Call Me Zebra(12)

I read: Isolation is a political tool.

Then: I have left behind all that I know, so I go into the room of my death.

And finally: I travelled all over the world, looking for trouble.

As I closed the book, I thought to myself, these three prophecies will come to mean something very soon.



Morales didn’t have a dearth of official students. I often bumped into a particularly banal pair of them on my way to his office. Alice and Tomaso were a feckless duo with broad, plain foreheads. They wore overalls and thick old-man glasses (it was unclear to me why they dressed alike), and they called themselves the New Poets. They walked around fluffing their feathers and boasting about having been admitted to the master of fine arts in poetry program. A couple of amateurs. While they struggled to compose a single verse a month, I read and wrote until my fingers were bruised.

I wanted nothing to do with them, but they were clingy, wide-eyed, curious types with spongy cheeks and large ears; the kind of undiscerning, overprivileged humans who ask inane questions and then listen to the answers with their mouths ajar.

That afternoon, I was particularly loath to talk to them. My hand was burning from holding Acker’s book. I wanted to get through my meeting with Morales as quickly as possible so I could return to my apartment, where my father would likely be reclining on his mattress, and read the book cover to cover.

The New Poets beckoned as we crossed paths in the hallway. “A minute of small talk?”

Small talk! Their diction was as terrible as their breath. I had had it with them. I told them that I would never use the term small talk, let alone engage in it as an activity. I considered speaking to be a grand waste of time unless its purpose was to get the big unsaid truths out in the open. I declared: “I have no time for small talk! While you two expose yourselves to the detrimental effects of a formal education—reduced self-knowledge, submission to authority, covert institutional indoctrination in linear time—I am employing unorthodox methods of learning in order to facilitate grand associative leaps, heightened cognition, and transcendental intellectualism, because with my father’s death fast approaching”—I bore into them with my eyes—“it is my duty, as the last remaining member of the Autodidacts, Anarchists, and Atheists, to make a major philosophical intervention aimed at correcting the skewed and pitifully narrow perception of the world’s pseudo intellectuals and heretics, your erroneous brethren!” The words came out with such ease, with such deliberate organization, that I realized they had been sitting on the tip of my tongue awaiting their turn to manifest.

The New Poets stood with their backs against the wall, looking mystified and confused. They gawked at me as if I were an exotic animal they were seeing for the first time, a wildly frustrated creature pacing inside a cage. I could see saliva pooling in their open mouths. Throughout my monologue—let’s call it what it was, an intervention—they were nodding at me with so much fervor I thought their heads had come loose. When they finally got it together, they asked me if I wanted to go eat a taco with them.

“A taco?” I asked. There was smoke coming out of my ears.

“A taco!” they implored in unison, as if they were twins.

There was no use in repeating myself. That pair wouldn’t be able to see themselves clearly if I held a mirror up to their tongues.

“I don’t eat tacos,” I said, and they dropped the subject.

?????????????

The events of that drafty day marked a turning point in my thinking. The intervention I had spontaneously offered to the New Poets, the way those words had glided out of my mouth, grand associative leaps, heightened cognition, transcendental intellectualism, helped me to realize that I was on the cusp of a revelation. By funneling extreme amounts of literature into my mind, I had engineered it to make a Grand Leap in Consciousness. All that was left to do was to push things over the edge, the way our exodus, in combination with my mother’s untimely death, had shoved my father and me over the threshold of sense.

I did this by reading even more intensely than before, with a passion bordering on madness—madness contained, the irrational in the palm of my hand—and with what I had identified through my studies as the Paranoiac-Critical approach of Dalí; a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge that allowed me to carve ever more delirious associative pathways within and among texts and therefore to expedite the plan I had been hatching all along: a vast constellation of literary networks I could inhabit during the period of grief that awaited me due to the rapid decline of my father’s health. In other words, due to his imminent death.

The night of my encounter with the New Poets, while my father was fast asleep, snoring through his mustache, I walked in concentric circles honing my plan. I said out loud to no one, “In contradistinction to the New Poets—literary attachés to the master of fine arts in poetry, a pair of disengaged numbskulls who lazily read with their eyes—I, outsider and literary terrorist in training, read not with my eyes but with my consciousness, scanning the stratified layers embedded in each text like an archaeologist in an excavation site!”

The next morning, I found my father in a fit. He was in a horrifyingly bad mood. It was obvious why. We both could see that my plan to compose a manifesto and his approaching death—his disintegration and eventual reabsorption into the mind of the universe—were inversely related. He pushed his glass of tea over the edge of the dining table with the end of his cane. It shattered, and I had to clean up after him. I looked around. The apartment was in a terrible state: dirty, disorderly, its corners patched with cobwebs that matched my father’s white-haired armpits. “This,” I said somberly, “is a Room of Broken Heirlooms.” At that, he fixed his eyes on me. His gaze was loaded with helplessness and rage. I watched him try to take in the circumstances of our lives, but he couldn’t. A barrier had gone up, and he was stuck on the other side of it looking as lost and bewildered as I had felt as a child. I nearly wept as I looked back at him. I turned away to conceal my pain.