“I need something to drink,” she finally said, and went to the kitchen.
Zal sat there, in that new air of the house, with all its doors open, Willa’s bedroom window also presumably open, this strange veranda-like museum of a home, empty and silent and cold. When she was out of the way, the enormity of the event hit him. Willa. Willa was gone.
Willa, his secret love.
Willa, whom he had never been able to love.
Willa, who had never been loved.
Zal suddenly heard himself make a high-pitched sound, unlike a human too, the sound of a bird at the end of its life, still holding on. He imagined Willa in her final moment, half her size, and yet still a thing of weight, the opposite of a bird in every way — perhaps that’s why he had loved her so, how rooted she was, how planted she was, how immovable her condition had made her — and yet her final gesture had almost been in mockery of one. He imagined her arms in a flap, futile, and the concrete below so quickly meeting all that body of hers.
And he wondered how he couldn’t have known. How Asiya had never known, how Zachary hadn’t, how Shell hadn’t. Wasn’t it obvious that Willa was absolutely miserable? That she of all people was entitled to suicide? What had her life amounted to? Apparently only in depression was she losing the weight that had made her depressed in the first place, most likely. It was a double bind. Freedom from the thing that was killing her was the thing that killed her.
How did they all go about living in a world like this, a world made of such hard anti-logic?
Eventually Shell came back, with two glasses and a couple of bottles of something in her arms.
“I know this is crazy, to drink champagne at a time like this, but this is apparently all they have stocked here,” she sighed as she popped the cork, wincing as if it were a gunshot. She poured a glass for her and a glass for him, without even asking.
It was the same pink champagne they had drunk on the night of Willa’s birthday, he suddenly realized. How recent that felt, how clearly he could see Willa’s soft face in the glow of candles, smiling serenely at their relentless foolishness that evening.
“I loved her,” Zal said after his second glass.
Shell, on her fourth, didn’t say anything, so he said it again.
“Did she know that?” Shell muttered finally. “Don’t answer that.”
She drank silently as the hours waned onward and the house grew dark, still all exposed to the elements, with its open windows and doors.
“What about Asiya?” he asked when it finally occurred to him.
“What about her?” Shell hissed, obviously drunk, her eyes rolling strangely. “Call her Daisy, please, it’s her name.”
Zal didn’t bother to nod. “Does she know about Willa?”
Shell didn’t answer and just lay back, her eyes barely open. He assumed not. He, like Asiya’s own mother, was suddenly disconnected from Asiya and whatever world and state she was in.
But she had been right: Willa had been in danger, like Asiya had said months ago. And by that anti-logic, and the very illogic in the air that season, she had to be right: it was all going to hell — that was clear.
Just as he was to never see Willa again, he never saw Shell again after that night, and he never saw Zachary after whatever that last time he saw him was. If there was a funeral for Willa, he had not been invited.
And it felt like he wasn’t going to see Asiya again, either, but he couldn’t accept that it could be true. Instead, he did what Willa had said, her final instruction to him seeming almost sacred at this point: he went home and waited for the Asiya situation to resolve itself.
For things to be — if you could call it this — back to normal.
But he always came back to the same nagging thought: what was he waiting for? What was it? What on earth was normal ? He knew he was further away from it than he had been, or perhaps thought he’d been, all along. But the times did not feel normal, even without Asiya there to highlight it all, to announce the undercurrents of bad in the air, to footnote the feeling of uneasiness he felt not just in his heart, but in the entire city’s.
It was at this point that he caught himself thinking, like Asiya, that he knew it had gone too far. That it was time to turn himself in.
So on September 4, he packed up more than just a week’s stuff. He took almost everything, in fact, and showed up at the doorstep of the only thing he still had in this world — not a small thing, either, but the man who had saved him from some other abnormal once upon a time and who had promised a life that would get as close to normal as possible, and had delivered, until Zal had wrecked it back to anything but. He went to his father.
Hendricks had been more than worried, but since he himself had been counseled by Rhodes again lately, he had realized that it was essential that he let Zal live his life. He would make mistakes, but everyone did — it was not just part of growing up, but of being human. So in spite of the bad feeling he got every time Zal grew more and more distant, left calls unanswered and e-mails hanging, he decided to honor his son’s autonomy. He considered that it might just be hard for him. That perhaps Zal was out having the time of his life, his days so filled to the brim with happiness that there was no room to remember his father. After all, even if Asiya had been a badly bruised girlfriend, his son had managed to find one. And jobs. And he’d maintained his own apartment. He had gone to Vegas and back by himself, gone out, met celebrities, done things maybe that Hendricks couldn’t imagine. He had to be first and foremost proud of Zal’s independence, and he had to assume that the freedom equaled happiness.
Hendricks struggled, of course, to take it all in properly when Zal appeared without warning that evening, with several bags, looking as though he hadn’t had rest in weeks.
“My boy!” he exclaimed, and immediately Zal dove into his arms. It was less an embrace than a need to be hidden inside someone else’s flesh, shielded from this wretched place they all had to inhabit.
When they went inside, Hendricks made Zal some tea and toast, and there they were again. Stories to tell, truths to divulge, much that had been concealed to reveal. Just as Zal had explained Asiya’s theories on the forthcoming end to Silber, there he was explaining all that and its parallel real-life narrative to his father. It was exhausting, all this storytelling, all these men to unload his life upon, his larger-than-life life, on to all these nodding and hmmming patriarchs, whom he adored and worshipped and truly loved. The only thing he had left.
Hendricks mostly said nothing. He shook his head at points, he sighed at points, he rubbed his eyes at other points, and once — at the news of Willa’s suicide, even though he never knew of her — he put his hand over his mouth. When Zal was done, he just gathered his son in his arms and rocked him back and forth.
“My, what you’ve been through,” he finally said. “What a life you’ve lived in just this year and a half. What an entry into adulthood, what a coming of age. I’m so sorry, Zal.”
Zal shrugged. “I don’t know what it’s like for other people,” he said, a sentence he used to utter when Hendricks would express some sort of pity over the limitations of his condition, back when his entire existence was a conglomeration of his limits.
Hendricks nodded. “It’s not like that, not quite like that. It doesn’t have to be so hard, Zal. You got involved with the wrong person.”
Zal shrugged again. “I felt love with her. I miss her, and that. That feeling.”
Hendricks shook his head. “No, that needs to stop, Zal. You need to let go of that. I demand that.”
Zal was shocked to hear Hendricks demanding anything, and in that tone. “I’m an adult — we just said that. And you never got to know Asiya. There are things I could tell you that might make you think twice. The world just might not be what it seems, you know!”