Her panic attack stopped suddenly and broke instead into a steady conventional sobbing.
“Did that not help?”
“It reminded me of my father,” she slurred through sobs.
Planes, Zal thought, her father, the plane maker—that was what flying meant to her.
“Look, it’s okay, I’m sorry,” he said. He suddenly felt the strong urge to take care of her, as if she were his little girl — the opposite of how Willa made him feel, like he was her little boy needing to be taken care of. “I want to take care of you, Asiya.”
“Zal,” she suddenly said, sobs melted a bit. “This morning I didn’t even know you.”
“That’s true.”
“Where did you come from?”
He said nothing. She wasn’t asking for his life story, but instead of hiding it — his original M.O. — suddenly he wanted so badly to tell her. This is where I come from, he wanted to say. It’s a long, long, long story. He knew somehow that with this house of hers, those siblings, her own strangeness, his story had a chance of being safe here, at least more than it would anywhere else.
She went on, “I mean, I am so scared right now, I’ll admit it. I’ve been dreading this night for months, maybe years.”
“You think something bad is going to happen?”
“No, but, I mean, it could. It won’t, though, I know. It doesn’t happen like that, I know, not on holidays especially. Bad things come when we don’t think they’re coming. But it’s coming, Zal.”
He didn’t know what to say, really. Rhodes: echo, question. “Why do you think a bad thing is coming?”
“I can feel it. Zal, if I tell you something, don’t think I’m crazy. I mean, fine, do — I don’t even know you.”
“Please stop saying that.”
“What?”
“That we don’t know each other.”
“But—” she stopped and adjusted her tone. “Okay. Well, it seems crazy, but. . I’ve been having these visions about something happening, something bad happening, and I’m not on drugs, Zal, not even prescription anymore, and I really have no diagnosis, nothing like hallucinations or delusions or anything. It’s something outside of me that I’m sensing, not something wrong inside of me. Does that make sense?”
“There are only wrong things inside of me,” Zal thought out loud, “so, no.”
“Time is running out right now, Zal.”
“Is it? I thought you said you didn’t believe it.”
“I did, didn’t I?” She paused. “I don’t know what’s happened to me, Zal. I mean, I’ve been a strange bird all my life. .”
Strange bird. He had heard that expression before. It was a saying. He loved that saying. He was a strange bird, too.
“You are, Asiya,” he said, matching her whisper, “but, you know, so am I. More than you. More than anyone.”
And there in the darkness he heard it, like peals, a skipping bell-toned vocalization, that thing he could not do, as much as he tried: a true laugh.
“Oh, yes, you are!” she said, laughing.
“You laughed.”
“So?” she said.
“I can’t,” Zal said.
“Oh, stop!”
“I’m serious.”
“What the fuck?” she snapped, and Zal knew the only way to melt her effing hardness again was to give in to that darkness and safety that this abnormal world of theirs had suddenly inspired in him and tell everything, right then and there.
“I was a bird.”
Asiya took a step back, as if bird were a synonym for serial killer.
He cleared his throat and started over. “I mean, I was raised among birds. I was raised as a bird. It’s a long story.”
For a while she just blinked, silent. Finally she said, “I have all the time in the world,” without, for once, thinking that she might not.
The story lasted that eternity between life and the possibility of no-life. It was his second time telling the story, and he felt it unravel less clumsily than it had with Silber. The off feeling was always there, but he had struggled to bury some of the odds and ends of the narrative so deeply that he was surprised to hear it all come together. There was something about the power of recollection that seemed to blur the lines — story became cinema became existence. There he was in a foreign dry heat, a land yellow and black, the mother country he got only a window’s view of, his eyes with nowhere to look but at his own kind — what he knew as his own kind — and their motionless marble bead-eyes that had nothing for him but cold empty allegiance to some god of oblivion. And there he was, his body just a mass of bones held together by broken filthy skin, squatting against walls of twisted wire that his limbs would fight against with each passing year, his bare feet only able to shuffle here and there on the mess of shredded newspaper and straw — always damp from urine and sweat and feces and blood — and the only nice thing in there, the one thing he could never have, feathers, that glorious evidence of wings from the many around him, from all around him, that somehow swirled through the dead air like the fresh flurries of an early New York winter.
Her arms broke the spell he felt, indeed, encaged by; she held him and held him and held and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed — but not in the panicked way; in the moved way, he thought, he hoped. And when they left that dark basement finally (a “wine cellar,” she clarified later), Willa and Zachary met them with looks even he could tell were funny.
“What?” Asiya: instantly annoyed when confronted with them.
Willa let out a soft husky giggle; Zachary a sort of disgusted groan.
Willa pointed to the television. On TV, a sitcom Zal vaguely recognized played, the old one with the stand-up comedian and his short bald neighbor and tall crazy neighbor and that girl, all in New York. The characters were all arguing in the comedian’s giant apartment, interrupted here and there by recorded laughter.
“Oh my God, what time is it?!” Asiya’s voice suddenly broke into a violent exclamation, her whisper altogether gone.
“Game over a while ago, Oz,” Willa said, just as Asiya shoved her watch at Zal.
12:37 a.m.
Zachary got up, still in headphones and with his smoking drug, and went to his room, slamming the door behind him. They rolled Willa into the elevator and up to her floor and exchanged good nights, Zal lingering just a bit at the door, to try to etch her form and all its infinite comforts in his mind.
In the empty living room, they stood in silence, not sure what to do with each other now. Zal tried to read her, but she seemed every instant to be made up of a different emotion: annoyance, fury, relief, euphoria.
“Zal, thank you,” she said in the ecstatic mode.
“For what?”
“For making the time pass, I guess,” she said. “For sharing your story.”
“We’re alive.”
“Yes.”
“Thank you for hearing it. I have never told anyone, really. I mean, the people that know know, but no one else. I don’t know many people.”
“I can tell,” she said, and just like that laughter that had been drawn out, something like a small smile revealed itself. She wore it much better than he guessed. With that embellishment, the stick figure became a girl almost.
They were silent for a few more moments.
“Well, it’s time to sleep now,” she said. “You should go home.”
“I should go home,” Zal quickly echoed, so embarrassed he had forgotten any notion of his home. This entire milestone of a day had made him feel like he was on another planet, not just some dozen blocks from his apartment. He suddenly felt totally out of touch with himself outside Asiya and her world. He did not understand how that could be possible, how the encounter could hold such power. He did not really understand what was happening, but he thought that it was worth thinking that it may be good.