The Last Illusion (28 page)

It had come from a single decision: that he was done with humans for the moment—at least until Asiya got out of the clinic—and that animals were better. He reminded himself this was not the step backwards that it might have seemed to anyone who knew his story and had spied him lingering at the glass window of a pet store, eyeing tiny canaries rapidly darting in a giant golden cage. Skydiving, too, had seemed like another step backwards, a way to get in the sky, to make a bird out of himself, but in the end it had taught him that he feared death. Beyond the shady impulses that might have led Zal to this particular job, it was really and truly just another way for him to make something of himself, as they said, in a way that was most feasible, a way to get a job for which he didn’t need a diploma or a college education or any expertise.

He told the manager simply,
I feel a deep connection with animals.

And there he was, with job. In actuality, it took a few more steps, and first and foremost courage: asking for a job application, which they didn’t have,
but just give us your résumé and we’ll call you, since we maybe could use some winter work.
He looked up résumés online and found some and he cut and pasted various items and changed a few others so that he had what they said was good: a single sheet with the most important items, never mind that they were not really his. Zal knew it was wrong, and probably illegal, to lie on a job application, but what could he do? He had nothing. And his next step was to get a job. A job was not possible for someone like Zal Hendricks, who had nothing, absolutely nothing, in the way of life experience. So he’d have to pretend to be someone else, a combination of someone elses, and pray.

“Wow, we don’t get many pilots with culinary backgrounds who went to Yale here. Interesting!” the old man who ran the place said. “What a life!”

He shrugged, sighing. “If you only knew, trust me.”

He was asked to “work the floor,” since he seemed not to understand the workings of the cash register very well, even after training. He became the one who put the puppies in the hands of the little gushing girls, who took the kittens out of their glass boxes to be pet—he did not like handling the kittens, he had to admit, but he tried to block out why. He was the one who scooped the angelfish out of their tank, and he once even had to feed the snake a microwaved frozen mouse. It was, as far as jobs went, suitable for him.

But where he spent most of his time, as much as he tried not to, was of course Pet’s Delight’s massive bird section, the rows of cages and their squawking, squealing, singing, chirping, mocking avian life. He couldn’t help it—he was mesmerized, the way any ex-convict would be on a visit to a prison. The hours went by quickly as he stayed among them and dreamed of a final workday: when he’d open all the cages and let them all out into the Manhattan sky, free.

As much as he tried to rationalize his choice of jobs, he knew he had nabbed the worst possible one for him. His fantasies didn’t exactly spell progress. But he had to admit there was a certain joy in knowing he wasn’t there yet, that there was still work to be done. He could still afford to mess up, despite knowing well enough how to be on the right track.

He wondered if that was part of what was wrong with Asiya, who haunted the back alleys of his head more than he cared to admit even to himself. Maybe her problem was that simple, just the opposite of his. He could go on, in spite of everything—because of everything—because he knew for him the end was nowhere near, that he was far from done. He had nothing but a future.

It was in those final days before 2001 that Silber remembered the name of the odd boy he had met and almost come to really know more than a year ago: Zal.

Silber was, for the most part, okay. He had nine months to go until he took on The Illusion, as he now called it, his Illusion of Illusions. Things had moved along. Manning, the best master craftsman a man of magic could hope for, was on board and ready to build. It had taken some convincing—
I don’t get it, Sil, make the thing disappear for what? Why?
Silber had tried to explain,
Boss, O boss, take the opposite of flying, bringing something high and proud and towering and bringing it to its knees, reducing it to dust, or worse than dust: nothing at all—
and still nothing had talked louder than numbers for Manning.
I can do it. I mean, I can do fucking anything, Sil, especially if the price is right—but sometimes you got to ask yourself: is it worth it?

It felt worth it to Silber in a way he couldn’t explain. He had tried it out on everyone, especially his latest rotation of lovers, which was more robust in project time than usual. A Middle Eastern writer with an unpronounceable name who was all legs and eyes took a stab at it:
What, “down with capitalism” or something?
A Sarah Lawrence college girl who fit-modeled in the city on the side, with a fondness for chess, cloves, and cocaine:
Artaud, plus Sartre, a dab of Derrida, and Kaczynski-Kevorkian undertones?
The multi-orgasmic yoga teacher/bistro hostess, who maybe came the closest to hitting the nail on the head:
Who said magic was supposed to have a purpose?

But even if he didn’t need a purpose, he did need a narrative, and not just for the press release—which was driving all the assistants batshit, they too were so unaccustomed to Silber’s sudden inarticulacy—but for himself. He saw his life as a very expensive biography, leather-bound with gilded edges, the size of a phone book, a bible for illusionists of the future. There was not a Houdini on this earth, not a Copperfield in the crowd, not that other guy, either, who would say their feats were
just because
. Illusion was almost an invisible thing—almost—with its substance consisting of concept, idea, notion, thematics. Without all that, it might as well not exist. Without all that, Manning was right to ask about its worth and value.

He knew he had to talk to people about it, more people, not just the women—whom he had already forced to sign a confidentiality contract, incidentally—but to people who didn’t even require that, who were so totally on the outside, he didn’t have to worry about their loose lips, people with out-there lives and even more out-there perspectives, who had no idea and therefore any and every idea, who could just maybe see the thing for him.

