The Last Illusion (7 page)

“I’m not crazy, Mr. Silber. I know who I am. I’ve learned. I get it. There’s still .
.
.
stuff
.
.
. but I’m pretty much normal.”

They both knew that wasn’t true. But they made it through dinner, both a bit gloomy with bursts of forced levity, forcing their way through their salads and leaving the orange blossom flans mostly untouched. Silber had taken a phone call, a long one, and ducked into his bedroom. Eventually Zal had grown tired of waiting and left.

He had received Silber’s e-mail hours later, while surfing the Net, unable to sleep. He had written back,
Thanks, Mr. Silber. No need to be sorry. I do trust. I trust everyone. I have no reason not to. I know you did not mean to hurt me. “Muse-worthy” is an honor, but not fitting, as I am not worthy of that. I am just an abused child with a particularly, I suppose, intriguing story to people. But it’s just my life. I have to confess that perhaps I lied when I said I was normal. I know I am not. But I think I can be helped. This may sound strange, Mr. Silber, but I believe you may be able to help me. I know by now that it could be unrealistic, that it is actually, as you end with, just me dreaming. And I do dream, in case you were wondering, and because I know you will further wonder, even though I do not speak of this to anyone really: yes, at times I have dreamt, as you might say, “in bird.”
, Zal.

It wasn’t until many visits to the Silbertorium that Zal realized its backyard was essentially an aviary, a garden of trees and shrubs and bushes crowned with ornate-looking cages, all with open doors and easy outs, to Zal’s relief. It was a world bound up in delicate netting, punctuated strangely by two large fountains—a young boy whose mouth spouted water, another young boy whose penis spouted water—and statues of lions and monkeys and cherubs and elephant gods. Beautiful as it was—and Silber did what he could to emphasize that: a
sanctuary,
not a
jail
—Zal would not enter.
I understand, of course,
Silber said,
but doesn’t a side of you, well, feel at home there, sugar pie?
Zal said it did not. But he watched, a big step. He stayed behind the glass doors and stared at Silber’s showoff antics with his birds, who swooped down on his blazer and swooped off, as if used to meeting-and-greeting distant shy bird boys for the sake of their god Silber. Silber went further for Zal, went through the whole round of Dove Tricks 101, as if he were a birthday party magician. He whipped out silk handkerchiefs of all colors from his every pocket and put them over cages and did a sort of silly semi-pirouette and
tada,
he mouthed:
bird gone!
Then he leapt onto a bench, in one movement whipped off his blazer and put it back on, and then shook his blazer sleeves: dove after dove after dove came flying out. He tossed another gold handkerchief in the air, caught it, turned once, then twice, and waved it in the air: a tiny canary fluttered into thin air. Zal looked on like his little son, reluctantly mesmerized but only partially disturbed. After a half hour or so of this, Silber left his little courtyard of flying creatures, looking a bit embarrassed, like old money suddenly revealed to be very, very new. He put a hand on Zal’s shoulder.
Anyway, I don’t do that shit for anyone, kiddo! That’s it!

Zal nodded. Fine with him.

Those were not the acts Zal was interested in, not the ones where Silber resorted to his slave birds and their sleazy relationship with sleight-of-hand games of animation and inanimation; his aerial cousins’ unabashed fragility, their barely there magnitude, their no doubt compressible constitution, was heaven for those slave masters of unreality: magicians. But this was not how he saw Silber, this was not what brought him, like they were brought, to Silber’s lair.

Until the end of his life, Zal kept the newspaper clipping that had drawn him to Silber in the first place, the one that announced “Master of Illusion Takes to the Skies.”
The daily paper had announced a series of shows Silber was going to do in Las Vegas in early December 1999, for
a tribute to the first millennium’s aeronautical innovations in the final countdown to the twenty-first century:
“The Flight Triptych.”
It was going to be Silber’s tribute to flight, past, present, and future. The article gave the skeleton of the acts: the first would celebrate ancient Persia and the
Thousand and One Nights
and end in a magic carpet ride, a levitation act of sorts; the second, a multistory free-fall descent from a high tower, in which he’d land on his feet; the third, Silber’s own ascension into flight, at the end of which a lucky audience member would join him in the high skies of a Vegas amphitheater.

He basically, the article implied, knew how to fly. Had, in fact, mastered it.

This interested Zal. Particularly the last one, in which a person—a normal person, or perhaps a not so normal one, one whose life had made him just barely not normal—could, for more than a few moments, in tandem, indeed experience flight.

