Call Me Zebra Read online

  The next day at the campus library, I walked through the damp corridors of books until I was dizzy. Hours later, exhausted, dehydrated, starved, my legs shaking beneath my head, which was becoming progressively more detached from my body, I reached for a book at random and found what I was looking for—proof, in a book by none other than the deft and mystical Blanchot: The world and the book eternally and infinitely send back their reflected images. This indefinite power of mirroring, this sparkling and limitless multiplication—which is the labyrinth of light and nothing else besides—will then be all that we will find, dizzily, at the bottom of our desire to understand. A few passages later I found a summary—Blanchot via Borges: The book is, in principle, the world and the world is the book.

  “Yes!” I declared, and petted the shelves with exaggerated tenderness. I felt satiated. The librarian had her eye on me. She was a plump middle-aged woman I deplored. Her head kept popping up between the aisles. I hated her fleshy cheeks. I walked faster, wove in and out of the corridors of books in order to lose her. I was looking for a pen. A minute later, I stole one from a sleeping freshman, who had likely been pulling an all-nighter and had left his supplies sprawled across the table. Pen in hand, I returned to the book to register my revelation. I crossed out both quotes, the Blanchot and his paraphrasing of Borges. Neither of them went far enough, which is no surprise. One is always alone in putting the nail in the coffin. I wrote: Literature, with its cunning and duplicitous nature, aware of itself, in possession of a supraconsciousness, is the only true thing in the world; it exposes man’s denial of reality’s shattering pluralism. I slipped the book under my shirt, prepared to steal it even though I had a library card. A minute later, the librarian showed up behind me.

  “Young woman, you are done for the day!” she announced, and kicked me out for writing in the library books and, as usual, for having entered with Morales’s card, which he had duplicated for me. As she closed the door behind me, I told her that her lavender smell made me wretch.

  I had succeeded in stealing the book. It was mine. Only its trace would remain in the library system. I walked over to the dying rose garden adjacent to Morales’s office and wove my way between the sickly plants. It was evening. The next day, I would have my final meeting with Morales. I was eager to know if he had procured the money for my journey. I walked farther toward the hedges bordering the garden. I slid from bush to bush thinking about “A Philosophy of Totality: The Matrix of Literature.” Then I leaned against a young tree. My thoughts branched out, took on horrifying proportions. The exile, I thought, whose identity is shattered with each progressive displacement from her homeland, also unmasks reality’s dizzying multiplicity. I looked at the bushes. Variations on a theme. What’s more, I realized, is that those among us who have not had to seek refuge in a land of hostile strangers, who have not been persecuted or strangled by the crushing hand of grief, maintain the privilege of deluding themselves into believing in a coherent and linear reality; in other words, metaphysically speaking, they think they are immortal! As if parts of their lives, whole blocks of consciousness, couldn’t suddenly die or become extinguished only to have to rise from the ashes of death like a phoenix. I walked up to a rose and punched it in the face. A few petals floated down to the gravel and caught a sinister beam of light coming off the moon. I had never felt more awake.

  The time of my meeting with Morales had arrived. I told him about my revelations. I told him about the web of literature. I recited my manifesto from memory. I opened my mouth and a voice emerged. It was the voice of my other self, the voice of Zebra. I said, “By going on the Grand Tour of Exile, I plan to prove that literature is an incarnated phenomenon; I, an exile and a Hosseini, am the embodiment of literature.” I informed him that my multiple selves and the archipelago of quotes that made up the Matrix of Literature eternally and infinitely send back their reflected images and that I would be collecting still more fragments by the Great Writers of the Past, and therefore more selves, throughout my journey. Morales looked at me, remote, philosophical. I told him that I would record the tour in my notebook and that by revisiting the origins of each of the multiple selves my knobby, incoherent exile had produced—selves I had no conscious memory of—I would give birth to literary duplicates and distribute between them the pain of the erasure that the so-called original version of myself had endured.