As usual for Silber, there was only one place for answers: the extraordinary.
Keep it surreal,
counseled the Old English on the back of a drug dealer he used to employ for various activities, and he kept a Polaroid of it in his wallet as a reminder. Ordinary life would offer him nothing; that he had always known.

In contemplating the outsides of every box, Silber scanned his universe for outsiders. And naturally, in his mental Rolodex of those stranger than strange, Zal figured prominently. Zal: a definite possibility. After all, Silber had been so frustrated he hadn’t met him earlier—before his Flight Triptych, at least, which, for all its genius, he knew suffered from what the critics had dubbed “the usual Silber style-over-substance razzle-dazzle.” Even that feat of theme was not enough for them.

He knew too much to make another mistake. He wanted to make magic the world could not live without! Magic to make them all live without the world! Or something like that, he thought excitedly. He was getting hotter, he could feel it.

Zal could be the key, or
a
key, at least, he told himself.

He had Anastasia—his new assistant, Indigo’s replacement for the few weeks in which she’d been fired for substance abusing more than was permitted on the job—call Zal up and ask him to dinner.

She returned in seconds. “He said he works evenings,” glum Anastasia declared, more glumly than usual.

“He works? Wha? No, tell him to come after, did you tell him that?”

“I did,” she murmured. “He seemed uninterested, once I convinced him he knew you.”

“Knew me? Of course he knows me, that silly billy! God, I have got to get him over here—he’s so mother-effing effity-effed up, he’s perfecto!”

“I think he was pretending not to know you. It sounds like he doesn’t want to deal with any of it.”

“Stasi, I know you’re new, but you’re gonna learn a few things: nobody says no to me, got it? It just doesn’t happen, baby!”

“I think it just did.”

“It just did! Ha! You’re such a—never mind, get him on my cell.”

When he finally got Zal on the phone, Silber put on a different voice, a muted, slightly shattered one, one he knew Zal would relate to. Need attracted need, he rationalized.

“Zal, I’m in a crisis, if you want to know the truth-Ruth,” he whispered.

“Mr. Silber, I don’t even know you,” Zal kept saying.

“You don’t know me? I’m a celebrity, baby—everyone knows me. You had dinners with me, you came to our shop, we were friends, or least friends-ish! People don’t forget celebrities, friends-ish ones! Anyway, Zal, I need you, I need your help.”

“Mr. Silber, I work now. I have a lot of responsibilities. I’m trying to turn myself around.”

“And bless your heart, too! I support it wholly! Let’s celebrate it with a dinner? Whenever you’re off work! What do you do, by the way, Mr. Man?”

Zal sighed. A huge side of him wanted nothing more than to be around Silber, his world, the everything that he had been in that little time period where they knew each other, the way he symbolized the possibility of filling the hole inside Zal. But he had gotten over Silber, he thought. And yet here the only man he had ever wanted to work for, a man who had no idea what he had meant to Zal at one point, was asking him what job he had, what miserable job he had.

“I work in a pet store,” Zal muttered. “Just for now.”

“Okay! No shame in that game! I love pets!
You
must love pets!”

“They’re okay. I don’t love them any more or less than most normal people.”

“I hear you, buddy! They’re neither here nor there to me, too .
.
.”

And he went on and on, a mile a minute, Morse code in Zal’s ear. The whole time Zal wondered whether this was his chance, his one chance, his opportunity to ask something of Silber now that the illusionist wanted something of him.

Zal’s something, naturally: What if he could work for Silber?

He didn’t ask.

But a week later, when he called Silber’s most personal cell—he had graduated to getting that number—to cancel their dinner date, he decided he really had nothing to lose.

“I’m sorry, I just can’t. But maybe we could meet in a different way in the near future?”

“Is this just a rain check, then, or what? How about two Tuesdays from now?”

“Mr. Silber—”

“Bran, baby, Bran. How many times—”

“Mr. Silber, I think it’s better I call you Mr. Silber. I wanted to ask something of you actually a while ago, and I didn’t have the guts. I don’t know if I do now, either, but I noticed, since you have a new assistant .
.
.”

“You want to fuck her? Wait, you don’t do that, do you?”

Zal groaned. “I do that—I mean, ugh, never mind. Listen, when we met a year ago, I really wanted to work for you—in any way, really. Now I have a job I don’t love, but I have some experience with jobs now and I was wondering .
.
.”

“Oh, God!” Silber exclaimed, as if he had heard something juicy or else his tail was on fire.

“What?!”

He sighed, with exaggerated weariness. “You want a job.”

“Perhaps.”

Silber gave another theatrical sigh, trying to mask the full brunt of his annoyance. “Zal, do you think you’re the first kid asking me for a job? Can you imagine how many people want to work for the world’s greatest illusionist? I mean, it is
literally
a dream job, is it not?”

“It is, maybe.”

“It is, definito! But, baby, I don’t have any right now. Stasi has been a personal assistant to all sorts of people—that guy from
Cheers,
Lara Flynn Boyle at one point, Michael Jackson for a day! Do you get that? What if I fired her and hired you? You work at a pet store. Sure, you got a cool story, but, kiddy-kiddo, this is a hard-knock job. What could you do for me, baby?”

“I really don’t know,” Zal said, suddenly feeling small, nervous, tripping over his own stammers. “I thought maybe I could have worked with you on the flight stuff, if even on the research or construction or—”