The Last Illusion (36 page)

“And one other thing,” Zal said. “Since, you know, I’m confessing.”

Hendricks held his breath for a moment. “Go ahead.”

“I’m still seeing Asiya. She’s in the bathroom. Asiya!”

For a second nothing happened, and he finally got up and knocked, and when the door opened just a sliver, he whispered something and led her out, by the wrist.

She smiled a watery, confused smile, relieved to be occupied with the mess of yogurt-coated insects on the ground.

“Hello!” Hendricks said to her, trying too hard to be cheerful. “How
nice
to see you!”

She said nothing, but managed a wave.

Hendricks’s eyes turned to Zal, who looked agonized.

“I just want everything in the open now, Father,” he said. “And here it all is.”

Hendricks rose to his feet and met his son’s gaze, still with a strange look.

“You’ve grown up, Zal,” he said. “That’s okay. You have your own life, things I’ll never know about.” His eyes turned to Asiya’s, which were still on the ground.

Zal nodded, more slowly, a sudden peace floating over him. “I think everything will be better from now on.”

And both Asiya and Hendricks looked to him for that promise, as if it were really true, as if it weren’t that August suddenly, as if things were really going to be different, as if he had all the answers—Zal, of all people.

Bran Silber’s phone was buzzing with calls and text messages—all Oliver Manning, of course—popping up again and again as “Papa Mans.” He did not like to be kept waiting, not now, of course, not with just a few weeks left. But Silber, as the date of the illusion got closer, was no longer one to dart up to his feet from bed after his usual 9.5 hours of beauty sleep. Instead, some days he’d linger in bed, having spent three of those 9.5 until his alarm went off fully conscious. He was wearing the same things every day, and not the metallic overalls, either, but just a black T-shirt and black jeans, his least Silberish look. He was avoiding his home and office gyms, his tanning booth, even the “products” for his hair, face, and body. He’d become one of those people who moved slowly, who took a while to answer a question if he did at all, who dreaded another day, who was often found by assistants—finally, after folks from cooks to Manning had needed him for hours, always needing something or other—hunched over his work desk, his face collapsed in his hands. When he’d finally look up, they’d shrink from the expectation of tears or some sign of anguish, but every time it would be the same: an expression of blandness, dead nothing, gold eyes that were suddenly just yellow.

Bran Silber was finally—on the verge of his most stunning spectacle—entirely depressed.

How did it happen? He didn’t know exactly. Was it when Manning started getting more and more difficult, bitching about the size of the “pillar in the pool,” the impossibility of media cooperation in airing it, his constant doubt about how to pull off the illusion perfectly? He didn’t think so. Was it the season of loneliness, now that all the lovers had been sent running by Silber’s work schedule and, worse, his lack of libido? It couldn’t be. Was it that he’d lost interest in magic, in illusion, in spectacle? He couldn’t imagine it. Was it all the interviews, the constant pressure for hints and winks and the usual Silberish razzle-dazzle drivel? Maybe, maybe not, but that felt closest. Because the one thing they—everyone who didn’t know him in particular but had followed his career—wanted to know was:
So .
.
. what does it all mean?

What did any of it mean? Silber would ask himself some nights, all alone in the Silbertorium instead of at home, just pacing the curves of the monster platform and all the mess of wires and stands and light cranes. Where it had all come from seemed a logical place to start. He tried over and over to take himself back to the season when it all began, 1999, fresh off the successes of the Flight Triptych, that triumph of theme, in the final breaths of Y2K season. Was it just the mass insanity of that season? What made him go there? What made any of them think so big, so much further than made sense, imagine it all gone, the nothing of absolutely everything, and yet live through that period, humor it, reason it out, rationalize it, expect and yet forget, cooperate with the end of ends as if it were written out in something other than fear and numbers and miscalculation and superstition, 99 + 1 = 00 = 0000 = a synonym for nothing if you wanted to be literal, everyone in the nightmare of the figurative gone literal and accepting it, as if it was not just the soapy fever of magical thinking for a season or two, as if they were not going to wake up from it and pretend it never was, like a bad one-night stand better left blamed on alcohol and filed under
forgotten
, like an embarrassment so grand in scale better revised and deleted if possible—better for life just to move on and away and onto bigger and better, isn’t that what they’d say, what they’d advise?

Bigger and better. In the dark, in the no-glitter of the Silbertorium, which became just what it was in the evening unlit—just a big cold Brooklyn warehouse filled with the incredibly expensive nonsense trappings of one man’s imagination—he questioned his illusion: but was it bigger and better? Why did he hear himself say over and over that this would be the one, The One, The One and Only? Did he say that every time? He didn’t, he was pretty sure. He had learned to leave them always wanting more, to exit with an open door, hinting at something more colossal to come. Maybe the
bigger and better
in his mind was just a substitute for something that he, at fifty-two, simply could not quite face: it was maybe
the last
.

