Call Me Zebra(18)
When the day came, Morales offered his condolences, and then he reprimanded me: “The Grand Tour makes exile sound like a delight!”
I felt irate. “Am I so worthless that I am barred from taking pleasure in my own suffering?” I rejoined.
He said nothing for a while. He leaned forward and put his elbows on the desk. His eyes had pooled over. I could see his pupils swimming behind the thick lenses of his glasses. When he finally spoke, his tone was unusually reflective.
He said: “Compose your manifesto and we’ll talk again. In the meantime, I’ll pull some resources together so you can be on your way.”
I stood up and bowed respectfully, like a warrior, like a soldier of death. I stepped out of his office thinking only of those lines he had recited so many months earlier and of the prophetic nature of literature I had been attuned to since birth: Oh pit of debris, ferocious cave of the shipwrecked. In you the wars and the flights accumulated.
I spent the following weeks feverishly composing my manifesto. I barely left the apartment, and to save money, I began rationing the little food I had left in the refrigerator. I grew as light-headed as a Sufi mystic. There were days I survived on a single date. As I chewed the sweetmeat, I thought of the date palm I was born under. The thought was sufficiently loaded with the weight of loss that it caused me to feel full instantaneously.
On one such day, as I stood near the kitchen window, I noticed there was more room in my mind for my thoughts to move around than there had been before. Something had shifted. Pathways that weren’t available to me before had suddenly appeared. It occurred to me that, before being absorbed by the mind of the universe, my father’s mind must have lingered. It had to have traversed the atmosphere. Then I remembered Pythagoras’s theory of the transmigration of souls, which supposes that the soul—or, as the Hosseinis believed, the mind—decomposes in death and continues its journey through the world.
In a clipped tone, I said the words: “Metempsychosis. Palingenesia.” Indeed, I thought to myself, that’s what had happened: More than likely, I had absorbed my father’s mind before the mind of the universe could get to him. In other words, I had beat the universe to it. I felt soothed by this notion, comforted. The sting of loneliness subsided a little. As a result, I was thinking with the brain capacity of two minds, each of them multilingual, extremely literary, and shattered by their shared and perpetual exile; which is to say that each mind contained multiple minds inside of it, many of which, by virtue of having come into existence under different cultural and linguistic parameters, had different intentions, objectives, and patterns of thought. I thought to myself, I am a person with a myriad of unsettled minds all operating at once, a kind of irregular genius. Not unlike the many-headed country of my birth and origin: Persia, Pars, Iran.
After that, my thoughts became lucid, electric, charged. I decided to spend the day advancing my manifesto by simultaneously reading Cervantes’s and Acker’s Don Quixote, along with Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” I would read the texts concomitantly by going back and forth between them with my many minds, metaphysically superimposing the texts and blurring the lines between them. Reading these works in concert would allow me to significantly increase the speed with which I built the constellation of literary networks that I had come to refer to collectively as the Matrix of Literature, an infinite cosmos created through the Paranoiac-Critical method of spontaneous association. To the rows and rows of tomes, I announced: “A many-headed reading experience!” and got to it.
Within a matter of hours, I arrived at the following conclusion: Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote and Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” are distorted duplicates of the original Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, which is itself a duplicate of other texts, a giant literary womb in which the chivalric tales of times past are gestating, preparing to be born again. I was struck then by a thought of epic proportions: Texts have been leaping across eras for centuries in order to cross-contaminate one another.
Without effort, I declared: “Literature is so self-aware that it knows how to perpetuate itself like a disease. Every text is a mutant and a doppelg?nger!” This discovery drew another into the light: that we, the Hosseinis, have been operating like literature for centuries. In other words, each of us is a distorted duplicate of the other. My father fit inside me the way his father and his father’s father had fit inside him—a mise en abyme of Hosseinis.
This was the tip of the iceberg. I was just getting started. The voice of my manifesto, woven together from my plethora of minds, had appeared. I needed to give it some air. I grabbed my father’s cane and left the apartment.
Outside, I made a series of left turns and ended up on a street I hadn’t walked on before. The street was undergoing repairs. The asphalt had been overturned, and there was a ditch in the center. I peered into that abysmal wound in the center of the street. The sun was baking the sidewalks, the building facades, my head. A pregnant woman walked by. With a great deal of complicity, I announced to her, “Literature is pregnant with itself, too! It’s constantly having triplets!” She stopped, looked at me pleadingly, then hid her face behind her hair, hugged her belly, scurried away. I watched her leave and wished someone was there to take my photograph, the first portrait of Zebra. But I didn’t have a camera. So I took a mental photograph of myself instead and imagined that the following caption, simultaneously inspired by my family motto and Blanchot’s transcendent words, was written beneath it: Death is nothingness and nothingness is the essence of literature. So, I thought, weaving together my various thoughts, if liberty = death and death = nothingness and nothingness = literature, then it follows that literature = liberty, death, nothingness. I was headed in the right direction. I was going to disappear into literature.