Call Me Zebra

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

  “Ah, Ludo,” I would say. “What a tragedy. What a drama. Once again, the world as we know it is coming to an end. Is this what it means to be human?”

  Ludo would stagger toward me in the dark. Without saying a word, he would reach out and grab my hand; he would pull me into his embrace, and we would cry together. That night, we would lie motionless on his bed, our eyes open in the dark, the colossal weight of the tragedy of our young century hovering over us, the television still on in the living room, the patter of his father rising from his bed, reaching for his walker, rolling his way to the bathroom, remorseless words floating up from the set, congealing in the air, taking on enormous proportions: “suicide bombings,” “air raids,” “mass death,” “dearth of food, of water, of justice,” “severed limbs of children,” “buildings covered in soot.”

  After a prolonged silence, Ludo would utter into the air: “We need the rest of our lives to untangle the toxic knots of our childhoods.”

  I saw then that he understood why I had eaten the mud. We were on the cusp of recognition. Soon, half the world would be rising up in revolt. Half the world would be eating dirt. I closed my eyes. I saw blurry shadows, eddies, trenches, craggy mountains, the endless black waters of the seas and oceans. I raised my hand and waved it in the air.

  “War is a contagious affair. Sooner or later this violence will spill over. We will all be drawn into it. This is the beginning of another end,” I would say. “We are all poor. We are all starved. We are all persecuted.”

  “Yes,” Ludo would say. “If one of us is persecuted, we all are.” He would roll over and climb on top of me. His cheeks would be wet with tears. We would make love. Then, panting, weary, exhausted, I imagined that he would say: “I don’t know what it means to be human. I thought I knew, but that, too, has been undone along with everything else.”

  We had been warned the sea was high. A storm was brewing. I sat in a windowless cabin. The ship pitched precariously in the inky waters. I could hear rain falling. A heavy, warm rain. It was the last storm of the year. I could hear the waves rising up to scrape the underbelly of the damp sky. Restless bodies moved impatiently outside my cabin door. Dante’s voice came at my side: For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

  “Lost,” I mumbled into the vaporous air. The Grand Tour of Exile had come to an abrupt end. No, not an abrupt end. Like the many faces of my father, the Grand Tour of Exile had reproduced itself. It had acquired a second and third and fourth face; it had metamorphosed, acquired digressions. A new phase of exile awaited me in Florence. A new living death in that rational city with its open piazzas, its Haussmann-inspired boulevards, its bloody history, the Arno that floods its ochre banks every hundred years. In my mind’s eye, I saw the image of a bull plowing the earth with its horns, exhuming the dead. I said quietly to myself: “I am a patient born into an inhospitable world, an outsider, a spectator, a painmonger, a nonmember.” Words spooled through my mind. An alien, a fugitive, a castaway, a boat person.

  Taüt nervously paced my shoulders. The sea was threatening to swallow us whole, as if enough people hadn’t already drowned in its brackish waters. The bird intermittently hooked his beak to my ear. I felt my stomach float up into my throat. I belched. I emptied myself out. Then I sniffed the acerbic, briny air.

  It had been hours. We had likely passed Montpellier, Marseille, Cannes. The ship rocked and rolled in the violent waters. I nursed Taüt. I held steady through the night. I fell asleep a few times. I dreamt Ludo and I were raking the depths of the sea, gathering the bodies of the dead, resurfacing with them one by one. I was holding my notebook in one hand and scraping the seabed with the other. We walked in silence until we came across a sunken warplane. The rusted fuselage was covered with algae, barnacles, starfish, shrimp. Schools of tropical fish were moving through it. Ludo kept a certain distance from me as we examined the wreckage. He seemed rather suspicious of my presence. I climbed onto the blunted nose of the plane. I opened my notebook; it had acquired a prophetic aura underwater. In an oratorical tone, I declared: “The process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization. Arendt on Benjamin through Shakespeare.”

  Ludo considered my words. He had a pensive expression on his face. He dragged his nimble hands across the tendrils of algae. Those hands had tried to nourish me. I climbed back down and stood on the seabed next to him. We were moving with such grace underwater. He stared at me in silence for a long time. He opened and closed his mouth in rapid succession. When he finally spoke, his words were rich and strange.

