Call Me Zebra(101)

“It’s going to come down on your head,” Ludo protested.

“Let it,” I said.

The wind was howling and wheezing; it was dragging everything down. I crouched on the ground.

“I’ll relive that, too,” I said.

“Relive what?” he asked. His voice was breaking. Petita was pacing anxiously. Taüt let out a shrill scream.

“My mother’s death!” I declared.

Ludo’s eyes widened in horror.

Rain started pouring down. It was the hardest rain we had seen that year. I was standing at the epicenter of my life. I could see toxic fumes radiating outward. The drops were the size of my hands. We were drenched within seconds. Torrential cascades of water were pouring down the mountain. I started looking under the rocks for food. What was the first thing my mother would have laid her eyes on when she walked into that house of ruin? The last thing before she died? Did she swallow the dirt of the world? I grabbed a chunk of mud and ate it.

“You are a lunatic,” Ludo said. “You are acting like a savage.”

I wiped my mouth. I swallowed the clumps of wet dirt.

“I have been made an enemy,” I said. “I have endured the world with grace for long enough.”

Then I remembered my mother leaning over me, whispering into my ear: Somewhere, deep inside you, hidden by all sorts of fears and worries and petty little thoughts, is a clean pure being made of radiant colors.

So I had remembered her words all along. I recognized the quote. It was by Shirley Jackson. My mother, too, had embedded sentences into my body; the words of literature, like my mother and father, were everywhere and nowhere at once. She had appeared to me in the most ordinary way. This, I decided, implied that she had been there all along and that dead or alive the minds of the sensitive beings of the world were slogging through the cosmos even if I could not perceive them with my eyes.



Hours later, the storm subsided. Ludo, Taüt, Petita, and I made it down the mountain. We had no idea where the other pilgrims were. We stood in front of Saint Michel de Cuxa, dumbfounded, stunned by the strange unfolding of the day. The abbey’s cloister and crypt were stained by the rain. I again remembered standing with my back to the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park. Behind me were the Cuxa, the Bonnefont, the Saint-Guilhem, the Trie. Should I leap into my death? I wondered. My memories were recycling themselves. Then all my thoughts were interrupted by the sound of Ludo’s scream.

“My car!” he exclaimed. “Where is my car?”

Rainwater was dripping off the trees, off the red-tile roofs of the abbey, off the stubborn granite of the mountain. We were standing knee-deep in the muddied waters of the earth. We trod through the waters until we found Ludo’s car. It had slid off the road. It was sinking in the river. We watched the hood disappear.

“No!” Ludo cried. “No!” He kicked the ground, then he stood there with his hands on his head, speechless.

I watched that car sink. We had left the miniature museum—my father’s casket—in the trunk. It was too awkward to carry up the steep mountain. It drowned with everything else. It disappeared. I felt a weight lift from my shoulders. I felt my life dissolve, as though the person who had set off on the Grand Tour of Exile no longer existed. I am from nowhere, I thought, as that car sank into the river; I was born in the nothingness that contains everything within it. I petted Taüt gently on the head. That, I said to my dead mother in the depths of my heart, is my only essence.





THE LIQUID CONTINENT

The Story of How I Traveled Across the Sea of Sunken Hopes





Ludo was wearing a tweed jacket over his red wool cardigan even though it was summer, and he had a gray cashmere scarf tied around his neck. He was leaving but not before giving me one last admonishing look. He planted his umbrella into the floor of the landing and leaned into it, that umbrella he had begun to carry with him everywhere, using it to point at things as if it were an extension of his arm. His eyes betrayed no remorse. Anger, maybe. And pity. But remorse: none at all.

“At last,” he said with labored breath. “Finally.”

He stood in the shadowy landing, pipe tucked neatly into his breast pocket, copper curls perfectly conditioned. The landing was dark and dusty, full of residue from times past. The walls were perpetually damp; the Mediterranean humidity had gotten into the building’s bones. In that wet, ashen bleakness, Ludo lay bare his reasons for leaving: He was departing because of my self-prescribed cure for the long dark history of my past: my literary pilgrimages into the void of exile.

When I pressed him for more information, Ludo set his leather suitcase, which matched his shoes, squarely by his feet. Kindly but with a certain formal distance, he said, “Look, the way you choose to cope with your past is unbearable to me. The fact is there are toxic side effects to your writing behavior, effects I can’t stand.”

I looked at him, astonished. He proceeded, blasted past my bewilderment, to deliver the bullets one by one.

“ONE,” he let out, as stern as a drill sergeant. “Sudden disappearances.”

I told him I knew perfectly well where I was at all times.

“TWO,” he declared. There was no stopping him. “Pathological indifference toward the living. THREE. The worst transgression of all—”

“I hardly agree,” I said, somewhat helplessly.