The Last Illusion (26 page)

“You won’t want to be,” Zal said. “They’re fixing you. Just do what they say.”

“You don’t even know,” she shot back—a common line in that phase that he just ignored.

“Trust me,” he said. “In a lot of ways, they fixed me, baby.”

Baby
: he had started calling her what men called their women.
Baby
was a normal thing to call a woman you loved, he knew this. In her absence, he possessed her more wholly than ever.

For that reason, he was happy she was there. He was also happy for other reasons. It wasn’t like the time she was mad at him; this time her absence gave him space to breathe and think and remember himself without her. He started to remind himself of things he liked to do, and he thought of others he could grow to like to do as well. He decided he’d use this time to complete any final steps to normalcy, while Asiya completed hers.

Of course, with any journey to enlightenment, one falls here and there. The skydiving, with its giving in to old bird fantasies, was one fall—but he had managed at the last minute to escape it. The insect candies were another—he tossed a large bag of them all out one day, swearing to never order a single treat box again. The bird dreams were another, and of course the hardest to control, so he started watching horror movies and porn—what normal men did, he knew—so they’d seep into his dream life. They hadn’t, but he knew that with enough consumption, they would.

He started wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap. He started to curse more. He started to look no one in the eye. He started to stare at women in the chest or ass and tell himself to imagine them naked, underneath him. He started to watch the news, keep up with the weather, even watch an occasional sports game. He started to do push-ups and sit-ups more and more. He started to feel insecure, depressed, horny, irrational, frustrated, reckless. He started to focus on cultivating it all, consciously, fully, wholeheartedly—feeling like a man, and not just any man: an American man.

On a particularly gray and dull late autumn afternoon, he decided to do something he’d never done before: he went to a bar alone, a little Irish pub on a corner that boasted with its chalkboard sign,
happy hour daily, 2 for 1 complete menu.

By that point Zal, whether nervous or not, had learned how to learn things. One way was simply coming up with savvy ways to ask.

“So, guys,” he asked the two men, also in caps, behind the bar. “If there was one drink guys like me—regular guys—order the most at this bar, what would it be?”

One of the guys laughed. “What, you doing research?”

“Just wondering, guys!” Zal said, trying to push his face into a grin, something he’d been practicing lately, but put his hand over it quickly. He was still wary of displaying the fruits of his efforts, as they often looked more like an expression of horror. “I’m sick of my usual and wondering if my usual is usual, you know?”

The other guy snorted. “They get a beer, smart guy, maybe a Guinness.”

“Oh, it’s been a while since I had that,” Zal shot back. “I’ll have that.”

“You’ll have what?”

“That!” He didn’t want to fumble the pronunciation.

“Smart guy wants a Guinness?”

Zal nodded, trying hard to make the nod casual.

When the tall foamy dark drink in the pint glass was set before him, he drank it quickly. It was indeed good; he felt seduced by its creaminess. He finished it fast. “Another,” he said, making a thumbs-up sign.

He drank four pints of Guinness in an hour, left what he hoped was a great tip, and stumbled onto the street, which was still too light for him to give up on the day.

He began to automatically head uptown, without thinking where, and minutes later he realized he was on Asiya’s doorstep. Where Asiya wasn’t. Where her brother who still hated him lived, where just next door lived Zachary’s friend who had made out with him and probably hated him, too, where a very large beautiful woman who made his heart race in a way he couldn’t even begin to explain sat on a bed with wheels, day after day, waiting for nothing. He had no place there.

He—drunk as he had ever been, but no drunker than he had ever been—suddenly knew what he had to do. He took his set of keys that Asiya had made—expressly for the reason of getting in and out without needing Zachary, should she not be there—and tiptoed inside.

Zachary’s door was closed, which meant he was gone.

He sighed, relieved, but also suddenly nervous. There was no turning back then, no good reason to.

He looked up and over at Willa’s doorless room, which was, of course, wide-open as ever.

“Hey, Zal, what are you doing here?” she asked the minute she saw him. She was not in her usual nightgown, but in a gray T-shirt that had the words
new yorkers do it better
on it. He realized it must be Zachary’s duty to get her in and out of clothes these days, an idea that somehow made him feel uneasy.

“I was just in the neighborhood!” he said, breathless with excitement, suddenly filled with energy at the sight of her. He couldn’t remember the last time it was just the two of them in that house.

“Okay,” she nodded, with a small smile. “I was just reading. Zachary might be home any minute, though.”

He nodded. He suddenly didn’t care at all about Zachary or his wrath. He was going to let the Ginseng, or whatever it was called, do the quelling of all that for him.

“Make yourself at home then,” she said. She seemed slightly tense, perhaps noticing his drunkenness.

“Yes, I’ve been drinking,” he said. “I have indeed .
.
. baby.”

He couldn’t believe he had called
her,
a woman he did not own,
baby.
But it was nothing compared with what he wanted to do.

