Call Me Zebra(107)

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.