Call Me Zebra(34)

Just then, it occurred to me that I could think of the Matrix of Literature as a black hole: an abyss with no boundaries, an elastic void that consumes everything and from which nothing but a faint residue radiates back out into the world—a nonplace where time collapses, becomes imaginary, and therefore, finally, truthful. It occurred to me that if the matrix is an elastic void capable of digesting the whole then its structure is analog to the future, which, much like a black hole, is a vast, open nothingness capable of containing everything that approaches it. I said to myself: “Literature is the residue of the past radiating back out into the world.” Then I examined the thought from a different angle: The past, I concluded, contains within it a trace of the future. That trace acts as a conveyor belt through which certain images can be experienced as visions in advance of their time.

I looked at the three black encrustations on the red fabric of the recamier and imagined steam rising from the mouth of a volcano. The apartment, I realized, was nourishing me. It had been doing so all along. With all its accumulated clutter, it was signaling to me that until now I had been floating around the matrix. Until now, I had been metabolizing literature. But, as I watched the steam rise into the air, it occurred to me: What if literature metabolized me? I imagined being regurgitated by the matrix, my body radiating back out into the world as the residue of literature and spreading across the surfaces of the Old World, which was itself an afterimage, a residue. I felt incredibly pleased with myself. I felt delighted with the irrational symmetry of my plan. I realized that I must be receiving private communiqués from the Matrix of Literature: signals of genius, signals of Dalínian proportions. I, Zebra, was exactly where I wanted to be: in the land of oblivion and the land of persistence, on the precipice of the future and about to enter the past. I was on the verge of becoming more Zebra than I ever had been before.



I walked up to the window at the end of the corridor and opened it. Fresh air streamed into the apartment. It smelled like sardines and salted cod; it flowed sweetly through the wooden gaps in the shutters. The streets were coming to life. There were people walking on the sidewalk. I could see their limbs moving through the louvers. They seemed tiny and far away. An electric current traveled down my spine. As I inhaled the warm, brackish air, I said to myself, “Something horrible is going to happen.” I had the distinct feeling, a premonition, that the cruel events that were working their way into the fabric of the world—political suicides, spontaneous bombings—would soon accumulate into an undeniable critical mass; there would be no turning away from the stain of horror. “Not even love will save us,” I whispered into the sealed shutters. Love! What is love when it can’t save us from the wrenching severance of death?

For a moment, I saw myself as a child in my father’s arms. I felt a tickle in my mind. My father was pressing his mustached mouth against my void. I heard him whisper: Read to me from your notebook! He must have known my notebook was in a great state, pregnant with citations, in stato interessante, as they say in Italy. As I thought this, I realized that I had not heard a peep from Ludo Bembo. This lack of contact confirmed to me that he was, in fact, a part of the .1 percent; it proved his literary nature was underscored by an innate suspicion of others. Were it otherwise, I concluded, he already would have showed up at Quim Monzó’s door. And yet there was a part of me that wished he had. A part of me I could only acknowledge in brief segments, that had been yearning for Ludo to interrupt the brutal progression of my mourning, the miserable state of linking together a wretched sequence of thoughts and memories.

My father slumped down into a chair inside the vaulted maze of our double mind and tapped his cane on the floor. He was growing impatient. “Read to me!” he echoed. I retrieved my notebook and consulted it at random in accordance with the Hosseini practice of bibliomancy. I read from a list of transcribed quotes and maxims extemporaneous to my father’s Catalan oeuvre. I announced: Those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire. Borges. I walked in concentric circles reciting the sentence. This seemed to soothe my father. Soon, he was replaced within my void by words. It was as if the words Unconscionable Maps were sitting on the chair he had vacated, cross-legged, regal, polite.

With my father folded again into the obscure sheets of memory, I walked into the kitchen to get a glass of water. There was that ghoulish bird. He was walking across the counters. I stared at him in dumb astonishment. He kept sticking his beak into this and that, spilling coffee grounds, peeling cloves of garlic. The next time I looked down at my notebook, my eyes fell on the following transcription: Someday that mustache of yours will poke a hole in the world! From my father’s oeuvre! A joke Josep Pla had often repeated to Dalí. I crossed out the word mustache and replaced it with the word beak. Certain sentences are extraordinarily accommodating. “Someday that beak of yours will poke a hole in the world!” I warned Taüt. The bird cringed forward in response and plunged his head into a bowl of sugar Quim Monzó had left near the stove.

I took a step back. Considered from the Paranoiac-Critical perspective of Dalí, whose presence had manifested serendipitously, Taüt’s seemingly insignificant gesture began to yield meaning. After retreating from the bowl, the bird turned his plumed head and looked at me with impish resolve. I noticed a soft depression on the surface of the white crystals. In my mind’s eye, this cavity in the sugar bowl immediately positioned itself alongside the other indentations that had surfaced in Quim Monzó’s apartment. I reviewed each instance—craters in the recamier, the black hole that had insinuated itself in the morning, the bedroom ceiling that had the appearance of a sinkhole—and concluded that, reflected upon together, this procession of hollows intimated the following: that Taüt was no ordinary bird; no, he was a real-life manifestation of Unamuno’s pájaro sabio, the famous origami bird through which Unamuno, a life-long paper folder (producer of reverse folds, pleats, and sinks), had ironically expressed Plato’s views on love and politics. Unamuno, who had suffered two blows of exile for refusing to allow ideology to interfere with intellectual life. In other words, a Hosseini hero.