Call Me Zebra Read online

  I handed Quim Monzó the noose.

  “A good luck charm,” I said.

  Quim Monzó was delighted. He slipped the noose into his breast pocket. Halfway through his talk, he retrieved it, held it up to the light, looked through the ring as though it were a monocle, and said, “Love is just lust dressed up in a bow tie!”

  I happened to be carrying a book by Badiou that day. I opened it at random, as if it were an oracle, according to the Hosseini tradition, and read: Love is no more than an imaginary canvas painted over the reality of sex.

  A second later, the interviewer, a Catalan translator, asked Quim Monzó about Josep Pla, a writer also known as the Memory Man whose books I had been consulting that very morning. This double coincidence emboldened me. I felt as though I were descending the craggy, interwoven slopes of literature. The farther down I went, the more aware I became of the lie of reality, the treachery of this illusory world that, according to Josep Pla, is the sewer where we all slog. I looked at the New Poets and mouthed at them, “Unlike you, who are just a pair of amateurs, I navigate the labyrinthine corridors of literature with the speedy diligence of a dirty old rat in a maze!”

  But that was months ago, long before my father’s death. Now I was alone, staring into the darkness of this other Quim Monzó’s apartment. I slid my hand across the surface of the wall, still in search of a light switch. I thought of the pile of ill-fated corpses. I thought, I am a stranger wherever I happen to go, a pitiable migrant with no one to hang on to. I thought of my mother. I imagined her rummaging through the house for food before its stones came down on her head. The tenses in my life were being radically demolished. The past was projecting itself into the future, becoming the future, while the future, I realized, had been sending signals all along to the present, which was now the past. Time itself was becoming literature. I dragged my hand along a different wall. Finally, I found the switch. The foyer lit up like a stage.

  As I moved through the apartment, my breath was labored and shallow. Still, I could smell damp feathers, barley, cheese, and rotting vegetables. I remembered Quim Monzó’s bird. Quim Monzó had told me the bird’s name was Taüt, and I tried calling for it as I walked around. “Taüt,” I said a few times, each time louder than the last. There was no answer. I headed to the kitchen. I sucked in little patches of air. I turned on all the lights along the way. I watched the darkness retreat. The walls, sound and stable, came into view. In the kitchen, there was a string of chili peppers hanging from a nail in the wall and a container of coffee beans that had been left on the counter. I opened the fridge. Inside, I found a half-empty jar of mayo, three cloves of garlic, a package of jamón, manchego cheese, and an old baguette. I broke off a piece of the bread and chewed on it. I thought to myself, There is not a thing that is more positive than bread. Dostoyevsky. I walked through the rest of the apartment. The furniture was old and heavy, indicating a long genealogy of owners. In the living room, a recamier and a chesterfield were separated by a wooden coffee table (too heavy to move even an inch). Lined against the walls, like a moat surrounding the central decor, were twelve armchairs with cabriole legs and splats that finished off in palmettes. There was something worn and patient about the chairs, as though they had recently served to cup the shocked bodies of mourners after a funeral. In the corner, resting on a broken Corinthian-style column, was a telephone in the shape of a lobster tail. I pictured Quim Monzó speaking through that tail. I remembered his Dadaist inclinations. The chairs, I concluded, may have been arranged for a séance or a group session of automatic writing inspired by hypnosis.

  I moved on to other surfaces. A long table sliced the dining room in half. I detected ghostly water rings and wine stains on the wood, sugary red bumps that prompted me to look through the pantry for a bottle, which I quickly found: a middle-of-the-road reserve rioja from 2009. I sat on one of the dining chairs, uncorked the bottle, and drank half of it at once. A line piped into my head: I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans. Hemingway. I drank some more wine. I snapped off another piece of the baguette. I felt drunk, queasy. I said, “Rigor mortis,” out loud to no one. I felt a sharp pang in my chest. I got up and opened the window. I opened the molded shutters. The wind had picked up. There was a mild fall chill. I leaned my head out. Catalan flags of independence, marked with their four red stripes of blood, were hanging from the iron terrace of the building across the street, being dealt remorseless blows by the wind.