  Morales stood up from his desk, removed his heavily framed glasses and set them on the table. He hadn’t shaved in days, and without his glasses on, I could see how much he had aged over the course of that long year. There were more white hairs growing on his cheeks, at the nape of his neck, and in his sideburns. Even his red suit looked pale, more of a salmon pink. I gave him the book I had stolen from the library and instructed him to open it to the earmarked page. I had added more notes to the margins of the page overnight. He put his glasses back on. They sat crookedly on his face.

  “The Final Exit,” he said, reading my notes back to me, humming, rocking back and forth on his heels. He adjusted his glasses.

  “Yes,” I said. “I am preparing for a Final Exit from the New World and its lineup of fakes who refuse to acknowledge the warped nature of reality!”

  We both laughed. Then Morales paced his office with his head hanging, eyes searching the ground, thinking. Finally, he looked up, and said, “It’s time for you to go. Be on your way. I have made a few arrangements.”

  He handed me an envelope. It contained ten thousand dollars. It was money the university had given him over the years to fund a research assistant, but he had never found a worthwhile candidate. He explained this in his usual matter-of-fact tone. He also added that a certain Ludovico Bembo, whose contact information he had enclosed, would pick me up on the other side of the pond so long as I communicated my arrangements. I thanked him. I knew that I would never see Morales again.

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  That week, I drained what little money we had in our bank account ($80.56), gave my notice, purchased a plane ticket (depleting a full tenth of my reserves), went to my father’s grave, and said my final good-byes. I grabbed the old chest-shaped suitcase and began to pile into it the residue of the past, my broken heirlooms. I grabbed the samovar and shoved it into the suitcase. I removed The Hung Mallard from the wall, took a knife to the canvas, and separated it from the frame. I rolled it up and put it in the suitcase. I thought of my dead relatives, the Autodidacts, Anarchists, and Atheists, of how they had retreated into the deep web of literature in order to survive their deaths while all around the world was being shattered, blasted into a million shards, its parts repeatedly, unceasingly added to history’s pile of ruins. I rolled up the bludgeoned rug. I put the leather-bound notebook and my most cherished books, those old tomes lining the walls of the apartment, into the suitcase. By the time I was done packing, the chest was so heavy I could barely pick it up. It weighed as much as my ill-fated past—a burden I had to shoulder in order to do what my father had asked me to do since birth: to sound out the Hosseini alarm, to leap into the pitiful abyss of our human condition and rove the depths in search of the slimy pearl of truth.

  A few days later, at dawn, the hour of false hope, I, Zebra, left New York City forever. I got on the A line and headed to JFK. I looked around at the empty orange seats. Soon they would be filled. History, I thought, according to my father’s logic, which was now also my own, has a way of choosing new victims. Metaphysically speaking, I wondered, where do the world’s exiles, its living dead, reside? I thought of Dante’s triangular purgatory, and the answer came to me immediately: in the Pyramid of Exile, an elastic funnel in which the refuse of the world can be piled.

  I closed my eyes. I saw an infinite stack of ill-fated corpses. In the devastation, I captured a memory of the future: I was wearing a gas mask, standing alone under a crescent moon in a gloomy, ashen landscape. I breathed in. I breathed out. I watched the glass panel over my eyes fog up, then clear. I was bruised and wounded, standing inside a ho
logram of the future, my future, which was composed of quotes from literature’s past. I could smell the rubber of the gas mask. I was holding a telephone in my hand, then setting it down to transcribe words on a typewriter. Then the image transformed, and I was standing on a cobbled sidewalk in a remote town somewhere in the Mediterranean. Or, I wondered, was I in the no-man’s-land of my childhood? There were dead bodies scattered everywhere. Windows and shutters of the houses were drawn. There was dried blood on the faces of the dead. Even through the gas mask, I could smell oil, vinegar, rotting corpses. The only people on the street were a group of undertakers wearing masks. They were lifting the bodies into cars, into wheelbarrows, onto horses, carrying them out to the graves in distant fields. A line from Calvino floated through my mind: And you know that in the long journey ahead of you, when to keep awake against the camel’s swaying or the junk’s rocking, you start summoning up your memories one by one, your wolf will have become another wolf, your sister a different sister, your battles other battles. I opened my eyes. The image resolved itself. Each thing, I thought, replicates itself to compose the wretched eternal return of life. I felt as though I had been trapped in a terrible nightmare.

