day. He had come to her place after therapy and found her on her bed, lying naked on some almost black petals. He had worried she had lost her mind and asked her what was wrong. She had laughed bitterly and reminded him what day it was. He had simply blinked. She had pulled him close to her and he had closed his eyes, as he often did when Asiya was nude—somehow her nudity was too much, although he had no problem showing her his. They had made out for a while, and Asiya had, over his clothes, sought parts of him, parts of him that were simply just confused. Eventually she had given up.
You’re not into it, are you?
she had asked, knowing the answer. He had apologized, explaining this was all happening very fast for him. He had reminded her he was not like other people and had almost cried from shame. And then she, too, had felt ashamed, and they had embraced. She put her clothes on, and they had had a decent enough dinner together.

Since then, Asiya had tried every few weeks, but every time it went much like that, sans petals. He had started to feel panicked at the very idea of her advances, just as he was alarmed by the idea that he would never be free of their relationship, something he had at first thought of as an experience yet was now looking like a condition.

And now that condition was gone. And yet Zal, sitting in his dark bedroom, utterly doghoused by her and by the world, suddenly realized:
That’s it.
Sex was the key. She wasn’t really upset about him with another human, but she was upset about him still not wanting to have sex.

What if he could?

What if sex
was
the physical manifestation of saying
I love you
? And once consummated, might as well be topped off with the oral confirmation?

What if it was that easy?

What if it was that hard?

Well, he thought, it could not be impossible.

In his head he heard Asiya’s black laughter at the phrase he considered forbidden for its ugliness, but which was, he had to admit, here quite apt:
killing two birds with one stone
.

He had no choice, anyway; he suddenly did not know how to live without her.

He spent hours practicing in the bathroom. He knew how people did it—he was not that naive—but he had never seen the point. Yet there he was frantically working at himself and at the same time trying to remain calm and in a pleasant mind-set to make the thing work, something he had only curiously tried abortively once or twice and abandoned. It took ages, but in the end he did get over that edge they talked about, felt his heart race to near explosion, it seemed, felt his body spasm, his insides burst and recoil. He sat there, in his mess, so proud. It had been a struggle, but he had done it. He had done it for his, yes, girlfriend.

Because outside of Asiya, he reminded himself, he would never be there, pawing at himself. He felt dirty. He felt animal. He felt more feral than feral. He felt so human. It disgusted him, and yet he did find it to be an accomplishment—another accomplishment-rung on the long ladder of Normal Human Behavior.

Plus he had figured out the equation, the one simple variable that could make it work. To function properly, he needed to meditate on a single notion, because the idea of Asiya was like an amalgamation of notion-hoods of sorts. It was, of course, almost ironic, almost cruel, and perhaps in the wrong spirit. But there was no other way. He, and Asiya, if she were ever to find out—and this time, no way in hell, he promised himself—would have to live with it: to have sex with his girlfriend, he would have to be thinking of her sister.

He finally turned to the computer and did that thing he never thought he’d have a reason to do, but which was the obvious final step in preparation: he began watching pornography to memorize the steps, the very complicated and yet apparently Human 101 steps, the means to that same end he was sitting in.

When he showed up at Asiya’s door, he presented her with a saran-wrapped paper plate of beetle cookies. She shook her head at it, looking so pale and exhausted. It relieved him to see her look so unhappy alone; it somehow meant they still had a chance, that she had not found a happiness outside of him.

“Asiya, please let me come in,” he said. “I am so sorry. I really am. I have something more for you, too.”

Nothing in her eyes changed, but she let him in. Her gaze looked dead, and her voice had no emotion. “Let’s go to my room. Zach might be home any sec.”