Call Me Zebra(22)

A moment later, we hit a vacuum. The plane dropped a few thousand feet. I belched. In that abysmal drop, I heard myself say: “Descend into the Matrix of Literature, which is infinite, elastic, as mysterious as the universe.” I looked out the window to see if that false New World was still visible, but I couldn’t see anything. We were enveloped in a dense white mass. We were too high up in the air. I thought to myself, what use is there in looking one last time at a land where people plot their lives in advance of the future, as if history will never come knocking with its cruel claw on their door?

The plane began regaining elevation. The copilot came on the intercom. “Our apologies for the unexpected plunge,” he said. “One more storm to cross. We’ve weathered worse. Nothing to worry about here.”

His voice failed to inspire confidence.

The plane drifted across the sky laterally. We were rolling through another cloud mass, and it seemed the pilots’ strategy was to let the aircraft ride the waves. We hit a bump in the sky. I nearly jumped out of my seat. The plane skidded, then righted itself. There was a deafening sound overhead. The engines started wheezing, a brutal screeching noise. I looked around: supplicating human faces. Impossible: my neighbor, still asleep while everyone else, after a brief reprieve, was sighing, shifting, pleading with their personal god. In the theater of my mind, I imagined my neighbor in conversation with me. My neighbor, who was grinding her teeth, whose saliva was trickling out of the corner of her pink mouth.

I said to her, “I, Zebra, am primed to expose death’s movements, to illuminate the way ruin moves among us in plain sight.”

“How so?” I heard her ask.

“Because I live my life in the Matrix of Literature.”

My neighbor winced and nearly slid out of her seat. She must have drugged herself.

“Should I go on?” I asked. But before I could, I was interrupted.

The flight attendant burst into the cabin and came running up the aisle. She landed in her jump seat. I heard her clear her throat. I leaned over my neighbor and looked down the aisle. The attendant sat facing us, her captive passengers. I watched her flick three imaginary specks of dust off her pencil skirt with the back of her hand—whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. She crossed her legs, strapped herself in. Military precision, hers.

My neighbor shifted in her seat. For the first time, I took in the details of her face. She had rosy cheeks and a flat, oily nose and wispy hair, which she had coiled up on the crown of her head. Her head was tilted to one side, and there was a peanut stuck in the crease of her double chin. I studied her hands. She was holding an open bag of trail mix. I helped myself to a peanut, to some chocolate. The copilot came on again and announced that there would be more turbulence ahead.

He said: “Keep calm and pilot on!” He laughed vigorously at himself.

My mind was suddenly flooded with incongruous memories of Dante the Pilgrim. Easy to be calm about life, I thought, but not so easy to shuttle between life and death, between the persistence of memory and oblivion, like a lost pilgrim, an exile, neither here nor there. At least the pilgrim was midway through the journey of our life when he found himself banished into the dark forests of exile far from everyone. I was not even halfway through mine when its infrastructure, meager to begin with, was extinguished in a two-pronged blow. I felt the toxic fumes of my parents’ deaths rise through my void. I could barely keep down my stomach.

The engines picked up speed. Out in the distance, the clouds were beginning to break up. This was the last stretch before the wide-open sky. I could hear the motors revving furiously beneath the wings, which were trembling and folding upward. My palms began to sweat. I dried my hands on the bony knobs of my knees. If we crashed, who would die first? I didn’t have my neighbor’s padding. Suddenly, everything went still and silent, as though the plane were hovering in the sky without power and was about to drop. The flight attendant was still strapped in her jump seat. She stared ahead with glassy, unperturbed eyes. She looked like a mannequin. The plane tilted sharply to one side.

“Brace!” the mannequin yelled. There was a burst of wind.

A food cart that had been stowed away broke free and rolled down the aisle. A man’s hairy hands fanned out to catch it. The way his hands launched out from the peripheries in desperation reminded me of my father’s flailing his arms as he recited lines of literature, and then of the distorted bodies of the men and women that Dante, the exiled poet-pilgrim, had to witness as he worked his way down the spiral of hell into the icy core of the universe. I thought of sharing all of this with my neighbor. I wanted to tell her that my exile had evacuated all meaning from my life, left me with nothing, with no choice but to pursue that nothing, that nothingness of death that, as it turns out, is the essence and privilege of literature. I reached for my notebook and again sniffed its pages. I recited to myself: The straight way was lost.

“Lost,” I said out loud, and clicked my tongue.

“Listen to this,” I said, turning to my neighbor. “I came to myself in a dark wood / for the straight way was lost. Dante, circa 1320. And now listen to this: In a village of La Mancha the name of which I have no desire to recall. Cervantes, 1605.” The opening lines of those two books had begun to form a kind of slogan for my journey. Reciting them had helped to settle my stomach.

“Do you see the connection?” I asked. Then I said, making a dramatic gesture, “You see, these books were conceived at the site of a rupture, a trauma; they are about loss of identity, about death!”