Call Me Zebra

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

  Once his initial surprise had passed, the funeral director did his best to normalize the situation. He stood there and continued to smile kindly while he searched the ground at his feet. But his unresponsiveness failed to soothe me; it only fueled my anger. I raised my notebook to my nose and sniffed it, then I took another sip of my water.

  “Soon,” I said, swallowing, “this notebook will smell like ink, like the blood of literature, the blood that runs through all Hosseini veins.”

  The man took a respectful step back. He stood there with his hands clasped, his head bent humbly. He was still staring at the gray carpet beneath his feet. I took another sip. His mouth finally opened. His tongue had started working again.

  “I understand,” he said humbly. He raised his head and looked past me at a man who was walking across the room carrying an arrangement of roses, lilies, and white hyacinth.

  I got up and walked over to the chest-shaped suitcase, which I had parked near the door. Naturally, my dead father was no longer in it, but the pungent odor of his corpse had been absorbed into the leather and wood. The scent of his death made me dizzy, but I carried on. I had to persist in the face of dread. It was the valiant thing to do. I pulled out a few of our favorite books: The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, The Odyssey. I walked back over to the man with the polished face and asked him if he could give the books to the undertakers to put in my father’s casket before sealing it. I wanted him to have access in death to the tattered pages from which he had so often read to me in life. I could see the man wasn’t pleased with my request, but again he nodded and said he understood.

  “And who do I give the epitaph for the tombstone to?” I asked, shoving the old tomes under his arm.

  “I can take care of that for you,” he said.

  I handed him a piece of paper. It read: Like desert camels of thirst dying while on their backs water bearing. The man read the note. He looked up from the page, and asked: “This is what you want on his tombstone?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “And make sure the engraving is poorly done. I’d like the words to be lopsided, as if they were written hastily and upside down during times of war, between bouts of carnage, detonations, and bombings.” As I spoke, the bony knobs of my knees ached the way they had hurt when we walked across that no-man’s-land with those blackboards hanging over our chests and backs to protect us from the imprudent blows of history.

  The man who had been carrying the flowers was now walking back across the room. This time he was holding a blown-up photograph of one of the world’s other recently deceased, a man with glasses, a tiny nose that looked like it had been chopped off, and white hair.

  After that, I don’t know what happened. At some point, hours later, I was standing out in the cemetery under a cluster of trees looking at the plot I had seen on eBay. It had since been dug up. It was a moist black hole. I was dazed, holding my notebook, watching as my father was slipped into the mud of the earth. Again, I had the feeling that someone was draining my blood. I yielded to the dizziness until I was at the point of delirium, until I felt myself double, triple, quadruple. I thought to myself, I am among the loneliest of this pitiful world; all the other Hosseinis are dead.

  My void widened in order to contain my increasingly voluminous loneliness. In response, my consciousness stretched and spun. Just then, like a bolt of lightning, a magnificent thought struck my mind. It occurred to me that I would need a new name for my journey of exile, one that referred to my multiple selves. I declared inwardly: I, the last of the Hosseinis, will continue to live so that this scattered collective of selves can fill my notebook with literature; in other words, my manifesto—composed of literary fragments systematically organized into a vast matrix, with each portion reflecting a disparate self—is my only vindication, my final line of defense.

  At that critical moment, the light came down through the trees in the cemetery and fell across my father’s casket so that it appeared striped. The image was charged with an electric force, and for a brief moment, my inner and outer worlds were in perfect alignment. I felt as though the fate of my future self were tied up with that image of my father’s casket wrapped in alternating bands of light and darkness. It formed a kind of chiaroscuro composed of shadowy, inky bands laced with contrasting stripes as white as paper. That’s when the word appeared in my head: zebra.

  I let it sit for a moment. I watched the undertakers—three men dressed in black, all of them strangers—sow my father into the earth, thinking, as I did, that the juxtaposing stripes of light and darkness were sending a message to me, a message that consisted of that very word, zebra, which had spontaneously manifested itself much as the truth does. The truth, which is odder than one expects.

