The Last Illusion

by Porochista Khakpour

  What if he could?

  What if sex was the physical manifestation of saying I love you? And once consummated, might as well be topped off with the oral confirmation?

  What if it was that easy?

  What if it was that hard?

  Well, he thought, it could not be impossible.

  In his head he heard Asiya’s black laughter at the phrase he considered forbidden for its ugliness, but which was, he had to admit, here quite apt: killing two birds with one stone.

  He had no choice, anyway; he suddenly did not know how to live without her.

  He spent hours practicing in the bathroom. He knew how people did it—he was not that naive—but he had never seen the point. Yet there he was frantically working at himself and at the same time trying to remain calm and in a pleasant mind-set to make the thing work, something he had only curiously tried abortively once or twice and abandoned. It took ages, but in the end he did get over that edge they talked about, felt his heart race to near explosion, it seemed, felt his body spasm, his insides burst and recoil. He sat there, in his mess, so proud. It had been a struggle, but he had done it. He had done it for his, yes, girlfriend.

  Because outside of Asiya, he reminded himself, he would never be there, pawing at himself. He felt dirty. He felt animal. He felt more feral than feral. He felt so human. It disgusted him, and yet he did find it to be an accomplishment—another accomplishment-rung on the long ladder of Normal Human Behavior.

  Plus he had figured out the equation, the one simple variable that could make it work. To function properly, he needed to meditate on a single notion, because the idea of Asiya was like an amalgamation of notion-hoods of sorts. It was, of course, almost ironic, almost cruel, and perhaps in the wrong spirit. But there was no other way. He, and Asiya, if she were ever to find out—and this time, no way in hell, he promised himself—would have to live with it: to have sex with his girlfriend, he would have to be thinking of her sister.

  He finally turned to the computer and did that thing he never thought he’d have a reason to do, but which was the obvious final step in preparation: he began watching pornography to memorize the steps, the very complicated and yet apparently Human 101 steps, the means to that same end he was sitting in.

  When he showed up at Asiya’s door, he presented her with a saran-wrapped paper plate of beetle cookies. She shook her head at it, looking so pale and exhausted. It relieved him to see her look so unhappy alone; it somehow meant they still had a chance, that she had not found a happiness outside of him.

  “Asiya, please let me come in,” he said. “I am so sorry. I really am. I have something more for you, too.”

  Nothing in her eyes changed, but she let him in. Her gaze looked dead, and her voice had no emotion. “Let’s go to my room. Zach might be home any sec.”

  In her room, he immediately, without missing a beat, got to it—undressing himself—since he could see he had to make her better ASAP, not a minute to lose. He was already late.

  When she saw him naked, she just blinked a couple of times. “I don’t have the energy to take photos of you, if that’s what you mean.”

  He shook his head. “You do the same now.” He pointed to her body.

  She squinted. “No?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  He thought he saw the flicker of a smile on her face. Carefully, she started removing articles of clothing, not for a second breaking eye contact, still searching his eyes to see if he was really and truly serious, if this could actually be the it she thought it was.

  Suddenly they were naked, both of them, with all the space in the world, it seemed to both of them, between them.

  Zal knew he had to make all the moves. He stepped up to her and pressed his body against hers. He thought of the porn scenes; he thought of Willa.

  They kissed with a wildness he hadn’t experienced since . . . since nothing. He let her go wherever she wanted with her hands, and he did the same. He eventually, like one porn guy, threw her on the bed. He tried to say the things the guy had said to the woman he was having sex with, but the words were getting scrambled in his head, threatening to distract him, and he could not, would not, no way in hell, let himself lose it, lose this. He focused, he breathed, he thought of her, that other her, and he moved in and in and in. She moaned in the way the girl in the porn scenes did, and he thought that was good. He moaned, too, like the man had, and he thought maybe it helped, those sounds.

  The funny thing was that they did not sound human at all, even less so than the humans in pornography.

