Call Me Zebra Read online

  The apartment was scattered with objects—most of them rusty, damaged—that we had either carried with us across that no-man’s-land, that miasma of death, or accumulated during our subsequent exodus through the Mediterranean in search of intellectual freedom. A vain search that turned up nothing, because no matter where you go, knot-brained idiots outnumber honest and straightforward men.

  I stood near the dining-room table, dustpan in hand. I examined the objects of our lives: a rust-stained samovar, a hand-woven rug that looked like it had been bludgeoned, an old suitcase shaped like a chest, The Hung Mallard (our most prized possession), and a book of poems by Hāfez, which was lying on the floor near my father’s La-Z-Boy. He was sitting in that armchair now, slumped over, nervously tugging on his mustache. He had staggered over to it with his cane, grunting along the way, while I swept up the shattered glass.

  My father often consulted Hāfez’s poems. In what turned out to be the final weeks of his life, these poetic consultations confirmed for him a fact he had firmly come to believe and that seemed to have revised his thinking up to that point: Our future had been sealed off, we had been permanently barred from it, and we would never have access, not now, not ever, to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness; we, to put it shortly and sweetly, belonged to the cast of the living dead and there was no point in our continuing on.

  “No point! You hear me?” He spattered so loudly that his voice carried across the room. He was breaking down inside. He had given up his sword.

  I walked into the kitchen, stunned. I removed the lid from the garbage and got rid of the shattered glass. My father, annoyed at my lack of response, got up and lurched across the rug to the window that looked out onto the street. I came back out of the kitchen and watched as he struggled to open the window. He kept pointing at the glass, at the people on the street below. He was repulsed by their dress, their manners, their way of being in the world. He banged his cane against the sill. The framework came loose. He stuck his cane out, pointed it at a passerby, and announced: “I spit on my life!”

  Then he wheeled his head around, slipped his cane out of the crack in the window, and pointed it directly at me. He said: “You should know: The final hour is always approaching.” His hands were shaking. His cane was bouncing up and down. I noticed his mustache was wet. The tips were so long that they were getting caught in his mouth. I took this as evidence of a bad mood gone sour.

  That night, before my father went to bed, he reached into his pocket and retrieved an image of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s face, a cutout from an old rial banknote. When I was a child, he had made me a mobile out of those cutouts; he would twirl the mobile around and I would see the king’s shadowy face redoubled on the ceiling and the walls. I remembered him telling me: “Look, the Ruler of the Aryans ate the ground!” Or, with a chorus of defiant laughter, applauding his own sarcasm: “If we who have mingled with the Arabs, Turks, Mongols, and Greeks for hundreds of years are Aryans, then the Spanish are pure-blooded Iberians!”

  Now, as if the King of Kings were still alive, my father looked at me from across the room and let out: “Ha! The man thinks his sweat is as white as milk!” He was holding the king’s face up to the light. His mind had unreeled.

  He seemed to be working his way backward across his life, which was ending in the most unfortunate place: exile’s cold claw. As I observed him, I felt a sharp pain in my chest. This pain, I believe, derived from the sudden and unexpected loosening of the screws that kept the lid on my past tightly shut. I was faced with the prospect of having to open that lid in order to fit my father in the same container I had relegated not only my mother to but also the senseless phenomena that had accumulated during the course of my ill-fated life. I was sure those forgotten fragments of memory, sharpened into spears on the jagged cliffs of time, would inevitably slip out and stab me in the gut. I had no doubt that upon my father’s death I would enter a labyrinth of grief so complex that I may never find the exit.

  That fateful day finally arrived. In April, while the cherry trees were blossoming and the sky was a cloudless blue, my father died. His heart stopped.