  I turned the word over on my tongue; I muttered it to myself. I examined it. Zebra: an animal striped black-and-white like a prisoner of war; an animal that rejects all binaries, that represents ink on paper. A martyr of thought. That was it. I had arrived at my new name. To the funeral director’s astonishment, I declared out loud, “Call me Zebra!”

  The funeral director leaned his polished face over to look behind the trees, his eyes searching for a zebra grazing in the grass. But unbeknownst to him, I was the zebra; the zebra was I. I gave him a broad, happy smile. He shrank, like any man would, because that smile was the smile of a conqueror.

  That night, after returning the empty suitcase to my studio, I set out again despite feeling exhausted. I went out on a peripatetic walk in honor of my father. I walked around New York for hours, thinking of him, of the long lineage of autodidacts I had descended from, of the relentless machinery of terror that is history, of its wheels that never stop turning. I thought of the dim light cast by my perpetual exile, of the way we had been gored by history, and felt sadness set in, and a mild sense of vertigo. I sat down on a bench. I comforted myself with the thought that all conquerors are secretly melancholy. For a moment, I felt my sadness lift. In that brief reprieve, my new name—Zebra—echoed in my ears. Then the sediment of grief settled again in the craggy pits of my void. A man walked by with his dog. A woman dragged a suitcase on wheels past me. The sky was growing steadily darker. After a while, I got up. I stopped at a deli and bought a scalding cup of black tea. The Pakistani man at the cash register counted out the money I handed him with robotic movements. I examined the mechanical aspect of his gestures. He, too, seemed divorced from his environment, but while I was scrutinizing the gap between myself and the world to the point of dizziness, he was simply detached. I left, drank my tea, walked. Hours later, run-down, drained, I got on the subway.

  Underground, the air was stale and damp. The train pulled into the station, and I got on. It was a busy time of night. At every station, the doors pumped open and more people piled in. A few of them looked at me with an odious glare, and when they eventually got up to leave, I felt the residue of their hostility resonating through the orange color of their abandoned seats. I looked around. There were women with eyeliner running down their tired faces; men in suits with hunched shoulders, their shoes freshly shined; families carrying bags of fruits and vegetables; Orthodox men in fur hats hiding their faces behind newspapers. I felt like I was being squashed between the bodies of the other commuters. I couldn’t breathe. I tried to suck in air. The back of my throat was burning. For a second, I had the distinct sensation that the train was headed to a mass grave, that the whole city was a graveyard full of discharged energy and waste. Then the subway doors pumped open, and still more people piled in. When my stop was finally announced, I got up, and pushed past the crowd of bodies. I climbed the urine-and-grease-stained stairs and walked north toward our building.

  Inside the apartment, I struck the odious bulb that burned in the center of the room. The bulb didn’t shatter; it swayed from side to side like a pendulum until it lost momentum and went still. A cacophony of emotions cycled through me: rage, grief, numbness, amazement, shock, guilt. Every time I heard a noise, I asked: “Who’s there?” But there was no one. M
y father was gone. Exhausted and at the edge of despair, I draped myself over the La-Z-Boy. Hours later I was possessed by a strange euphoria. I got up and began walking through the apartment in ever-expanding concentric circles. I thought long and hard. I consolidated my thoughts from the funeral. The circle—prehistoric, divine, natural god of geometry, responsible for the ever-increasing speed of human travel. According to the Greeks, the smoothest, most perfect of forms. Innate. Embedded in the earth, manifest like death in the body. I dragged my hand against the wall of the Room of Broken Heirlooms, across the boundary of the circle. What path leads to freedom? I asked. Any vein in your body, I answered, thinking of the great philosophers of the past. I felt relieved for my father. As it turned out, death was the only liberty there was. I wanted to taste that liberty. I wanted to be wrapped, like my parents, in the silky folds of death.

