The Last Illusion (18 page)

They sat like that for a minute, each enjoying the opposite effect of the other’s touch, each filled with unquiet panic, each thinking of Asiya.

“How did you get like this, Willa?” he eventually asked, shocked at his own words—the courage or whatever it was that made his thoughts immediately exist outside of him. Like the hand-holding, there it was, to his shock. Was there nothing he wouldn’t do?

There were some things he couldn’t.

He looked into her eyes, worried, seconds after he said it.

She closed them for a long pause.

When she opened them, they glistened in a way that he knew meant one thing: tears.

My God,
he thought,
I have made not one but two women cry tonight. Both women I like, even.

“Forgive me,” he said. “Let’s talk about something else .
.
.”

She shook her head, and a few tears flung loose, like diamonds off a chain. “You are right to ask. It’s okay to, I mean. You’re not the first.”

He nodded, still ashamed.

“It’s a long story,” she said. “It’s a bad story. Are you sure you want to hear it?”

He shrugged. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours. But only if you want to.”

She closed her eyes again and took a deep breath. “I do.”

Many minutes went by in silence, their hands still locked.

Zal started to see swirls in the darkness, the candlelit darkness. He worried the room was going to spiral around itself again. He looked at her and gently nudged her along. “Willa,” he said. “Once upon a time .
.
.”

And it was a long bad story, even with Willa abbreviating its odds and ends. It was the worst he had ever heard.

Later, while he could not remember her saying it—could never re-create that setting, her weeping in the candlelight and saying all those awful, cataclysmic almost, words—he felt quite haunted by the actual story.
Story,
he thought,
a strange thing, tales within their very tales, other lives in their lives.
He didn’t want to accept it. In his head, it was just a story that he couldn’t accept as someone else’s reality; it might as well have been another nightmare-scape—his or hers, who cared, just downward-turning plot points, with the etiquette of weather, almost randomly generated for her.

He was amazed the memory was contained inside her, even in that enormous inside of hers, bigger than any outside could possibly hint at. How could anyone be big enough for that; how could that person find a way to smile?

The Story.
When they had been young—very young; she did not say exactly how young—Asiya used to be in charge of babysitting her when their mother was out, usually with men, usually in bars. They were often alone, as Zachary had a best friend one house down, where he spent most of his time. Asiya eventually got bored with the responsibility and started acting in many ways like their mother, running loose through the city, with men, in bars, and worse, though who knew the extent of it. Eventually it was just Willa. This was before she was bedridden, before she was fat, even, when she was at most a slightly chubby girl, made of the same type of chub of normal little girls. She started liking being alone, talking to herself, playing with imaginary friends, making up story after story after story. She began to live in her imagination, almost solely. On one of these afternoons, when she was imagining being a princess in a tower, thin with long blond hair, so long that it spanned miles, across the hilltops and meadows of a magical little village on another planet—Zal wished this was
the
story, that the story ended there, capped with a final
happily ever after,
but no—the house was broken into. A man in dark clothing suddenly appeared, darting from room to room, knocking things over, packing things in dark suitcases, whispering things to himself that she did not understand, until finally he found her, sitting in a pile of Legos in her room. He told her he would kill her if she made a sound, that she was going with him and they were going to take a ride. So she cried, but silently. He threw her in the back of the van. It was dark. Time went by. When she was let out, they were in a cabin, and outside the one window there was just night and wilderness, nothing else, no sign of city. (“What did he look like?” Zal had interrupted, his body growing hot with fear and anger, wanting both to visualize the demon and to ID him, so he could punish Willa’s attacker forever, not knowing if the story ended with the law doing that or not. But she said she could not remember. All she knew was that he was old and there was some facial hair and that was it; time and perhaps sanity had rendered the man faceless.) And the story grew even blurrier—Zal did not know whether it was for his sake or if she couldn’t bear to utter it or if she simply had blocked it all. (“I couldn’t tell you so much about my life at that age, either,” he assured her.) But this is what she knew: he had hurt her again and again, she had been hurt in ways she had never imagined possible, over and over, until she began to do whatever the man said, until she began to never cry, until she began almost to accept him as her keeper, until she accepted that life, until she began to almost—“and I say this word and I know it’s so weird, don’t judge me,” she cried—
love
him. She found a purpose in all those weeks with him, a way to stay alive. It was the one thing she knew how to do at that age, a way that caught the man’s interest, that had him keep her just-so intact, that preserved her to this day: she told him stories. Every night before the man went to bed—and he had trouble going to bed, she recalled—she told him a part of one long, continuous story, each night saying she’d tell the rest tomorrow, to-be-continuing the thing for months, until the police finally broke in one night and found a naked little girl perched atop the stomach of the psychopath, telling stories as if she were a mythological fairy and he was the luckiest monster on earth.

