The Last Illusion (4 page)

It had been twenty-five years without her, and yet who would have believed in a million years, much less twenty-five, that he would actually be able to claim this fully Iranian child after all, a child so like the hero of the old epic poem she once introduced him to—a boy who had come to life by bird and
almost
bird alone. After all, he thought, Zal was also
their
child, their broken child, the fruit of their long-gone selves, forever bantering in the dim orange light of those endless office hours where lyric and stanza were twisted and turned and torn and reattached.

It’s the most beautiful allegorical tale I’ve heard,
he had said to her that evening, when she read until her voice began to crack. Finally done, she had triumphantly slammed the thick, worn, old Iranian hardcover on her desk. It had the weight of a phone book and the look of a Bible, he remembered thinking.

Allegory!
she had cried, her laughter more disdainful than ever.
Try telling that to any self-respecting Iranian!
She had made Hendricks promise that he wouldn’t try to write about it—
I don’t think you’re there yet, not sure you’ll ever be—
and he had, with some will, allowed it to fade away from his consciousness.

And now here he was, as if he’d never left it. It was like a fairy tale, a thing for novels, the type of turnaround you’d read in romantic epics, poetry of another time altogether.

Hendricks courted skeptics from around the world—those who doubted a feral child could grow into a functional human, as well as those who questioned just how feral Zal had been to begin with. The idea that Hendricks’s love alone had caused the miracle, the very miracle of his son’s endurance, floated precariously—and while no one would call it a recovery, per se, they allowed these as advancements of an unheralded magnitude.

There were times Hendricks wondered to what degree Khanoom really had come in contact with Zal. Was it possible it was more than Zari had said on film? Was he really fully feral? Was it more than the doctors wanted to believe? To what degree had their imaginations filled the holes, and to what degree did his reality challenge them?

There were some things they would never know. Ask Zal about Khanoom and he would look blank, blinking neutrally. He would not recognize the name, not even understand the reference. Sometimes not knowing and not understanding would make him scared. Hendricks would simply hold him and let him know that it did not make him any different from many people, people like himself even, who had in some ways also been raised without a parent.

You are all right, son
, Hendricks would always tell him, over and over.
As all right as any of us.

Little by little, Zal began to surprise them. They said language would not come to him, would never come to him; by the time Zal was fifteen he could speak and read on the level of a ten-year-old.

I am all right,
he eventually said back, and eventually even fully understood.

They said his body would forever remain deformed—but nine surgeries later, Zal went from a walker to standing upright on his own, with aches and pains and inflammations not so different from those of someone with MS.

So, unlike his infinitely masculine namesake, he did not resemble a cypress, he was not capturing beauty queens, and he was not saving the world, but if you looked at him for the first time, you’d have to be awfully tipped off to find something amiss. Here stood Zal of just over two decades—a man, finally a man—Hendricks thought, never mind how badly circumstances had distorted his age. He was five feet seven inches, not horribly short, though they all assumed even getting to such a height meant that if he had grown up under normal conditions he’d be well over six-two. He was thin but not emaciated, definitely too thin, but not in a way that disgusted. His skin was pale and was prone to irritations—burns, eczema, acne, the works—but nothing so different from the usual blemishy human. And his hair was still fair, still blond, but the white blond had, thanks to sun exposure, faded a bit more into a dull brass. His eyes were black and still huge, still like Nilou’s wonderful dreamer eyes, though they revealed nothing—and in some ways Hendricks preferred them to hers, in that strangely sincere blankness. Hendricks imagined Zal was what some wandering poet girl, some eccentric artist with a romantic edginess, might consider good-looking.

They said he would not be capable of experiencing human emotions, but Hendricks witnessed them all: the embrace out of nowhere he once or twice got, the welling of tears during frustrated episodes,
the fear the fear the fear.
True, there was no laughter, there was no smile, but that would require a time machine to fix. The thing Hendricks and ultimately the therapist to whom he entrusted Zal—his colleague, the eminent child psychologist Gerald Rhodes—were most grateful for was the obvious: that Zal, in his adulthood, had lost his association with birds, that he finally did not and would not and really could not consider himself a bird, that birds and their natures were about as foreign to him as unicorns and griffins.

The last one was not true, but only Zal knew this.

Zal himself never saw his own reflection for too long—avoidance of mirrors was a quality he shared with all feral children, that and the failure to smile and laugh. But what he had seen of his looks, he did not object to. He was, he simply
was,
and Hendricks and Rhodes and scores of other people in his life had told him that was something to be proud of,
considering
. Always “
considering,
” but still. He was.

I am a boy,
he told himself, and then,
I am a man,
he reminded himself. He was just that and that alone, he thought over and over and over, until it all sounded meaningless.

But he had to. And eventually he learned to keep the bird in him, any bird in him, so deep within himself that it resurfaced only rarely. Let it out and he knew he’d be back to the world of doctors and scientists, make it flutter before him and enter camera crews and a million more glossy and newsprint updates on the miracle Bird Boy of Tehran, uncage it once and for all, and break his father’s, his one and only father’s, heart. He knew enough of humankind by then to know you did not do a thing like that. The parts of him that they could not get to were perfect like that, best kept to himself.