She laughed and shook her head, amused, but only a little bit, it seemed.

A wave of desperation and urgency washed over him. One day he would die—it could be anytime—and all they had was now, beautiful, lonely Now!

“Willa, lovely Willa!” he said, kneeling beside her bed suddenly, level with her rainbow-stripe-socked foot. “Willa, I really like you, did you know that?”

“Sure, I like you, too,” she said, frowning a bit for a second. “Have you heard from Ozzie? I talked to her today and she seemed almost cheerful, like kind of funny—”

“No, I mean
I like you,
baby.” He’d said it again. “I like you .
.
. more than .
.
. you think.”

“Okay, Zal,” she sighed. He noted she was self-consciously twisting her bangs, not a bad sign, he thought.

Nervousness, he knew well, was part of the conversion into the seduction act. Awkwardness was fine, too—he and Asiya were still often entangled in endless layers of awkward. They could get around it and more.

“I want you, Willa,” he suddenly blurted, a bit to his own horror, as he put one hand on her foot.

Her foot jerked away, as if he had burned it. “Stop it,” she said. “Look, stop making fun of me, Zal. Go home, you’re drunk.”

“Making fun of you?” He suddenly stood up, suddenly towering over her helpless body. “How could I make fun of you? I think I love you, Willa!”

She scowled—a woman like that could really look menacing in a scowl, he noticed—and turned very red. “Zal, I have feelings, too! Just cause Oz treats me like shit doesn’t mean you get to, too! You leave me alone now!”

Either she didn’t believe him or her condition made her more abnormal than he was. Or maybe it was just him.

“You don’t believe me? Or you don’t like me? Or you don’t like any boys?” he said glumly.

“Of course I don’t believe you! You think I’m an idiot?” She looked like she was going to cry.

“Willa, I want to kiss you,” he said. “Can I just kiss you?”

The scowl morphed into an expression of utter confusion. “Zal, why would you—you’re my sister’s boyfriend .
.
.”

“I told her I had .
.
. feelings for you,” he said, getting closer, leaning over her, until he could feel her erratic breath on his face.

“Zal, you don’t,” she whimpered.

“Willa, I do. You don’t know me,” he insisted. “What did she call us again?”

“Who?”

“Your sister. Fucks? Fugs? No, freaks! Yes, we’re both freaks .
.
.”

“Stop,” she said, inching her head away. “You smell so boozy.”

“I’m sorry, baby, I’m sorry, baby Willa,” he said, cursing the Ginkgo or whatever it was that made him suddenly unappealing in this magic moment that he had so long awaited.

“You really want to kiss me?”

“I do.”

“You know I’ve never—”

“I hadn’t until recently.”

“And my sister—”

“I won’t tell her.”

“But—”

“I know it’s wrong, Willa, I know it’s wrong. But what can we do? No one will know.”

She suddenly broke into a sob, the sweetest sob he’d ever heard, so different from Asiya’s violent heaving gasps. She looked so little, even in all that largeness, that he hushed her, held her face with both hands, and went for it, much slower, with more tenderness than he had ever approached her sister with. Willa’s tears somehow made the whole thing sweeter.

She responded well. She did fine.

And so, slowly, like a starving worm atop his dream apple, he inched his body onto hers and found himself in that position he had dreamed of, over and over, on and off, curled up perfectly atop the mountain of her now rapidly heaving breast. She smelled like sour milk and water crackers and wet towels, but in that moment, it was the best combination of smells in the world. She felt like a type of home he had never imagined for himself.

He stopped kissing her altogether and just let himself lie in that easy curl on top of her, listening to the sound of her chaotically drumming heart eventually smooth itself out.

He fell asleep.

When he finally woke up, it was as violent as the sleep had been comforting; when he came to, it was to Willa’s scream and someone else’s fist in his face, someone with flashing eyes he knew well—and should have known to expect.

“I’m going to fucking kill you, motherfucker!” Zachary was screaming, in a way that it was safe to say Zal had never heard anyone, in real life, scream.

He was going to kill him, there was no doubt about that. Zal suddenly felt horribly hungover, although the digital clock seemed to imply he had been asleep for less than an hour. He had been mostly unlucky, but one small part lucky; he did a quick thanking of higher powers that Asiya’s brother had caught him in a moment of more or less genuine innocence—a mere baby asleep at the breast of a mother, almost—rather than in a more suspect-looking posture, in the less honorable state he had envisioned when he first set his eyes on her that evening.

He was, as the saying went, dead meat.

And he was afraid: check. Of death, truly death: check. And he did not want to die: check.

But the blows were unstoppable. They were mostly to his face, but also his chest, his gut, his limbs, and soon he was on the floor, being kicked in all the same places, as if punches were just the first course. Zal screamed and squealed and shrieked, and when he could he tried to apologize, beg, barter, find some way out with words, but Zachary refused to respond, all sense transforming into animal warbles and wails, and soon even Willa’s pleas faded into blue muted bays in the background.