The Last Illusion (27 page)

It was no use: he was being beaten in a way he’d never experienced—his body was being shattered. He felt everything and nothing, so fast that he couldn’t even register pain from no-pain. His body felt foreign to him like all the events of that day, like Willa even, like that Upper East Side townhouse, and how the hell he had gotten there—not then, but in the first place. He tried to steady his mind, to tell himself soon it would be over, and he tried to imagine other types of overs—better ones, worse ones—and eventually his mind focused on falling, the earth coming up at him, faster and bigger and harder, and he accepted it and promised himself: soon, sooner, soonest, it would all be over.

“Fuck, man, he’s had enough—you don’t want to go to jail!” came another voice, another male one, finally breaking Zachary’s singular focus.

Zal, with his face now jammed under Zachary’s suddenly frozen Air Maxes, thought he recognized the voice, so he peeked up. There, under a cap like Zachary’s, in the same big clothes, was Connor, a boy he had known mostly in skin and boxers and tongue.

“Homo say what?!” Zachary was shouting—at him or Connor, who knew—while laughing an awful, homicidal laugh that was not a good sign.

“Seriously, bro! I mean, I don’t give a shit, but especially if he’s retarded or slow or some shit—”

“Not too slow to come and fucking rape my whole world, the motherfucker!” Zachary’s shoe lifted and quickly came back down hard on Zal’s jaw. Zal tried to vocally gargle his blood, so he could know how far the beating had gone.

Eventually—long after he heard Connor leave, after a few more whimpers from Willa, who put up as much of a fight as a tiny scared child—Zachary stopped. Not without a few final words, however: “Now get the fuck up. You don’t get to say bye to my sister. And you don’t get to say hi to my other sister. And you don’t get to fuck my friends. You don’t get
shit,
you get it? You don’t fucking get to come here anymore, do you get that, faggot?”

Zal nodded, his everything, it seemed, gushing with blood. He noticed his briefs were wet—either with blood or, more likely, he had peed himself in all that horror. He was a mess of blood and urine, tears and alcohol sweat, something he realized even Death must have found unworthy.

“I didn’t kill you, but I will next time, got it?”

Zal nodded.

Zachary spit on him and Zal nodded again, as if it was the right thing to do.

“Here,” Zal said, removing the keys to the house from his pocket.

Zachary grabbed them without touching his hand, spit on him again, and disappeared into his own room.

Zal left the house, without even looking back to say goodbye to Willa.

He regretted everything that night, absolutely everything. Pain made you feel regret. That was human.

He went to the hospital and got treated, went home and fell asleep, a long sleep that he woke from with alarm, panicked that he had died in it. Instead he had dreamt long bad nightmares that had nothing to do with anything. In one, the sky was filled with horrible pterodactyl-looking storks delivering bundles of blood and bones and dismembered rotting flesh they insisted belonged to somebody.

He was failing, somehow, and he knew this was what people did, all the time. In some way, human life could be seen as one big long fail. But his failure was starting to bother him, starting to get in the way of his doing things, things that were sometimes as elemental as getting up to see the light of day.

It was getting so bad that one day when Hendricks called as usual to check on him, Zal could not pretend anymore. He told Hendricks everything that he had ever left out, which he realized had really added up.

Hendricks basically only knew a Zal of the twentieth century, Zal realized.

“Zal, why didn’t you tell me this when it was happening? I thought Asiya was in Europe, that her show had gone well, that everything was fine .
.
. But that boy at the show, the beating—my God, Zal! How long had you and Asiya been .
.
. you know,
intimate
?”

“Father, please,” he snapped.

“Okay, Zal, okay, I appreciate your honesty, even if a bit late, and the boundaries that come with honesty. But you’ve been through so much, my boy—I want to help. How much does Rhodes know?”

Rhodes, always Rhodes. “He knows enough,” Zal said, testily. “I didn’t call you for help. I just somehow wanted it .
.
. out there.”

“Zal, I want to be there for you. Already I feel like I’ve failed you. A father is supposed to be there for his son. I should be giving you talks about women—women and men maybe—and sexuality, and we should be talking about Asiya and her problems and everything.”

Zal groaned. “I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want to get into it. I still don’t. I don’t need your answers, Father. I’m learning them myself. I can do that, you know. It’s going fine. I’m alive.”

“How bad are your injuries?”

“They’re nothing, some bruises,” said Zal. There were indeed bruises, cuts, swollen limbs, wounds that kept bleeding, new scabs, and then of course the more gory ones, held together by stitches he had received promptly, once he had walked himself straight to the hospital where Asiya had been treated. Hendricks would get the hospital bill soon enough; there was no need to get into it now.

