The Last Illusion Read Online Free Page B

had, thanks to sun exposure, faded a bit more into a dull brass. His eyes were black and still huge, still like Nilou’s wonderful dreamer eyes, though they revealed nothing—and in some ways Hendricks preferred them to hers, in that strangely sincere blankness. Hendricks imagined Zal was what some wandering poet girl, some eccentric artist with a romantic edginess, might consider good-looking.
    They said he would not be capable of experiencing human emotions, but Hendricks witnessed them all: the embrace out of nowhere he once or twice got, the welling of tears during frustrated episodes, the fear the fear the fear. True, there was no laughter, there was no smile, but that would require a time machine to fix. The thing Hendricks and ultimately the therapist to whom he entrusted Zal—his colleague, the eminent child psychologist Gerald Rhodes—were most grateful for was the obvious: that Zal, in his adulthood, had lost his association with birds, that he finally did not and would not and really could not consider himself a bird, that birds and their natures were about as foreign to him as unicorns and griffins.
    The last one was not true, but only Zal knew this.
    Zal himself never saw his own reflection for too long—avoidance of mirrors was a quality he shared with all feral children, that and the failure to smile and laugh. But what he had seen of his looks, he did not object to. He was, he simply was, and Hendricks and Rhodes and scores of other people in his life had told him that was something to be proud of, considering . Always “ considering, ” but still. He was.
    I am a boy, he told himself, and then, I am a man, he reminded himself. He was just that and that alone, he thought over and over and over, until it all sounded meaningless.
    But he had to. And eventually he learned to keep the bird in him, any bird in him, so deep within himself that it resurfaced only rarely. Let it out and he knew he’d be back to the world of doctors and scientists, make it flutter before him and enter camera crews and a million more glossy and newsprint updates on the miracle Bird Boy of Tehran, uncage it once and for all, and break his father’s, his one and only father’s, heart. He knew enough of humankind by then to know you did not do a thing like that. The parts of him that they could not get to were perfect like that, best kept to himself.
    Because it was impossible to say how long he had—no one really knew the lifespans of ferals, he had heard Rhodes once say on the phone to someone, although, Rhodes had actually chuckled, because Zal had busted all those other feral-children “truths,” who knew what it could be. We’re writing the textbook all over again with this kid —he was not sure how quickly he should work on getting his birdness out of his system, how hastily he should outgrow it if his own growth arc was so difficult to evaluate. So far, any work he had done on it did not work, but he didn’t tell them. For instance, he could not get rid of the bird dreams, those nightmares of the small white ones—they never taught him the names of birds, and while he could recognize an astounding variety as distinct, could even tell the same type of birds apart, the way a human knows one human face from another, he could not play name-that-species— all trapped in, say, verandas with big windows that they could not recognize, fluttering about in pure panic, disorientation, and desperation, bumping into the glass over and over and over, the collision of beak and glass a thing so painful it would take pounding a human head against a sledgehammer to understand it, colliding and dizzily floating down and then coming back to sense and up in an eternity of entrapment, spiraled in the killer-without-killing loop of where where where . Those were the worst nightmares. Sometimes there were good dreams, flocks of birds in V formation in blue skies, giant fountains where some old lady god-hand made it rain birdseed for all