The Last Illusion

by Porochista Khakpour

  Until one evening, during closing, whether he meant to do it or not, he took her out and let her go into the night sky. He claimed it was an accident, that he would pay for it, that they could take it out of his paycheck—

  “Sorry, Zal,” the manager said. “I’m probably crazy for thinking you got obsessed with a bird, but you freed the same one you kept playing with. I’m in this business because it’s just a bunch of animals, no drama. The thing with you and that bird was weird. What’s it gonna be next, the iguana or the rat terrier? I can’t have employees that get all attached. I love animals, too, and I’d love it if they were all free to rule the world, but I got to run a business.”

  Zal nodded and nodded and nodded. He was grateful for the interpretation.

  And in many ways he was grateful to go through it: another human step: Being Fired from a Job. It was fine. He could get another one.

  For a second he thought about calling Silber, but he knew he had, as they say, burned that bridge, maybe for good.

  That night, he went home happier than usual. He gazed at the sky as he took those automatic steps and thought to himself, Somewhere a beautiful creature is free. He missed her a bit, but he reminded himself that he didn’t even know her, couldn’t know her. He reminded himself that she had entered his life—like the skydiving, like the job in the first place—to test him. And he had failed, but the beautiful thing about failure and humans, as he was realizing over and over, was that it was not just permitted but in many ways supported. Failure was part of the condition of life.

  Many years later, Pet’s Delight, on the Upper West Side, was shut down because the owner was caught selling dozens and dozens—possibly more than a hundred—canaries to a ringleader of a canary-fighting ring upstate.

  Canary fighting was a shock to most people, but not to Zal, who had grown up around them. They could fight indeed. But it all reminded Zal of his canary and her rescue, on the last day of his work. Sometimes, as they said, things really did happen for a reason.

  He felt that mixture of heartbreak and relief that had defined all of his life’s many near misses.

  Heartbreak and relief, also, when he saw Asiya come up his stairs—Zal had told her an abbreviated version of why it was too risky to meet at her place—and to his open door, and finally his open arms. Heartbreak, relief, and of course some fear and anxiety, but also, he thought, as his heart raced in the good way, maybe honestly love, too.

  She looked more beautiful than he remembered, wearing what the old Asiya would never have worn: a floral silk blouse, of all things. Her hair had grown a bit, to a little-girlish bob, and her body of course had filled out just enough to still err on the side of slender but a healthy slender. She had on a tiny smile, like a schoolgirl with a secret. Zal couldn’t believe this was the girl he could call his.

  “Look at you,” he gasped as he took her in his arms, squeezing her tight to convince himself she was indeed real.

  “I missed you so much,” she whispered into his chest, as if communicating directly with his heart.

  He felt the cliché of his heart melting. He led her to where she was going and they did it, in some ways, for the very first time. They surpassed sex—that duty Zal felt he had to perform for her sake—and made actual love.

  “Is that it?” were the first words Zal said to her as they lay there in the dark, naked.

  “Is what it? Why are you making that weird face?”

  “I thought maybe I was smiling. God, I really feel it inside me, like it wants to come out. Not it either? Look, here . . .” He made a grimace.

  “Nope. But one day you’ll get there, Zal, I’m sure.”

  “One day.”

  They lay there in a peaceful, perfect silence for a few minutes.

  “Hey, Asiya.”

  “Hey, Zal.”

  “Happy anniversary.”

  “Happy anniversary to you. Why do you think I wore that outfit?”

  “You look more beautiful than anyone!”

  “Thanks, Zal. I feel . . . good. Weird, but also good, you know?”

  “Understandable.”

  “But I can’t wait to get better,” she said, very softly.

  Zal, in a type of ecstasy he rarely got to soak in, refused to read into that.

  They got dressed again and decided to go to that nondescript café of the first day they met, for their anniversary meal.

  As they walked out together, Zal could not get over his happiness. It was the type of bliss he hadn’t felt in ages, a happiness that seemed like it was bursting out of him, that seemed to have a life of his own. He thought the last time he’d been so happy was in the audience at Silber’s final act, thinking he could be the chosen one.

  He wasn’t, of course, and that happiness had been a lie, and here was the thing that had replaced it: real life stuff, real love stuff, real normal reality. It felt good.

  He tried to watch them as if he were out of his body: A Man and a Woman Walk Down the Street, on Their Way to the Café Where They Had Their First Date, on Their One-Year Anniversary.

  What more could he want out of life?!

  He was a man, a man, a man: finally.

  Asiya also seemed happy. She was full of laughter, laughter and light, as if she were a whole other woman. He tried to separate what was medication—he had not asked yet—and what was just her good spirits, but he realized it didn’t matter. Everything about her was different, and he didn’t feel an ounce of guilt for loving this new Asiya over who she had been, because he was so busy being so damn happy.

  On the subway, they held hands and stared into each other’s eyes.

  Then suddenly, three stops before they needed to get off, Asiya—still smiling—tugged at his hand and led him out the door.

  “What are you doing? This is not our stop!”

  “I just think we should get in a different car!” she said, giggling.

