The Last Illusion Read Online Free Page A

years, much less twenty-five, that he would actually be able to claim this fully Iranian child after all, a child so like the hero of the old epic poem she once introduced him to—a boy who had come to life by bird and almost bird alone. After all, he thought, Zal was also their child, their broken child, the fruit of their long-gone selves, forever bantering in the dim orange light of those endless office hours where lyric and stanza were twisted and turned and torn and reattached.
    It’s the most beautiful allegorical tale I’ve heard, he had said to her that evening, when she read until her voice began to crack. Finally done, she had triumphantly slammed the thick, worn, old Iranian hardcover on her desk. It had the weight of a phone book and the look of a Bible, he remembered thinking.
    Allegory! she had cried, her laughter more disdainful than ever. Try telling that to any self-respecting Iranian! She had made Hendricks promise that he wouldn’t try to write about it— I don’t think you’re there yet, not sure you’ll ever be— and he had, with some will, allowed it to fade away from his consciousness.
    And now here he was, as if he’d never left it. It was like a fairy tale, a thing for novels, the type of turnaround you’d read in romantic epics, poetry of another time altogether.

    Hendricks courted skeptics from around the world—those who doubted a feral child could grow into a functional human, as well as those who questioned just how feral Zal had been to begin with. The idea that Hendricks’s love alone had caused the miracle, the very miracle of his son’s endurance, floated precariously—and while no one would call it a recovery, per se, they allowed these as advancements of an unheralded magnitude.
    There were times Hendricks wondered to what degree Khanoom really had come in contact with Zal. Was it possible it was more than Zari had said on film? Was he really fully feral? Was it more than the doctors wanted to believe? To what degree had their imaginations filled the holes, and to what degree did his reality challenge them?
    There were some things they would never know. Ask Zal about Khanoom and he would look blank, blinking neutrally. He would not recognize the name, not even understand the reference. Sometimes not knowing and not understanding would make him scared. Hendricks would simply hold him and let him know that it did not make him any different from many people, people like himself even, who had in some ways also been raised without a parent.
    You are all right, son , Hendricks would always tell him, over and over. As all right as any of us.
    Little by little, Zal began to surprise them. They said language would not come to him, would never come to him; by the time Zal was fifteen he could speak and read on the level of a ten-year-old.
    I am all right, he eventually said back, and eventually even fully understood.
    They said his body would forever remain deformed—but nine surgeries later, Zal went from a walker to standing upright on his own, with aches and pains and inflammations not so different from those of someone with MS.
    So, unlike his infinitely masculine namesake, he did not resemble a cypress, he was not capturing beauty queens, and he was not saving the world, but if you looked at him for the first time, you’d have to be awfully tipped off to find something amiss. Here stood Zal of just over two decades—a man, finally a man—Hendricks thought, never mind how badly circumstances had distorted his age. He was five feet seven inches, not horribly short, though they all assumed even getting to such a height meant that if he had grown up under normal conditions he’d be well over six-two. He was thin but not emaciated, definitely too thin, but not in a way that disgusted. His skin was pale and was prone to irritations—burns, eczema, acne, the works—but nothing so different from the usual blemishy human. And his hair was still fair, still blond, but the white blond