  At one point, she stopped and he worried and she quickly assured him it was nothing, she just had to get something, and then she went to a drawer and came back with a small square of plastic, which she opened, and he recognized it: so this was a condom. She handed it to him, and he worried and he quickly asked her to do it and she smiled, turned on by that, it seemed. She put it on and he thought it didn’t feel too bad.

  He went back inside her and thrust and thrust and let all the productive thoughts take him over—he was reminded over and over how the best part about living was that others could not know your thoughts—and finally, he exploded into that little thin bag of plastic that covered him.

  She took it off for him, tied it, and tossed in the trash.

  They lay together.

  He was more exhausted than he had been in ages.

  She seemed fine, happy. He heard her breathe hard for a second and then giggle.

  “Tornado!” was the first word she said after it all.

  He thought to ask what that meant, but he recalled that in porn the women said all sorts of things before and after. None of it was supposed to make sense.

  She nodded at him. “Really.”

  He nodded back, with a wink.

  He had one more thing to do, he realized.

  He suddenly said, without even opening his eyes, without even moving her or a muscle in his own body, so very exhausted he was: “Asiya, I have to tell you something.”

  She made a sound that implied exhaustion, too, but also curiosity.

  He said—even though nothing about what had happened right then or anytime before made him sure of this—“Asiya, I love you, too.”

  And she smiled and smiled wider and was relieved he could not know her thoughts, which were elsewhere, outside, entrenched in anomalies. The world was becoming an increasingly odd place, capable of all sorts of impossibilities.

  All that mattered was that he was in a heaven of sorts: problem of problems solved. He had done well as a human man. When he finally got up and left her, he was so immersed in replaying what had just happened and what that had done to him that he neglected to notice the strangely solemn carnage of uprooted trees and their leaves all across her block, and the surly blinks and shrieks of speeding ambulances, and the eerily beautiful bouquets of broken glass from sources no one could quite pinpoint. New York was New York—what was there to notice?—and besides, he was the first bird to have made love to a woman on earth.

  Later, in evaluating his first time, he thought it had not been too bad. He didn’t yet have the taste for it that he had for simple kissing, but all in all, it had those glimmers of wildness and ferocity, abandon and liberation, ecstasy and fury that he had heard of, that made it certainly worth returning to. His first time, he knew, could definitely have been worse. It could have, for instance, not been his choice.

  One of the things that he did not reveal to Asiya, that he had found mildly disconcerting and, for a second, slightly arousing—sex was interesting that way; the grotesque could also double as the sublime, any evaluation and subsequent judgment best left to after the fact—was Asiya’s skin. He didn’t know how he hadn’t noticed before, but as he ran his hands all over her, he could have sworn all sorts of parts of her felt like they had patches of a disturbed sort of skin, of something that was not skin and yet not quite hair or fuzz or even fur. If he had to be altogether accurate, he’d have to employ the word feathers.
>
  Love: check! Sex: check! Zal thought. That has to be everything! But of course, as he was discovering, it was never so easy with what he thought they must have ironically dubbed “the fairer sex.” In fact, many of the problems he attributed simply to the pitfalls of human social conditioning were actually of a subset of that: female human social conditioning.

  For a day or so, it seemed as if he had handed Asiya the world, that all wrong had been erased forevermore, that there was nothing but happily-ever-afterings for them—but then, like a rubber band rebounding off a sling, the spell disintegrated and Asiya had more demands than ever. Perhaps she had come to realize that, given time, he would always come around and do anything she asked; perhaps the last two gestures double-knotted their souls for eternity so that she was entitled to ask for anything. And so she began her campaign for The Next Thing, something she had asked for before but had simply shelved in that past era of uncertainty and frustration in their relationship.

  Zal missed that era.

  The request was another big one that made Zal queasy with anxiety: Asiya wanted to meet his father.

  Why? he had asked her again.

  Because I love you and I want to love what made you.

