The Last Illusion (24 page)

Rhodes knew more than he had told him—that Zal could tell. Rhodes had long ago told him what he shared would remain confidential and never divulged to his father, but Zal didn’t altogether buy it. Rhodes and Hendricks were old friends, colleagues from way back when, and they still talked sometimes. Zal could very well have casually entered a recent conversation. In any case, the moment he walked into Rhodes’s office, Zal felt certain Rhodes and his thick, clear-framed glasses were beholding him in a slightly different way.

“Am I a new man or something?” Zal joked.

“You tell me,” Rhodes said and smiled, a bit sinisterly. He wrote down
immediate levity
à
intro, comic greeting,
a new thing.

“Well, whether you know it or not,” Zal began, “there are some things to tell.”

“I know nothing, but I don’t doubt it,” said Rhodes, looking at his folder of notes. “It’s been a while, Zal. Almost a month. Not good. You’ve been canceling and changing times all over the place. This, I take it, is still because of Miss Austria?”

“Asiya,” Zal snapped. Rhodes had to be doing that on purpose, he thought, at this point. He must have brought her up a hundred times at least.

“Oh, my bad again!
AWE-see-ya.
”

Zal rolled his eyes, and Rhodes wrote it down:
eye-rolling.
He had never seen that either. “Look, shall I just spit it out?”

“Sure, a good use of our time,” Rhodes egged him on, scribbling
annoyance markedly heightened, bantering abilities also up.

“Rhodes, I did it,” Zal blurted out. “I
did it
with her. You know what I mean by that. And also I told her I loved her.”

“Is that all?!” Rhodes could not believe what he was hearing. He scribbled it in all caps, underlined. “I’m gonna use the recorder today, Zal, okay?”

“And she met my father.”

“Well, well,” Rhodes said. “That
is
a lot. Last time we met, you were being photographed by your girlfriend for her show. You had already kissed her, something you were participating in but only
maybe
enjoyed, but you were still ambivalent about furthering physical contact, and in fact the notion of lovemaking seemed a bit repulsive to you, which of course I assured you was more than normal, of course,
considering.
”

Of course,
Zal thought. He did not want to deal with Rhodes today.

“And now you’ve done that, and also you’ve told her you love her. Last time, remember, I asked if you loved her, and you said you were not sure, but you did not think so. So what changed, Zal? Tell me, what happened?”

Zal paused. It was his tradition, almost, to tell Rhodes everything and anything. It was easy with Rhodes, a person he never really cared about, a person hired to serve him, he realized. And yet now the Lying Zal was born, and he didn’t believe he owed him the whole truth if he didn’t owe it to his father and his girlfriend.

“I changed how I felt,” Zal said, slowly. “That’s pretty human, last I checked.”

More sarcasm,
Rhodes jotted, without looking at his sheet. “Sure, Zal, sure. But it doesn’t mean there is no root cause. Perhaps you did just, over time, fall in love?”

Zal shrugged.

“Or perhaps she demanded your love and wanted to make love and you gave in to it all?”

Zal tensed up. “Look, Rhodes, this is not a problem for therapy. It’s not even something I want to discuss today.”

“Okay, Zal. What would you like to tell me?”

Zal searched his head, his month, for something to eclipse any judgment of Asiya and their escalated status. All he thought of was the Mistake. Rhodes would be all over that, but what else did he have? “Do you want to know about the show?”

“Oh, certainly. How was it?”

“It was a wonderful night. One of the best of my life.”

“Tell me about it, Zal.”

Zal told him about it. “Really, a highlight, if not
the
highlight, of my life,” he said. “I was so normal, Rhodes.”

“Good. I’m amazed, Zal. Not at you being normal, of course, but your enjoyment of the event. I remember you had some dread surrounding it.”

“Well, it was all great. Almost all. And then I did something bad, something I suppose normal people might do in a night like that, but a bad thing nonetheless.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I made out with a man—a boy, really—in the bathroom of the gallery.”

“You did. I see .
.
.”

“And the boy was Asiya’s brother’s friend.”

“Ah.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve been drinking here and there still, Zal? No more than that?”

“I was a little drunk,” Zal admitted sheepishly.

“Any drugs?”

“No, of course not.”

“Any chance anyone drugged you?”

“
Rhodes
.”

“Any chance you had a dream or daydream?”

“Rhodes, this happened! I wouldn’t make it up!” Zal had noticed that since he had told Rhodes a while ago about kissing Asiya, Rhodes had acquired a new suspiciousness about his words. He jotted more things down, too. He had been so reluctant to believe Zal had even acquired a girlfriend; maybe suddenly he was wondering if the sex was made up, too.

For a moment, he was. “Zal, it’s just that I have to make sure. I have to admit to you that this is all very much above and beyond what I would have thought possible. Zal, tell me, how does making out make you feel?”

“Well, it’s great. I like it, I really do. Don’t you want to know about the sex?”

