Free The Last Illusion by Porochista Khakpour Page B

felt deafening, but Zal had only slapped his thigh weakly through it all, instead of properly clapping. And he had exited quickly, walking home alone, feeling emptier than he had in ages, as if it were Vegas all over again.
    He was due to attend Silber’s NYE party, but he was at best ambivalent; as much as he flipped coins for it, he did not think he could bring himself to go. Silber had disappointed him, had become another dead end, and Silber’s reciprocation of interest bored him more than anything. Silber was another person who was dazzled by the most undazzling—or so Zal insisted—life of Zal Hendricks. It had in some ways turned him off from not just Silber but the possibility of magic, of unassisted human flight even.
    In the end, skipping the NYE party was less his choice. It was that very day, after all, that Zal met someone who, once and for all, took him outside of all the considerations— who saw him as something more than his miracle story and his name and his oddities and even the hint of his private fetishes—and saw him, it seemed, as wholly normal, a normal adult human man . Or at least he suspected this, because of the accidental nature of the encounter, the purity of it, the lack of question marks and exclamation points.
    It was, of all beings, a woman. And while she didn’t seem like the most normal woman—there were things that were different about her, that he knew from first sight and then first speech and soon first touch—she was an adult human woman at least all the way. At the age of twenty-one, Zal Hendricks had his first contact with the thing that he had read of in the stories of his namesake, in all stories really, from book to trash-TV plots: a “love interest.”

    The more the flying act was behind Silber, the more flying was behind him. But in many ways, no one else let go of it. It was widely recognized as Silber’s greatest show, the pinnacle of his career, though nobody guessed it was his penultimate one. And so at his epic New Year’s 2000 party—which Zal was invited to but did not attend, to Indigo and the assistants’ shock and to Silber’s only mildly irked registering; while the guests drank and drugged themselves to a numbness that they joked was in case the end of the world was coming; as the clocks upped themselves in their ultimate double digits that the guests took too much and then not enough heed of, on and off, throughout that bottomless night—Silber tossed around his new idea.
    “I want to make New York fucking disappear!”
    People laughed and made jokes and had clever quips, and Silber teetered and drank and snorted and locked lips with a few different women and even a man or two, and he clarified.
    “Not New York exactly, but the New Yorkness of New York, what’s more New York than New York, a symbol of New York . . .”
    Nobody knew what he was talking about. Silber only had a clue.
    The next morning, as life, same old life, went on without a hitch, and everyone felt embarrassed about their boarded-up stores and stocked-up kitchens and gas masks and kits and provisions, Silber was the only human at his party who remembered what he had revealed. The rest had dismissed it as party talk.
    But it was going to be his biggest stunt yet, a stunt so much bigger than him and them and bigger, even, than itself.
    It was terrifying. For the first time, a feat of illusion worried him. He was terrified.
    It was everything the Triptych was not, this one darkness to its light, destruction to its hope. This one was the opposite of flying, taking down something high and proud and towering and reducing it to dust, or worse than dust: nothing at all.

PART III
     
    At the end of the twentieth century people were not certain whether they were to celebrate the beginning of the new millennium in 2000 or 2001. It was important for people who were waiting for the end of the world, but most people did not believe in the end of the world, so they did not care. Other people