  He didn’t, Asiya, not technically, you know.

  I know! I meant, I love you and I want to love what loves you, too.

  What if you don’t?

  I have no doubt I will. He sounds amazing.

  But what if you don’t, then what?

  She assured him then that nothing would happen. But what Zal really meant to ask was: what if he doesn’t love you? In all his years with Hendricks, he had rarely known his father to dislike anything, but something told him that Asiya would not be an easy sell for anyone, much less the man who loved him most in the world. More than anything, he worried that since Hendricks sometimes knew him better than he knew himself, he would be able to see through to the side of Zal that was terribly ambivalent about and perhaps even slightly trapped by Asiya’s love. Hendricks, after all, was his savior, the bearer of freedom. He would perhaps see Asiya as Zal sometimes saw her, like that old birth mother of his: another crazy woman nature had thrust Zal under the jurisdiction of, for no good reason.

  But because this was the season of his guilt, his regret, the season of his Mistake, because he never forgot the dead look in Asiya’s eyes right before their first time, because of that highlight-of-their-lives night, because she was all he had and he was stuck with her, he could not bear to hurt her anymore. He promised her they would meet, and soon.

  Hendricks, of course, was elated, as Zal had predicted—of course he would be elated before he met her. The idea of his son beating all the odds that mandated a lifelong loneliness was of course good, if not downright miraculous. Hendricks would kiss Asiya’s hand, thank her, embrace her, praise her, and then he would get to know her.

  What made Zal feel downright ill was the very plausible possibility that the only two people he had in the world would not get along. There would be no choosing—though their contributions to his life were not, of course, equal in any way—because the Zal he was today depended on the pieces they each had installed in him, and without one or the other, he would be nothing all over again, back to just a boy in a birdcage, back to just a boy out of a birdcage.

  They settled on tea at a teahouse Hendricks liked. He had sensed Zal’s stress and decided that a simple tea hour would be the least committal, the lowest-impact, the very least obtrusive way to deal with the young couple in their season of hurdles he could only guess at.

  T Is for Tea was a quaint little café, all deep rose walls with mahogany floors and chairs that probably, at best, sat twenty. They were the only patrons there, Zal noted upon entering, somehow feeling more alarmed at their aloneness, as if the three of them were the sole human survivors of the end of the world—everyone knew how that story ended. Hendricks, always early, was already there, and when Zal finally saw him face-to-face, after some weeks, he immediately felt panicked. To see his father, someone he had made a near stranger, for an occasion of monumental strangeness and strange monumentalness—he was sure he wouldn’t be able to endure it. His father was in his best suit, a dapper yellow tweed, the one he wore for special occasions only. Zal knew he knew he knew that, and it filled him with guilt. Perhaps he should have warned him. Perhaps he should have explained that Asiya was no normal girl. Perhaps he should have made it sound like she was just a phase.

  Zal quickly glanced at Asiya and tried to see her as if he was seeing her for the first time. Her most notable feature was her extreme boniness and her pallor—as thin and as white as human beings could get, he wagered. All of her features were dark and resolute in their bold plainness: eyes that were impenetrably black and appeared unblinking, hair in the austere black bowl worn by certain little boys. She had worn a blazer and a skirt for the occasion, a simple black pencil skirt, which just made her stick-legs look all the more stick-figured. She looked as if she were going to a funeral or a job interview. She looked utterly negligible and yet unlike anyone in the world at the same time.

  He supposed he looked the same way, though, and maybe Hendricks would note that, see that as a plus. Hendricks couldn’t have expected a Barbie doll, an old movie ingenue, a porn actress, just any normal perfect girl on the street, could he have?

  “Hello, hello!” It was the usual Hendricks boom, the usual Hendricks-bolting-up-with-an-outstretched-hand. Zal noticed happiness in his father’s eyes, true joy, and felt relieved that the first hurdle—the sheer visual one—appeared to have been at least somewhat cleared.

