Call Me Zebra

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

  I was drenched. The wind was blowing sheets of rain left and right. I pressed my back against the doorway and saw my reflection in the first-floor windows. I looked like a fugitive. A fugitive attached to a stubborn and volatile bird whose beak hung ajar. I let my mouth drop open, too. Steam came rising out of it. I took a long, hard look at myself standing there with Taüt. Flattened onto the surface of the window, the bird and I seemed to be looking back at ourselves in disbelief from behind the smoky veneer of an old photograph.

  Finally, the rain diminished and then ceased. A pale winter sun emerged, casting its mild light on the window. Taüt and I disappeared from view. The street started to fill up again. People moved about briskly, hoping to avoid the next downpour. I resumed my walk to the train station, sliding past lottery vendors, street sweepers, businessmen in slim black suits and pressed white shirts, middle-aged women in boxy colorful outfits that made them look like gifts waiting to be unwrapped; there were office clerks, cocktail waiters in double-breasted suits, teenagers wearing puffy down coats and shoes made of foam and rubber that looked good enough for walking on the moon, whose depressed, acne-pocked skin reminded me of the craters in the red recamier in Quim Monzó’s living room. These people had places to go, loved ones who would be angry, or worried, or disappointed if they failed to arrive. Next to them, I felt like a feral animal, untethered and unstitched. I felt the sweetness and the bitterness of my solitude in my mouth. As I watched them, it occurred to me that if I’m going to be condemned to death in life I should at least have a thinking chair. I wished I had stolen the red recamier, too.

  On the train, I thought of Ludo Bembo. Ever since he had walked out and left me soaking in the tub, as wrinkled as a prune, I had been planning to show up at his house unannounced. He had abandoned me in a moment of need, thickening my distrust of humanity; he had poured salt into my Hosseini-shaped wounds. In an hour, I would be at his door in Girona. I would be able to impose myself on his life just as he had imposed himself on mine by interfering with my notebook.

  I closed my eyes and assessed the sum of the thoughts I’d had in the weeks since Ludo had abandoned me. I remembered that for a few days I had considered my imposition on his home and hearth an artistic performance of what one of André Breton’s translators refers to as the love of the irrational and the irrational of love. I had consulted one of Breton’s books at random while pacing Quim Monzó’s corridor and his words had detached themselves from the page and hovered over the book in three dimensions, an occurrence that lent them a prophetic quality. Breton’s words had soon positioned themselves alongside my father’s: Love nothing except literature. Words taken from the First Hosseini Commandment.

  The two phrases, stationed in my mind as opponents and prepared to engage in conflict—one steering me toward Ludo and the other away—had provoked in me a serene sadness that was almost blissful, joyous. The more I considered my options, the more intoxicated and elated I became. It was in that state that I deduced the following: By showing up at Ludo’s house unannounced and—how shall I put it?—prepared to move in, I was going to teach him a lesson. What lesson? The following: If love is irrational and if one loves the irrational, then it follows that one—i.e., Ludo Bembo—loves love; and when one loves love, one risks turning into a steamroller, a psychic murderer of one’s lover—i.e., me, the object of Ludo’s love. By moving to Girona and imposing myself on Ludo, I was going to demonstrate the damaging effects of love, its fundamental intrusiveness, and would thus be engaging with Breton’s missive and, simultaneously and rather paradoxically, would also be proving the inherent wisdom of the First Hosseini Commandment. In doing so, I would be establishing a complex truce between the two sides of my brain. By using literature to expose the lie of love, its false pretense of unconditional generosity and kindness, I would be proving yet again that literature is the only magnanimous host in this piddling universe, and as if that were not enough, I would be doing so in Ludo’s presence, which I was loath to admit I had missed.

