“Zal, I want to be there for you. Already I feel like I’ve failed you. A father is supposed to be there for his son. I should be giving you talks about women — women and men maybe — and sexuality, and we should be talking about Asiya and her problems and everything.”
Zal groaned. “I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want to get into it. I still don’t. I don’t need your answers, Father. I’m learning them myself. I can do that, you know. It’s going fine. I’m alive.”
“How bad are your injuries?”
“They’re nothing, some bruises,” said Zal. There were indeed bruises, cuts, swollen limbs, wounds that kept bleeding, new scabs, and then of course the more gory ones, held together by stitches he had received promptly, once he had walked himself straight to the hospital where Asiya had been treated. Hendricks would get the hospital bill soon enough; there was no need to get into it now.
“Son, you’re calling me, telling me these things, and you just expect me to hear it and offer nothing?” Hendricks finally asked, raising his voice.
“It’s over, Father. I know now how to make love to a woman. I know now not to cheat on her, with women or men. I know—”
“Zal, are you still with Asiya?”
“With?”
“You’ve broken up, I hope, by now?”
“Why?” Suddenly it was Zal’s turn to be shocked.
“Zal, there’s no other way to say it: the girl is a mess. She’s too much for you, and frankly anyone! For you of all people, to have her as your first girlfriend—”
You of all people, thought Zal. If anything kept him in a cage nowadays, those sentiments were it, he wanted to say. “I love her,” he said instead, automatically, as if it was programmed in him like an autopilot. He didn’t know anymore if he meant it; he was just following the boyfriend script, what he imagined Humphrey Bogart would say in his shoes. “And I’ll have you know, people would have said the same thing about me being a mess. As if I’m — or was — so normal! And yet I’m doing fine — I’m doing better than anyone ever thought was possible. Isn’t that what you, Rhodes, everyone always said?”
It was true. Zal knew that; Hendricks knew that.
There was silence. Hendricks was making sounds that Zal thought sounded perhaps like sniffling, like a cold, like a cry — he didn’t want to know which.
“I don’t need you anymore,” Zal said, partly because he believed it, partly because being cruel felt right at that moment. “You must know that.”
“Zal, son, please don’t talk like that.”
“You can’t control how I talk anymore. I’m totally free, freer than you ever thought possible.”
“Okay, Zal, that’s fine, but you have to understand I still know things—”
I know things. He thought of Asiya and her madness and her knowledge. “I do, too, Father. And I don’t want a father right now. I was rid of a mother; now I want to be rid of a father. I’m letting myself out this time.”
“Zal Hendricks!”
“I don’t want you to call me. I won’t call back,” Zal told him, his foreboding voice almost unrecognizable in its assurance and its girth and its volume, almost as if it took all those bruises and blows to get to the man inside, a real man. “This, by the way, is a normal response, what some normal people might do. Goodbye.”
And he hung up, something he’d never done to a person, a thing he knew was not honorable but was, here and there in bad times, done, and he thought to himself what he couldn’t bring himself to utter to his father—Goodbye, yesterday—and he closed his eyes and thought of everything that was to come, a future he couldn’t imagine — a healthy sign, he decided, the opposite of Asiya’s suicidal clairvoyance.
A week later, he marched into Rhodes’s office at their normal time, feeling bizarrely cheerful, equipped with the armor of premeditation, a man with a mission, his final mission, feeling the way he imagined school shooters must, their final goal before them, all nothing-to-lose vigor, all there’s-nowhere-to-go-but-nowhere force, finally all-powerful, finally afraid of nothing.
Rhodes met his smileless smile — he could tell by then when Zal wanted to smile — with a smile of his own.
Zal put his hand up as if to silence him.
“Rhodes, I’ve come to say your final check will be mailed by my father as usual, but that’s it. I will no longer be needing you.”
Rhodes didn’t change his expression. He was a man who was used to pretty much anything from patients, even the most extraordinary, Zal told himself.
“Zal, sit down. Let’s talk about this—”
“I don’t want to talk about this or anything else with you, ever. It’s over, Rhodes. I’m not ungrateful. But goodbye.”
“Zal, you came here to tell me this?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you come at all? You could have phoned—”
Zal wished he could answer in a laugh, in that ugly, tarry laugh of the worst villains. He wasn’t sure what to say. The best he could come up with, he supposed, was okay: “I wanted the satisfaction of walking away from you forever.”
But it wasn’t entirely true.
“How about just a few minutes, Zal? So we can wrap things up?”
Zal shook his head. He had to be firm. He turned around to face the door and said, “I am saying goodbye to my past. I’m done with you, with all of it. It’s time for the future!”
The best part of all was what he had forgotten to say. He had rehearsed telling Rhodes about the job he had gotten yesterday: Oh yeah, and thanks, Rhodes, for one thing: telling me to get a job. Bet you didn’t think I’d actually get one! In hindsight, Zal thought it was even better that Rhodes would never know; that the satisfaction was again all Zal’s, every last bit.
Of his constant hurdles, Zal Hendricks felt the easiest had been the one most people would have assumed would be the most challenging, at least for him, considering! But somehow — maybe as a cosmic reward for all the rapid-fire hardships of the era — it came easily. In the winter of 2000, Zal Hendricks suddenly found himself in the possession of a real live job, at a pet store.
It had come from a single decision: that he was done with humans for the moment — at least until Asiya got out of the clinic — and that animals were better. He reminded himself this was not the step backwards that it might have seemed to anyone who knew his story and had spied him lingering at the glass window of a pet store, eyeing tiny canaries rapidly darting in a giant golden cage. Skydiving, too, had seemed like another step backwards, a way to get in the sky, to make a bird out of himself, but in the end it had taught him that he feared death. Beyond the shady impulses that might have led Zal to this particular job, it was really and truly just another way for him to make something of himself, as they said, in a way that was most feasible, a way to get a job for which he didn’t need a diploma or a college education or any expertise.
He told the manager simply, I feel a deep connection with animals.
And there he was, with job. In actuality, it took a few more steps, and first and foremost courage: asking for a job application, which they didn’t have, but just give us your résumé and we’ll call you, since we maybe could use some winter work. He looked up résumés online and found some and he cut and pasted various items and changed a few others so that he had what they said was good: a single sheet with the most important items, never mind that they were not really his. Zal knew it was wrong, and probably illegal, to lie on a job application, but what could he do? He had nothing. And his next step was to get a job. A job was not possible for someone like Zal Hendricks, who had nothing, absolutely nothing, in the way of life experience. So he’d have to pretend to be someone else, a combination of someone elses, and pray.