Call Me Zebra(60)

I went to the living room and sat on the recamier, a trail of images running through my head. That dry and sordid no-man’s-land, my father and I and our ass, a trio of lamentable figures. I thought to myself, exile begins long before the exiled person is banished from her country. One is first expelled psychologically, emotionally, intellectually; physical exile is the final blow. My father and his father and his father’s father had all been condemned to death. What for? For being thinkers. I got a whiff of the Caspian. It smelled like oil, watermelon, moist soil, rusted beams, a forest of eucalyptus. I thought of Dante the Pilgrim, of the words of warning he had received: You will know how hard a path it is for one who goes ascending and descending others’ stairs.

That death sentence, I thought, hangs over my head. Perhaps it is best to finish things off, conclude the long trial once and for all. My thoughts had regressed. They folded over themselves and spun a tangled web. I got off the recamier and paced the corridor—the real corridor of the apartment and the symbolic corridor of my exile. The apartment seemed different again. Certain objects I hadn’t noticed before stood out in unnatural relief against the background chaos, the most striking of which was a desk globe, its surface wiped clear. The globe was devoid of land and water masses; the representation of the world had either eroded or been scraped off, leaving a pure white surface, as though the universal clock had been set back to the beginning of the beginning. Or rather, I thought, correcting my thinking, the desk globe represented a nonplace where time did not exist, or if it did, its fabric was undifferentiated—the past, present, and future had folded over one another, rendering their boundaries indivisible, unclear.

The ghost globe, I concluded, was a sign of my unbecoming. I grabbed the globe and carried it with me into the bathroom. I contemplated its pure surface. I again felt as though I were standing on the event horizon of a black hole. I thought of the black band my father had placed over my eyes. I looked at myself in the mirror one last time. My hair was long and knotted. I could see lines beginning to form on my forehead. My skin was pale. My eyes looked bruised. I was exhausted.

The ghost globe, I realized, had been my cue to begin the process of unbuilding, of becoming residue, the nothingness that is everything. The bathroom was inviting me to be a patient, to take some pills, to draw a bath. It was inviting me to reenter the womb, blast past the singularity of my birth, to unbecome, to undo the pain of the losses I had endured so that, like the phoenix, I could be reborn ad infinitum in humanity’s pile of ruins.

I remembered telling the funeral director that my father had gone back to the beginning, to a space before his birth.

I opened the medicine cabinet. The top row was lined with bottles of pills. One of the bottles was unlabeled. I unscrewed the cap; inside, there were tiny star-shaped pills. “Star is only one letter away from scar,” I exclaimed, letting out an incredulous gasp. There it was: the past in the future, Nietzsche’s eternal return.

I dug one of the stars out with my finger. I swallowed it. I swallowed my past. I said out loud to no one, “I am a cannibal.” I turned the tap and listened to the sound of water run through the faucet into the tub. I swallowed a few more pills. I felt time begin to dissolve. I leaned over the tub and looked again at my face; it appeared deformed in the rising water. I scooped up the water and swallowed it. I drank my face. The water had a thick metallic taste; it was like swallowing milk mixed with blood. I sat on the edge of the bath until I heard a buzzing in the margins of the universe. Matter was disintegrating. Time was going limp. I peeled off my clothes. I got into the tub.

I was ready to die in order to begin again. “The sole objective and purpose of Zebra,” I said out loud to no one as I immersed myself in the water, “is to reemerge from the womb as a constantly regenerating residue of the collective data of the infinite archive of literature, to spread across the web of the Old World, which forbids the accumulation of a center, is complex, stratified, simultaneous, a continent as ungraspable as totality itself . . . unreal, Irrational-Pragmatic, multiple . . .” I was becoming formless.

The room began to disappear. The tiles began to drift apart from one another. Time was breaking down. I sank farther into the water. I thought of Dante. I thought of the ice at the core of the universe. I thought of the frozen lake of our hearts. I was approaching expulsion. I laughed. It was the laugh of the darkness of birth. I felt time buckle and go limp. The water turned cold and dense. I saw myself become compressed. I saw myself become other. I saw myself become more Zebra. I faded into the ethereal distance. I felt myself become nothingness.



Sometime later, hours, days, minutes, Ludo came bursting into the bathroom.

It was morning.

“What are you doing in there?” he asked.

I heard everything he said twice. I leaned over to look at him. There were two of him. Two Ludo Bembos, like I had thought there were. I felt a sense of hysteria bubbling up inside me. Who was Ludo Bembo? Where were my father, my mother, my homeland? Who was I?

I heard Ludo say, “You look feverish.”

He kneeled on the floor and put his hand on my forehead. He looked at me with concerned eyes.

I heard myself answer. “I’m not an idiot. You don’t need to repeat everything!”

He looked hurt, confused, angry, and despairing all at once. “I don’t know why I even bother,” he muttered. I felt stabbed by those words twice.