Because it was impossible to say how long he had—no one really knew the
lifespans of ferals,
he had heard Rhodes once say on the phone to someone, although, Rhodes had actually chuckled, because Zal had busted all those other feral-children “truths,” who knew what it could be.
We’re writing the textbook all over again with this kid
—he was not sure how quickly he should work on getting his birdness out of his system, how hastily he should outgrow it if his own growth arc was so difficult to evaluate. So far, any work he had done on it did not work, but he didn’t tell them. For instance, he could not get rid of the bird dreams, those nightmares of the small white ones—they never taught him the names of birds, and while he could recognize an astounding variety as distinct, could even tell the same type of birds apart, the way a human knows one human face from another, he could not play
name-that-species—
all trapped in, say, verandas with big windows that they could not recognize, fluttering about in pure panic, disorientation, and desperation, bumping into the glass over and over and over, the collision of beak and glass a thing so painful it would take pounding a human head against a sledgehammer to understand it, colliding and dizzily floating down and then coming back to sense and up in an eternity of entrapment, spiraled in the killer-without-killing loop of
where where where
. Those were the worst nightmares. Sometimes there were good dreams, flocks of birds in V formation in blue skies, giant fountains where some old lady god-hand made it rain birdseed for all the scrappy beggar pigeons, and his favorite of all: the dreams of sparrows and starlings, those sweet ones, and their painstaking nests, just that reel of them looking after their newly hatched young ones, enshrouding them in the heat of their wings, and most poignant of all, feeding them from their very mouths.

Feeding. Zal had to admit that a runner-up to bird dreams was food dreams, but what foods—this he could not discuss. It was true that he had a sensitive digestive system and for years could tolerate only a bland diet of bread and rice and dull fruits and vegetables (bananas, potatoes), with no sauces or spices or sweets. As time went on, he began to indulge in the edibles of everyday life, and soon candy and junk food—explosive-tasting food that created thunderstorms in the mouth and fireworks in the stomach and all sorts of warfare on the way out. “Foods” like gum intrigued him to no end; popsicles were a preposterous game; and most surreal of all, cotton candy was something he simply could not accept people voluntarily ate—they were downright otherworldly stuff he imagined was in the cuisine of that other imaginary genus (that humans were not sure, though fairly sure, did not exist but nonetheless devoted all sorts of arts and lore to) that Hendricks had once tried to explain to him: “aliens.” But Zal had real food urges that surpassed simple fascination, hungers that could be sated only in complicated ways.

What he wanted more than anything was painfully obvious and horribly cliché,
considering.
He wished it didn’t exist, that very typical craving, that Circumstances 101 urge, that forbidden and yet certainly understandable hunger. He tried to block it out, and really sometimes he was very good at resisting caving in, but the quintessential forbidden fruit was more than just a hunger of the stomach. It was a hunger of the heart.

For what Zal wanted to eat more than anything was, of course:
insects
.

Earthworms, budworms, mealworms, army worms, ants, wood borers, weevils, mosquitoes, caterpillars, houseflies, moths, gnats, beetles, grubs, spiders, crickets, grasshoppers, termites, cicadas, bees, wasps, any larvae—for starters. While Zal didn’t know the labels affixed to different birds, he sure did learn the names for insects. At bookstores, he flipped through
The Field Book of Insects of North America
and other giant picture reference books as if he were looking at the world’s most illustrious epic menu. The things it did to him; Zal was relieved no one could possibly know what he was up to when he was heatedly scanning the pages as though they were a cross between food porn and, well, porn.

But what could he do? He—
not a bird not a bird not a bird,
sprinted the voice in his head—what could
he
do? He had once heard Hendricks comment that drug addicts—apparently humans chained to the ingestion of reality-altering chemicals—even when broke or absolutely dirt-poor, could always find a way to afford drugs, and even very expensive ones. Their addiction turned into a lethal combination of boundless creativity and unshakable will. If you want something bad enough, he had heard Hendricks say, you will get it.

So once in a while Zal wanted it bad enough and he got it—all the many
its
and their odds and ends. And he didn’t even need to get creative or exercise much will when he had the one thing that made him like everyone else, that gave him access to a world he could navigate as well as Hendricks or any other human, the beloved equalizer of his life: the computer. (Hendricks and Rhodes had, at first, both marveled at his ease with the device, an ease that very rapidly became aptitude, an accomplishment they would have declared miraculous if it weren’t for the fact that elementary school kids of the same generation were also that savvy.) All he had to do that first time was type “insect eating” into the search engine and a whole world unveiled itself.

What he found:

I) First, the Word:

Entomophagy.
It was a word that, as much as he tried, he could not say.
Appropriately impossible,
he thought.

II) The Numbers:

1,462 recorded species of edible insects.
The possibilities,
he thought.

III) Where to Get Them:

There were three options, apparently: catching insects in the wild, buying them from pet stores or bait shops, or raising one’s own. But there were problems with the first two: in the wild there could be pesticides, and the ones in pet stores or bait shops have often been fed on newspapers and sawdust, so one had to put them on a diet of grains first. The best option was raising one’s own. (The idea put Zal in a cold sweat. Hendricks had always worried about Zal living on his own, and imagine if his apartment soon became an insect farm—an insect farm for
eating.
)