  As the train lurched forward, I realized that my fate had been sealed. I felt more clearly than ever that my vindication, my survival, depended on training, through the literature of the void, to stand against my opponents—nonexiles—those fakes who increase their own longevity by hastening the exile’s death, borrowing time and well-being against our increasingly dwindling resources. In the waning darkness, as I set off on my Grand Tour of Exile, I registered the message: I had become a literary terrorist, a Knight—no!—an armed Dame of the Void.

  Barcelona

  The Story of How I Leapt into the Void of Exile and Became Entangled with Ludo Bembo, the Embalmer of Words

  The Boeing 747 rumbled down the runway and took off into a misty gray sky. The plane was buffeted by strong crosswinds. It spat and skidded its way through a mass of clouds. Once we were airborne, a flight attendant emerged in the feeble, dimmed light of the cabin. She came down the aisle in a superhero pose, legs spread wide for balance, both arms up against the overhead luggage compartments. It was clear she was expecting severe turbulence. With a shrill voice, she announced, “Seat belts!” She leaned over my neighbor—a middle-aged woman with a moist, round face, who was already fast asleep—to make sure she had strapped herself into her seat.

  There was something austere and unforgiving about the flight attendant’s features: the drooping corners of her thin and forbidding mouth; her eyebrows, which were narrowed into blades; her square chin; her face, which reminded me of the corpse-strewn deserts of that no-man’s-land I had traversed so long ago with my mustached father. That land that drew everything toward itself and returned nothing, the land where my mother was buried. I looked through the window. The sky was as white as the sheet my father had been wrapped in before he was slipped into his casket. It occurred to me: There is no longer any “we” to speak of. I am alone.

  At that precise moment, an alarming noise originated from the right engine. It lasted a few seconds. Long enough to cause a great deal of uneasy shuffling in the cabin. Everyone was agitated, everyone except my neighbor, who was still sleeping. People were looking out the window at that measureless white sky and then turning away from it to scrutinize one another, the plane. Some flailed their arms. Others sat rigidly, holding their breath. I could see steam coming out of their mouths and ears. The steam of war, I thought, and stuck my neck out to study the anxious faces of the passengers. What if someone is sitting here with bombs strapped to their person or with explosives stuffed in their shoes? Someone who is eager to die, to take everyone else down with them.

  I shrank into my seat. The captain came on the intercom and hopelessly announced: “Be advised, we are going through a storm.” I heard a wave of whispers spread through the cabin. It was unbearably hot. People were muttering in different languages, crying, holding hands with their neighbors. This was the other 99.9 percent, the world’s numbskulls, its sheltered amateurs. I had enclosed myself in a plane with them. I thought of Rousseau. “What about me,” I murmured. “Cut off from them and from everything else, what am I?”

  I sat there contemplating the question for a while. What am I? I considered my options: a brute, a pitiable creature, nothing. Then I heard my father answer from a faraway place: “The .1 percent,” he grunted. If he were alive, he would have taken me by the scruff of the neck, and said: Child! Enfant! Get a grip on your death!

  The swift communiqué from my father galvanized my spirit. I felt as fit as a fiddle. I removed the in-flight magazine from the seat pocket in front of me. As the plane rocked and rolled through the sky, I skimmed glossy picture after glossy picture. I looked at infinity pools, light-flooded hospitals, fluorescent images of brains, ornately plated molecular foods, biodegradable coffins. My father’s coffin was made out of the cheapest materials. Papier-mâché, cardboard, recycled paper—how should I know? I felt a sharp sting in my void at the thought of his body being buried in that misshapen New World. I looked at my neighbor. Was she dead? Her chest was rising and falling. So she was alive but sleeping, as unmoved as a stone.