Dr. Rhodes, Zal’s longtime therapist, would have described Zal’s interest as
an unhealthy and furthermore unnecessary indulgence and regression.
But as the years went on, Rhodes had become a cartoon angel on his shoulder, blurring in and out of high beam, just as easily brushed off—stardust, dirt, moral nebulae, particles of judgment neither here nor there—as the cartoon devil on his other side, the one he’d one day come to understand spoke most devotedly to the impulses that made all men simply men.

He sent the author of the article an e-mail immediately
. Thank you for your most informative article on Bran Silber’s upcoming Flight Triptych. It is urgent I get in touch with Mr. Silber. I would like to work for him, consult with him, volunteer, or do anything affiliated with this production. Since you have quoted him in your very informative piece, I think you know how to get in touch with him. I am not a student, I am not just some kid or obsessive stranger. You may have actually heard of me, though perhaps not, since the story is old. I have links below to my story in any case. It should make my interest in this stunt of his very clear. I thank you for your time. Most sincerely, Zal Hendricks

To his surprise the journalist had written back the next day, with the e-mail and number of Silber’s “press people.” The journalist had added a note:
And I’m sorry to say, I have never heard of you, but my God. What a story. To be honest I could not endure finishing the big article. It was too much. To say I am moved would be a real understatement. God bless you
.

Zal did not write back, but instead wrote the press person. And again wrote the press person when he didn’t hear for days and days. And called and left a message and called again and finally got a young woman who said she’d pass the message on to his assistant.

He had basically given up when one evening Silber’s assistant called him.

“Zal Hendricks?” She pronounced his name the way many did, as rhyming with “Al.” “This is Indigo Menendez, from Silber Studios, calling—”

“It’s
Zal,
like ‘fall.’ Thank you so much for your call, Ms. Menendez.”

“Indigo, please. Anyway, I’m just his assistant. He was kinda sorta interested in that e-mail you sent our press chick, Betsy. You can come to his first show, the magic carpet one, with a backstage pass, how’s that?”

On the one hand, it was exactly what he wanted. On the other hand, it was not the show he wanted, although he wondered whether, if he went to the first one and then met him, he might be able to go to the second and third.

Zal tried to hide any traces of disappointment. “It’s a dream come true,” Zal said, which it still was. “How’s that?”

“Peachy to the max,” Indigo said flatly. “Bran will love to hear that. What’s your address, dude? I’ll overnight you the ticket. It’ll be worth the Vegas trip, trust me!”

Vegas trip.
Zal did not say another word, just nodded into the phone, waiting until the dial tone to type the words into the search engine of his computer.

Early December 1999.

Zal, who had never flown since that fateful trip from Iran—Rhodes, though not against the idea, had advised he take some extra courses of therapy to manage planes in general, but aside from that Zal really had no interest in getting inside the belly of a giant roaring aluminum-alloyed bird—and suddenly he was on an Amtrak from New York City to Las Vegas, Nevada.

It took nearly sixty hours. He slept only here and there, half sleeps of sorts, filled with semi-lucid dreams, the dreams he’d normally shake off at home, dreams that were as abstract as they felt historic, even ancestral—the rush of air, swatches of perfect blue sullied only by a few puffs of transparent white, the stillness of atmosphere, endless canvases of black speckled with glimmering white-hot intangibles. In the nowhere-land of the train, he let himself go, fully go, into that other world, the world even his dreams sometimes resisted for their very dangerous dazzle: the what goes up that does not come down.

He barely registered Las Vegas—he simply took a cab to the hotel and checked in and stayed in. He had a full day to kill before the show that night. He spent it in bed all day, eating from the minibar, lunches and dinners made of M&M’s and Dr Pepper and cashews and Doritos and tomato juice, all at prices Zal had also not registered. He was still in his dreams. His heart raced when he thought of what lay ahead.

The world, they said, was about to end—there were fewer than thirty days until the new millennium—and all he wanted to do was the one thing in that other life, as well as this life, he was not able to do: fly.

He was supposed to be over that. And yet. But Zal had always justified it to Rhodes and others most simply,
Who doesn’t want to fly? Take the Wrights. Take Bran Silber! It’s every man’s dream. This isn’t the result of me being a
— and he only mouthed the words, other people’s words, words he could never get himself to own or even hit the air with in all their outrageously brazen odd audio—
“feral child.”

His father had messengered him a suit, a hasty lunch-break buy in Midtown, when Zal announced his intention to go to Las Vegas, his first solo trip, just days before he’d embarked. Hendricks had asked him again and again, even asked Dr. Rhodes again and again, if it was really and truly okay. Zal was twenty-one, almost twenty-two, but his real age, Rhodes had estimated, was something more like fourteen, though Zal—who had turned the study of feral children upside down with his precociousness, a miracle of adjustment in a world of malformed and mush-minded freaks—was maybe, just maybe, more like seventeen. They had consented, even if a bit reluctantly.