  Once my breathing had steadied, I sealed the window and resumed my tour. I walked down the narrow bleak hallway and opened all the doors. The first two gave way easily, but I had to force the third door open; it was as withholding as Ludo Bembo. I banged on it. I kicked. I side-slammed the door. Finally, it jerked open. I fell across the threshold into a room devoted entirely to the bird. A small square window carved into the back wall let in a dim trickle of light from an interior courtyard. Perching branches had been screwed into the walls. In the bleak light, the branches blurred into scissors, blades, spades, swords. The room looked like a fake forest. Plastic ivy plants hung from the ceiling in woven baskets. The bird had chewed through the straw. A tall wide cage rested on a gilded stand in the center of the room. It was empty. The bird was nowhere to be found. I lingered in the room. I looked through the window at the darkening bands of the universe. A thick canopy of clouds veiled the stars.

  I felt exhausted, drained, confused. I had the distinct sensation of being in multiple places at once. I retreated from the bird’s room and moved methodically down the hallway. I felt my eyes close against my will. I forced them open again. The final door led to the bedroom. An oversize mattress was nestled in a wooden bed frame with dramatic turned posts that looked like obelisks. “Taüt,” I called out one last time, and pictured the bird emerging from the mouth of a mysterious tunnel to greet or attack me.

  I dragged in my suitcase of books and set it down next to the bed. I flung myself on the mattress. I turned away from my suitcase to avoid inhaling the fetid odor of my father’s death. My head spun with little patches of memories. I remembered that Quim Monzó had sent me a photograph of the bird as an attachment in one of his e-mails. In the photograph, the cockatoo is perched on the arm of a swivel wall lamp in the living room, his crown and right tarsus raised, his toes tense and spread wide as though he were simultaneously saluting and warning the cameraman to halt. The bird had cast a stubborn and furtive glance at the camera, wickedly aware that his picture was being taken. I had never seen anything like it. Then I remembered the bird’s date of birth: January 1, 2000. So that bird, wherever he was, had been born the same day that the odd parade of the twenty-first century began, which so far had been a century of haphazard bombings, of revenge killings, of undeserved misery, of terror without reprieve, of death. It wasn’t the Great War, but it was the end of the world as we know it all over again. I heard my father’s voice boom across my void. He said, It is always the final hour. My heart, that soiled and wrinkled piece of paper, folded over itself like an envelope.

  I smelled my hands, sniffed them like an animal seeking comfort in the porousness of the earth. They smelled like dirt and onions. I said to myself obtusely: “You are in Barcelona; the Grand Tour of Exile has begun!” I started laughing hysterically, laughing at the thought of my body being tied to the bedposts and sacrificed in the night. I fell asleep with my clothes still on, my lips stained with wine, a stale chunk of bread in the palm of my hand. If I had seen myself from above, say from a helicopter after an air raid, I would have mistaken my body for a corpse.

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  That night I dreamt I was walking through a tunnel illuminated by a garish light. I was thirsty, weary, famished. But I kept putting one foot in front of the other. I was afraid that if I didn’t keep on walking I would vanish into thin air. I persisted, and the tunnel deposited me in front of an ugly building devoid of character, a funereal administrative building constructed of slabs of concrete that were cover
ed in smog stains. The facade was interrupted only by a series of windows, all covered in protective metal bars casting geometric shadows across the glass. I peeled the double doors of the entrance open and stepped into a rectangular waiting room. There were people sitting on wooden benches—all of them dressed in black, as stiff as mannequins—waving forms like fans to circulate the stale air. When I examined their faces more closely, I realized that my forebears, Dalir Abbas Hosseini, Arman Abbas Hosseini, and Shams Abbas Hosseini, were all there, along with my mother and father. I couldn’t believe my eyes. A stain of blood spread across my paper heart. It rolled and flapped as if it were being dragged through the streets and valleys of the world by a violent gale. I lunged forward. I wanted nothing more than to embrace them, but as soon as I arrived at where they had been sitting, they were gone. They had vanished. That sheet of paper, heavy with blood, sank into my void and faded into oblivion.