  “Crystallization,” he declared, “is that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events. From the commentary on your notebook,” he admitted.

  “Ah, Stendhal,” I muttered forgivingly, content that our notebooks had multiplied and merged. “Sentimental weasel, doppelgänger to Marie-Henri Beyle.”

  A monkfish swam by. I stared at its huge mouth, its depressed head, its inwardly inclined fangs. It had been camouflaging itself in the sand.

  “Lophius piscatorius,” Ludo said. Then he asked: “Where should we eat this evening?” We were getting along swimmingly.

  I laughed, and replied: “Lophius piscatorius swims through the liquid continent, the great green, the inner sea, the corrupting sea, the bitter sea, but, most important, the Sea of Sunken Hopes, the sea of refugees.”

  My words cut the jovial mood. Ludo’s eyes swept through the waters. He took a few steps back. He regarded me anxiously. He was preparing to ask the most conclusive question of all. “More important, when will you say the great and coherent yes to life?”

  A deep silence ensued. In that chasm, I heard Nietzsche: A soul that knows it is loved but does not itself love betrays its sediment: what is at the bottom comes up.

  Ludo, having posed his question, leaned against the engine of the plane. A school of pink fish swam through the gaps between the blades. His blond curls were floating in the saline water. He looked at me in that special way of his, with a petulant pout; he was sulking again.

  “Ludo,” I protested. “We have to keep walking. We have to keep raking the bed of this inner sea.” But he refused to move.

  “Then why not bring it all to an end?” he asked reluctantly. “Why this obstinate perseverance to live a life you are not committed to?”

  The monkfish swam over the wings of the plane. I watched it pump the water out of its gills and carve its way through the water in sections. We can only conquer life a little at a time, I considered. There will always be a remainder out of reach. We have to make our peace with that. Would I make my peace? Would I conquer? I wanted to dig my head in the sand.

  Suddenly, as I looked at Ludo, I realized he was upset with himself for loving someone who hadn’t yet managed to land on earth. To cheer him up, I swam over and perched on the nose of the plane. I said: “Ludovico Bembo, I came down to this earth through the same canal as everyone else: my mother’s vagina. In that regard, I am like everyone else. But in other respects, I am unique. I arrived physically, but there was a part of me that lingered behind. My descent was incomplete. This incompleteness, this gap, was widened by the cruel facts of my life, its elusive calamity, the cultural assassination of my ancestors, the psychological massacre of exile, the physical and transcendental homelessness that has marked my life. But don’t worry, I am an irregular genius who is in the process of synchronizing her multiple minds in order to acquire the privilege to rise in the morning and say a great and coherent yes to life.”

  I expected him to come back with a rebuttal, but he just tossed his head back and laughed. We walked side by side through the seabed, raking the void.

  I woke up hours later sweating, panting, out of breath. What did I see when I opened my eyes? The bloated waterfowl of Lake Urmia. The craggy flanks of Mount Sahand. The date palms of the Caspian. Will I ever return home? I turned that word—home—around in my mouth. It tasted like dust, ash, decomposed corpses, and simultaneously, like fresh
mulberries, cherries ripened in the sun, rose water, pulverized saffron, dates.

  There was a swell. The ship rose, then leveled again. A body moving through the corridor slammed into the wall and then began to vomit. Everyone was emptying their stomachs. The stench of death was everywhere. It was wafting up through the porous waters of the sea. I reached for my notebook. Had I been waiting in vain for my life to become legible in it? I flipped through it, browsed sentence after sentence. Cut them and a viscous fluid will pour, I heard.

  I fell asleep again. In my dream, I walked up the narrow spiraling staircase of the double-helix dome of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. It was night. There was no one else there. The baked red bricks of the dome looked like they had been soaked in blood. There was something organic, anatomical, about that labyrinthine staircase. I felt as though I were walking the pathway of my converged brains, as if all my selves had overlapped into this radiant and strange structure. At the top of the staircase, I climbed through a small opening and stood on the terrace overlooking Florence that wraps around the dome like a belt. In the quiet air of the night, I had the sense that the baked stones of the city were breathing, that the city was alive with all its deaths, that everything it has ever been, everything it will ever be, was always already here.

  I opened my notebook one last time. I read: My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati, that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.

