“Zal”: the very name did not come back to him for many months.
“Zal,” his father said to him gently, more gently than ever, on the phone one winter night — the phone being their prime mode of communication now that live contact was impossible, with Zal’s schedule suddenly all hers. “It sounds to me like she has become almost like a. . well, girlfriend.”
Zal thought about it. “I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t think so.”
“I mean, son, you’ve never felt this way about another woman, have you?”
He wanted to say yes, yes and more, but how could he get into that impossible thing, all the everything he felt for Willa?
“I guess not, Father.”
“So you like her? You maybe even love her?”
He was silent.
“I’m sorry, son. Maybe that’s not appropriate. I will let that be yours. It’s just, I am surprised.”
“I understand.”
“This is an important development.”
“Why?” And then Zal knew why. “Oh, because I am supposed to be of no. . sexual persuasion?” Sexual persuasion had to be a Rhodes-ism, he thought.
“Well, yes. But, look, you’re growing up. Am I even entitled to ask? This is all new for me, too, son.”
Before Zal could tell him that nothing, even after all these weeks, had gone sexual, that he did not perceive any sex in him — at least not yet — Hendricks had stopped himself from asking and had said he had to go. There was a distance, Zal began to realize, growing between them. It worried him. He was, in many ways, content with the surprising-indeed way that the universe was shaping itself for him, but sometimes all he wanted was for Hendricks to come and save him from his destiny for the second time.
And yet there were other times when Zal swore she was the best thing that had ever happened to him. How, he wondered, day after day, did Asiya McDonald remain the same person and yet also manage to grow more and more beautiful in his eyes?
Theory no. 1: He became more beautiful as well. He soon became her muse. Asiya began shooting Zal like crazy, one of the first human subjects she had ever taken on.
“Trust me, you’re not just another dead bird,” she’d joke, and take photo after photo, Zal feeling nearly blinded, focusing so hard on not blinking that every shot featured a certain tension in his face that she found fascinating.
Theory no. 2: Because she was the first person open to all of him, even the sides of him he’d hidden the longest. One particularly intimate day, Zal had brought her a gift of white-chocolate-covered ants with a great deal of trepidation, finally wanting to expose this last demon to her and feeling safe enough to do so. She had loved it, she claimed, and, in spite of her eating issues, consumed at least three or four little pieces, more than he’d ever seen her do with candy. Later she asked him to take his clothes off. She had blushed a great deal as she said it. But to her shock, he did it without a hesitation, a blush, a protest, not even a pause. The word boyfriend overshadowed the word art in her head those days; boyfriend was in constant play, and it was something she had, in spite of her age, never managed to possess fully.
A body = a body, Zal thought, registering her embarrassment, knowing why her request made her that way, but also feeling protected from her embarrassment by something barely there and yet there, that flimsy membrane that separated her sexual persuasion from his non-sexual persuasion.
She was almost disappointed. There was something entirely unsexy about his standing there, unaroused, that pale thin body not altogether unlike hers, save a few minor additions and subtractions.
She shot away.
He looked beautiful behind the lens. She told him so.
He said nothing, bored, longing for the sweet ants, for the flashing to stop, to be alone again.
Theory no. 3: Because she, too, was vulnerable, in a way he understood. And in moments when she was clearly hurt, when he saw her go soft and quiet like that, pity overwhelmed him, as if he were staring at gentle tender Willa, and he really felt something he thought might be a close relative of love.
And so he told her, too. That she was beautiful and — Theory no. 4—maybe anything could become the most beautiful thing in the world if you gave in fully, let it take you over, let it be all you had.
“Pose like you’re hugging yourself,” she told him. He did it, and she said he looked like he was suffocating himself. She asked him what pose he would most like to be in.
He asked her if impossible ones counted.
She shrugged. What was possible, what was impossible?
He went right ahead and told her — he was feeling so bold, bolder than ever, with her eyes all over him, all of him, a man, yes, he was a man, not a bird not a bird not a bird — he told her he would like to fly. And if he couldn’t exactly fly, he wanted the next closest thing. And not in one of those planes of her father’s, either. Real flight. But if it was indeed out of the realm of possibility, then maybe something like that photo of hers, the one with the dead bird suspended by string.
She blushed, happy. She told him she was the wrong person to ask, clearly, but that she thought that was not impossible. She told him to hold out his arms, his wings. She tried to show him how.
Theory no. 5: Because she took him there. He told her he didn’t need direction; he knew how. He’d grown up with it. He’d watched them circling the veranda like it was a ballroom and they were debutantes, showing off for the old lady, round and round, to her laughter and applause. He was the only one who couldn’t fly, the impostor bird, the Bird Boy, the White Demon bound by hard skin, dull hair, and heavy muscle and bone in their world of light, air, and feather.
And yet, beheld by Asiya, he was suddenly back in that dream, that dream that was reality, but this time one of them, the biggest bird of all, the most incandescent twinkle in Khanoom’s wide eyes. If there had to be an analogy, this Zal was as far from demon as possible. At the very least, he was a winged human: an angel.
She asked for one more shot. He didn’t move, not quite hearing her.
Eventually she took his hands and tried to read his eyes.
He told her — he meant this — that so many things felt possible with her.
She, so happy, said she felt the same way with him.
He told her more, everything that was left. He told her about Silber and the Flight Triptych and all his dreams for it.
Her mouth dropped at the story. She told him maybe that was it, maybe there was a way.
He told her it was not real. He told her: strings, wire, smoke, mirrors.
She told him he shouldn’t think negatively. All the craziest things happen. If we can think it, it can happen. She told him she could read his mind, right then.
He told her he was thinking something right now that he knew would never happen.
She went over to the naked Zal and put her lips on his.
That’s not it, he thought frantically, sure he was dying, that he was being choked to death, that she was sucking the oxygen out of him. Then he remembered all those movies, Casablanca and the others: the men always went for it like they were hungry, like the women were food on a plate that they were going to devour, how they took charge of it, swooped down and pressed their mouths against the woman’s, tightly closed and long and hard, arms all over what was theirs.