  I inspected the 99.9 percent. I met the gaze of a bald, bearded man who was sitting across the aisle and had the dignified look of a Renaissance man. His hand was shaking. He was nervous. He stroked his beard; it was heavily perfumed. I got a waft of lavender, sage, mint. I felt sorry for him. I thought, this man deserves to know the truth. The truth about life. His beard is asking for it. Besides, why should I keep my wisdom, hard-earned in the trenches of literature, to myself when I could be providing him with ground-breaking perspective?

  I echoed my father. “Life,” I said to the man, “is brutal, savage; it will wear you down.” After a brief pause, I came into my own. “You could be struck by the whip of uncertainty at any moment”—he stroked his beard again (his mouth had fallen open and I could see his lips were thin and chapped)—“and what can a two-legged rodent like you do in the midst of all that uncertainty except rise above the flotsam and jetsam?”

  He had square yellow teeth. He pointed at himself, and weakly asked: “Are you speaking to me?”

  “No,” I lied, smiling softly at him. It was a hopeless cause trying to help him. I leaned into my neighbor, and announced across the aisle: “I am speaking to that other bearded man.”

  He looked around. There was no other bearded man. I watched him through the corner of my eye. I gave him a second and then I raised my voice. “Give it up!”

  I watched his pupils dilate.

  “Give what up?” he asked desperately.

  But I didn’t respond. I was through with him.

  The plane got blasted by a series of strong winds. After a brief rush of adrenaline, I suddenly felt defeated, morose, sullen. The hunchbacked and uncertain piece of metal we were enclosed in was being propelled across the sky by a listless pilot. I calculated that it had a 50 percent chance of making it across the Atlantic Ocean. I reached down into my bag and retrieved my notebook. I petted its musty pages. I sniffed the leather binding. So what if the plane doesn’t make it? Why worry about it when we, like everyone who has died before us and who will die after us, will be buried in the indifferent landscapes of history; will turn to ash, residue, into poor fodder for someone else’s plants? I looked at the Renaissance man again. He was anxiously stroking his facial hair. I inhaled the dusty herb perfume of his beard. He looked pale. The blood had drained from his face. His pupils were still dilated.

  A moment later, we hit a vacuum. The plane dropped a few thousand feet. I belched. In that abysmal drop, I heard myself say: “Descend into the Matrix of Literature, which is infinite, elastic, as mysterious as the universe.” I looked out the window to see if that false New World was still visible, but I couldn’t see anything. We were enveloped in a dense white mass. We were too high up in the air. I thought to myself, what use is there in lo
oking one last time at a land where people plot their lives in advance of the future, as if history will never come knocking with its cruel claw on their door?

  The plane began regaining elevation. The copilot came on the intercom. “Our apologies for the unexpected plunge,” he said. “One more storm to cross. We’ve weathered worse. Nothing to worry about here.”

  His voice failed to inspire confidence.

  The plane drifted across the sky laterally. We were rolling through another cloud mass, and it seemed the pilots’ strategy was to let the aircraft ride the waves. We hit a bump in the sky. I nearly jumped out of my seat. The plane skidded, then righted itself. There was a deafening sound overhead. The engines started wheezing, a brutal screeching noise. I looked around: supplicating human faces. Impossible: my neighbor, still asleep while everyone else, after a brief reprieve, was sighing, shifting, pleading with their personal god. In the theater of my mind, I imagined my neighbor in conversation with me. My neighbor, who was grinding her teeth, whose saliva was trickling out of the corner of her pink mouth.

  I said to her, “I, Zebra, am primed to expose death’s movements, to illuminate the way ruin moves among us in plain sight.”

  “How so?” I heard her ask.

  “Because I live my life in the Matrix of Literature.”

  My neighbor winced and nearly slid out of her seat. She must have drugged herself.