At the prompting of the final press releases and several urgent major profiles in the papers, he gave the event a title before he was quite ready, a title he did not like: the Fall of the Towers.
It was descriptive, yes, but, as the last interviewer asked,
What is it all about?

How did he not know what the illusion meant? he wondered. And if he didn’t know, who the hell exactly was pulling the strings here?

He had laughed it off, tried to make the interviewer feel stupid for asking, a question you did not ask an artist like Bran Silber, America’s greatest illusionist. He had done all he could to hide that it was the very question he was grappling with day and night, especially night.

Had he ever, in the time span of a stunt, outgrown it? Never, he thought. In his early days, when he was more of an endurance artist, the relentless preparation for a stunt would often leave him demoralized, doubting, or simply exhausted. But he was younger then, and he was the whole act, nothing more. He could control it, he could convey it, he
was
it. If anyone was to ask what it all meant, all he had to do was point to himself, his body, him. There were no further questions—just held breaths followed by a whole lot of relief: Bran Silber had survived again.

And then he outgrew simple survival. He suddenly had more wealth than he knew what to do with, and just making it for the masses seemed cheap, indulgent, and, of course, though he admitted it to no one, dangerous, especially as he grew older. He had to become an illusionist, even if it was less real, even if the stakes—no longer life or death—were not as high. He was not Houdini. And there was another layer to illusion—there was the outside world, the suggestion that the external universe was not what it appeared it to be, the notion that it could all be taken away, all gone at his whim, vision, insistence.

The Fall of the Towers: it was he, the god of this disaster, who was wishing them gone. No one had asked for it, no one had even thought of it. Why would the imagination go there, of all places?

What does it mean, Bran Silber? What is the meaning of all this?

Bran Silber found himself that season in a situation he never imagined he’d be in. He found himself absolutely inconsolably distraught. He found his mind wandering as he watched the businessmen, janitors, restaurant workers, and shopkeepers file in and out of work at the WTC, with a sense of purpose. He wondered what their world was really like, and he concluded that he envied them. After this last stunt, he would have to find the daily purpose illusion could no longer afford him. How could he go further? There had to be some other world.

He ignored the buzzing and ringing of his phone that seemed to go off all the time, at all hours, in those days, and he slowly, with much trepidation, walked into the room that had now become as much a torture cell as a meditation room for him: the Mirror Room. And he looked at himself and he looked at himself.
What is the meaning of this, Bran?
But he got nothing back. Just dead yellow eyes and a tired man in all black in his fifties. And he tried again to see himself as he had just weeks earlier, he tried his hardest to flash that insignia of his, his unforgettable blinding white-hot smile. And he couldn’t.

He remembered Bird Boy and his inability to smile. He had become like that, like a bird boy of sorts, with no joy, no connection to this world. The Bird Boy who had turned his back on him months ago and then come back recently with that e-mail, wanting to visit, wanting to see if he was okay, wanting to let him know he was in love, wanting his help even.
My God,
he thought,
even Bird Boy, smileless Bird Boy, has love in his life.

Bran Silber saw something he rarely saw in the mirror: tears. They would not come out, however, as if even that was too much effort. He was, he had to admit, not just depressed but, in a way, its opposite: he was very, very afraid. And he could not even begin to acknowledge the feelings—so deep, so strange, so almost mystical—that those fears stirred up. All he focused on was the problem most obviously before him, the surface issue: he thought,
My God, maybe there is no meaning. Maybe for once all I have in my hands is just a big fucking trick.

In the end, Zal had spared Asiya—rather, he’d looked at Asiya’s long rambling deliriously typoed e-mail drafts, declaring an apocalypse that only Bran Silber could avert for all of their sakes, and realized there was no way he could admit to Silber that he was associated with that girl—and deleted it all and written Silber himself. It was a short e-mail, an icebreaker of sorts, he hoped, something casual and easy, as if their break had never happened, as if they sent e-mails like that to each other all the time, old friends that they were. And he had gotten back the e-mail he deserved, also casual and easy, also pretending, also reeking of old times and bonds:
Tricky week, even trickier week. If you come, just a whole lotta waiting. I could see you after but hard to know when it all wraps up. Very private here at moment. But if you don’t mind waiting .
.
. Dream, B.X.S.

He read it out loud to Asiya.

“What’s the point of that?” she said. “We don’t need to hang out with him! We need his help.”

Zal almost corrected the
we,
and said, “But I thought if we went there, he could introduce us to the illusion and that would be the perfect opportunity to explain your .
.
. your
feelings
on it.”

Asiya was pacing, disturbed. “We don’t have time for stuff like this, Zal! We’ve got to move.”

Zal groaned. “Asiya, I know you think there’s a deadline—”

“And it’s not like he’s exactly inviting us anyway! He’s saying it’s always inconvenient, but if we go over there, maybe there’s a slight chance—”

“He just talks like that!”

“Look, Zal, I’m willing to go there, but we can’t waste any time. I need him to know beforehand why we’re there. Then he’ll definitely meet us first thing, make the time for it urgently, you know.”