  Zal paused for a moment. He could question this or he could ignore it. He decided instead to give her a quick hug. “Let’s do it.” And they got on the next car over.

  They went one more stop and she did the same thing at that stop.

  “Why are we doing this, Asiya?” he asked, starting to feel something like irkedness release a bubble or two inside him. It was an irkedness rooted in concern, he told himself, even though, looking at her, still smiling, still laughing, she looked more than fine.

  She started laughing louder, as if her answer was that it was all just a game, or as if she couldn’t—just could not, not now, with them like that—answer at all, or at least, answer it honestly.

  And they got on the next car again, until it was their stop.

  When they got out into the open air, she burst into even more laughter, the most hysterical sort even.

  Zal wished he could join along. “Ha-ha-ha, hee-hee-hee,” he spoke, as if along with her. “That’s not it, is it?”

  He only made her laugh harder.

  Zal kept doing it as they walked to the café, and she kept laughing.

  They looked, he knew, like the happiest couple on earth.

  When they got to the door, he cornered her under the awning and gave her a long kiss.

  He missed kissing, first and foremost, he had to admit. But he also missed kissing her.

  “Wait, check this out now,” he suddenly said, his hands crawling all over his face.

  “What is that? What are you doing?”

  “How about this?” He looked angry suddenly.

  “What? What are you doing? Stop!” She was not laughing anymore.

  He tried harder, went further and suddenly looked like a monster, a deranged monster, his forehead all wrinkled, eyes tightly squinted, his mouth wide-open in the way monsters with fangs pose, his tongue dangling out, dripping with saliva. He looked terrifying. She looked away, trying to hide the disappearance of her own smile.

  He noticed and stopped and sighed wistfully as they entered the café. “One day, I swear . . .”

  PART
VII

  Dawn: his heart shook in the tension of the world.

  Dawn: and what is your passion?

  —Robert Penn Warren,

  “Audubon: A Vision”

  Whose story is this exactly? Zal thought.

  Sometimes, around Asiya, he thought like that.

  Especially when she was bad.

  All it took was a few days, not even weeks or months, for the old Asiya to be back. Or for him to notice she was back, and in that way.

  And taking over my story, he thought. All the progress he was on the verge of: the story of a man, a normal man. Just when things were beginning to be about him, he had to give her everything he had all over again.

  He started feeling that most horrible of human sensations: irrational loneliness, he thought it could be called, that inexplicable alone feeling even when there was another warm body right at your side, and sometimes because of it.

  The new year came, and this time nobody worried about the sky falling, bombs, computer breakdowns, financial ruin, anarchy, riots, and looting. It was just another year. Zal and Asiya celebrated it quietly by renting the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which neither of them had ever seen.

  Asiya got up and walked away during the HAL meltdown scene. “It’s too much,” she said. “I don’t like watching stuff like that.” And she went to bed.

  That was at 11:35 p.m. When midnight struck, Zal was watching a blank black screen, pretending to wave a party favor. Loneliness, the loneliness, of what, he wondered. A disintegrating relationship?

  What were the signs?

  He tried not to think about it too much. He’d been through so much in one year, and there was so much ahead of him, now that he could own being a man. He had to pace himself.

  The only out he could think of was what generations of men before him had sought as an escape from so many of life’s problems, especially women: another job.

  He found many jobs, one after another. Zal realized he was good at two things: getting jobs and getting fired from them. But it was fine, he told himself; failure = experience. He was fast becoming the most failed, a.k.a. experienced, man of the New York work world.

  He worked at the Audubon Society as a janitor, which he was glad to be done with—bathroom trash was one thing, but staring at bird paraphernalia all day, the indolence that got him fired in the first place, was a harsh reminder of the same bad instinct that had lured him to seek a job there. He tried his best to branch out, taking a job as a dishwasher at a Japanese restaurant, but they had those honeybee appetizers, and he was caught sneaking some out with him. He also failed at being a bookstore clerk, when it was revealed he had read almost no books; a birthday party clown, when his smile—still a grimace at best—was scaring children instead of delighting them; and a dog walker, when he let a poodle off his leash, out of fear, during a particularly intimidating barking fit.

  He was running out of options. His dwindling possibilities, plus the recent stress of Asiya’s relapse into madness—more It’s coming crud, more tossing of her pills, more crying fits, more panic attacks, more refusing to see doctors—put him in a particularly dark frame of mind when he looked for his next job.

  It hit him when he walked by the one restaurant he usually speed-walked past or avoided altogether by taking a long-cut. It was beyond sinister—and yet. Was he bird or was he man? Hadn’t all of what he’d been through in 2000 made a man of him? Wasn’t that the real root of his problem with all the jobs? That there was still a tiny side of him that wasn’t? Wasn’t that un-man drop in him what kept him attached to a woman who could drive any man to madness, too?

  He imagined walking in. Better yet: he imagined jumping out of the twin turboprop plane; he went further: he imagined throwing himself off the Brooklyn Bridge; and further: he imagined falling off the face of the whole fucking planet.

  (Fucking, he thought. Yes, he thought, fucking.)