  Asiya, with the tiniest-biggest smile she could muster for a stranger, took his hand gingerly, as if it could be a trick hand. “Asiya McDonald. Nice to meet you.”

  “Asiya!” he pronounced perfectly. “Yes! An absolute joy to meet you. I’ve heard so much.”

  “Same with me, so much,” she muttered back.

  For a moment, they just stood there suspended in natural discomfort, Hendricks still frozen in a monster smile, Asiya deeply immersed in floor-tile evaluating and lip biting.

  Eventually they sat down and small-talked about the city, the subway, the weather, and all that usual stuff even Zal sometimes found himself entangled in with Hendricks. Everything was fine until the waitress came to take their order, turning to Asiya first.

  “Do you have anything with liquor?” she asked quietly.

  Zal immediately stiffened. That was bad. Hendricks did not know about his drinking.

  “Uh, this a teahouse,” said the waitress. “Just tea.”

  “We could get a drink somewhere else, if that’s what you want, Asiya,” Hendricks offered, looking only barely thrown off.

  Asiya turned to Zal. “What do you—”

  Zal shook his head, furiously. “I love tea! I’d like a calming one—do you have one of those?”

  “Lavender Lilypad—an organic lavender-rose-chamomile blend—is a favorite,” the waitress offered.

  “Perfect!” Zal cried.

  “I’ll second that,” Hendricks said.

  “I’ll . . .” Asiya paused, red in the face still. “I’ll have your blackest black tea.”

  “The Calamitea Jane?”

  “Perfect,” Asiya said.

  Zal noticed he was sweating. She had picked the right tea for her but, of course, the wrong tea for this. He looked to Hendricks, who was back to unfazed, still smiling at her.

  Once the tea came—and a tray of little cakes Hendricks requested—things got better. Their small talk continued, and Asiya started to sound more impressive as she went on about photography and art.

  And then she said the wrong thing again:

  “And Zal, well, he’s my new muse, my living bird boy!”

  Hendricks’s eyebrows had knotted a bit.

  Zal sighed. “Father, she knows.”

  “Oh? Oh, okay. That’s fine. What do you mean, your muse? You shoot, er, photograph him now?”

  “I had a whole show
of him!” she said. “Zal, you didn’t tell your father?”

  Zal shook his head. “It was nothing.”

  “It was nothing?” Asiya snapped, glaring at him.

  “I mean, Father, it was really, really, really nice,” Zal quickly said, gulping at the scalding tea, gasping at the burn. “I was an angel.”

  “An angel,” Asiya echoed, “not a bird.”

  “I see,” Hendricks said. “You must have . . . enjoyed that, Zal?”

  Zal nodded, swallowing hard.

  More drinking, more nibbling, some calm, and then came the next big problem point, again Asiya’s.

  “I’m sorry to ask this, but do you feel like the room is getting hot?” she suddenly whispered, during a conversation about the mayor. “Those men in the corner, with the big samovar: do you feel like they are up to something?”

  For a second, Zal thought she was hallucinating the men altogether, not noticing anyone had come in, but there they were, just a group of New York businessmen, chatting unsuspiciously.

  Hendricks turned around and raised his eyebrows at her. “Excuse me? The men right there?”

  She nodded, tugging at her blazer collar. “It’s so hot in here.”

  Hendricks looked concerned. “The air is on; I feel it. Maybe you’re ill? Would you like to step outside? I think those men are fine.”

  “Father, she’ll be fine,” Zal interjected. “Asiya, you know you will be okay. She gets like this sometimes.”

  “Zal!” she cried. At what, he didn’t know.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, for what, he also didn’t know.

  “I’ll be fine,” she echoed, saying it to no one in particular.

  Silence.

  Zal looked at his watch—only thirty-five minutes had gone by and they had planned at least an hour. But it already felt like an eternity, and things were going badly, worse than he had thought. He thought Asiya had nowhere to go but even further down. He faked a double take at his watch.