The Last Illusion (31 page)

Zal frowned. To his sheer terror, it was a word that sounded like “fly.”

“I don’t understand,” Zal said, helplessly.

Finally the man, frustrated, lifted a takeout menu and hit the word over and over and over again, the third word in the very name of the place: Ken Lee Fried Chicken.

And he did fry them, many of them, over and over, day in and day out. There he was: at the workplace of his worst nightmares, doing the job he was most afraid of in the world, at the takeout joint whose very existence had the effect of a pop-up Auschwitz for him. Washing, cutting, and indeed frying chicken, there he was.

Experience,
Zal reminded himself.
How many men even get to experience what it feels like to be a serial killer? Experience!

The first day, he periodically had to go to the bathroom and throw up. He did it four times, until eventually he had nothing but saliva to expel. Ken told Zal he could eat a free meal on them, depending on his shift, and he politely declined. The very notion of eating in that place seemed unfathomable to Zal, even if he avoided chicken altogether and just had plain rice. Eating at all, even outside of that place, began to feel impossible. With no weight to lose, really, Zal started to lose weight.

Asiya took a break from her own worries and focused on him in this period. Something was wrong with him, she knew. Why else would he work there, a place no one with his story could possibly endure? Over and over she asked him if he was depressed. She told him she had been with lots of depressed people at the home and she knew what depression looked like: it was hating yourself to the point that you take joy in nothing, hating yourself to the point where you want to do only the opposite of the best.

“Who says I’m taking joy in nothing?” Zal snapped. “I’m getting another experience.”

“You don’t need this experience,” she argued. “Nobody does! You think everyone at some point just
has
to work at a fried chicken place? It’s crazy!”

He bit his lip to keep from commenting on her use of the word
crazy.
“Look, Asiya,” he said instead, “the very fact that you think it’s a problem for me to work at a fried chicken place—when every day people work at them all over the world—is the reason I have to do it! It’s not out of your head, your idea of me!”

“But, Zal, if I go by that logic, then the very reason you took that job was because you had to prove something to yourself, meaning you’re not over it, either!”

Crazy or not, she had a point. “Asiya, it’s nothing I need to explain. It’s hell, but I have to do it. What’s the saying .
.
. ‘That’s life!’”

“What about another type of food place?”

Zal rolled his eyes. “And the purpose of that would be? C’mon, you got the point of this. Anyway, don’t worry, I’ll get fired soon enough, that is for sure!”

So Asiya waited. And in fact Zal waited. He held on to this job longer than any other. It seemed to be the one thing he excelled at. He was apparently made to be a chicken fryer.

During this time, he started having his grisliest nightmares—the grisliest and birdiest that he had ever had. He saw his old canary, the one he’d had a crush on, falling out of the sky to her death because her wings didn’t work. He saw little boys covering birds in kerosene and setting them on fire as they flew, to make stars. He saw battered birds—by
battered
he meant
fried
, of course—flying out of their buckets and into the sky, a whole skyful of Ken Lee Fried Chickens, crunchily flapping through the air, raining crumbs on them all.

And yet, sleep-deprived or not, he’d go to work as if it nothing was wrong.

“Is this some what-doesn’t-kill-you-makes-you-stronger shit?” Asiya hissed, during the phase when she started to get downright hostile about it, hating that fried poultry smell always on him, his greasy hands, his oil-stained shirts.

Sleep deprivation, at its peak, they say, can mimic madness. So in retrospect, Zal always blamed the scant rest of that era for what he did next, the worst thing he had ever conjured, period.

He chose Valentine’s Day to ruin his life—his life at that point, in any case.

The sickest thing anyone has ever done to me,
a less sick Asiya later recalled.
The sickest thing he ever did to himself.

I am so sorry,
he said only later, and only in his thoughts, over and over to the Asiya of his memory.

Because on Valentine’s Day 2001, it was his gift to her—and to himself in a way, as he wanted to take that cannibal step, that suicidal partaking, on that night of romantic nights. He’d thought simply that bringing home several extra-large buckets of fried chicken—so filled with dead fried birds he could barely balance them—was a gift, one that a normal human man would give, itself a celebration of normal humanness even.

When she left, he drank himself to a sleep he wished was death, whatever that was—no amount of dismembering and frying of fowl could really explain that to him, since he was in the business of their post-death anti-existences. When he woke up the next morning and saw the crime scene—dozens of broken fried chicken wings, some in buckets, some strewn on his floor, and, worst of all worsts: two telltale little bones, almost perfectly cleaned—he contemplated suicide for the first time.

