The Last Illusion (20 page)

He told her more, everything that was left. He told her about Silber and the Flight Triptych and all his dreams for it.

Her mouth dropped at the story. She told him maybe that was it, maybe there was a way.

He told her it was not real. He told her: strings, wire, smoke, mirrors.

She told him he shouldn’t think negatively. All the craziest things happen. If we can think it, it can happen. She told him she could read his mind, right then.

He told her he was thinking something right now that he knew would never happen.

She went over to the naked Zal and put her lips on his.

That’s not it,
he thought frantically, sure he was dying, that he was being choked to death, that she was sucking the oxygen out of him. Then he remembered all those movies,
Casablanca
and the others: the men always went for it like they were hungry, like the women were food on a plate that they were going to devour, how they took charge of it, swooped down and pressed their mouths against the woman’s, tightly closed and long and hard, arms all over what was theirs.

He tried it.

She seemed to respond. Then she pulled back and put her finger in his mouth, as if prying it open, and told him to keep it that way.

He gasped for air as her open mouth closed on his.

She laughed softly as she pulled away. She demonstrated on his hand.

It felt good. He could tell it would feel good.

Inside his mouth, an explosive wetness suddenly existed; a searching, writhing, assured wetness worked some magic.

He was repulsed at first, and then he wasn’t.

They went on like that for a while.

When she pulled away, she spoke in an even quieter whisper than her usual and told him she had, in all her experiences over the years, never had a
real
boyfriend. There had been phases, men of different gods—but she stopped herself from getting into it.

And he told her, in all his no-experience, he had never had a girlfriend.

So, she wondered, was he?

He paused. She was asking him but also offering, clearly.

She told him she didn’t mind taking charge, and so she cleared her throat and just went for it.

“Zal, do you want to be my boyfriend?”

Zal tried to swallow the feelings of alarm and panic. It was okay, it would not hurt him. Certainly he had gone this far—he had to.

Echo,
he thought,
echo.
“Asiya,” he said. “I want to be your boyfriend.”

She again did that thing she rarely did: she smiled—what a smile—and embraced him and again kissed him, wetness and all. She was so happy.

They went on like that for a while, then ate some ant candy and talked about where to go next, until Asiya got another one of her disaster premonitions and they rushed to her home. It, like all of them, passed.

But Asiya’s panic attack was an especially bad one for Zal, the first really bad one. On the evening of their girlfriend-boyfriend-hood, just hours after their first kiss, in the midst of her terrors, she had turned to him and said, “It’s you, isn’t it?”

Zal had kept her close to his chest, wanting to contain her tremors somehow. He pulled back a bit. “What do you mean, Asiya?”

He had never seen her look so frightened. “You’re going to .
.
. going to .
.
.” It seemed as if she were choking on an idea she was too scared to give life to in the open air.

“I’m not doing anything, Asiya. I’m just here with you, trying to help you.”

She shook her head so hard he worried she’d hurt her neck. Her face was blood red when she finally spit it out: “You’re gonna betray me, aren’t you?”

And before either of them could say anything, she had melted that statement into an avalanche of sobs.

“Asiya, you’re wrong!” Zal said over and over.

“I don’t mess this stuff up. Sometimes I know what’s in your head, maybe before you even know what’s in your head. I know what could happen, what will happen .
.
.”

Zal remembered something. “No, you’ve been wrong! Just earlier you were wrong. When I said I was thinking about something I knew would never happen, you kissed me.”

For a moment, a cruel gash of a smile appeared on her face through that curtain of tears. “I kissed you because I wanted to kiss you. You, on the other hand, want to fly.”

Zal swallowed his alarm and shook his head at her, even though they both knew she was right.

“Make sure you’re flying, not falling, though. They’re not the same thing. The earth pulls us down, not up,” she said through clenched teeth, as if the words hurt to utter.

The whole world filled with the rumbling of her inconsolable panic. Zal tried to focus on the ticking of the watch on his wrist.

It would be over soon. And when it finally was, neither of them would have the courage to bring it up, whatever it was.

PART V

Watch out, the world’s behind you.

—The Velvet Underground,

“Sunday Morning”

He developed a taste for kissing, and soon it was anything but confusing and really not even a matter of wetness but rather another way for the flesh to explore other flesh, to get deeper, almost as deep as was permitted—
almost
to get a hint of what was inside others. No one had access to all the real insides of anyone else, much less themselves, the network of organs and blood and cells and muscles and fats and all that other fragile machinery and their continual miracles. He felt like those movie heroes, hungry for kisses, and when he went in, he really went in, making him altogether a different kisser from most people.
Who knew it could hurt,
she would half-joke.
If anyone could do that, it’s you, Zal.

It was about to hurt her more than she could imagine.

