The Last Illusion (15 page)

Her arms broke the spell he felt, indeed, encaged by; she held him and held him and held and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed—but not in the panicked way; in the moved way, he thought, he hoped. And when they left that dark basement finally (a “wine cellar,” she clarified later), Willa and Zachary met them with looks even he could tell were funny.

“What?” Asiya: instantly annoyed when confronted with them.

Willa let out a soft husky giggle; Zachary a sort of disgusted groan.

Willa pointed to the television. On TV, a sitcom Zal vaguely recognized played, the old one with the stand-up comedian and his short bald neighbor and tall crazy neighbor and that girl, all in New York. The characters were all arguing in the comedian’s giant apartment, interrupted here and there by recorded laughter.

“Oh my God, what time is it?!” Asiya’s voice suddenly broke into a violent exclamation, her whisper altogether gone.

“Game over a while ago, Oz,” Willa said, just as Asiya shoved her watch at Zal.

12:37
a.m.

Zachary got up, still in headphones and with his smoking drug, and went to his room, slamming the door behind him. They rolled Willa into the elevator and up to her floor and exchanged good nights, Zal lingering just a bit at the door, to try to etch her form and all its infinite comforts in his mind.

In the empty living room, they stood in silence, not sure what to do with each other now. Zal tried to read her, but she seemed every instant to be made up of a different emotion: annoyance, fury, relief, euphoria.

“Zal, thank you,” she said in the ecstatic mode.

“For what?”

“For making the time pass, I guess,” she said. “For sharing your story.”

“We’re alive.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you for hearing it. I have never told anyone, really. I mean, the people that know know, but no one else. I don’t know many people.”

“I can tell,” she said, and just like that laughter that had been drawn out, something like a small smile revealed itself. She wore it much better than he guessed. With that embellishment, the stick figure became a girl almost.

They were silent for a few more moments.

“Well, it’s time to sleep now,” she said. “You should go home.”

“I should go home,” Zal quickly echoed, so embarrassed he had forgotten any notion of his home. This entire milestone of a day had made him feel like he was on another planet, not just some dozen blocks from his apartment. He suddenly felt totally out of touch with himself outside Asiya and her world. He did not understand how that could be possible, how the encounter could hold such power. He did not really understand what was happening, but he thought that it was worth thinking that it may be good.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m sleepy for once. I couldn’t imagine sleeping tonight, and look. Yawning. Amazing. Thank you.” She took his hand and walked him to the door and they embraced again.

“Thank you,” he said, but she did not know he meant for the hug, which both times had felt less bad than he would have thought from Asiya’s body, though it did make him wonder a bit how much better Willa’s might feel.

“It’s easy to say goodbye to you, because I know I will see you again—I know things, remember” were her final words to him, final if you didn’t count the words on a scrap of torn paper:
asiya mcdonald / see you soon
and a phone number.

This, he realized, was a big deal, romantic or not, though he knew it was a step toward romance for sure.

He had a girl’s number.

He had a human’s number.

For the first time in his life, Zal Hendricks felt a certain coloring in of himself—a hologram being filled in to flesh; a ghost suddenly acquiring corporeality—and he thought maybe he was finally there, that this was it: normalcy.

PART IV

The crows like to insist a single crow is enough to destroy heaven. This is incontestably true, but it says nothing about heaven, because heaven is just another way of saying: the impossibility of crows.

—Franz Kafka,

The Zürau Aphorisms

Zal saw Asiya McDonald soon indeed. He called her the next day to thank her for a nice New Year’s “gathering”—it took him more than an hour to pinpoint the best word for that strange day, that strange night. She had been quiet at first and suddenly said, “Want to come over? I mean, I want you to come over if
you
want to.”

Suddenly it seemed everyone wanted him. He had an e-mail from Silber’s address, disappointing especially for its sign-off, “xoxo Indigo”:
What. The. Fuck, Chuck? Too cool for school? Party was a blast. Happy 00. See u soon!
He had a note from his father, who had left his apartment when he got his note:
I hope you (and whoever this friend is, wow!) had a nice New Year. Happy New Year, son. Please call soon. Love, Pops.

But all that played in his head was her silvery syllables, her wants, her
“asiya mcdonald / see you soon”
scrawl. She would be the only being on earth who would get his
soon
this time
.
The
Silbertorium went uncalled, his father was left unheeded.

Zal went over to her house, in an almost entranced autopilot. He never even asked her to repeat her address. He simply just knew it—subway to the park, across the park, up four blocks to that big grocery store, past the museums, and there: the red townhouse with the black iron gate in front of it, next to all the gateless white townhouses. When he got to the top of the steps just outside the door, she appeared.

