The Last Illusion (10 page)

Zal had nodded. “For everyone, it seems.”

Everyone. His son was slowly but surely becoming
everyone
. Hendricks had looked down before he thought Zal might see the wetness gathering in his glance.

So Hendricks had given his blessings and Zal went. But every time Zal had been cut off from cell phone reception on his Amtrak ride, Hendricks had felt a despair like he hadn’t experienced since his wife’s death. The thought of losing Zal, who of all people was constantly in danger of being lost—in spite of the advancement and progress and the whole miracle of him—had been much too much. He could not imagine living through that.

But Zal had made it. And when he’d come back, they’d had lunch at a local vegan diner they both liked. (For a while, Zal could not endure normal diners because of the plethora of egg options and hovering egg dishes and smells, a horrific concept to him that he didn’t need to explain to Hendricks.) But Zal had seemed not at all energized or refreshed but rather somewhat exhausted and confused.

“Well, come on! What did you see?” Hendricks, who had never been to Vegas, kept asking.

“I mostly stayed in the hotel and then I went to three magic shows. Except they weren’t really the magic I thought they might involve.”

Hendricks chuckled. “Illusion, they call it, right?”

Zal shrugged. “Something. It was strange. I made friends with Bran Silber, though.”

Bran Silber
—Hendricks, unaware of most popular culture, had forgotten to look him up. “Well, that’s astounding! You and
the
Bran Silber! Did he know about you?”

Zal’s face tensed up and he sighed it out, as he had been taught long ago. “Yes. I told him.”

“Well, great! A real wow!”

“We’ve been e-mailing. But, you know, I don’t think he has much use for me.”

Hendricks frowned. “What do you mean, use for you?”

Zal for a moment looked flustered, but then quickly shrugged to gloss over it. “I don’t know. I thought maybe I could work for him. Like, intern, as you once suggested I do for someone out there. But he seems more interested in dinners.”

Hendricks raised an eyebrow with movie-detective-like curiosity, a look of his Zal was fond of. “So he’s interested in you? Your story, I’m sure?”

“Yeah, maybe. Anyway, I just wanted to do something amazing .
.
. for me.” Zal looked down, embarrassed at the grandiosity of his words.

Hendricks reached over their plates to give him an affectionate rub of the shoulder. “Zal, give yourself time. You will have it all, my boy, you will have it all. Look at everything you have now, how far you’ve come.”

Zal nodded. He had heard it so many times. He got up and said it was time to go home, that he had a TV show (he did not mention
nature show
) that he liked to watch. Hendricks embraced him long and hard, as usual, taking a few steps backwards to face Zal for just a bit longer as they went their separate ways.

Days later, Silber performed his Triptych-in-One in New York, and Zal got further disillusioned. The audience volunteer was again a stooge, another young woman, a famous New York City hotel tycoon’s daughter, a socialite heiress with whom the whole city was in love that season and that season only. The applause felt deafening, but Zal had only slapped his thigh weakly through it all, instead of properly clapping. And he had exited quickly, walking home alone, feeling emptier than he had in ages, as if it were Vegas all over again.

He was due to attend Silber’s NYE party, but he was at best ambivalent; as much as he flipped coins for it, he did not think he could bring himself to go. Silber had disappointed him, had become another dead end, and Silber’s reciprocation of interest bored him more than anything. Silber was another person who was dazzled by the most undazzling—or so Zal insisted—life of Zal Hendricks. It had in some ways turned him off from not just Silber but the possibility of magic, of unassisted human flight even.

In the end, skipping the NYE party was less his choice. It was that very day, after all, that Zal met someone who, once and for all, took him outside of all the
considerations—
who saw him as something more than his miracle story and his name and his oddities and even the hint of his private fetishes—and saw him, it seemed, as wholly normal, a
normal adult human man
. Or at least he suspected this, because of the accidental nature of the encounter, the purity of it, the lack of question marks and exclamation points.

It was, of all beings, a woman. And while she didn’t seem like the most normal woman—there were things that were different about her, that he knew from first sight and then first speech and soon first touch—she was an
adult human woman
at least all the way. At the age of twenty-one, Zal Hendricks had his first contact with the thing that he had read of in the stories of his namesake, in all stories really, from book to trash-TV plots: a “love interest.”

The more the flying act was behind Silber, the more flying was behind him. But in many ways, no one else let go of it. It was widely recognized as Silber’s greatest show, the pinnacle of his career, though nobody guessed it was his penultimate one. And so at his epic New Year’s 2000 party—which Zal was invited to but did not attend, to Indigo and the assistants’ shock and to Silber’s only mildly irked registering; while the guests drank and drugged themselves to a numbness that they joked was in case the end of the world
was
coming; as the clocks upped themselves in their ultimate double digits that the guests took too much and then not enough heed of, on and off, throughout that bottomless night—Silber tossed around his new idea.

“I want to make New York fucking disappear!”

People laughed and made jokes and had clever quips, and Silber teetered and drank and snorted and locked lips with a few different women and even a man or two, and he clarified.

“Not New York exactly, but the New Yorkness of New York, what’s more New York than New York, a symbol of New York .
.
.”

Nobody knew what he was talking about. Silber only had a clue.

The next morning, as life, same old life, went on without a hitch, and everyone felt embarrassed about their boarded-up stores and stocked-up kitchens and gas masks and kits and provisions, Silber was the only human at his party who remembered what he had revealed. The rest had dismissed it as party talk.

