Asiya was pacing, disturbed. “We don’t have time for stuff like this, Zal! We’ve got to move.”
Zal groaned. “Asiya, I know you think there’s a deadline—”
“And it’s not like he’s exactly inviting us anyway! He’s saying it’s always inconvenient, but if we go over there, maybe there’s a slight chance—”
“He just talks like that!”
“Look, Zal, I’m willing to go there, but we can’t waste any time. I need him to know beforehand why we’re there. Then he’ll definitely meet us first thing, make the time for it urgently, you know.”
Zal tried to imagine the Silber he knew in confrontation — he could just see him in his deep tan and silver overalls, hands on his hips, poking fun at Bird Boy and his freak girlfriend, waving them off ultimately with a wail of a laugh, pawning them off on assistants while he argued with his illusion-engineering team. He then tried to imagine the Silber Asiya was seeing — a man in a black suit and top hat, like those real magicians of the past, or, better yet, a fortune-telling gypsy with a crystal ball who’d hear them with closed eyes and a grimace, who’d nod when they were done and make promises, ones he’d guarantee he could keep, ones that would, as Asiya said, with no irony whatsoever, save the world.
“Asiya, I do love you,” Zal began, trying to pump his voice full of patience, “but I need you to understand something.”
She looked at him pleadingly, as if to say her heart was in his hands — her heart and mind.
“There is no way I’m taking you to meet him, I’m sorry. I’m not going there, and neither are you. I agreed to give a letter, but that’s it.” He left his changed mind bare, unadorned, simple, naked; it was all he had.
Asiya ran her hands through her hair, tugging chunks in her fist along the way. “I can’t believe this! Do you know how irresponsible you’re being? We’re on the verge of an emergency here, Zal! Fuck you and your limits! I don’t need you, you know that?”
Zal sighed. “Great, well then do whatever you have to do yourself. Leave me out of this.”
“You are so, so, so selfish!” she snapped. “I’m disgusted! I’m horrified! I’m just—” and then she stopped, a pale hand coming up to meet her pale mouth. “My God.”
Zal looked up and away. Not again.
“Oh my God, Zal, I get it, I get it.”
Zal tried to fill his mind with other thoughts, to drown her out.
“Holy shit, Zal. .”
But it was hard to ignore her in general, much less when she got like that. “What, Asiya, what?”
She was backing up as if he were holding a weapon, as if he was out to get her, shaking her head, muttering something unintelligible, just barely mouthing whatever unutterable it was.
“Asiya, I need you to speak to me. What is it?”
And he asked it over and over, until she hit the wall behind her — he didn’t warn her, didn’t think she’d actually back into it — and crumbled, as if it had swatted her to the floor, and began crying, deep panicked sobs.
Zal crouched down and just watched her, without touching her. When he finally got up, his legs cramped, her sobs grew softer, until she could finally squeeze some words out.
“Zal,” she gasped. “You. Don’t. Believe. Me.”
And Zal shook his head, not sure at what exactly.
It was in this period that Zal started closing himself off from the world. He found himself avoiding the computer — the world seemed bleaker than ever, bad politicians, missing girls, shark attacks everywhere. He started avoiding his father and Asiya, the only two people who consistently demanded his attention. His excuse: he wasn’t feeling well.
And it was true: in August 2001, Zal found himself consistently not feeling well. Whether physiological or psychological, he did not know. He just knew that every morning he rose, he regretted it.
And so his solution was to simply not rise. When Asiya or Hendricks would come in or call or want him in some way, Zal would tell them, I don’t feel well. I need to rest today. Over and over. He’d insist it was nothing and yet it was enough to prevent him from participating.
In those last few weeks of summer, Zal simply dropped out: blank page.
Except that dropping out of one world meant dropping into another: the world of his fantasies, from heavy, sickly-sticky dreams to gauzy, easily puncturable, lucid ones. Except for trips to the bathroom, water and some granola for meals, an occasional step or two out the door, he began living exclusively in the attic of his head. And his head was a strange place that season, even he had to admit.
Zal began dreaming in bird again. There he was in the tangles of a nest, his wings tucked against him, waiting with an open mouth for a bigger one bearing small squirming worms. There he was soaring through the scorching summer atmosphere or cutting through sheets of relentless rain. There he was perched on a windowsill, watching human life and all its mundane oddities, big people sitting and standing and lying down and eating and smiling and fighting and just staring. There he was in their garden, on their roof, in their tree, on their steps, with others of his kind but all alone — or with humankind, trapped again, in those airless cubes called rooms, waiting for one of them to carve a square into a wall and open a dimension into the natural world, the real one they barely lived in.
But sometimes the dreams were not so far-fetched — they were not the daily life of an actual bird, but that of a bird boy. There he was in that other world, the old world, that other climate that was his native one, dry and dusty and hot, the country of his ancestry, the village of his family, his homeland. But what did he know of that place, any of it, beyond a single veranda, occupied by others of what he imagined were his lot: the commune of canaries and doves and little white parrots that the older woman, Khanoom — a name he never learned — kept in a wide variety of homemade cages. There he was in his own, a badly bent cylindrical wire tower padded with straw — and damaged, it seemed, bent from his own doing, the nudging and hitting and pushing for things that could never come soon enough: more food, more water, the cleaning up of his space. How she would dwell on all the others, nestle the canaries against her bosom until they’d reanimate with joyous song, line the parrots up on her arms as she flapped them, as if she was Mama Parrot, giving them a playful hurtle up and down. How she filled their cages with worms and bugs and then threw the dregs to him: wet seeds, stale rice, uncooked beans, all sorts of food that was neither, not in that shape at least, for man or bird. He’d envy the others so much, knowing that although he was one of them, he was also somehow different, something more even than just bigger, less feathery, without beak, without claw. He was, after all, familiar with the one name she called him: White Demon.
And he had accepted it.
Sometime he saw her coming in and opening all the cages except his, letting them loose in the covered veranda that they knew so well they bumped into nothing, just spun through the air at top speeds, relishing the rare opportunity at unfettered abandon, in their element, doing what they were born to do, the makers of tornadoes yellow and white, with her, the older woman, in wonder at its axis. She’d look up at them, laughing almost deliriously, holding out her arms as if in a gesture of mass embrace, just enjoying her place at the center of their world. And he’d watch, behind his own bars, neither theirs nor hers, not of that element, but not of this, either. He was doomed to be outsider and observer, sibling to those who even in captivity enjoyed freedoms he thought he’d never come close to knowing. He knew that, and he watched, and he watched, and he watched. And when they complained, as she tucked them back into their cages and hushed them to submission, he bowed his head down, as if not minding them out of respect. In certain ways, he did not envy them — he didn’t know what it was like, after all, had no clue what in the world it would be like to be let out to fly, to be loved like that. He felt related to the concepts, in close reach somehow, and yet ultimately alien.