The Last Illusion by Porochista Khakpour Read Free Book Online Page B

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