But it was going to be his biggest stunt yet, a stunt so much bigger than him and them and bigger, even, than itself.

It was terrifying. For the first time, a feat of illusion worried him. He was terrified.

It was everything the Triptych was not, this one darkness to its light, destruction to its hope. This one was the opposite of flying, taking down something high and proud and towering and reducing it to dust, or worse than dust: nothing at all.

PART III

At the end of the twentieth century people were not certain whether they were to celebrate the beginning of the new millennium in 2000 or 2001. It was important for people who were waiting for the end of the world, but most people did not believe in the end of the world, so they did not care. Other people were waiting for the end of the world but thought it would happen on any old day.

—Patrik Ourednik,

Europeana

MCMXCIX, also known as 1999, had been unremarkable so far, she thought.

There was: the Euro. Amadou Diallo, shot in New York City. Best Picture:
Shakespeare in Love
(other notables
: Saving Private Ryan
and
Life Is Beautiful
). The Columbine shooting. Napster.
Time
Person of the Year: Jeff Bezos, founder, president, CEO, and chairman of the board of Amazon.com; Person of the Century: Albert Einstein. The iBook. The plane crash of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. Other major plane crashes: Korean Air Cargo, Mandarin Airlines, EgyptAir, TAESA. Earthquakes: Colombia, Turkey, Greece, Taiwan, Vanuatu. Select notable
Billboard
hits: “Genie in a Bottle” (Christina Aguilera), “.
.
. Baby One More Time” (Britney Spears), “I Want It That Way” (Backstreet Boys), “Believe” (Cher), “Livin’ La Vida Loca” (Ricky Martin). The world population hit six billion.

Nineteen ninety-nine was the “International Year of Older Persons,” the United Nations declared.

It wasn’t even the end of the second millennium or the twentieth century—that was technically next year, math people reported.

Before New Year’s Eve, it was everywhere—in stores, on radio stations, on commercials, in everyone’s head:
So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999!

Asiya hated that song. She hated all songs that year or about that year. She had started, that year, to hate sounds, in fact; she was sure she had some form of hyperacusis, perhaps even a phonophobia of some sort. She had become easily startled. She had started to talk in a whisper. She was starting to believe that everything, pretty much, was wrong with everything.

Asiya, as her parents always said, was “the strange one.”
But it feels strange to call them my parents,
she would say if she knew you very well, well enough to break out of the painful quietness or shyness, interpreted differently depending on the person, that defined her. Asiya had raised herself, she insisted—and this was basically true—she and her younger sister and even her younger brother: Willa, who had plateaued in the mid-five-hundred-pound range in her mid-teens and was bedridden in a wheel-equipped iron bed, and Zachary, who was a complete insomniac with a remarkably low IQ. She was parent to the most undesirable children she could imagine. If love produced
them,
she thought, fuck love. But somehow she doubted it was love exactly.

Her parents: father, Bryce McDonald, CTO and senior vice president of engineering, operations, and technology for the Boeing Company, who lived in Chicago; mother, Shell Hooper, New York socialite and onetime air stewardess for Pan Am, who lived in Zurich. They had divorced when Asiya was twelve, the age when she’d supposedly begun homeschooling, but that was really the age she’d been when Shell left the family (first stop: psychiatric hospital; second stop: rehab; third stop: rehab; fourth stop: rehab; fifth stop: commune; sixth and final stop: Hawaii, with eight dogs, three horses, two live-in partners, and their four almost-stepchildren).

Back then she was not Asiya; she was “Daisy,” the real name she through-and-through hated. But that Daisy McDonald was a true child of New York City. After years of the Barton School—Lower, Middle, all of K–7—an all-girls independent school located on the Upper East Side (tuition: $28,000 a year), she became an adult, an adult with access to a trust fund, a mother-sister, and, in some ways, a woman, a woman-child. She did what any New York rich girl in her position would do: she went to clubs, she drank and smoked and took drugs, she slept with older men. She managed this all while being incorrigibly shy. This was what she called her Ignorant Bliss Era.

She was bound to burn out on it, that she knew the whole time. But she kept waiting for something to take her out of it, something to fill the hole, another tug in another direction, and then it came.

It came in the form of religion. God came.

It began with Patrick, one of her exes—a senior publicist at a high-powered fashion PR house, whom she always suspected was gay—who turned her on to Buddhism. And she tried it and fell in love with it, and then after a season she began to find holes, that it was full of holes—all holes, even—just too bleak for her still hopeful heart, and that this god left her more empty-feeling than the lack of a god altogether. Months later, she met another guy who dabbled in Hare Krishna ideology, an artist whose name she could never remember, not then nor now, and she was fascinated but eventually found the whole thing—all the freakish superpowered animals and their supernatural feats and the Technicolor paintings and madcap mantras—entirely too psychedelic, making her feel somehow conservative, practical, and black-and-white-souled by comparison. As an insult, he mentioned she’d make a good Catholic, though that had its imagery, too. Still, she took Catholicism on for a season, even attending church, until she decided that she, hater of all authority, could never stand for its hierarchies—plus, sometimes at night her mind played Sinead O’Connor’s
Saturday Night Live
pope-photo-tearing appearance
over and over and over in a loop.