Call Me Zebra(19)

I climbed out of the hole and walked up Broadway. I stepped over a half-eaten chicken thigh and a slice of pizza that had been discarded on the road. I walked past a group of old men chattering loudly and playing bridge on the sidewalk. I walked past the neighborhood grocery store. Through the shop’s glass wall, I saw rows of Bustelo coffee cans stacked on top of one another, piles of plantains, loads of polished vegetables. I pressed my face against the glass. I gawked at that food for a few solemn moments. All the produce looked unreal. Then I walked away, gripped by a strange euphoria, utterly convinced that I had absorbed my father.

That night, as I lay awake beneath The Hung Mallard, I made tremendous progress. A single but epic thought kept belting around my many minds: that I had metabolized a critical mass of books, that I had read enough to conclude once and for all that literature is duplicitous, and that texts give a false impression of being closed systems capable of operating independently of one another when, in fact, they secretly reside in a mutable and ghostly environment, a dynamic matrix where they disappear inside one another, mirror each other in a series of replicas. I watched the blue light of the moon glide across the hung mallard’s beak. Books, I realized, are connected to one another via nearly invisible superhighways of language, the way stars are interrelated via light and dust, the debris of the universe.

Finally, I fell asleep. But in the early hours of the morning, as the dewy light of dawn was rolling in and the city was starting to come to life again, I startled awake. I bolted straight up. Literature, I mouthed, reciting as if from a script, has evolved over time through a process of borrowing, repetition, plagiarism. I was edging toward wakefulness. Every book, I whispered into the retreating night, is a distorted duplicate of another book, the ghost of a false original, which, like the seed of the universe and my dead ancestors, is nowhere and everywhere at once. I made a mental note to go to the library in search of proof before revealing my findings to Morales. Then I went back to sleep. I had earned myself a few good hours.



The next day at the campus library, I walked through the damp corridors of books until I was dizzy. Hours later, exhausted, dehydrated, starved, my legs shaking beneath my head, which was becoming progressively more detached from my body, I reached for a book at random and found what I was looking for—proof, in a book by none other than the deft and mystical Blanchot: The world and the book eternally and infinitely send back their reflected images. This indefinite power of mirroring, this sparkling and limitless multiplication—which is the labyrinth of light and nothing else besides—will then be all that we will find, dizzily, at the bottom of our desire to understand. A few passages later I found a summary—Blanchot via Borges: The book is, in principle, the world and the world is the book.

“Yes!” I declared, and petted the shelves with exaggerated tenderness. I felt satiated. The librarian had her eye on me. She was a plump middle-aged woman I deplored. Her head kept popping up between the aisles. I hated her fleshy cheeks. I walked faster, wove in and out of the corridors of books in order to lose her. I was looking for a pen. A minute later, I stole one from a sleeping freshman, who had likely been pulling an all-nighter and had left his supplies sprawled across the table. Pen in hand, I returned to the book to register my revelation. I crossed out both quotes, the Blanchot and his paraphrasing of Borges. Neither of them went far enough, which is no surprise. One is always alone in putting the nail in the coffin. I wrote: Literature, with its cunning and duplicitous nature, aware of itself, in possession of a supraconsciousness, is the only true thing in the world; it exposes man’s denial of reality’s shattering pluralism. I slipped the book under my shirt, prepared to steal it even though I had a library card. A minute later, the librarian showed up behind me.

“Young woman, you are done for the day!” she announced, and kicked me out for writing in the library books and, as usual, for having entered with Morales’s card, which he had duplicated for me. As she closed the door behind me, I told her that her lavender smell made me wretch.

I had succeeded in stealing the book. It was mine. Only its trace would remain in the library system. I walked over to the dying rose garden adjacent to Morales’s office and wove my way between the sickly plants. It was evening. The next day, I would have my final meeting with Morales. I was eager to know if he had procured the money for my journey. I walked farther toward the hedges bordering the garden. I slid from bush to bush thinking about “A Philosophy of Totality: The Matrix of Literature.” Then I leaned against a young tree. My thoughts branched out, took on horrifying proportions. The exile, I thought, whose identity is shattered with each progressive displacement from her homeland, also unmasks reality’s dizzying multiplicity. I looked at the bushes. Variations on a theme. What’s more, I realized, is that those among us who have not had to seek refuge in a land of hostile strangers, who have not been persecuted or strangled by the crushing hand of grief, maintain the privilege of deluding themselves into believing in a coherent and linear reality; in other words, metaphysically speaking, they think they are immortal! As if parts of their lives, whole blocks of consciousness, couldn’t suddenly die or become extinguished only to have to rise from the ashes of death like a phoenix. I walked up to a rose and punched it in the face. A few petals floated down to the gravel and caught a sinister beam of light coming off the moon. I had never felt more awake.



The time of my meeting with Morales had arrived. I told him about my revelations. I told him about the web of literature. I recited my manifesto from memory. I opened my mouth and a voice emerged. It was the voice of my other self, the voice of Zebra. I said, “By going on the Grand Tour of Exile, I plan to prove that literature is an incarnated phenomenon; I, an exile and a Hosseini, am the embodiment of literature.” I informed him that my multiple selves and the archipelago of quotes that made up the Matrix of Literature eternally and infinitely send back their reflected images and that I would be collecting still more fragments by the Great Writers of the Past, and therefore more selves, throughout my journey. Morales looked at me, remote, philosophical. I told him that I would record the tour in my notebook and that by revisiting the origins of each of the multiple selves my knobby, incoherent exile had produced—selves I had no conscious memory of—I would give birth to literary duplicates and distribute between them the pain of the erasure that the so-called original version of myself had endured.