“Son, you’re calling me, telling me these things, and you just expect me to hear it and offer nothing?” Hendricks finally asked, raising his voice.

“It’s over, Father. I know now how to make love to a woman. I know now not to cheat on her, with women or men. I know—”

“Zal, are you still with Asiya?”

“With?”

“You’ve broken up, I hope, by now?”

“Why?” Suddenly it was Zal’s turn to be shocked.

“Zal, there’s no other way to say it: the girl is a mess. She’s too much for you, and frankly anyone! For you of all people, to have
her
as your first girlfriend—”

You of all people,
thought Zal. If anything kept him in a cage nowadays, those sentiments were it, he wanted to say. “I love her,” he said instead, automatically, as if it was programmed in him like an autopilot. He didn’t know anymore if he meant it; he was just following the boyfriend script, what he imagined Humphrey Bogart would say in his shoes. “And I’ll have you know, people would have said the same thing about me being a mess. As if I’m—or was—so normal! And yet I’m doing fine—I’m doing better than anyone ever thought was possible. Isn’t that what you, Rhodes, everyone always said?”

It was true. Zal knew that; Hendricks knew that.

There was silence. Hendricks was making sounds that Zal thought sounded perhaps like sniffling, like a cold, like a cry—he didn’t want to know which.

“I don’t need you anymore,” Zal said, partly because he believed it, partly because being cruel felt right at that moment. “You must know that.”

“Zal, son, please don’t talk like that.”

“You can’t control how I talk anymore. I’m totally free, freer than you ever thought possible.”

“Okay, Zal, that’s fine, but you have to understand I still know things—”

I know things.
He thought of Asiya and her madness and her knowledge. “I do, too, Father. And I don’t want a father right now. I was rid of a mother; now I want to be rid of a father. I’m letting myself out this time.”

“Zal Hendricks!”

“I don’t want you to call me. I won’t call back,” Zal told him, his foreboding voice almost unrecognizable in its assurance and its girth and its volume, almost as if it took all those bruises and blows to get to the man inside, a real man. “This, by the way, is a normal response, what some normal people might do. Goodbye.”

And he hung up, something he’d never done to a person, a thing he knew was not honorable but was, here and there in bad times, done, and he thought to himself what he couldn’t bring himself to utter to his father—
Goodbye, yesterday
—and he closed his eyes and thought of everything that was to come, a future he couldn’t imagine—a healthy sign, he decided, the opposite of Asiya’s suicidal clairvoyance.

A week later, he marched into Rhodes’s office at their normal time, feeling bizarrely cheerful, equipped with the armor of premeditation, a man with a mission, his final mission, feeling the way he imagined school shooters must, their final goal before them, all nothing-to-lose vigor, all there’s-nowhere-to-go-but-nowhere force, finally all-powerful, finally afraid of nothing.

Rhodes met his smileless smile—he could tell by then when Zal wanted to smile—with a smile of his own.

Zal put his hand up as if to silence him.

“Rhodes, I’ve come to say your final check will be mailed by my father as usual, but that’s it. I will no longer be needing you.”

Rhodes didn’t change his expression. He was a man who was used to pretty much anything from patients, even the most extraordinary, Zal told himself.

“Zal, sit down. Let’s talk about this—”

“I don’t want to talk about this or anything else with you, ever. It’s over, Rhodes. I’m not ungrateful. But goodbye.”

“Zal, you came here to tell me this?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you come at all? You could have phoned—”

Zal wished he could answer in a laugh, in that ugly, tarry laugh of the worst villains. He wasn’t sure what to say. The best he could come up with, he supposed, was okay: “I wanted the satisfaction of walking away from you forever.”

But it wasn’t entirely true.

“How about just a few minutes, Zal? So we can wrap things up?”

Zal shook his head. He had to be firm. He turned around to face the door and said, “I am saying goodbye to my past. I’m done with you, with all of it. It’s time for the future!”

The best part of all was what he had forgotten to say. He had rehearsed telling Rhodes about the job he had gotten yesterday:
Oh yeah, and thanks, Rhodes, for one thing: telling me to get a job. Bet you didn’t think I’d actually get one!
In hindsight, Zal thought it was even better that Rhodes would never know; that the satisfaction was again all Zal’s, every last bit.

Of his constant hurdles, Zal Hendricks felt the easiest had been the one most people would have assumed would be the most challenging, at least for him,
considering
! But somehow—maybe as a cosmic reward for all the rapid-fire hardships of the era—it came easily. In the winter of 2000, Zal Hendricks suddenly found himself in the possession of a real live job, at a pet store.