  In their absence, a security guard appeared. He was large and had terrible breath.

  “Death certificate?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I replied, as I anxiously scanned the room. There was a wall of windows at the rear of the building, and beyond them, I could see date palms and eucalyptus trees planted in rows; a thin layer of fog had settled over the fertile paths winding between the trees. I thought I heard the Caspian Sea gurgling in the distance.

  “Look around all you want,” the security guard said. “There is no one here. We are all alone in our final hour.”

  “But I belong with them!” I moaned, looking again at the place where my family had been and then beyond, through the windows, at the trees.

  The security guard hooked his plump arm around mine and walked me to a separate room where a secretary sat at her desk. She was wearing orange lipstick, and she moved her mouth like a fish sucking in little puffs of air. She handed me a number and instructed me to sit down. I took a seat.

  “Where am I?” I asked the secretary. “Iran?” I protested. “Islamic Republic of Iran? Van? Ankara? Istanbul?”

  She told me to keep my mouth shut.

  Just then, a set of speakers, which were hanging precariously from wires over our heads, announced my name. “Zebra!” a mechanical voice declared.

  I looked at the secretary. She was busy filing her nails.

  “Come here,” she hissed, fixing her glassy blue eyes on me. I approached her desk. She informed me that I had to report upstairs.

  I went up a flight of stairs and stepped into an elevator. It jerked up. The doors opened onto a dim and drab hallway. There were water stains on the walls. I could see the second door at the end, which the secretary had instructed me to knock on, but it appeared to recede every time I tried to move closer to it. The hallway was elastic; it was extending with my every step, an infinite corridor. Exhausted, I leaned against the wall, drenched in sweat. After some time, a second security guard appeared. He looked like the first one’s twin.

  “Visa paperwork,” he demanded.

  “But I’m dead.”

  “You need a visa in order to get a death certificate,” he said.

  “A visa?” I whined with astonishment. Inwardly, I tried to enumerate how many visas and passports we had filed for over the years. A light came on overhead. It didn’t do the security guard any favors. He had a fleshy mouth. I could see the black roots of his fallen teeth, and he had combed a few remaining strands of greasy hair over his balding scalp.

  “I’ve had enough of visas!” I intoned fiercely, and watched his confidence retreat.

  He stood there motionless, guarding the corridor despite his obviously waning confidence. There was a long interval of silence during which I shuttled up and down the hallway. I felt small and helpless, as though I were walking on a suspension bridge and on either side of me there was a door to nowhere. I was an exile in the cosmic corridors of the universe. I don’t know how much time went by. Years, decades. The security guard grew old. His hair grew white. He slouched down into his chair and fell asleep. Finally, I was able to get past him. But I, too, was older. I walked up to the door and turned the knob.

  The door opened onto a network of caves. There were shadows drifting across the stone walls. I walked from hollow to hollow. Each cavity had been assigned a letter—A through Z—as if the caves composed an abecedarium. I wove my way through the alphabet. I came to the letter Z. “Z for Zebra!” I sighed. After Z, there was nothing: the void, pure and simple.

  A slender man with round glasses appeared. He was sitting on a rock at the end of the cave. I told him, “I’m here to collect my death certificate.”

  The man nodded his head and removed his glasses. His eyes were muddy, bloodshot. They looked like they were about to run down his face.

  “What are you doing in this pit of sorrow?” he asked. A thick fog rose around him and obscured his features.

  “I need my death certificate! I am the last of the Hosseinis, all of whom are in this building,” I explained, nearly weeping. He ignored my pleas. I spoke again, but my voice, thin and desperate, was barely audible. The man scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to me. I read: Raphèl maì amècche zabì almi. I recognized the line. Spoken with icy breath by Nimrod, the founder of the Tower of Babel, in Dante’s hell. I had never felt more alone or more exhausted. I thought of the origin of different languages, of the confusion and miscommunication that ensued thereafter among humans. I thought to myself, I speak so many languages and yet I am understood by no one. I have been deserted, abandoned. I am companionless despite my ability to operate a plurality of systems. Then the fog grew more viscous.