  I felt a few pangs of hunger. Before leaving Barcelona, I had counted the money Morales had given me. It was halfway gone. As a result, my food rations had become even more meager than before. To distract myself, I opened my eyes and looked at the Mobile Art Gallery. I took inventory: the typewriter, the telephone, the gas mask, the bronze statue of the bull, the miniature plastic reproductions of the toilets, the ghost globe. To my view, I hadn’t stolen any of Quim Monzó’s objects. I had merely reappropriated them. I had given them new life by turning them into art objects. Quim Monzó, Dadaist though he is, hadn’t taken things far enough. It was I, to whom the world had offered nothing, who, by creating a box in a valise in the Duchampian spirit, had taken the literary critic’s belongings to their logical conclusions.

  I had spent hours designing the interior of the suitcase. I had attached a retractable wooden cross to the inside of the lid and fastened The Hung Mallard to it. Now, when I opened the lid and extended the cross, the painting would unfold and hang over the rest of the objects with a great deal of somber ceremony; the Hosseini mantra—in this false world, we guard our lives with our deaths—hovered ominously over the objects in the gallery.

  I had built shelves for the miniature reproductions of the toilets, the bronze bull, the ghost globe. I arranged my portable library at the bottom of the valise. I squeezed in our rusty samovar and our rug. On top of the rug, I fitted the typewriter, telephone, and gas mask. Inside the valise, these last three objects, ordinarily pitiable due to the abuses inflicted upon them during the world wars, had suddenly taken on the dignified, grave look of art.

  The train carried on. We went past raked fields of wheat, vineyards, poles, towers. I sat there with the composure of a mannequin and reviewed the Mobile Art Gallery’s function with surgical precision. I had built two foldout tables that I could secure to each side of the chest. I pictured myself sitting at the desk with the typewriter, practicing the Irrational-Pragmatic methodology by transcribing five sentences, one for each member of the Hosseini lineage (including me), before moving over to the telephone on the opposite desk; there I would pick up the receiver and listen to the silence at the other end for a corresponding number of minutes. This silence, I decided, which was loud enough to hear, was the white noise left over after the devastation of exiles the world over, those of us whose fates have been bludgeoned by failed constitutional movements, world wars, dictatorships, coup d’états, and counterrevolutions. In other words, by coupling the Irrational-Pragmatic methodology with the Art of Transcription, I had caused a live Dadaist performance to be born. What would Quim Monzó have to say about that? I wondered smugly.

  One evening, while I was sitting on Quim Monzó’s red recamier in the smoky light of dusk, I had raised my grief antennas and received the following message from the Matrix of Literature: Since I have a more refined sense than most for the virtues of literature in relation to the total problem of life, it is my job to expose the macabre state of the world to its tired and tried posers through a series of performative transcriptions designed to put the uselessness of our suffering on display, to expose the only truth that exists: the truth of literature, an ugly truth disguised in the form of a beautiful lie. It is my job, I considered, to warn the world that we have not yet hit rock bottom; that we, members of the twenty-first century, the supposed moderns, are on the cusp of a profound and prolonged senselessness, a senselessness that will be even more senseless than its senseless predecessors. No one will be spared. There will be war everywhere, a sporadic, remorseless war that will appear and disappear at random, a war that will spread to the Four Corners of the World. At this thought, I rose from the red recamier and announced: “Squirmy little rodents, if one of us is ill-fated, sooner or later we will all be ill-fated. Bah! The war to end all wars is the biggest lie we have ever been fed.” I sat back down.

  After my epiphany, I affixed wheels and a handle to my chest-shaped suitcase. That way, I could easily transport the Mobile Art Gallery.
There would be no place out of reach. If I was going to sound out a warning, I would have to do it without bias. Its message was meant for everyone; it didn’t matter how remote a village a person lived in. They deserved to know the truth, and the Mobile Art Gallery was capable of delivering that truth anywhere, anytime. My notebook, though filled to the brim, was not enough. What about the illiterates and abecedarians of the world? Who would sound out the Hosseini alarm to them? I needed a visual representation of my notebook, a three-dimensional sculpture that would drag the ghosts of our past into the present and ask: Why is the present, which is history itself, not being addressed?

