Call Me Zebra(20)
Morales stood up from his desk, removed his heavily framed glasses and set them on the table. He hadn’t shaved in days, and without his glasses on, I could see how much he had aged over the course of that long year. There were more white hairs growing on his cheeks, at the nape of his neck, and in his sideburns. Even his red suit looked pale, more of a salmon pink. I gave him the book I had stolen from the library and instructed him to open it to the earmarked page. I had added more notes to the margins of the page overnight. He put his glasses back on. They sat crookedly on his face.
“The Final Exit,” he said, reading my notes back to me, humming, rocking back and forth on his heels. He adjusted his glasses.
“Yes,” I said. “I am preparing for a Final Exit from the New World and its lineup of fakes who refuse to acknowledge the warped nature of reality!”
We both laughed. Then Morales paced his office with his head hanging, eyes searching the ground, thinking. Finally, he looked up, and said, “It’s time for you to go. Be on your way. I have made a few arrangements.”
He handed me an envelope. It contained ten thousand dollars. It was money the university had given him over the years to fund a research assistant, but he had never found a worthwhile candidate. He explained this in his usual matter-of-fact tone. He also added that a certain Ludovico Bembo, whose contact information he had enclosed, would pick me up on the other side of the pond so long as I communicated my arrangements. I thanked him. I knew that I would never see Morales again.
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That week, I drained what little money we had in our bank account ($80.56), gave my notice, purchased a plane ticket (depleting a full tenth of my reserves), went to my father’s grave, and said my final good-byes. I grabbed the old chest-shaped suitcase and began to pile into it the residue of the past, my broken heirlooms. I grabbed the samovar and shoved it into the suitcase. I removed The Hung Mallard from the wall, took a knife to the canvas, and separated it from the frame. I rolled it up and put it in the suitcase. I thought of my dead relatives, the Autodidacts, Anarchists, and Atheists, of how they had retreated into the deep web of literature in order to survive their deaths while all around the world was being shattered, blasted into a million shards, its parts repeatedly, unceasingly added to history’s pile of ruins. I rolled up the bludgeoned rug. I put the leather-bound notebook and my most cherished books, those old tomes lining the walls of the apartment, into the suitcase. By the time I was done packing, the chest was so heavy I could barely pick it up. It weighed as much as my ill-fated past—a burden I had to shoulder in order to do what my father had asked me to do since birth: to sound out the Hosseini alarm, to leap into the pitiful abyss of our human condition and rove the depths in search of the slimy pearl of truth.
A few days later, at dawn, the hour of false hope, I, Zebra, left New York City forever. I got on the A line and headed to JFK. I looked around at the empty orange seats. Soon they would be filled. History, I thought, according to my father’s logic, which was now also my own, has a way of choosing new victims. Metaphysically speaking, I wondered, where do the world’s exiles, its living dead, reside? I thought of Dante’s triangular purgatory, and the answer came to me immediately: in the Pyramid of Exile, an elastic funnel in which the refuse of the world can be piled.
I closed my eyes. I saw an infinite stack of ill-fated corpses. In the devastation, I captured a memory of the future: I was wearing a gas mask, standing alone under a crescent moon in a gloomy, ashen landscape. I breathed in. I breathed out. I watched the glass panel over my eyes fog up, then clear. I was bruised and wounded, standing inside a hologram of the future, my future, which was composed of quotes from literature’s past. I could smell the rubber of the gas mask. I was holding a telephone in my hand, then setting it down to transcribe words on a typewriter. Then the image transformed, and I was standing on a cobbled sidewalk in a remote town somewhere in the Mediterranean. Or, I wondered, was I in the no-man’s-land of my childhood? There were dead bodies scattered everywhere. Windows and shutters of the houses were drawn. There was dried blood on the faces of the dead. Even through the gas mask, I could smell oil, vinegar, rotting corpses. The only people on the street were a group of undertakers wearing masks. They were lifting the bodies into cars, into wheelbarrows, onto horses, carrying them out to the graves in distant fields. A line from Calvino floated through my mind: And you know that in the long journey ahead of you, when to keep awake against the camel’s swaying or the junk’s rocking, you start summoning up your memories one by one, your wolf will have become another wolf, your sister a different sister, your battles other battles. I opened my eyes. The image resolved itself. Each thing, I thought, replicates itself to compose the wretched eternal return of life. I felt as though I had been trapped in a terrible nightmare.
As the train lurched forward, I realized that my fate had been sealed. I felt more clearly than ever that my vindication, my survival, depended on training, through the literature of the void, to stand against my opponents—nonexiles—those fakes who increase their own longevity by hastening the exile’s death, borrowing time and well-being against our increasingly dwindling resources. In the waning darkness, as I set off on my Grand Tour of Exile, I registered the message: I had become a literary terrorist, a Knight—no!—an armed Dame of the Void.
BARCELONA
The Story of How I Leapt into the Void of Exile and Became Entangled with Ludo Bembo, the Embalmer of Words