The Last Illusion (2 page)

Zari’s young man was kneeling before the cage, silently taking pictures of the frightened and apparently human creature. He whipped out many other machines, too, that apparently recorded their words and their images—Khanoom was momentarily distracted by these miracles—artifacts that would forever serve as the only testament to global-phenomenon “Bird Boy’s” early existence.

Zari could not take it; she pushed her mother and her friend out of the way and took the boy out of his cage. As much as he flapped and screamed and shivered and drooled in her arms, she would not let him go. She said her name over and over:
Zari Zari Zari, I am your sister, your sister, your sister,
but it was no use. She cried and cried, shaking him gently in her arms,
Poor baby, poor baby, poor baby .
.
.

White Demon was at that point ten years old.

He could not talk. He could not walk. He could not identify his sister as his sister, his mother as his mother, the young man as a young man, human as human.

What he did know: the other birds, and maybe some God they believed in. What he could do: chirp, tweet, coo, shriek. He could squat and jump; flap his elbows and fingers in the air like wings; piss and shit, right there in his cage; peck at and bite into foods and water and consume them, but just in bits; sleep in that squat and perhaps even dream, but who could know but the birds.

Zari eventually bound the weeping hysterical Khanoom up in yarn—the only restraint she could conjure—bound her and bound her hard until Zari could gather her wits and find a way for them and White Demon to get out. The young man, lost in the awful poetry of the situation, said to Zari,
She calls him White Demon, of all things, but
this child is like the parable’s Zal. White like Zal, and raised by, well, not just by one great bird, but all birds. This is the
Shahnameh’
s Zal.

He’s our Zal, yes,
Zari said and turned to that thing, apparently her brother, and with her voice cracking and even crumbling, she asked him,
Do you want to be Zal, love? Are you Zal?

But the boy wouldn’t look at them, any of them. He just sat there shuddering in a state of incomprehensible emergency, eyes cast to the narrow swatch of sky the window permitted.

Zari had let the young man, a filmmaker, shoot more while she made the calls. She had finally left her mother, still bound, in the hands of the police while she and her filmmaking companion took the boy and his cage—he was used to it, after all—out and into the world for the very first time.

Weeks later, a rumor: Khanoom had died in prison by her own hands. The prison refused to confirm the exact cause of death, but another prisoner said on the filmmaker’s tape,
She kept claiming she was nothing without her children. We asked her, well, why did you do that to that little Zal-child? And she said, no, not him—he can go to hell, the White Demon. I mean, my real children. We told her that her children are fine and grown and she said, no, the children I have now. She had meant her birds. One day the guard told her they had burned her birds, out of cruelty and maybe he was just sick of hearing about them. The next morning we found her pulseless, with her hands still locked at her neck.

Zari took Zal to Tehran and found a sort of halfway home—part orphanage, part psychiatric ward, with a touch of juvenile detention center. It was a place where children who were beyond hope went, it seemed. There was no option to take him home with her, just blocks away—he needed constant attention: specialists, doctors, a whole team to study him and somehow envision a future for him, a miracle plot in which a child of that level of ferality could endure. She visited him daily for a while, but ultimately she could not take it.

Plus everyone’s eyes were on her. Zal was a national phenomenon, thanks to her filmmaker and other documentarians internationally as well, and many blamed Zari and her siblings for abandoning their mother but also Zari for fame-mongering. Every time a photo of Zari with that squatting bony child came out in a paper or magazine or on the news, the next day—if she happened to walk among the Tehran skyscrapers even for a few moments—without fail, she’d feel fresh spit on her hunched shoulders, her knotted back, her ever-aching head. Whoever had cursed Khanoom now cursed her.

Zari, some say, started to lose her mind and ultimately disappeared, somewhere abroad. Even the filmmaker could not find her. The other six siblings remained anonymous, discussing the issue only in phone calls, whispering as if the whole world had their ear to the wall. But no one knew they were part of the family that had created the infamous Zal. None of them could bear to imagine that child, their own flesh and blood, raised by birds, essentially a bird slowly converted to human by lab scientists. He appeared in the prayers of this silent scattered cult once in a while, but even they, with their own troubles, eventually let the horror of him fade, like an old bad dream.

The doctors who studied him claimed he had not been properly touched by a human since his early infanthood. That Khanoom had seldom spoken to him, but apparently sang to all the birds and he could sing back as much as they could. That he was only let out of his cage every few days at most, and even then likely for very limited time, and just on the veranda at most. That he had limited exposure to sunlight, just what the veranda could offer. That his skin could not endure normal clothing, and would not for many years. That he could not digest human food, only seed and water, and would not for a while. That it would take years and years to get him to walk upright, to get him to straighten his arms, to get him to hold utensils, a pen, another human. That teaching him a language would require a staff of the best language acquisition specialists in the world.

And yet as much as the country’s—and indeed parts of the world’s—hearts were with him, as much as his room in the home got filled with dolls and stuffed animals and candies and clothes that he could do nothing with, nobody was paying the medical bills. Articles did not feed Zal or his staff of scientists and doctors.

One day maybe,
someone would say.

Perhaps possibly,
someone else would say.

But the odds,
another would say.