“Don’t worry, Zal,” she said when she finished. “He died in prison.”

Zal could not say a word. He had only one question, which he asked her after many minutes of silence. “What was the story you told him?”

She smiled and shrugged at the familiar question. “That I can’t tell you. I really don’t remember. His face and the story: the only things missing. I wish the whole thing were missing, to tell you the truth.”

“I know what you mean,” he muttered.

“Zal, I do therapy. A therapist comes here.”

“I do therapy, too.”

“You do?!”

“I do.”

“I’m pretty much better,” she said, sniffling. “I’m not so afraid. But over the years, I stopped leaving the house. I stopped moving. I got very sad. I hated my body that that man had owned. I hated my story, all stories. I turned to the most simple things. And soon, before I knew it, I, well, got like this.”

Zal couldn’t raise his eyes to hers, with all those tears streaming down her cheeks over and over. He wished she could go back to being that dumbly smiling angel of the moments before. Now, on her birthday, to bring back all that, to make her cry like that! He wanted to disappear.

“Don’t feel bad for me,” she later whispered. “I’m better, I really am. It’s Asiya you should worry about—she’s never forgiven herself.”

He sighed, nodding. “I should never mention it to her.”

“Yes, she won’t talk about it. Poor thing.”

Zal got up and went to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. He looked strange; he felt strange. The story had sobered him, he felt, suddenly noting the strangeness of normalcy seeping in. The strangest part of all was that the story had a familiar ring somehow to Zal. Something about it felt ancestral, ancient, but very much a part of him, like when Hendricks read him those bedtime stories of the great bird and its human son, the young albino, the story that had given him his name. In spite of Hendricks, he’d always found that a horror story of sorts, until he heard Willa’s.

The world, thought Zal, was such a very bad place.

When he came out, she looked exhausted, and so he wheeled Willa to her room and covered her with blankets. She insisted on sleeping in her tiara and party dress and all; Zal imagined it was because she didn’t want him to see her undressed, but whatever it was, he respected it.

“Good night, Willa, sleep well,” he said, echoing his father, squeezing her hand very briefly, as if holding on to it too long would start the whole cycle of the story and the tears all over again. “One question: is there any more of that alcohol anywhere?”

There was, and plenty of it. He took another bottle of champagne to Asiya’s room. Asiya was, as he expected, not sleeping, but sitting on the ledge of the window, peering into the sky.

She looked at him, clearly annoyed.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t seem to open this bottle. Could you help me?”

Asiya snorted and took the bottle. Zal was startled by the pop and fizz and overflow, in spite of beholding it all night.

They passed the bottle back and forth mostly in silence.

He started to feel that fire-blooded lunatic eclipse him again, words and actions all a chore, and yet endless and essential in their chaotic flow.

“You look very nice,” Zal said, lying on her bed as she still sat perched on her sill. “Right now, you look so nice. And always. I didn’t mean what I said completely, you know.”

She shook her head at him.

“I have to tell you something, Asiya.”

He suddenly felt like crying.

“What’s wrong?” she said, sounding concerned. She got up from the sill and sat next to him on the bed, searching his eyes. “What is it, Zal?”

He closed his eyes and all of Willa’s story came back to him, and he thought how much she deserved everything in the world—Willa, not Asiya—how he could never care for her enough, how he could never, ever risk enough for her. Nothing would ever be big enough to make it better, so what the hell was he afraid of in speaking the truth anyway?

Asiya: he was afraid of Asiya. He somehow belonged to her already. He had never felt so close to someone so fast, but he felt trapped. He could not believe the power she held over him.

“Zal, you have to tell me now .
.
.” she was saying.

He was owned by her, trapped, behind her bars completely.

“Why did you give me this?” he moaned, pointing to the bottle and then quickly taking a big sloppy gulp from it, half of which he spit out.

Asiya grabbed the bottle and put it behind her back. “No more. Zal, tell me.”

He suddenly started laughing at the whole situation, what madness it all was. Where was his father, where was his home, where were his candied bugs, his computer, his bed, his health problems? What a long endless wicked date it had been since the moment they had met over the body of a dead bird.

When he finally told her, it came out with a startling simplicity:

“Asiya, I have feelings for your sister.”

She looked at him, confused for a second. Then she snorted. Then she shook her head. Then she did the thing he almost never saw her do, the thing he could not do and always found surprising in others—she broke into a massive grin and eruptions of the deepest sort of laughter.

“Oh, Zal! Oh, Zal, oh, Zal, oh, Zal! God, you worried me there! Shit! Great! Well, that’s very nice, Zal! Okay, next topic!”

And she kept going like that, laughing bottomlessly in huge heaves, as if she were about to throw up or become very ill. She did not think he was serious, he eventually realized, or so she was pretending. His interest in Willa, at least on some level, was not real to Asiya at all.