Call Me Zebra(14)

I grabbed the notebook and went back into the kitchen. I leaned against the sink. I opened the tap. I watched the water run down the drain. I looked out the window. The New World. There it was, shamelessly conducting its business while halfway around the globe whole towns, cities, and villages were being razed to the ground. Then I thought, what does that word—new—mean anyway? I had never seen anything new in my life. All I had seen was the anxiety of people wanting to say something new. The New Poets! The New World! I examined the word. I filled a glass and took a drink of water. I turned off the tap. “New!” I turned the word over on my tongue. “New!” I laughed. I laughed with repulsion, with hatred. The sky changed colors. Yellow to ochre to rust. I don’t know how much time went by. Soon it was evening. In the street, the neon lights of the shops came on. Their green glare glided across the walls. I felt as if I were standing at the bottom of the sea. For a brief second, I remembered the wrinkled surface of the Mediterranean, how it shone like treated leather in the muted light of dusk. Fragments of the past were already pushing their way up to the surface in spontaneous fits and bursts. The Mediterranean, that green sea, that Sea of Sunken Hopes, appeared like a photograph, a surface without depth. I laughed. I laughed until I had no idea what I was laughing at. I laughed until there were tears coming out of my eyes and ears. Brackish waters rose through the craggy walls of my void. It stung so hard, I thought my organs had been set on fire. Then I called 911.



The police and paramedics came and went. I told them they were not allowed to move my father from the La-Z-Boy because I, his only surviving family member, was in the middle of a funereal ritual.

The paramedics leaned over his pale body. They tried to resuscitate him despite the obvious signs of death. I wanted to speak out, to stop them from touching him, but my voice had drowned.

Finally, I murmured, “He is not returning. He has gone back to the beginning, to the space before his birth. His mind is in the process of being reabsorbed into the mind of the universe.”

They hardly heard me. They pumped his chest. They shocked it. They gave him mouth-to-mouth. Nothing. Finally, they gave up and pronounced his time of death, then proceeded to walk around, investigating the scene with sinister grins, clearly hoping to uncover a crime.

“Look all you want,” I said, exasperated, my voice thin. “My father died when it was time for him to die.”

They pretended not to hear me. I tried to raise my voice a notch, but a thinner voice emerged, a babble incomprehensible even to me. I was standing there watching myself dissolve. I couldn’t tell where I ended, where the room began.

Eventually, one of the police officers came up to me. He was tall and imposing, and had a flat face. He looked like he had been attacked with a pan. There were three of them altogether. Two men and one woman.

“What do you do?” the flat-faced officer asked, and my mother’s face swam up the back channels of my mind. I pushed it away.

I heard myself say, rather matter-of-factly, “I am composing a manifesto.”

His face distended, as if someone had gone over it with a roller. Thoughts were galloping around my mind, colliding into one another. I took a step back and corrected myself. I told him it was more complicated than that.

“What do you mean?”

I leaned against the bookshelf near my dead father. I drew several deep breaths. Then, as coolly as I could, I explained to the officer that I was preparing my mind to produce a manifesto and that once I had sufficiently primed my mind with literature the manifesto would come to me as if it were my second voice. I would just have to transcribe that voice into my notebook as faithfully as possible. I pointed at my notebook, which was on the table. I picked it up and sniffed its pages. They smelled musty, old. I looked over at my father’s face. He looked thinner than he had been an hour before. He was already shrinking, shedding parts of himself, beginning to disappear.

I looked at the officer again. He had brandished a pen and a notepad from his pocket, and was jotting a few things down. I saw him carve a question mark into the paper. He was making such a tight fist with his hand that the ball of his pen nearly tore through the sheet.

“Are you a graduate student?” he asked, looking up at me. His eyes were narrow and blue, barely a contrast against his veiny white skin.

“Exactly,” I lied, letting myself off the hook, because my mother’s face had returned to occupy its proper place next to my father’s, and with my parents’ dead faces illuminated by the feeble light of my mind, I felt I was going to faint.

Before the policemen and the paramedics had arrived, I’d extended the La-Z-Boy by pulling on the lever and managed to straighten and then bend my father’s limbs. I wanted to avoid the worst of rigor mortis. After that, I pulled all of Nietzsche’s books off the shelves and laid them on the floor in a circle around my dead father. The police officers were examining those old tomes now. I told them that I planned to walk around my father’s body all night, picking the books up one by one and reading several passages from each book out loud. He had read to me through the deepest recesses of our lives. Now it was my turn to read to him, to siphon literature into the hollow left over by his absence.

I said to myself, “Walking is the best medicine!”

The policeman with the flat face looked at me with the suspicious gaze of a passport controller. He looked like a man whose head is full of questions.