It happened one very significant early summer evening, when the first breaths of humidity were just barely giving the city a taste of what was to come and people’s thoughts were turning more and more to water and naps and sand and sun and sunblock and skin. It was the night of Asiya’s big solo art show, also a monumental night for him. He later wondered if it would be the highlight of his life, even with its mistake, and he decided maybe the mistake had been just a casualty of the night’s greatness. That night he had felt better than normal; he had felt
special.
He had graduated from normal so suddenly and fully that at the opening people saw him as different only because they saw him as better than all of them. All of Asiya’s dozens and dozens of fellow artists, plus gallery bigwigs, critics, and passersby, had been staring at him all night, but in a way that he knew for sure was not bad—not that old look of shock or wonder at him as the mere fruit of an unbelievable story, but instead as a pure example of unshakable freakdom. He had been Asiya’s muse for months, here and there, almost casually, when she had film to spare, but soon it became apparent he was the subject of the best work she’d ever done. Two-thirds of a show she’d thought would be all dead birds simply had to be
living bird boy,
as she put it. In the end, even the one-third that were bird photos were different bird photos than she had originally envisioned; they looked almost animate, beating hearts and all even. A blurry bird silhouette, a “sleeping” bird in a human-built nest, flocks of birds in various formations, and of course the bird attached to strings and posed in artificial flight. It was as if her fascination with decay had simply melted away, while her fascination with birds had only been reinforced. When she realized it was all Zal’s doing, she began to focus her lens on him. She even re-created that very bird photo Zal loved, put him in black Halloween angel wings and attached him to thin wire hung from the plant hooks on her ceiling. It was the centerpiece of nearly a dozen blown-up prints and smaller oversize Polaroids. She called Zal “Angel” in her show
All My Angels.

He was filled with pride. He had never been the most important bird. In all his time with his bird mother, Khanoom, and all her children, he was at the bottom by far.

He was also grateful that Asiya had found a way to skirt the bird issue—
his
bird issue—and yet pay homage to it at the same time. He liked the idea of angels. And he loved the notion of some genuine light seeping into Asiya’s steadfast night vision. Her world of angels, with him at its core, seemed to transport her slightly outside her dreaded realm of apocalypse.

Zal had even submitted to her styling for the show. He truthfully wasn’t that happy with the white feather boa slung around his neck—
it’s angelic, not birdlike, I swear the feathers are fake,
she had insisted and insisted—over the white plain shirt upon which she had scribbled a red outline of an angel with a halo, harp, wings, and all. She told him he looked
edgy, hip, arty,
like
he
was with
her
.
An art couple,
she had cooed. And for the first time, Zal saw Asiya in something other than black—she wore a white linen tunic and white flowing slacks, the outfit simple as ever but shocking on Asiya for its brightness, chosen to be in sync with her muse, her angel, her show, of course.

That night could have been the highlight of her life, too, it occurred to him too late.

In some ways it had all been overwhelming, the all-eyes-on-them as they walked in a bit late—Asiya had told him it was very important they be just a bit late—but once he had realized these were different looks than what he used to get, he fell in love with the attention. He was suddenly full of things to say and excited to shake hands and hug and even air-kiss and pose by his photos and even autograph one girl’s cocktail napkin.

If he had ever had a shot at smiling, that night was it.

And then finally there was that boy. The one with all the questions, mostly innocent ones.

“Who are you?” he asked, just like that.

“I’m fine,” Zal had said, mishearing
who
for
how,
several drinks into the evening. Since the night of Willa’s birthday those many months ago, he had developed a love-hate relationship with alcohol, locked, it seemed, in a cycle of regretting and indulging over and over.

The boy had chuckled. “Not too modest, huh?”

Zal had blinked, confused. The boy—freckled, thin, scrawny, in a cap, tank top, and jeans—was looking him up and down, in a way that was somehow different from all the other eyes on him.

“Is that you?” he said, pointing to one of Zal’s black Halloween wing portraits. “Are you
the
angel?” The boy was smiling, an oily smile; he knew the answer.

“I am
the
angel,” Zal said, and tried to make a joke to tag on: “But I’m no angel.”

The boy chuckled again, as if Zal were a masterful comic. “Oh yeah? You want to prove it?”

Zal didn’t say anything, just tried to follow those eyes that moved from his feet to his feathered boa.

The boy finally went for the least innocent question of all. “Do you want to go in there,” he asked, pointing to the restroom across the hall, “and kiss me?”
Only one aspect of it had shocked Zal: the very idea that you could kiss someone other than the one you were supposed to kiss. The notion was absolutely revolutionary, and of course appealing—he had recently felt just a touch enslaved by Asiya and his boyfriendhood, and of course, at the same time, he had become such a kissing enthusiast that the idea of a new set of lips was stupefying. Before he could make a decision—after all, he knew giving in was the wrong thing to do, and, should Asiya find out, which he suspected she would, suspected in fact
he
might be the one to tell her, if not that night, well, one day, everything could very well be ruined—the boy had led him by the hand to the bathroom and gone in first. A few seconds later, through just a crack, he motioned Zal in with a big smile, and all that beautiful hell had broken loose.

They went in and stayed there for what felt like an eternity. He lost all sense of himself, but gladly somehow. There he found himself kissing as if his life depended on it. The alcohol in his system was suddenly overwhelming him, so his technique (slow, circular, searching, whipping, flicking, thrusting, backing off, thrusting harder, and harder and harder, in that order) was sloppier than usual, but it didn’t hinder his desire to take that mouth in, take everything he had, and employ the hands, face, neck, ears, shoulders, arms, just short of another place he knew people went but he still felt too on the fence to introduce now, or anytime, for that matter. This was making out, and Zal thought he was good at it, maybe even better with the boy than with Asiya. So in the bathroom of the gallery where Asiya was having her first solo art show, he gave it everything he had, let the alcohol coat his conscience, and allowed himself to enjoy every bit of the very eager body before him, without a second’s second thought—

“Fuck!” The door opened, and both of their heads ripped apart from each other and turned to it, the source of the
Fuck.