Call Me Zebra(17)

I turned the word over on my tongue; I muttered it to myself. I examined it. Zebra: an animal striped black-and-white like a prisoner of war; an animal that rejects all binaries, that represents ink on paper. A martyr of thought. That was it. I had arrived at my new name. To the funeral director’s astonishment, I declared out loud, “Call me Zebra!”

The funeral director leaned his polished face over to look behind the trees, his eyes searching for a zebra grazing in the grass. But unbeknownst to him, I was the zebra; the zebra was I. I gave him a broad, happy smile. He shrank, like any man would, because that smile was the smile of a conqueror.

That night, after returning the empty suitcase to my studio, I set out again despite feeling exhausted. I went out on a peripatetic walk in honor of my father. I walked around New York for hours, thinking of him, of the long lineage of autodidacts I had descended from, of the relentless machinery of terror that is history, of its wheels that never stop turning. I thought of the dim light cast by my perpetual exile, of the way we had been gored by history, and felt sadness set in, and a mild sense of vertigo. I sat down on a bench. I comforted myself with the thought that all conquerors are secretly melancholy. For a moment, I felt my sadness lift. In that brief reprieve, my new name—Zebra—echoed in my ears. Then the sediment of grief settled again in the craggy pits of my void. A man walked by with his dog. A woman dragged a suitcase on wheels past me. The sky was growing steadily darker. After a while, I got up. I stopped at a deli and bought a scalding cup of black tea. The Pakistani man at the cash register counted out the money I handed him with robotic movements. I examined the mechanical aspect of his gestures. He, too, seemed divorced from his environment, but while I was scrutinizing the gap between myself and the world to the point of dizziness, he was simply detached. I left, drank my tea, walked. Hours later, run-down, drained, I got on the subway.

Underground, the air was stale and damp. The train pulled into the station, and I got on. It was a busy time of night. At every station, the doors pumped open and more people piled in. A few of them looked at me with an odious glare, and when they eventually got up to leave, I felt the residue of their hostility resonating through the orange color of their abandoned seats. I looked around. There were women with eyeliner running down their tired faces; men in suits with hunched shoulders, their shoes freshly shined; families carrying bags of fruits and vegetables; Orthodox men in fur hats hiding their faces behind newspapers. I felt like I was being squashed between the bodies of the other commuters. I couldn’t breathe. I tried to suck in air. The back of my throat was burning. For a second, I had the distinct sensation that the train was headed to a mass grave, that the whole city was a graveyard full of discharged energy and waste. Then the subway doors pumped open, and still more people piled in. When my stop was finally announced, I got up, and pushed past the crowd of bodies. I climbed the urine-and-grease-stained stairs and walked north toward our building.

Inside the apartment, I struck the odious bulb that burned in the center of the room. The bulb didn’t shatter; it swayed from side to side like a pendulum until it lost momentum and went still. A cacophony of emotions cycled through me: rage, grief, numbness, amazement, shock, guilt. Every time I heard a noise, I asked: “Who’s there?” But there was no one. My father was gone. Exhausted and at the edge of despair, I draped myself over the La-Z-Boy. Hours later I was possessed by a strange euphoria. I got up and began walking through the apartment in ever-expanding concentric circles. I thought long and hard. I consolidated my thoughts from the funeral. The circle—prehistoric, divine, natural god of geometry, responsible for the ever-increasing speed of human travel. According to the Greeks, the smoothest, most perfect of forms. Innate. Embedded in the earth, manifest like death in the body. I dragged my hand against the wall of the Room of Broken Heirlooms, across the boundary of the circle. What path leads to freedom? I asked. Any vein in your body, I answered, thinking of the great philosophers of the past. I felt relieved for my father. As it turned out, death was the only liberty there was. I wanted to taste that liberty. I wanted to be wrapped, like my parents, in the silky folds of death.

But as the sun was coming up, I was struck by another bolt of lightning. A Hosseini Commandment. That literature, magnanimous host, does not treat life and death as if they were two antagonistic blocks. It is courageous enough to dissolve the barrier, and therefore, it is liberty in life. It was then that Acker’s words trumpeted through my void. I whispered them to myself: I travelled all over the world, looking for trouble. Trouble! What a wonderful word, originating from the Latin turbidus, meaning opaque, milky, turbulent. I muttered the word again: “Trouble!” Then I thought of the Proven?al word trobar—to find, to invent—origin of the word troubadour, a medieval lyric poet. In other words, I, a modern literary inventor, was going to walk the void of my multiple exiles causing trouble, discombobulating the world.

I sat back down on the La-Z-Boy. I thought: If Ulysses can set off on a Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, Don Quixote on a Grand Tour of Literature, and Dante the Pilgrim on a Grand Tour of Human Nature, then it stands to reason that I, Zebra, can do all three at once. Done and dusted. I was going to use the papers I had secured through the inky sweat of my father—my American passport—to embark on a GRAND TOUR OF EXILE.

Just one obstacle remained: I, a penniless rodent, did not possess the funds to backflip into the void of exile. But I had a meeting with Morales in a few days. I had prepared myself to relay the truth: that my father had died and that I needed money—roughly ten thousand dollars—to fund the Grand Tour of Exile. I barely had any savings. My father, who had found erratic work as a translator, had left behind enough money for me to pay a few months of rent, basic utilities, and food if I ate nothing but mint-and-onion soup.