Call Me Zebra(15)

Before he could form his words, I said, bitterly, “Don’t ask me. I plead the Fifth!”

A terrible silence fell.

I wanted to push him over. I added, “Keep on bombing Iraq and invading Afghanistan, strangling the region, and there will be more of us here!”

His flat face grew red. It looked like a plate that had been rubbed with the blood of a rare steak.

“Get a grip!” he ordered.

I wasn’t sure if he was talking to himself or me.

“A grip?” I echoed. Inwardly, I thought that, like my mother, my father will soon be swallowed up by the earth; there are no ledges in the abyss of grief.

I walked over to my father and placed my hand against his forehead. His body was growing colder by the minute. I combed his mustache with my fingers. I pressed my hand against his cheek. Again, I felt dizzy, as if someone were draining my blood. My legs grew weak.

The other two police officers, who had been mute until then, came over. The woman had brown hair and thick, straight eyebrows that sat over her round eyes like dashes. Her partner, a short, bald, squat man with glasses and arms as long as his legs, walked around with hunched shoulders, emanating a kind of resigned kindness. He looked like a man who had taken a few beatings in the neck.

“Do you have a cemetery plot?” he asked, his voice gentle and reserved. “Have you called the morgue?”

“Yes and yes,” I lied, steadying myself against my father’s body. Once I had regained my strength, I said, “Your flat-faced partner over here is looking at me with such sadistic appetite, you’d think I was a pig about to be butchered.”

He apologized on his partner’s behalf.

“We’ll get out of your way,” he said.

The female officer was so wide that she looked like she had swallowed a helium balloon. She floated across the room and took the other two with her.

I closed the door behind them. I was alone with my father. I could finally breathe. My mind freshly oxygenated, I did what I had to do. I walked in a circle and wept through the night, shuddering and incredulous. Even so, I read to him until the crack of dawn. When I came across his favorite verses, I managed to stay calm long enough to kneel and whisper them in his ear. By morning, my face was dirty, streaked with tears. Tracks of salt sliced my cheeks in half. I caught my reflection in the window. My hair was a tangled mess. I had never seen anything so ugly. I thought to myself, I am one of the wretched of this pungent, futile earth. Far off in the distance, the half-moon, which had risen through the night, faded; it turned a translucent white. The lights that had come on in a sequence along the empty road, a necklace of pearls that illuminated the ghostly street through the night, died down. Instantly, my image vanished from the window’s reflective surface.

I went to the bathroom and washed my face, then headed out to the neighborhood café, which had free Wi-Fi, and searched eBay for a cheap cemetery plot. There was a man in Westchester County selling a grave his father had purchased before moving away; he had left the plot behind. His son, who said his name was Kevin, had taken several photographs. The grass was overgrown. The stones in the adjacent lots were falling over. There were a few fake flowers scattered across the lawn, blown here and there by the wind. In one of the photos, Kevin, wearing a white polo shirt and slacks with a cell phone clipped onto his belt, was lying down on the site of what would have been his father’s future tomb with his arms on his chest. He looked as good as dead. I told him my father was much thinner than he was; in fact, he was emaciated, but judging from Kevin’s graveyard portrait, about the same length. Kevin confirmed that it was the perfect size for an adult male, and I bought the plot then and there.

The next day, I took my dead father for a ride on the Metro-North in our chest-shaped suitcase. It took hours to fold his knees into his chest so he would fit. But I persevered. It was how he would have wanted it: transported in the memorabilia of the past.

He weighed next to nothing. Even so, we both arrived at the funeral home a few pounds thinner.

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

I sat in the funeral home for hours, waiting. Eventually, the man who prepared my father’s body for burial and wrapped him in a white sheet—a reserved, thin man with polished cheeks—came out to offer his condolences. He disappeared through a door and then reappeared a moment later and offered me a glass of water. It was so quiet, I could have heard a pin drop. The man stood there, hovering over me while I drank the water. I wanted him to go away, but he continued to stand there in silence. He seemed to expect me to say something, to explain the circumstances of my father’s knotted body. I began to lay bare the various nodes of my ill-fated life. I found myself saying that I intended to reverse our exile—“Our forced retreat from the past,” I said with emphasis—by retracing our jerky, incoherent journey across the Mediterranean, street by street, in a backward manner. As soon as I heard myself say the words, I realized I had been nurturing the idea since the start of my father’s decline, the onset of his blindness.

It became clear to me then and there that my father’s missive to record the uselessness of our suffering would become, over the course of the following months, an unstoppable impulse. An impulse that would require everything of me. I, alone in the world and without family, am a person of little consequence. But, I thought inwardly, let the story of the Hosseinis, which is also my story, the story I inherited and through which I must slog, be a resounding alarm to the rest of humanity, the 99.9 percent of anti-intellectual rodents who scamper about this earth indifferent to the pain of others. I’m not talking about a mild heartache. No. I’m talking about the kind of pain that eviscerates, the kind that levels your life, that leaves you barely holding on. I reached for my notebook. “This notebook is my only hope,” I told the gentleman who had prepared my father’s body. “Everything rests on it. I am willing to extend my life, which is itself a death, in order to put these words in the record.”