Meanwhile, they tracked the boy’s descents and ascents—shriek to song, grimace to bawl, cuddle to hurl, off and on and on and off—as if there were even logic in this world.

“Zal’s Crisis,” a headline in the
Tehran Times
declared. The story featured ample speculation from the doctors who worked with him daily and who were growing more and more concerned for the boy as he aged. It also featured the young filmmaker who had first seen the boy, who had done more than anyone to spread Zal’s story beyond the border of Iran, whose three-hour documentary
Zal Lives
had won awards around the world and broken the hearts of many a man and woman who could not locate Iran on a map.

It was the filmmaker who first got the letter from Anthony Hendricks, a New York child psychologist and feral children researcher who was interested in coming to Iran to set up a meeting with Zal.

The young filmmaker, with little connection to Zal and his world, had simply relayed the number of the home and said it was all he could do really.

But by the time Hendricks came to Tehran three months later, something inside the filmmaker—perhaps some indebtedness to this story that had catapulted him from mere student of film to one of the world’s most sought-after documentarians, this link to a life that he had barged in on and frozen and capitalized on like an earnest but profiting almost-Audubon, this bond that would be in some ways a forever-connection to everything Zal—all this had prompted him to be there at the airport to greet Hendricks, one hand extended in a shake, the other perched on his camera, about to film what was effectively the sequel.

In the film he comes out of customs, a giant man with white beard, big belly, laughing eyes, in a too-tight beige tweed suit and bow tie, all Santa-Claus-gone-professor pleasant looks. The sound of the filmmaker’s chuckles at his image are caught on the film, and then Hendricks himself laughing, and then saying, “Well, adventure of adventures! Tony Hendricks here!
Salaam, chetori
?”

The filmmaker had lowered his camera, shocked by the man’s pitch-perfect Persian salutation.

He had been married to an Iranian woman who years ago had died, Hendricks explained, his eyes still laughing.

“I am so sorry,” the young filmmaker said. “No children of your own?”

Hendricks had shaken his head. “She couldn’t. She was sick since I met her. A long struggle.”

“I am even more sorry,” the filmmaker said. “You are so kind to come see this child that nobody can care for anymore. It’s such a tragedy. He has family, but none of them will claim him. They are too ashamed. I would take him if I could.”

“Don’t worry,” Hendricks said, with real confidence. “He will be taken care of, that I promise.”

But the filmmaker did not imagine Hendricks meant he would care for the boy himself. In fact, when the papers reported this American scientist Hendricks was adopting Zal, nobody believed it. They thought the home had simply paid him to take the kid, not the other way around.

Zal and Hendricks lived in a temporary apartment in Tehran’s north side for several months. It was important to Hendricks that Zal be near his medical team and slowly get to know his homeland. They took walks together—Zal from wheelchair to walker—and sat in parks. After a while Hendricks read to him and saw glimmers of peace in the boy, peace that had to be indication of thought.

The boy was maybe, just maybe, thinking—thinking as we do.

A few papers called him “Zal’s Ann Sullivan,” and one cruelly printed a photo of them in the park, a hysterical Zal amidst a fit, clawing at Hendricks’s hair and beard, and Hendricks in a sort of composed agony, trying to contain the little savage of his, with apparently little luck.

Given the nature of Zal’s nightmares, Hendricks made sure they always slept in the same room.
Zal Hendricks,
he would always say to his son before bedtime, with an index finger poised like a gun barrel against the boy’s heart, as he lay—finally lay!—in the twin bed that flanked Hendricks’s double bed.
You
:
Zal Hendricks
.

In those months in Tehran, often after Zal fell asleep, Hendricks would take out his translated copy of the
Shahnameh
and read Zal’s namesake’s sections to himself. Who could say whose story was worse? His Zal was not exactly an albino but a white-blond child in a family of raven-haired folk, in a nation almost entirely of raven-haired folk. But in the
Shahnameh,
Zal grew into such a great hero that the father who had abandoned his too-white freak child in the wilderness to be raised by the giant godlike bird, the Simorgh, came back to claim him. The Simorgh reluctantly returned Zal, though forever remained his guardian angel through all his many victories and travails. And in spite of Zal’s “old man’s hair,” he was described as possessing “a body like a cypress tree,” or else a lion’s, and a “chest like a mountain of silver” and “cheeks as fresh as spring”; he evolved into “a shining star” and ultimately a ruler of a kingdom, a man—all man, a real man—whose greatest challenge in the end was capturing the most beautiful woman in the world and keeping her, against all odds.

Of course, it was just a story, but sometimes for Hendricks it had the feel of a session with a well-reputed astrologer. It could all be—and it likely was—bunk, but what marvelous bunk. He was reminded of that old feeling he used to have—one that some hand-me-down rationality would try fruitlessly to deny—that you could wish things into being if only you tried hard enough. Of course, until Zal he had never considered that a being could be wished into being if some other source or combination of sources willed it enough. His mind ran away with glorious possibility: that darkly glittering will of the cosmos conjuring through some magical combo of, say, blood, guts, sun, sky, and spirit—
and isn’t that how every human is made anyway?
he tried to argue, with whom he did not know.
Isn’t that how every story is created?