  The train was beginning to slow down. I looked out the window. We were pulling into the station in Girona. Soon, I would see Ludo again. I felt as though a hundred horses were galloping across the flat fields of my heart. The train came to a stop on the elevated tracks, and the doors pumped open. I got off and stepped into the powdery light on the platform. There I was: a ghost of my former self, a double alien in Girona, a stranger once again. Taüt pressed his talons into my shoulder. He held on tightly.

  I left the station. It was raining, and I stood for a while under the awning of a nearby store. There were blue buses idling in the parking lot, rings of smoke rising from their exhaust pipes only to be pushed back down to the ground by the dense, moist air. I turned around to look at the station’s facade. A giant round clock, flat and cream-colored with two thick, rigid arms, hovered at the top. With its fascist severity, the clock brought to mind Franco’s moronic face, as indifferent and withholding as the moon.

  I felt something move inside me. It was my father. He was making an appearance after a prolonged caesura. I felt renewed by his presence, emboldened. He had always liked Girona. I remembered him spitting with excitement: “Catalonia is Spain’s literary and political frontier, and its capital, Barcelona, is famous for attracting and producing thinkers, writers, artists. Barcelona is the Manchester of the Mediterranean, the City of Bombs, the Rose of Fire. But Girona . . . Girona is a hothouse and exporter of exiles!”

  It was true. Sandwiched between France and Barcelona, Girona had been the corridor through which exiles had come and gone from Catalonia for centuries.

  “Verily!” I said to my father with a bucolic glee, delighted to see him now, caressing his mustache. He rolled its ends around his finger and tickled me.

  “Moronic fascist! Moronic clock!” he exclaimed, gagging with laughter.

  Despite my father’s sporadic entries, I had observed a disturbing pattern: He had become more desultory with every passing day. He was aging in his death. He was decomposing. There were pieces of his nails and hairballs and flakes of dead skin on the floor of my void. He kicked them up every time he made an appearance, causing parts of his body to blow about my inner deserts as recklessly as tumbleweeds in the wind. He seemed to be running out of breath more quickly than before. Seeing him come undone, I felt as though I, too, could suddenly evaporate, dissolve into nothingness, become an echo of the past. My sick hand ached.

  “Father?” I inquired in vain. But there was no answer. He had submerged himself in my void once more.

  I began advancing through Girona without him, crestfallen and glum. The interlocking network of streets returned to me in segments, block by block. I didn’t have an umbrella, so I hugged the sides of buildings as I made my way. Taüt moved to my right shoulder, the side protected from the rain. By the time I had made my way to the Pont de Pedra—an arched stone bridge that hangs over the Onyar River and marks the center of the Old Quarter—the rain had ceased and a diaphanous glow filled the evening sky.

  I stood on the bridge for a moment and stared at the still, moss green waters of the river. The rain had kicked up soot and dirt. The water looked dreary, a metaphor of doom and gloom. A line of Dalí’s piped into my mind: I have never denied my fertile and elastic imagination the most rigorous means of investigation.

  I emitted a pained laugh. “The most rigorous means of investigation!” I repeated.

  My mind, I considered, is even more centerless and elastic than Dalí’s. My mind is as supple and resilient as the Matrix of Literature, which, by nature of being a working cartography of the literature of the void, is itself infinite. How am I supposed to carry around a mind like that? I thought. A mind that never stops stretching? A mind that contains all of literature?

  I looked straight ahead into the vanishing point of the landscape that stretched before me. There were more bridges farther up the river and colorful buildings crowding the embankment. Their windows resembled a row of eyes, and the iron railings of their terraces protruded like swollen mouths. They stared back at me dumbly, each one a different color—salmon, mother-of-pearl, mint, toast, olive, white, mustard, pistachio, red, muted orange.

  Rain clouds moved quickly overhead, and the glow of the sky diminished. A grainy evening light emerged. I navigated the darkling streets. I went deeper into the Old Quarter. I walked up stone-paved plazas, through cobbled alleyways. The distant hum of conversation flowed out from the doors and windows of dimly lit restaurants and spread across the deserted streets. Everyone was eating, drinking, carrying on with their lives. My reflection in the glass superimposed itself on their figures: I looked sordid, miserable, ragged. The skin around my eyes and mouth was tight, my lips were as thin as a razor. I was livid with envy. The people on the other side of the glass were living the good life, feasting on pleasure and bliss while Taüt and I—and the Mobile Art Gallery, corpse of my past turned future—walked along utterly invisible.

