Call Me Zebra(47)

“According to whom?” he challenged.

The bird crossed in front of the door again. He was rushing to and fro. He had tucked his crest back to render himself more aerodynamic.

“The lofty Unamuno,” I said, smiling widely. That bird, with his aura of death, was transmitting signals to me from the Matrix of Literature. It couldn’t be more obvious. I watched him go. From the end of the corridor, I heard the bird echo, “Unamuno, una-mano.”

Ludo reached for his underwear—a pair of white briefs—and wiped the remaining come off his penis.

“I can do better than Unamuno,” he said, folding his underwear and placing it near the edge of the bed.

“Of course you can. It seems that when it comes to sex the man knows his literature.” I chortled.

I could see his mind was spinning. His penis was starting to raise its tired head again. It was bouncing up and down. “You don’t believe me?” he said. My heart skipped a beat. I felt both an intense urge to get rid of him, as if the fumes of my void were rising to my throat to choke me, and, strangely, a fear of him being gone. But regardless of how I felt, it seemed he had come to stay. I was both wary of and comforted by his stubborn resolve. He was a buttery, sentimental man hiding behind a severe mask. A romantic, I thought, when Ludo Bembo suddenly ordered me to lie back and spread my legs.

“Very well,” I said.

I don’t know what he did next, but I came again and again. That sensation of pain in the tips of my fingers returned. I felt as if my life were slipping away, colliding with his and then dissolving. It was, to my surprise, a little bit like dying and being resurrected. It was like bursting into a thousand fragments, each part of myself a plane of perception, a plateau with a view. As he worked on me, massaging my labia, licking my clitoris, images of the ruins of my past, as flat as photographs, reeled through my mind. I saw the black waters of the Caspian crashing against the calcified walls of the houses it had swallowed over the years; abandoned watermelon rinds sticking out of the sand on the shore like grotesque white smiles; men in camouflage patrolling the coast in tiny boats; sickly palms; rows and rows of dusty tomes; my father’s tea-stained mustache; the blue domes of Istanbul backlit by a copper sun; the Mediterranean, slack and purple at dawn, hemmed in by cliffs and coves of pink granite against which the Sea of Sunken Hopes was railing; and then, finally, the Room of Broken Heirlooms. These images belonged to selves I had once known intimately but whose identities, dispersed by the violent onslaughts of exile, had grown unfamiliar to me. In my mind’s eye, I saw a lineup of those other selves. They looked wanting, distressed, lost. They fixed their gaze on me, and I felt the parched sheet of my heart roll shut, a scroll I couldn’t read. I had nothing to give. “The second best is to die soon,” I murmured, as I came one last time, right before Ludo pulled his face away from my vagina. The images faded. They sank into oblivion.

“We are sorry little heaps of flesh and bone,” I said, catching my breath.

He wiped my hair out of my face, and said, “Look, here’s your bird again.”

Indeed, there was Taüt, staring at us through the frame of the door.

“And that corridor out there,” I added, “is the corridor of exile.”

At that, silence resumed its show.



It’s a well-known fact that sex ends in emptiness. When we are done climaxing, the void yawns wider than ever and allows us to peer for a moment into the silky black depths of the abyss. Arthur Schopenhauer knew this. So did Pascal. And I, Zebra, a privileged member of the ill-fated community of intellectuals that inhabits the Matrix of Literature, cling to this truth as a spider to its web and, therefore, much like the above-mentioned figures, am not only a defender of committing one’s life to aesthetic contemplation in lieu of dumbly searching for love but am also repulsed by the notion of perpetuating the human species, which is decisively worthless.

I wrote my thoughts on this subject down in my notebook and recited them aloud each morning to remind myself not to become disarmed by Ludo’s presence. Even so, following that first encounter, we spent a lovers’ weekend at the apartment. And then Monday came and Ludo stayed. He remained at the apartment with me all week, going out only for brief excursions to buy bread, cheese, coffee. But one night, Ludo let loose the word love in relation to me while he was orgasming—whether he was aware of his speech act or not I cannot say. The next morning, after consulting my notebook, I warned him never to use that word in my presence again. He fell silent, looked away, collapsed into himself. He dipped a croissant rather halfheartedly into his coffee, stuffed it into his mouth, and, with a muffled voice, said, “Who said anything about love?”

I raised my hackles.

“You did,” I answered curtly. “But if it’s more comfortable for you to lie to yourself, go ahead, be my guest.”

There was an awkward pause during which Ludo sat at the table pouting, sniffling, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose, looking down into his coffee mug. The side of him that was half man—petty, clingy, overly concerned with the ethics of earthly conduct, stiffening when things didn’t go his way, exhibiting a sense of pride when things did (prime example: celebrating his ability to facilitate my orgasms with a triumphal grin), and, last but not least, possessing a considerable predisposition to cluttered thinking that I attributed to the sum of the aforementioned parts—had taken over. I was beginning to realize that he, despite inhabiting the Pyramid of Exile, had no idea what it means to be squashed by history; ground down to the atomic level; reduced to dust; pulverized; flattened to a singular surface; rendered as thin as paper, two-dimensional; and drained of any real power while those who have only been grazed by the incendiary flares of history strut about full of themselves, their hearts pumping with fresh oxygenated blood. Not to mention history’s victors, those boisterous few who ignite the flames without considering who will be broiled, who will be braised, what the gravitational pull of the leftover negative space, the nothingness, will be; a black hole that will draw more death to itself, a bottomless pit that survivors will want to leap into in order to join the dead members of their family and resuscitate the past.