  I stood there attempting to cultivate undying love for everything that had happened to me: my mother’s untimely death, my father’s near blindness and ultimate death, my subsequent entanglement with Ludo. But I came up short.

  As soon as I thought of him, Ludo manifested. He was standing next to me, staring out at the city of his childhood. He had demolished the obstinate walls of his character. We had been transformed by our own narrative.

  “What is wrong with us?” he asked tenderly.

  I told him that I didn’t know, that I couldn’t be certain. I told him the only thing I knew was that I had tried to keep my love for him locked down, because if I projected it onto him, invited him into love’s sweet glow, I knew that he, too, would inevitably disappear. That is my belief, I told him, distorted and delusional, but so far unchallenged by the strange and staggering events of my ill-fated life.

  There was a knock on my door. I woke up. The sea had calmed. The ship was sailing smoothly. There was a vague buzzing in the margins of the universe. It was the sound of the residue of the dead. It was beautiful. I lay there listening to its music. I didn’t bother to open the door.

  At midday, I walked out onto the deck with Taüt. He was happy to get some air. He spread his wings. He stretched his talons. He fanned his crest. I sucked on that rock. There were whole families sitting on the orange plastic chairs fixed into the deck. The sea was clear. The sun was hanging low. The waters parted for our ship to pass. In the distance, the sky looked as if it could catch on fire at any moment; the horizon was tinged with sparkling embers. I turned around and looked at the faces of the other passengers. They seemed so safe, as if they had been ensured against any and all potential losses, their lives saccharine, punctuated by beach vacations, lobster bisque, freshly folded laundry, pool parties, champagne toasts. Everything regulated, balanced, even pain and suffering delivered in measured blows designed never to overwhelm the recipient whose emotional life was protected by vast and sturdy guardrails.

  I turned back to the sea. I imagined swimming in those open waters with Ludo, hundreds of feet from the shore. A golden light fell across the water. The eddies sparkled. The water foamed up against the sides of the ship. I stood there under the broad dome of the midday sky, and as seagulls flew through it and the rugged coast of Italy came into view, I thought to myself, reality is either liquid, or it consists of nothing at all. One moment we are here, and the next we are elsewhere and everything we thought we knew dissolves. Memories we have eschewed are awakened. They rise and beckon us to realign our multiple selves again and again. Even if I turn out to be a lone voice in the dark night, I thought inwardly, I will not lose conviction. I am unafraid to admit that the world we live in is violent, obtuse; that a gulf, once opened, is not easily sealed; that one does not drink from the waters of death and go on living disaffected, untouched. And what, I wondered, does it mean to love in the midst of such shifting shores? Love, I thought, a provisional remedy to decrease our suffering, which will be infinite and self-perpetuating as long as we flock back to this meager universe. Love, like death and literature and liberty, is everywhere and nowhere at once. It is nothingness itself—only I hadn’t seen it as such before, and even if I had, how would I have known to recognize it or welcome it when the ill-fated are only ever given the most infertile fields to plant our lot in? I sucked on my rock some more. I had been sucking on it intermittently since I had found it. It had grown smooth. I removed it from my mouth and cast it into the great green sea, into the Sea of Sunken Hopes, thinking to myself, it’s just a word. And yet, I considered, it is the greatest key and the greatest riddle.

  We were approaching land. The banks of Italy were brilliant ochre. I scanned the black water of the coves, the white sand, the crescent-shaped beaches. On the coast, Genoa—sooty, industrial, sinister, hemmed in by mountains—seemed perfectly lovable. Those mountains were the bones of the sea, the fangs of the earth. I stood there staring at the land. I thought of the Matrix of Literature. I thought of all the black holes and crevices. I thought of the Pyramid of Exile. I thought of my sick hand. I thought of the mind of the universe. I heard the voices of the writers of the void speak to me in a calm susurrus. The air, I thought, remembering, is full of noises.

  About the Author

  Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the author of the novel Fra Keeler and an assistant professor in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Notre Dame. She is the winner of a 2015 Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree, and the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, as well as residency fellowships from MacDowell and Ledig House. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Guernica, Granta, Bomb, and elsewhere. She has lived in New York, Los Angeles, Tehran, Dubai, Valencia, and Barcelona, and currently splits her time between South Bend, Indiana, and Florence, Italy.

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