The Last Illusion Read Online Free

Something is wrong, Tony. Something is wrong, I know it.
    And of course, he said what every lover would: he insisted everything was fine. He denied her concerns and yet encouraged her to go to a doctor, and when they went still he denied it, until the doctor spoke those words Hendricks replayed over and over from then onward, hoping to have them refiled and reassigned, so certain they were intended for someone else’s story: ovarian cancer.
    She did not cry about the cancer—not once—but what she did cry about was what it precluded: children. She had waited her whole life— waited way too long, that I knew, but what can you do, a stranger in a new land —and now this.
    She told him to leave her. That she would go back to Iran, be with her family, get help there. But he did not, and she did not.
    Instead she lived as best she could, longer than anyone guessed, on loan with five-year extensions that started to look like forever, if it weren’t for the fact that evidence of decline, slowly but surely, was creeping in. When her end came, even though they had been prepared for it for years, it felt every bit as absurd and unjust. In her final days, she said to him, I only regret one thing, and it’s something you did. You never let me go back to Iran when I first got sick. And not so much for me—I mean, I left that damn place—but you. I would have loved to go to Iran with you, to show you everything.
    He had thought about it for a moment and then said, Well, I will go then. I will promise to go.
    But there was more: And, Tony, have a child. You of all people should have a child. You’ve always wanted one, and I can’t imagine a better father. Please marry. Please have one.
    He shook his head. Now that, darling, I will not promise.
    She had rolled her eyes at him, like he was the student again, struggling over a sestina or pretending to.

    She was fifty-two when she died. He thought of her every day after that, often many times a day, determined not to let the image, sound, smell, feel of her slip at all, in a land where nobody ever reminded him of her.
    And then years later, there in that other land, the minute he got to the Tehran airport, he saw bits of her everywhere. Previously, in New York, all he could do was make the routine visit to Great Neck, the Iranian enclave in Long Island, to get certain Persian groceries she would buy—saffron, sumac, a certain type of walnut cookie, Persian tea, yogurt soda—and would often eat alone at a Persian restaurant. It was painful—it would take him back to her, to them, and at some point he’d realized it had become a part of his culture, too, this other world of hers. Now at the airport, here it all was, all of it— hers : her people, her land, vibrant to him in spite of the chadors and pollution and mostly foreign chatter. When he saw the filmmaker come toward him, his camera in hand, he looked like more than a middleman—he was almost a relative. After all, what do you call a man who brings you to your son?
    When he saw Zal at the special care home the next day, he had to literally clamp his teeth down hard on his tongue to prevent himself from crying out and gasping. It wasn’t just his twisted posture, his tiny bones, the eerie otherworldly sounds he immediately hurled at his intruder. It wasn’t the atrocity, but the beauty: his eyes. Was it a trick of memory, a trick of one type of love now overlapping and overwhelming another type of love? Was it the emotional overpowering the optical, or was it actually the truth, reality plain and simple—that Zal’s eyes were Nilou’s eyes? And the frame: in his little face, they were it—he was all eyes, just like Nilou, eyes that were mostly whites, eyes set upon devouring the world, eyes that were perpetually in wonder, and maybe, now that he was seeing it properly, some horror. If he had any doubt before, the doubt was gone.
    It had been twenty-five years without her, and yet who would have believed in a million