  But as the sun was coming up, I was struck by another bolt of lightning. A Hosseini Commandment. That literature, magnanimous host, does not treat life and death as if they were two antagonistic blocks. It is courageous enough to dissolve the barrier, and therefore, it is liberty in life. It was then that Acker’s words trumpeted through my void. I whispered them to myself: I travelled all over the world, looking for trouble. Trouble! What a wonderful word, originating from the Latin turbidus, meaning opaque, milky, turbulent. I muttered the word again: “Trouble!” Then I thought of the Provençal word trobar—to find, to invent—origin of the word troubadour, a medieval lyric poet. In other words, I, a modern literary inventor, was going to walk the void of my multiple exiles causing trouble, discombobulating the world.

  I sat back down on the La-Z-Boy. I thought: If Ulysses can set off on a Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, Don Quixote on a Grand Tour of Literature, and Dante the Pilgrim on a Grand Tour of Human Nature, then it stands to reason that I, Zebra, can do all three at once. Done and dusted. I was going to use the papers I had secured through the inky sweat of my father—my American passport—to embark on a GRAND TOUR OF EXILE.

  Just one obstacle remained: I, a penniless rodent, did not possess the funds to backflip into the void of exile. But I had a meeting with Morales in a few days. I had prepared myself to relay the truth: that my father had died and that I needed money—roughly ten thousand dollars—to fund the Grand Tour of Exile. I barely had any savings. My father, who had found erratic work as a translator, had left behind enough money for me to pay a few months of rent, basic utilities, and food if I ate nothing but mint-and-onion soup.

  When the day came, Morales offered his condolences, and then he reprimanded me: “The Grand Tour makes exile sound like a delight!”

  I felt irate. “Am I so worthless that I am barred from taking pleasure in my own suffering?” I rejoined.

  He said nothing for a while. He leaned forward and put his elbows on the desk. His eyes had pooled over. I could see his pupils swimming behind the thick lenses of his glasses. When he finally spoke, his tone was unusually reflective.

  He said: “Compose your manifesto and we’ll talk again. In the meantime, I’ll pull some resources together so you can be on your way.”

  I stood up and bowed respectfully, like a warrior, like a soldier of death. I stepped out of his office thinking only of those lines he had recited so many months earlier and of the prophetic nature of literature I had been attuned to since birth: Oh pit of debris, ferocious cave of the shipwrecked. In you the wars and the flights accumulated.

  I spent the following weeks feverishly composing my manifesto. I barely left the apartment, and to save money, I began rationing the little food I had left in the refrigerator. I grew as light-headed as a Sufi mystic. There were days I survived on a single date. As I chewed the sweetmeat, I thought of the date palm I was born under. The thought was sufficiently loaded with the weight of loss that it caused me to feel full instantaneously.

  On one such day, as I stood near the kitchen window, I noticed there was more room in my mind for my thoughts to move around than there had been before. Something had shifted. Pathways that weren’t available to me before had suddenly appeared. It occurred to me that, before being absorbed by the mind of the universe, my father’s mind must have lingered. It had to have traversed the atmosphere. Then I remembered Pythagoras’s theory of the transmigration of souls, which supposes that the soul—or, as the Hosseinis believed, the mind—decomposes in death and continues its journey through the world.

  In a clipped tone, I said the words: “Metempsychosis. Palingenesia.” Indeed, I thought to myself, that’s what had happened: More than likely, I had absorbed my father’s mind before the mind of the universe could get to him. In other words, I had beat the universe to it. I felt soothed by this notion, comforted. The sting of loneliness subsided a little. As a result, I was thinking with the brain capacity of two minds, each of them multilingual, extremely literary, and shattered by their shared and perpetual exile; which is to say that each mind contained multiple minds inside of it, many of which, by virtue of having come into existence under different cultural and linguistic parameters, had different intentions, objectives, and patterns of thought. I thought to myself, I am a person with a myriad of unsettled minds all operating at once, a kind of irregular genius. Not unlike the many-headed country of my birth and origin: Persia, Pars, Iran.