  I came home from my weekly meeting with Morales and found my father sitting in his La-Z-Boy, dead, his cane resting across his lap, his mouth open, his tongue sunk back, his mustache flat and lifeless. I felt as though my heart had been put through the shredder. I heaved and wailed, but I couldn’t shed any tears. I had gone dry, like that no-man’s-land we had traversed. My eyes stung and my gut burned. I bit my lips until they bled. I gnawed on my fingers. I attacked myself the way animals do when they are in distress. Sometime later, somnambulant, comatose, I walked over to my father and caressed his face. I closed his eyes. Then I went into the kitchen and poured some tea. I didn’t know what to do with myself. There was a small radio balanced on the windowsill that led out to the fire escape. I had never turned it on, but I did then. There is a first time for everything, after all. I leaned against the sink and listened to the voice coming through. It said, “The long siege.” We were right in the middle of the reckless chaos of the Bush years.

  I retreated from the kitchen and again looked at my dead father. There was a white hue to his skin. I couldn’t stand to see him that way. I looked around. There was a notebook I hadn’t noticed before on the dinner table. My father had left me a present, a leather-bound notebook with a note on it that said: “Ill-fated child, last of the Hosseinis! Add to history’s pile of ruins the uselessness of our suffering.”

  I grabbed the notebook and went back into the kitchen. I leaned against the sink. I opened the tap. I watched the water run down the drain. I looked out the window. The New World. There it was, shamelessly conducting its business while halfway around the globe whole towns, cities, and villages were being razed to the ground. Then I thought, what does that word—new—mean anyway? I had never seen anything new in my life. All I had seen was the anxiety of people wanting to say something new. The New Poets! The New World! I examined the word. I filled a glass and took a drink of water. I turned off the tap. “New!” I turned the word over on my tongue. “New!” I laughed. I laughed with repulsion, with hatred. The sky changed colors. Yellow to ochre to rust. I don’t know how much time went by. Soon it was evening. In the street, the neon lights of the shops came on. Their green glare glided across the walls. I felt as if I were standing at the bottom of the sea. For a brief second, I remembered the wrinkled surface of the Mediterranean, how it shone like treated leather in the muted light of dusk. Fragments of the past were already pushing their way up to the surface in spontaneous fits and bursts. The Mediterranean, that green sea, that Sea of Sunken Hopes, appeared like a photograph, a surface without depth. I laughed. I laughed until I had no idea what I was laughing at. I laughed until there were tears coming out of my eyes and ears. Brackish waters rose through the craggy walls of my void. It stung so hard, I thought my organs had been set on fire. Then I called 911.

  The police and paramedics came and went. I told them they were not allowed to move my father from the La-Z-Boy because I, his only surviving family member, was in the middle of a funereal ritual.

  The paramedics leaned over his pale body. They tried to resuscitate him despite the obvious signs of death. I wanted to speak out, to stop them from touching him, but my voice had drowned.

  Finally, I murmured, “He is not returning. He has gone back to the beginning, to the space before his birth. His mind is in the process of being reabsorbed into the mind of the universe.”

  They hardly heard me. They pumped his chest. They shocked it. They gave him mouth-to-mouth. Nothing. Finally, they gave up and pronounced his time of death, then proceeded to walk around, investigating the scene with sinister grins, clearly hoping to uncover a crime.

  “Look all you want,” I said, exasperated, my voice thin. “My father died when it was time for him to die.”

  They pretended not to hear me. I tried to raise my voice a notch, but a thinner voice emerged, a babble incomprehensib
le even to me. I was standing there watching myself dissolve. I couldn’t tell where I ended, where the room began.

  Eventually, one of the police officers came up to me. He was tall and imposing, and had a flat face. He looked like he had been attacked with a pan. There were three of them altogether. Two men and one woman.

  “What do you do?” the flat-faced officer asked, and my mother’s face swam up the back channels of my mind. I pushed it away.

  I heard myself say, rather matter-of-factly, “I am composing a manifesto.”

  His face distended, as if someone had gone over it with a roller. Thoughts were galloping around my mind, colliding into one another. I took a step back and corrected myself. I told him it was more complicated than that.

  “What do you mean?”

