Zal’s face tensed up and he sighed it out, as he had been taught long ago. “Yes. I told him.”
“Well, great! A real wow!”
“We’ve been e-mailing. But, you know, I don’t think he has much use for me.”
Hendricks frowned. “What do you mean, use for you?”
Zal for a moment looked flustered, but then quickly shrugged to gloss over it. “I don’t know. I thought maybe I could work for him. Like, intern, as you once suggested I do for someone out there. But he seems more interested in dinners.”
Hendricks raised an eyebrow with movie-detective-like curiosity, a look of his Zal was fond of. “So he’s interested in you? Your story, I’m sure?”
“Yeah, maybe. Anyway, I just wanted to do something amazing. . for me.” Zal looked down, embarrassed at the grandiosity of his words.
Hendricks reached over their plates to give him an affectionate rub of the shoulder. “Zal, give yourself time. You will have it all, my boy, you will have it all. Look at everything you have now, how far you’ve come.”
Zal nodded. He had heard it so many times. He got up and said it was time to go home, that he had a TV show (he did not mention nature show) that he liked to watch. Hendricks embraced him long and hard, as usual, taking a few steps backwards to face Zal for just a bit longer as they went their separate ways.
Days later, Silber performed his Triptych-in-One in New York, and Zal got further disillusioned. The audience volunteer was again a stooge, another young woman, a famous New York City hotel tycoon’s daughter, a socialite heiress with whom the whole city was in love that season and that season only. The applause 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 were waiting for the end of the world but thought it would happen on any old day.
MCMXCIX, also known as 1999, had been unremarkable so far, she thought.
There was: the Euro. Amadou Diallo, shot in New York City. Best Picture: Shakespeare in Love (other notables: Saving Private Ryan and Life Is Beautiful). The Columbine shooting. Napster. Time Person of the Year: Jeff Bezos, founder, president, CEO, and chairman of the board of Amazon.com; Person of the Century: Albert Einstein. The iBook. The plane crash of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. Other major plane crashes: Korean Air Cargo, Mandarin Airlines, EgyptAir, TAESA. Earthquakes: Colombia, Turkey, Greece, Taiwan, Vanuatu. Select notable Billboard hits: “Genie in a Bottle” (Christina Aguilera), “. . Baby One More Time” (Britney Spears), “I Want It That Way” (Backstreet Boys), “Believe” (Cher), “Livin’ La Vida Loca” (Ricky Martin). The world population hit six billion.
Nineteen ninety-nine was the “International Year of Older Persons,” the United Nations declared.
It wasn’t even the end of the second millennium or the twentieth century — that was technically next year, math people reported.
Before New Year’s Eve, it was everywhere — in stores, on radio stations, on commercials, in everyone’s head: So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999!
Asiya hated that song. She hated all songs that year or about that year. She had started, that year, to hate sounds, in fact; she was sure she had some form of hyperacusis, perhaps even a phonophobia of some sort. She had become easily startled. She had started to talk in a whisper. She was starting to believe that everything, pretty much, was wrong with everything.
Asiya, as her parents always said, was “the strange one.” But it feels strange to call them my parents, she would say if she knew you very well, well enough to break out of the painful quietness or shyness, interpreted differently depending on the person, that defined her. Asiya had raised herself, she insisted — and this was basically true — she and her younger sister and even her younger brother: Willa, who had plateaued in the mid-five-hundred-pound range in her mid-teens and was bedridden in a wheel-equipped iron bed, and Zachary, who was a complete insomniac with a remarkably low IQ. She was parent to the most undesirable children she could imagine. If love produced them, she thought, fuck love. But somehow she doubted it was love exactly.