  After that, my thoughts became lucid, electric, charged. I decided to spend the day advancing my manifesto by simultaneously reading Cervantes’s and Acker’s Don Quixote, along with Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” I would read the texts concomitantly by going back and forth between them with my many minds, metaphysically superimposing the texts and blurring the lines between them. Reading these works in concert would allow me to significantly increase the speed with which I built the constellation of literary networks that I had come to refer to collectively as the Matrix of Literature, an infinite cosmos created through the Paranoiac-Critical method of spontaneous association. To the rows and rows of tomes, I announced: “A many-headed reading experience!” and got to it.

  Within a matter of hours, I arrived at the following conclusion: Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote and Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” are distorted duplicates of the original Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, which is itself a duplicate of other texts, a giant literary womb in which the chivalric tales of times past are gestating, preparing to be born again. I was struck then by a thought of epic proportions: Texts have been leaping across eras for centuries in order to cross-contaminate one another.

  Without effort, I declared: “Literature is so self-aware that it knows how to perpetuate itself like a disease. Every text is a mutant and a doppelgänger!” This discovery drew another into the light: that we, the Hosseinis, have been operating like literature for centuries. In other words, each of us is a distorted duplicate of the other. My father fit inside me the way his father and his father’s father had fit inside him—a mise en abyme of Hosseinis.

  This was the tip of the iceberg. I was just getting started. The voice of my manifesto, woven together from my plethora of minds, had appeared. I needed to give it some air. I grabbed my father’s cane and left the apartment.

  Outside, I made a series of left turns and ended up on a street I hadn’t walked on before. The street was undergoing repairs. The asphalt had been overturned, and there was a ditch in the center. I peered into that abysmal wound in the center of the street. The sun was baking the sidewalks, the building facades, my head. A pregnant woman walked by. With a great deal of complicity, I announced to her, “Literature is pregnant with itself, too! It’s constantly having triplets!” She stopped, looked at me pleadingly, then hid her face behind her hair, hugged her belly, scurried away. I watched her leave and wished someone was there to take my photograph, the first portrait of Zebra. But I didn’t have a camera. So I took a mental photograph of myself instead and imagined that the following caption, simultaneously inspired by my family motto and Blanchot’s transcendent words, was written beneath it: Death i
s nothingness and nothingness is the essence of literature. So, I thought, weaving together my various thoughts, if liberty = death and death = nothingness and nothingness = literature, then it follows that literature = liberty, death, nothingness. I was headed in the right direction. I was going to disappear into literature.

  I climbed out of the hole and walked up Broadway. I stepped over a half-eaten chicken thigh and a slice of pizza that had been discarded on the road. I walked past a group of old men chattering loudly and playing bridge on the sidewalk. I walked past the neighborhood grocery store. Through the shop’s glass wall, I saw rows of Bustelo coffee cans stacked on top of one another, piles of plantains, loads of polished vegetables. I pressed my face against the glass. I gawked at that food for a few solemn moments. All the produce looked unreal. Then I walked away, gripped by a strange euphoria, utterly convinced that I had absorbed my father.

  That night, as I lay awake beneath The Hung Mallard, I made tremendous progress. A single but epic thought kept belting around my many minds: that I had metabolized a critical mass of books, that I had read enough to conclude once and for all that literature is duplicitous, and that texts give a false impression of being closed systems capable of operating independently of one another when, in fact, they secretly reside in a mutable and ghostly environment, a dynamic matrix where they disappear inside one another, mirror each other in a series of replicas. I watched the blue light of the moon glide across the hung mallard’s beak. Books, I realized, are connected to one another via nearly invisible superhighways of language, the way stars are interrelated via light and dust, the debris of the universe.

  Finally, I fell asleep. But in the early hours of the morning, as the dewy light of dawn was rolling in and the city was starting to come to life again, I startled awake. I bolted straight up. Literature, I mouthed, reciting as if from a script, has evolved over time through a process of borrowing, repetition, plagiarism. I was edging toward wakefulness. Every book, I whispered into the retreating night, is a distorted duplicate of another book, the ghost of a false original, which, like the seed of the universe and my dead ancestors, is nowhere and everywhere at once. I made a mental note to go to the library in search of proof before revealing my findings to Morales. Then I went back to sleep. I had earned myself a few good hours.