  It was the darkest winter of his life.

  So on a particularly snowy January day, he entered the restaurant that he had avoided so effectively for years at this point, so effectively that he had almost forgotten about it. First step: he took deep breath after deep breath and almost relished the torture. It was worse than he thought. He was slashing his wrists and finding a certain joy in it.

  Worse than its smell was the fact that they were not hiring.

  Zal told the Chinese lady how much he’d work for, his new line when he really wanted the job. It was so much less than minimum wage—the offer nobody could refuse. Nobody, after all, knew he wasn’t doing this for money.

  The Chinese man who owned the place came out from the back and, in broken English, welcomed him and said he’d have to be there at dawn the next morning.

  That was when the chickens came in. He’d be in charge of washing them and cutting them.

  “That’s it?” gulped Zal, trying to sound eager.

  “Maybe you can ___ them, too,” the man said, nodding along.

  Zal didn’t catch the word. “I can what?”

  “You can ____ them,” the man said again.

  Zal frowned. To his sheer terror, it was a word that sounded like “fly.”

  “I don’t understand,” Zal said, helplessly.

  Finally the man, frustrated, lifted a takeout menu and hit the word over and over and over again, the third word in the very name of the place: Ken Lee Fried Chicken.

  And he did fry them, many of them, over and over, day in and day out. There he was: at the workplace of his worst nightmares, doing the job he was most afraid of in the world, at the takeout joint whose very existence had the effect of a pop-up Auschwitz for him. Washing, cutting, and indeed frying chicken, there he was.

  Experience, Zal reminded himself. How many men even get to experience what it feels like to be a serial killer? Experience!

  The first day, he periodically had to go to the bathroom and throw up. He did it four times, until eventually he had nothing but saliva to expel. Ken told Zal he could eat a free meal on them, depending on his shift, and he politely declined. The very notion of eating in that place seemed unfathomable to Zal, even if he avoided chicken altogether and just had plain rice. Eating at all, even outside of that place, began to feel impossible. With no weight to lose, really, Zal started to lose weight.

  Asiya took a break from her own worries and focused on him in this period. Something was wrong with him, she knew. Why else would he work there, a place no one with his story could possibly endure? Over and over she asked him if he was depressed. She told him she had been with lots of depressed people at the home and she knew what depression looked like: it was hating yourself to the point that you take joy in nothing, hating yourself to the point where you want to do only the opposite of the best.

  “Who says I’m taking joy in nothing?” Zal snapped. “I’m getting another experience.”

  “You don’t need this experience,” she argued. “Nobody does! You think everyone at some point just has to work at a fried chicken place? It’s crazy!”

  He bit his lip to keep from commenting on her use of the word crazy. “Look, Asiya,” he said instead, “the very fact that you think it’s a problem for me to work at a fried chicken place—when every day people work at them all over the world—is the reason I have to do it! It’s not out of your head, your idea of me!”

  “But, Zal, if I go by that logic, then the very reason you took that job was because you had to prove something to yourself, meaning you’re not over it, either!”

  Crazy or not, she had a point. “Asiya, it’s nothing I need to explain. It’s hell, but I have to do it. What’s the saying . . . ‘That’s life!’”

  “What about another type of food place?”

  Zal rolled his eyes. “And the purpose of that would be? C’mon, you got the point of this. Anyway, don’t worry, I’ll get fired soon enough, that is for sure!”

  So Asiya waited. And in fact Zal waited. He held on to this job longer than any other. It seemed to be the one thing h
e excelled at. He was apparently made to be a chicken fryer.

  During this time, he started having his grisliest nightmares—the grisliest and birdiest that he had ever had. He saw his old canary, the one he’d had a crush on, falling out of the sky to her death because her wings didn’t work. He saw little boys covering birds in kerosene and setting them on fire as they flew, to make stars. He saw battered birds—by battered he meant fried, of course—flying out of their buckets and into the sky, a whole skyful of Ken Lee Fried Chickens, crunchily flapping through the air, raining crumbs on them all.

  And yet, sleep-deprived or not, he’d go to work as if it nothing was wrong.

  “Is this some what-doesn’t-kill-you-makes-you-stronger shit?” Asiya hissed, during the phase when she started to get downright hostile about it, hating that fried poultry smell always on him, his greasy hands, his oil-stained shirts.

  Sleep deprivation, at its peak, they say, can mimic madness. So in retrospect, Zal always blamed the scant rest of that era for what he did next, the worst thing he had ever conjured, period.

  He chose Valentine’s Day to ruin his life—his life at that point, in any case.

  The sickest thing anyone has ever done to me, a less sick Asiya later recalled. The sickest thing he ever did to himself.

  I am so sorry, he said only later, and only in his thoughts, over and over to the Asiya of his memory.

  Because on Valentine’s Day 2001, it was his gift to her—and to himself in a way, as he wanted to take that cannibal step, that suicidal partaking, on that night of romantic nights. He’d thought simply that bringing home several extra-large buckets of fried chicken—so filled with dead fried birds he could barely balance them—was a gift, one that a normal human man would give, itself a celebration of normal humanness even.