“How did you know the exact second I was coming?” was the first thing he asked her.

She, looking as serious and as unsmiling as during their initial encounter, said simply, “I know things, Zal, didn’t I tell you? And of course, I was looking out the window. Not for you, really. I just do that.”

She did not invite him in, just stood there in front of the door and looked him up and down.

He looked down at his gray overcoat and gray trousers, black wool cap. He did not think he looked any different from yesterday.

He gestured inside. “Shall I—”

She shook her head. “Willie is being a horrible whiny pain today, and Zach has too many friends over playing awful music, and I just want to go to my studio. I thought you might want to see my work!”

Zal nodded slowly. The birds—he remembered her words immediately:
I use them. For work .
.
. I bring them back to life, of course
. He hoped this was not the beginning of their end already.

“You don’t want to?” She looked narrowly crestfallen.

“I am curious,” he said quietly.

I do art,
she had said. He tried to focus on that word
art,
a nice clean word.

“Oh, gosh! Zal, I totally forgot!” She put a hand over her mouth; it was unclear whether the gesture was intended to cover laughter or horror. She shook her head over and over, tragically, comically, tragicomically, it was hard to say. “The dead-bird stuff! That must have totally freaked you out!”

Zal shrugged.

“Oh, shoot. Yeah, well, it’s the series I’ve been working on for a while. I mean, there’s no way to sugarcoat it: they’re birds, dead ones, in various stages of decay. I mean, maybe it’s too much?”

Zal shook his head, even though he wasn’t that sure. He just knew he wanted to be around Asiya, that somehow having a new friend—and a female one!—was good, dead-bird art or not. “You never .
.
. do anything to them, do you?” He didn’t know how else to say it.

Asiya squinted her eyes. “
Do
anything? I do a lot of things.”

“But,” Zal sighed, “you don’t—I mean, you’re not the one who—before they—you don’t, you know .
.
.”

She did know, finally. She put an arm on his shoulder and he shuddered in joy—he hoped imperceptibly—at that exotic feeling of human-on-human contact. “Zal, I am not the one who hurts them. I find them like that; I find them
dead.”

Zal nodded, a bit ashamed at how it might have seemed: an accusation perhaps. “I didn’t think you did, Asiya.”

“But you don’t know me at all, really. That’s okay.”

“That’s true.”

“It’s funny, you got so upset yesterday when I said we were strangers,” she said, nudging his arm along as they walked toward wherever in that city her studio was, Zal in total blissful blindness.

“But yesterday was so strange,” Zal muttered. “I mean, I never had a day like that. By the end, I really felt like I had known you my whole life. I forgot what my actual life looked like.”

Asiya nodded. “I know. But you were right. I think we have known each other longer than we think.”

Zal looked at her to see if she was somehow joking or even being completely serious, but her eyes were turned upward, lost in apparently nothing but overcast city sky.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“Don’t worry,” she said, and she quickened her stride.

Zal quickened his.

They watched the city pass them by without seeing it at all, like characters in a dream, everything familiar just an irrelevant frame of motion picture passing along.

She finally said something at a crosswalk where a red flashing hand warned them against moving on. “People are always forgetting with you, aren’t they?”

“What?”

“The bird stuff. Like when I mentioned my art. I had forgotten already. People must forget.”

“No one knows. Or, few people. Well, I only know a few people.”

“But even them. It’s easy to screw up.”

“For some people it’s the first thing they think when they see me.”

She shook her head emphatically, furiously even. “Not me, Zal. I had forgotten already. I almost don’t believe it.”

“It’s true.”

“I know. I
almost
can’t believe it.”

“Well, okay.”

“There must be people like me, who come to care very much about you, who forget the whole thing and suddenly shove it in your face without knowing.”

Zal shrugged. He wanted to change the subject, but he didn’t. “It comes up less than you think. Lucky for me, the whole world is not a mess of birds, dead or whatever.”

People like me, who come to care very much about you.

He had heard that right, he thought, he had heard that exactly.

My God, he thought as the light turned green. Something was happening.

A few years ago, when Hendricks had finally sat him down to explain how human life was created, he had begun like that:
When two people like each other, who come to care very much about each other .
.
.

Her studio: it was the second studio he had seen in the past few weeks, if the Silbertorium could be called a studio, if his work could even be seen as a sort of art. This studio was very different, all the way at the end of the island—though only a sliver of water away from BXS’s—and very small, very simple: one large drawing table, another type of table, two counter stools, one small window. In some ways it looked like a cell, in others like a—dare he say it—cage.