“And bless your heart, too! I support it wholly! Let’s celebrate it with a dinner? Whenever you’re off work! What do you do, by the way, Mr. Man?”
Zal sighed. A huge side of him wanted nothing more than to be around Silber, his world, the everything that he had been in that little time period where they knew each other, the way he symbolized the possibility of filling the hole inside Zal. But he had gotten over Silber, he thought. And yet here the only man he had ever wanted to work for, a man who had no idea what he had meant to Zal at one point, was asking him what job he had, what miserable job he had.
“I work in a pet store,” Zal muttered. “Just for now.”
“Okay! No shame in that game! I love pets! You must love pets!”
“They’re okay. I don’t love them any more or less than most normal people.”
“I hear you, buddy! They’re neither here nor there to me, too. .”
And he went on and on, a mile a minute, Morse code in Zal’s ear. The whole time Zal wondered whether this was his chance, his one chance, his opportunity to ask something of Silber now that the illusionist wanted something of him.
Zal’s something, naturally: What if he could work for Silber?
He didn’t ask.
But a week later, when he called Silber’s most personal cell — he had graduated to getting that number — to cancel their dinner date, he decided he really had nothing to lose.
“I’m sorry, I just can’t. But maybe we could meet in a different way in the near future?”
“Is this just a rain check, then, or what? How about two Tuesdays from now?”
“Mr. Silber—”
“Bran, baby, Bran. How many times—”
“Mr. Silber, I think it’s better I call you Mr. Silber. I wanted to ask something of you actually a while ago, and I didn’t have the guts. I don’t know if I do now, either, but I noticed, since you have a new assistant. .”
“You want to fuck her? Wait, you don’t do that, do you?”
Zal groaned. “I do that — I mean, ugh, never mind. Listen, when we met a year ago, I really wanted to work for you — in any way, really. Now I have a job I don’t love, but I have some experience with jobs now and I was wondering. .”
“Oh, God!” Silber exclaimed, as if he had heard something juicy or else his tail was on fire.
“What?!”
He sighed, with exaggerated weariness. “You want a job.”
“Perhaps.”
Silber gave another theatrical sigh, trying to mask the full brunt of his annoyance. “Zal, do you think you’re the first kid asking me for a job? Can you imagine how many people want to work for the world’s greatest illusionist? I mean, it is literally a dream job, is it not?”
“It is, maybe.”
“It is, definito! But, baby, I don’t have any right now. Stasi has been a personal assistant to all sorts of people — that guy from Cheers, Lara Flynn Boyle at one point, Michael Jackson for a day! Do you get that? What if I fired her and hired you? You work at a pet store. Sure, you got a cool story, but, kiddy-kiddo, this is a hard-knock job. What could you do for me, baby?”
“I really don’t know,” Zal said, suddenly feeling small, nervous, tripping over his own stammers. “I thought maybe I could have worked with you on the flight stuff, if even on the research or construction or—”
“Baby, honeychild, homeybones, you don’t get how this industry works, do you? That’s over! I’m done with it. Fucking finito, bonito! There is no more of that — in fact, I’m working on just the opposite—”
Zal couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You just stopped working on it?”
“Do I need to send you a press kit? Have you followed me at all?! I work on something and then it’s on to the next thing—”
“No more flying stuff?”
“The opposite, angel!”
Zal was amazed at how much anger he felt over this. He wanted to shout, but instead he just spit out what he hoped would hurt him: “It wasn’t real anyway.”
Silber did not sound even mildly hurt, throwing a stray chuckle at that. “What is this?! You want to have a philosophic debate on the nature of reality, or do you want to talk illusion and showtime? My time is more money than money, honey. .”
“I can’t help you,” Zal grumbled.
“Set me free, why don’t you, babe. Get out of my life, why don’t you, babe!” Silber sang obnoxiously, a song Zal did not recognize. “Terrif! Have a nice life — kiss the pets for me then!”
Zal dropped his head into his hands. “Yeah. Okay. One last question, may I?”
“Shoot, shitcake.”
Shitcake, Zal thought. It had come to that. Knowing he’d never have to speak to Silber again gave him even more courage. “So what’s the opposite?”
“The opposite? Oh, the new illusion?”
“I guess so.”
He cackled like a cartoon witch. “Dine with me and find out!”
Amazing, thought Zal, amazing, the man’s shamelessness. He stood his ground. “I won’t do it. What do you want from me anyway?”
“You want to know what I want? I want to pick your brain! Give me the fucking electric chair now! Crime of crimes!”
Zal snorted, like Asiya used to, the most perfect expression of human disdain, he thought. “The thing is, Bran, I’ve grown up a lot since you’ve last seen me. It’s not my story that defines me anymore.”
Silber punched his empty dartboard, which hurt more than he thought it would. “Swell!” he shouted, sucking his knuckles. “Okay, see you never, baby!”
“I mean, what is this new illusion, that you’d need my help for it? All about birds and cages? People raised by wolves? Snakes? Rats?”
“Ew, no,” Silber said. “It has nothing whatsoever to do with you, if you want to know the truth. Nothing! I wasn’t trying to use you or your precious story, kid. Look, I really got to go. .”
Zal let him go. He was part stunned, part gutted, part infuriated. Nothing whatsoever to do with you. Why would Silber want his help, his brain to pick, on something that had nothing to do with his story? Zal felt as though he’d made a mistake and insulted someone possibly not deserving of it at all. What if Silber simply wanted to know what he thought, man to man — normal man to normal man?
But why now, so long after they’d met? Why out of nowhere? Why was Zal connected to him anyway? Zal had sought him out, but, as was confirmed in that phone conversation, he had no future with Silber; he would never be able to be that right-hand man. Plus, Silber had moved on. He was not the guru of flight Zal had taken him for — flight had been a phase for Silber, apparently. And Zal was one of Silber’s phases, too, and didn’t feel the need to stick around for the guy’s roller-coaster ride, just a bag of tricks — yes, tricks—that added and subtracted nothing to the world but a moment, just a moment when things looked different than they truly were. Zal was — he had to be — done with Silber.
He swept the floor of the pet store and locked up, his most recent rank-risen duty for good work. For a while he just stood there on the sidewalk, in the dark, the big New York City bright darkness, and thought about what it meant to have no one, no one at all.
Meanwhile Silber, shaking off the shock of that bird boy getting so crazy with him, summoned Anastasia again.
“In my Rolo, there’s a bearded lady under b — or maybe under class="underline" lady, bearded, whatevs — I forget her name. See if she’ll do dinner a week from Tuesday. Tell her Bran Silber loves her work and wants to connecticate! Then I think under lenny — or maybe lenny cruz? — there’s the Coney Island midget dude — maybe under coney — call him, too, and schedule something a week from then. . Then just go through the whole thing and see what there is. I want the wildest folks we got to have dinner with me, okay? And there is no no with me, Stas, got it?!”