  I leaned against the bookshelf near my dead father. I drew several deep breaths. Then, as coolly as I could, I explained to the officer that I was preparing my mind to produce a manifesto and that once I had sufficiently primed my mind with literature the manifesto would come to me as if it were my second voice. I would just have to transcribe that voice into my notebook as faithfully as possible. I pointed at my notebook, which was on the table. I picked it up and sniffed its pages. They smelled musty, old. I looked over at my father’s face. He looked thinner than he had been an hour before. He was already shrinking, shedding parts of himself, beginning to disappear.

  I looked at the officer again. He had brandished a pen and a notepad from his pocket, and was jotting a few things down. I saw him carve a question mark into the paper. He was making such a tight fist with his hand that the ball of his pen nearly tore through the sheet.

  “Are you a graduate student?” he asked, looking up at me. His eyes were narrow and blue, barely a contrast against his veiny white skin.

  “Exactly,” I lied, letting myself off the hook, because my mother’s face had returned to occupy its proper place next to my father’s, and with my parents’ dead faces illuminated by the feeble light of my mind, I felt I was going to faint.

  Before the policemen and the paramedics had arrived, I’d extended the La-Z-Boy by pulling on the lever and managed to straighten and then bend my father’s limbs. I wanted to avoid the worst of rigor mortis. After that, I pulled all of Nietzsche’s books off the shelves and laid them on the floor in a circle around my dead father. The police officers were examining those old tomes now. I told them that I planned to walk around my father’s body all night, picking the books up one by one and reading several passages from each book out loud. He had read to me through the deepest recesses of our lives. Now it was my turn to read to him, to siphon literature into the hollow left over by his absence.

  I said to myself, “Walking is the best medicine!”

  The policeman with the flat face looked at me with the suspicious gaze of a passport controller. He looked like a man whose head is full of questions.

  Before he could form his words, I said, bitterly, “Don’t ask me. I plead the Fifth!”

  A terrible silence fell.

  I wanted to push him over. I added, “Keep on bombing Iraq and invading Afghanistan, strangling the region, and there will be more of us here!”

  His flat face grew red. It looked like a plate that had been rubbed with the blood of a rare steak.

  “Get a grip!” he ordered.

  I wasn’t sure if he was talking to himself or me.

  “A grip?” I echoed. Inwardly, I thought that, like my mother, my father will soon be swallowed up by the earth; there are no ledges in the abyss of grief.

  I walked over to my father and placed my hand against his forehead. His body was growing colder by the minute. I combed his mustache with my fingers. I pressed my hand against his cheek. Again, I felt dizzy, as if someone were draining my blood. My legs grew weak.

  The other two police officers, who had been mute until then, came over. The woman had brown hair and thick, straight eyebrows that sat over her round eyes like dashes. Her partner, a short, bald, squat man with glasses and arms as long as his legs, walked around with hunched shoulders, emanating a kind of resigned kindness. He looked like a man who had taken a few beatings in the neck.

  “Do you have a cemetery plot?” he asked, his voice gentle and reserved. “Have you called the morgue?”

  “Yes and yes,” I lied, steadying myself against my father’s body. Once I had regained my strength, I said, “Your flat-faced partner over here is looking at me with such sadistic appetite, you’d think I was a pig about to be butchered.”

  He apologized on his partner’s behalf.

  “We’ll get out of your way,” he said.

  The female officer was so wide that she looked like she had swallowed a helium balloon. She floated across the room and took the other two with her.

  I closed the door behind them. I was alone with my father. I could finally breathe. My mind freshly oxygenated, I did what I had to do. I walked in a circle and wept through the night, shuddering and incredulous. Even so, I read to him until the crack of dawn. When I came across his favorite verses, I managed to stay calm long enough to kneel and whisper them in his ear. By morning, my face was dirty, streaked with tears. Tracks of salt sliced my cheeks in half. I caught my reflection in the window. My hair was a tangled mess. I had never seen anything so ugly. I thought to myself, I am one of the wretched of this pungent, futile earth. Far off in the distance, the half-moon, which had risen through the night, faded; it turned a translucent white. The lights that had come on in a sequence along the empty road, a necklace of pearls that illuminated the ghostly street through the night, died down. Instantly, my image vanished from the window’s reflective surface.