  I continued on. I passed recessed wooden doors affixed with rusty knockers shaped like gargoyles, barred windows, gas lanterns, and metal rings previously used to tie horses. I thought of our dead ass, of its ashes scattered across that no-man’s-land, and felt my envy calcify. I looked up. The sky was a long, solitary black strip, as narrow as the road. This was the kind of street, I thought, where the sun would go to die. It would plunge itself headfirst into this frigid narrow path. What did Ludo Bembo think, I wondered, as I dragged my body through that ghostly tunnel; that I was just going to lie down and die? Or lick my wounds out of view like a wild animal under a bush? That I was unable to speak, to resist, to react, to push back against the injustices the world and its subjects, including him, had assailed on me?

  It was true that I, as a middle-ranking member of the Pyramid of Exile, hadn’t had the willpower to shape my own life—a life that had been subjected to an infinite number of independent variables—let alone exert myself as a force upon the lives of others. But things change. The people who have been trapped in the ghetto of the pyramid eventually emerge to contaminate the world with their power and mirror back to this miserly universe its own terrible distortions. I am one of those people. An emergent. Combative. A literary terrorist. This dishonest globe, I thought, as I dragged all of my parts and their corresponding objects up the steep street, is inhospitable to writers and thinkers, not to mention members of the AAA. It has acted upon me with cold cruelty. I have been made an enemy. But I have endured the world with grace for long enough. I have been conditioned to become warlike by the perpetual war imposed upon my corner of the world, by the cultural assassination politely referred to as exile. Imposing myself on others in order to educate them is one of my duties. And Ludo Bembo, a literary amateur and underresolved member of the Pyramid of Exile, was in need of an education. He was a betrayer of exiles, an embarrassment to the legacy of the Bembos.

  By the time I arrived at Ludo’s doorstep, my ears were hot with fear and rage. As I knocked on his door, I thought to myself: What if he refuses my company? What if he invites me in? My thoughts spun and stretched. I knocked again, but no one came to the door. I was temporarily thwarted.

  I was forced to spend the night on a bench in the mud outside Ludo Bembo’s apartment. The bench was affixed to a dirt-covered overlook planted with a few young plane trees. It offered an astounding view of the foothills. The Pyrenees possessed an unnatural gleam. The ran
ge’s dense black form, composed of deep grooves and ridges and moss-encrusted rocks, was shrouded in a fine layer of mist—vapor that appeared to have been backlit. I sat there with Taüt and stared into the distance until the curtains of night were drawn. The sky turned purple before it turned black.

  “What is the nature of my predicament?” I asked Taüt. “I am from nowhere. Homeless, adrift, bewildered, crippled with endless estrangement.”

  Taüt nodded along in agreement with the calm patience of a man who has been locked up his whole life. He was weary from traveling, and his exhaustion had transformed him into a polite and cooperative being.

  “What does that make me?” I asked.

  He shrugged his wings as if to say, How should I know?

  Just then, I heard a breathless voice yell: Like the clear-eyed Edward Said, you are a specular border intellectual! It was my father’s muffled voice coming from deep inside my void. I barely recognized him.

  I swooned over Said’s name; it warmed my inky blood. It was true. As usual, my father’s assessments were spot-on. Though mutilated by my perpetual exile, I, Zebra, was at home in my homelessness. I refused to blend the unreconciled veins of nationhood running through my body. I refused to produce a singular whole self, free of gaps and fissures, a being that poses less of a problem to the rest of the world. Instead, I, Dame of the Void, will continue to inhabit a liminal space between worlds, a position that affords me a vantage point from which to envision new formations of thoughts, to live beyond the frontiers of ordinary experience.