The Last Illusion by Porochista Khakpour

Author:Porochista Khakpour
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-03-30T21:00:00+00:00

Rhodes knew more than he had told him—that Zal could tell. Rhodes had long ago told him what he shared would remain confidential and never divulged to his father, but Zal didn’t altogether buy it. Rhodes and Hendricks were old friends, colleagues from way back when, and they still talked sometimes. Zal could very well have casually entered a recent conversation. In any case, the moment he walked into Rhodes’s office, Zal felt certain Rhodes and his thick, clear-framed glasses were beholding him in a slightly different way.

“Am I a new man or something?” Zal joked.

“You tell me,” Rhodes said and smiled, a bit sinisterly. He wrote down immediate levity à intro, comic greeting, a new thing.

“Well, whether you know it or not,” Zal began, “there are some things to tell.”

“I know nothing, but I don’t doubt it,” said Rhodes, looking at his folder of notes. “It’s been a while, Zal. Almost a month. Not good. You’ve been canceling and changing times all over the place. This, I take it, is still because of Miss Austria?”

“Asiya,” Zal snapped. Rhodes had to be doing that on purpose, he thought, at this point. He must have brought her up a hundred times at least.

“Oh, my bad again! AWE-see-ya.”

Zal rolled his eyes, and Rhodes wrote it down: eye-rolling. He had never seen that either. “Look, shall I just spit it out?”

“Sure, a good use of our time,” Rhodes egged him on, scribbling annoyance markedly heightened, bantering abilities also up.

“Rhodes, I did it,” Zal blurted out. “I did it with her. You know what I mean by that. And also I told her I loved her.”

“Is that all?!” Rhodes could not believe what he was hearing. He scribbled it in all caps, underlined. “I’m gonna use the recorder today, Zal, okay?”

“And she met my father.”

“Well, well,” Rhodes said. “That is a lot. Last time we met, you were being photographed by your girlfriend for her show. You had already kissed her, something you were participating in but only maybe enjoyed, but you were still ambivalent about furthering physical contact, and in fact the notion of lovemaking seemed a bit repulsive to you, which of course I assured you was more than normal, of course, considering.”

Of course, Zal thought. He did not want to deal with Rhodes today.

“And now you’ve done that, and also you’ve told her you love her. Last time, remember, I asked if you loved her, and you said you were not sure, but you did not think so. So what changed, Zal? Tell me, what happened?”

Zal paused. It was his tradition, almost, to tell Rhodes everything and anything. It was easy with Rhodes, a person he never really cared about, a person hired to serve him, he realized. And yet now the Lying Zal was born, and he didn’t believe he owed him the whole truth if he didn’t owe it to his father and his girlfriend.

“I changed how I felt,” Zal said, slowly. “That’s pretty human, last I checked.”

More sarcasm, Rhodes jotted, without looking at his sheet.

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