After several rounds of vomiting, he went in to Ken Lee and told him: “I am depressed. I can’t do this.”

Ken Lee didn’t understand at first but finally let him go, with his last paycheck, which Zal refused to take. When he left, Ken Lee turned to his wife and made a circle in the air beside his ear with his index finger, though who knew if Zal had it in the first place to lose it now.

Asiya-less. Wasn’t that what he was getting at the whole time? She called the next day, suggesting their breakup—something she didn’t entirely mean—and he agreed.

“Asiya, I think I’m depressed, like you said. I think I’m in trouble .
.
. I’ll be fine .
.
. no, what I mean is, I just need you out of my life .
.
. This has nothing to do with you, no. But, yes, you have to go, too .
.
. The Ken Lee job is gone, yes .
.
. but so are you. I’m hanging up now.”

He thought about going to the ER, he thought about turning to his father, he thought about calling Rhodes, he even thought about telling Silber he’d love to have dinner. But none of it seemed possible. The only thing that did, as is often the case with truly depressed people, was the thing that seemed the most impossible: he thought about escaping, leaving New York.

And go where, Zal?
he imagined someone, anyone, somewhere asking. The only answer he had for that someone sounded like the punch line to a pathetic joke or just some one-off cheap insult.

To hell,
Zal would answer.

For months, naturally, Hendricks had been worried, but Rhodes had urged him to stay away. That this was a good thing, an important thing, the boy asserting his independence. When in the history of ferals had anyone seen anything like this? It was what most men did as teenagers.

“He’s trying to be a man, Hendricks,” Rhodes said. “Let him try. Maybe he’ll come out close to one. Who are we to say?”

But Hendricks didn’t know what to do with that. Did he simply just pretend Zal never existed?

Rhodes thought of making the empty-nest analogy, but saw it was unfit just in time, for too many reasons.

Hendricks stopped by his apartment twice, both times armed with the excuse of having forgotten something there, but both times Zal was not there. He still continued to mail Zal checks, and they would get cashed, but he never received a phone call, an e-mail, any proper acknowledgment.

Finally, on Zal’s birthday—Persian New Year and the first day of spring, a day Hendricks had decided would be fitting, since Zal’s proper birth certificate had never been found—Hendricks decided to camp out at Zal’s apartment from morning to night, with a small vegan cake that said, in frosting,
happy 23rd, zal!
The Zal he knew would not turn his back on a cake. So he waited. And even though he had the keys to his son’s place, he still stood outside. If there was any way to win his boy back, it was through showing him the utmost respect, he had learned.

His boy was, after all, maybe a man now, in spite of everything, considering everything.

Zal returned to his apartment at 11
p.m.
—earlier than had been the norm in that period—after six straight hours of drinking at the Irish pub where he had had his first Manhattan bar drink. He had recently discovered the Long Island Iced Tea—it was apparently everything behind the bar and maybe more. He had no idea. It did not taste like tea, and it was very strong—that was all he knew. He’d had more of those than he could count.

Hendricks almost didn’t recognize the stumbling gaunt Zal, drenched in the stench of booze, muttering to himself like a typical city indigent. When the thing almost fell over him at the door, Hendricks suddenly realized it was him, his son. He took him into his arms, to which Zal responded with a failed punch, not realizing whose arms he was in, but Hendricks caught the blow.

“Oh, Father, what the hell are you doing here!” he tried to say, casually, as if amused, as if it was nothing.

“Zal, I came to wish you a happy birthday. Are you okay? What’s happened to you? God, you’ve lost weight!”

“Of course—it’s my birthday! Happy birthday to me!” Zal hooted loudly.

Hendricks took his keys from him and let him in.

The inside of the apartment was a wreck, as he expected, but a worse wreck than he imagined, given Zal’s appearance: crumpled newspapers all over the floor, something that looked like sunflower seed covering the couch, empty bottles of beer and wine, and bulbless lamps. The place was dark, completely dark.

“What do you do for light, son?”

“I don’t,” Zal muttered as he lay on his couch. “Cake time?”

“Cake time,” Hendricks agreed, still depressed, feeling his way to the bathroom light. “When did you start drinking, Zal?”

“I don’t drink!” Zal shouted.

“Okay, okay,” Hendricks muttered. “Where is Asiya?”

“Dead,” Zal snapped.

“Dead?!”

Zal made a barking sound, cleared his throat, and said finally, “We broke up.”

Hendricks could not help but be wide-eyed at that. “Really?”