  I went to the bathroom and washed my face, then headed out to the neighborhood café, which had free Wi-Fi, and searched eBay for a cheap cemetery plot. There was a man in Westchester County selling a grave his father had purchased before moving away; he had left the plot behind. His son, who said his name was Kevin, had taken several photographs. The grass was overgrown. The stones in the adjacent lots were falling over. There were a few fake flowers scattered across the lawn, blown here and there by the wind. In one of the photos, Kevin, wearing a white polo shirt and slacks with a cell phone clipped onto his belt, was lying down on the site of what would have been his father’s future tomb with his arms on his chest. He looked as good as dead. I told him my father was much thinner than he was; in fact, he was emaciated, but judging from Kevin’s graveyard portrait, about the same length. Kevin confirmed that it was the perfect size for an adult male, and I bought the plot then and there.

  The next day, I took my dead father for a ride on the Metro-North in our chest-shaped suitcase. It took hours to fold his knees into his chest so he would fit. But I persevered. It was how he would have wanted it: transported in the memorabilia of the past.

  He weighed next to nothing. Even so, we both arrived at the funeral home a few pounds thinner.

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  I sat in the funeral home for hours, waiting. Eventually, the man who prepared my father’s body for burial and wrapped him in a white sheet—a reserved, thin man with polished cheeks—came out to offer his condolences. He disappeared through a door and then reappeared a moment later and offered me a glass of water. It was so quiet, I could have heard a pin drop. The man stood there, hovering over me while I drank the water. I wanted him to go away, but he continued to stand there in silence. He seemed to expect me to say something, to explain the circumstances of my father’s knotted body. I began to lay bare the various nodes of my ill-fated life. I found myself saying that I intended to reverse our exile—“Our forced retreat from the past,” I said with emphasis—by retracing our jerky, incoherent journey across the Mediterranean, street by street, in a backward manner. As soon as I heard myself say the words, I realized I had been nurturing the idea since the start of my father’s decline, the onset of his blindness.

  It became clear to me then and there that my father’s missive to record
the uselessness of our suffering would become, over the course of the following months, an unstoppable impulse. An impulse that would require everything of me. I, alone in the world and without family, am a person of little consequence. But, I thought inwardly, let the story of the Hosseinis, which is also my story, the story I inherited and through which I must slog, be a resounding alarm to the rest of humanity, the 99.9 percent of anti-intellectual rodents who scamper about this earth indifferent to the pain of others. I’m not talking about a mild heartache. No. I’m talking about the kind of pain that eviscerates, the kind that levels your life, that leaves you barely holding on. I reached for my notebook. “This notebook is my only hope,” I told the gentleman who had prepared my father’s body. “Everything rests on it. I am willing to extend my life, which is itself a death, in order to put these words in the record.”

  The man stood there, nodding along and smiling warmly.

  I said, “I intend to dive into the lacunae of exile. In other words, just like my father and my mother, I am going to become nothingness, fade into the white noise of death—only I will do so by physically retracing the ill-fated steps of our journey from Iran through the Mediterranean to the U.S.A.”

  His eyes widened, but he kept nodding.

  “The U.S.A.,” I said, letting out a chuckle. “The Unanimous Station of Apathy, a station where the selfish and the greedy readily set up shop with the intent of exploiting the vulnerable!”

  The funeral director looked at me with that polished countenance of his.

  I said, “Just so the message is clear”—at this, he looked like I had slapped him in the face with a dirty dish towel—“I intend to prolong this ridiculous habit of living just long enough to examine the landscapes we traversed during our long and brutal exodus. After that, there is no knowing what I will do.”