  I woke up in a terrible confusion, covered in sweat. At first, I wasn’t sure where I was or how long I had slept. I got out of bed and walked through the apartment. A grainy light was filtering through the window at the end of the corridor, revealing a lead-colored sky. I looked at my reflection in the glass. I couldn’t remember how old I was. I might have been any age. I was young and old at the same time. I looked down at the street where Ludo Bembo had dropped me off. It looked ghostly, deserted. Suddenly, I was struck by the gravity of the situation: I was adrift in the world, alone with my notebook. Who was I retracing my past for? Even if I recovered its shattered bits, even if my disparate selves appeared in my notebook, witnesses to life’s reckless blows, there would be no one to share it with. I looked around. The apartment was flooded with a feeble light. I walked into the kitchen and took a drink of water. I grabbed a knife. I grabbed my notebook. I carved the title of my manifesto into the leather binding: A Philosophy of Totality: The Matrix of Literature. The telephone started to ring. I let it ring on and on. I wondered if it was Ludo Bembo. Or maybe it was Quim Monzó calling from Greece. I looked around for Taüt, but the bird was nowhere to be found.

  I went back to bed. Immediately, I fell into another dream. I was swimming in a sea of ink. I climbed onto a rock. My chest-shaped suitcase was bobbing along near the rocks with its lid open. It contained a map of the Mediterranean. I wondered if my father was lying beneath that map, but as soon as I craned my neck to look, the chest sank to the bottom of the inky sea. I looked up at the sky. It was dark. There were books suspended like stars in the air. Ink was dripping off the books into the sea. I sat there perched on the rock until the sun came up, until I was drenched with the blood of literature.

  In the morning, on the edge of wakefulness, before I opened my eyes, I thought to myself that books, like the catacombs of the world, contain the ruins of humanity. I turned that word—humanity—on my tongue. It repulsed me.

  During that first week in Barcelona, I couldn’t bring myself to leave the apartment. I felt more directionless than I ever had. My thoughts spun and staggered, contaminated by the shadowy sheen of my dreams. I was afraid that if I went walking through the city I would get dragged along a current of human bodies and, eventually exhausted and uncertain of my gait, fall over and get stepped on by a remorseless stampede of feet. Who would peel me out of the city’s grooves and gutters? No o
ne, I concluded. So I stayed within the confines of Quim Monzó’s apartment and, true to the inky principles of the Hosseinis, reinforced my mind by training in literature.

  A week went by during which I slept by day and read by night. I worked on my notebook. I saw no one. No grocer, no Ludo Bembo. I never saw the bird. I kept strict library hours: four-hour segments during which I, formal steward of death, trained in nothingness through intense reading and contemplation. In between segments, I paused to search for the bird. I looked under the bed, under the cushions, in the kitchen cabinets. He was nowhere to be found. I continued to read. I read in order to drag the Catalan portion of my mind out of the mud; with it, certain aspects of my father’s mind came along. I gained access to his Catalan literary consciousness, that part of his mind that came into being during our years in Barcelona.

  By the week’s end, my manifesto had evolved. I devised from Salvador Dalí’s Paranoiac-Critical approach an Irrational-Pragmatic methodology that consisted of entering and being consumed by the void of exile in a systematic manner in order to produce writing. My methodology involved writing in five-minute segments with a black band over my eyes. Each time I did this, I experienced déjà vu. I saw the faces of my family, the Hosseinis, as I had seen them in my dream. They would appear before me, composed and full of a strange light, before fading into the surrounding darkness, leaving me alone in the eerie stillness of night. The band, torn from one of Quim Monzó’s shirts, was a tribute to the black band my father had placed over my eyes before we crossed into Turkey while each of the five minutes was a salutation to the most influential members of the Hosseini lineage, starting with me and going as far back as my great-great-grandfather, Shams Abbas Hosseini. I wrote for five minutes and rested for five minutes. During the pauses, I received signals from the Matrix of Literature regarding the next segment of writing. I made more than a few entries in my notebook.