“Zal, I need to just make sure: how do you know it’s sex? Are you sure you’re having intercourse?”

Zal turned red, and Rhodes wrote
registers significant embarrassment at idea of sex
. “Look, I know some things! And so does Asiya, you know. If you don’t believe me, you should at least believe she’d know a thing or two.”

Rhodes sighed. “Zal, is she still having delusions about hellfire and all that?”

“No. I mean, sometimes. She is. But she’s not crazy, not crazy about everything, at least. She knew I’d betray her, for instance. Don’t ask me, but she did.”

Rhodes was silent, nodding away, writing things down, feeling very, very distant from Zal, even though just a desktop separated them.

“Tell me, did you feel real desire for the boy?” he finally said.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Do you feel real desire for your girlfriend during sex?”

“Maybe. Yes. No.”

“Which is it, Zal?”

He was starting to feel upset—at what exactly, he didn’t know, but the past few Rhodes sessions, sessions that used to seem essential to him, now seemed more and more like something he longed to skip, and did. “Can we stop talking about this?”

“Zal, you do understand that you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to? You can still be normal, still be a man.” His words echoed Hendricks’s, from his debriefing phone call.

“I know that.”

Rhodes’s face softened a bit, and he put down his pen. Zal could feel his eyes, intense with scrutiny, intense with concern, drilling at Zal’s forehead. “Zal, you also know this: that you are asexual.”

He had known it was coming—it had come the last time, the time before that, and the time before that, when he had first mentioned Asiya and his newfound boyfriendhood. “I really am done talking about this.”

“Zal, you know you have to face that.”

“Things can change. You know that’s possible,” Zal murmured. “I’ve become things people thought were impossible.”

Rhodes nodded furiously. “You really have, Zal. But sexuality, that’s a tough one. You can’t face it. Tell me, how does it make you feel, making love?”

“I really can’t discuss this today. Maybe another time.”

“Did you tell your father?”

“No. Please don’t.”

“I don’t tell him things, Zal. What did your father think of her?”

“I don’t know. I suppose he was concerned.”

“Zal, would it surprise you to know I am concerned?”

“About what?”

“About your involvement with that girl. I’ve known you for a long time, Zal.”

“What’s so wrong with her?” He wondered what he had said to Rhodes to make him think Asiya was off. Or was it what Hendricks had said to him? All along, foolishly, Zal had thought Rhodes would have rejoiced—selfishly or for science—at these major developments in his life.

“Zal, I, too, am human. I don’t know everything—I only have my theories. You are welcome to bring her. I do couples therapy too.”

“We don’t need that.”

“She might need help herself.”

“You don’t think I should have a girlfriend, Rhodes—that’s the bottom line.”

No inhibitions, straightforward anger,
Rhodes quickly scribbled. “Zal, I am concerned about you having that particular girlfriend.”

Zal dropped his head in his hands. “I suppose you want me to ask what you would do in my position, like we always do, right, Rhodes?”

“Zal,” he said, pen down again, eyes like lasers. “I would isolate the problem, as we always do. If it were me, I would leave her, for a time, at least. But you are not me.”

Not normal yet, in other words,
Zal thought glumly. But he knew he was getting warmer as the troubles, the offenses, the complications, the anxieties were appearing one by one, on top of each other, like bubbles in a pot of boiling water. It was something like he used to imagine life would be.

Their session had ended and picked up the next time with the suggestion Rhodes thought was the antidote to all this: a job. He rationalized that if Zal was ready for a relationship, then certainly he was ready for a job.
Now, that is progress towards normalcy, with minimum chance of hurt,
he had said.

Hurt. It was a strange sensation, that feeling—a very real feeling. The more normal he became, the more he felt it, as if it were some raw throbbing glistening organ inside him, something between heart and stomach, a type of core, but a vulnerable fragile one that could become easily swollen, irritated, wounded. He felt softer and softer as days went by. Sometimes he found himself uncovering mirrors and really looking at himself and really seeing himself and weeping. Other times, he thought he was so close to smiling, so filled with joy, that he worried the hurricane of happiness inside him would cause his body to shatter, and he wondered if laughter was like that—violent like the worst weather, like the best orgasm, and as brawny and urgent as anger, an eruption that could hurt as well as heal.

And the more Rhodes and Hendricks and even strangers in the street, it seemed, worried about him because of Asiya, the more he felt he loved her. Poor Asiya, who grew less normal by the day, who started to need him far more than he did her.

One sunny September day, a little over 250 days since their meeting on what they affectionately called the Day the World Didn’t End, Asiya woke up screaming. Zal was on the other end of the bed, mummified by her too many sheets, and he quickly embraced her and put his hand over her mouth.
Stop, it’s okay, it’s okay,
he said, assuming it was a nightmare, one of her many nightmares. But she bit him and got up, naked, pacing, crying.