Call Me Zebra(61)

I saw both Ludo Bembos rub their eyes. The pair looked far away, as if I were looking at them from the wrong end of a telescope. They were both as white as milk. They looked like long boiled noodles. I wanted to stab him back.

I said, “You pair of linguini need to get out of my hair!”

The pair raised their heads and looked at me with an inscrutable expression. Severity, repulsion, pain—I couldn’t tell.

“Fine. I’m leaving,” he said matter-of-factly, washing his hands and drying them on the towel. He was doing his utmost to resist getting dragged into the vortex of my wounds. His whole body went rigid, cold. “I can’t skip any more classes,” he said without looking at me. “I’m teaching in the afternoon.”

For a brief moment, I felt myself resurface: the two Ludo Bembos consolidated. There was only one of him. I didn’t want him to leave, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him as much. Instead, I asked him for his address. He said he would leave it for me on the dining-room table on his way out. I lifted my arm out of the tub and waved it.

“Good-bye,” I said. “When we see each other again, it will be under different terms. Love is a two-way street, but until now I didn’t have your address.” I heard my words echo.

“Okay,” he said. “Very well.” His tone was exasperated, conflicted, both final and full of yearning.

I waved my arm again, hoping he would reach for my hand and drag me out of the tub. Instead, he caressed my hair as if I were a scrawny dog he had tried to save from drowning in a dreary lake, a dog that would soon return to the frothy, putrid waters, incapable of learning a lesson. After that, he left. I sat in the bath, soaking, consoling myself with the fact that he had no idea that I had used the word love instead of the word interference. He had interfered with my notebook, my life. Now I would interfere with his.



I fell asleep in the tub. The next day, I awoke to the sound of footsteps in the stairway. My fingernails were blue. My hands were pruned. I looked like a newborn: shriveled, slimy, reduced. I was shivering. My temperature had dropped dramatically. The water level had gone down, as though my body had absorbed the liquid or it had begun to evaporate. I looked at the rectangular cross section of the world beyond the window. Daylight was beginning to wane. I listened to the echo of the footsteps. Whoever was outside the front door was walking indecisively up and down the stairway.

My mind and body were slowly reconnecting. I stood up. The water slid off me like a wave in the ocean. I felt the sudden onset of vertigo. I managed to step out of the tub, to bend down and drain the water. My fingers were unstable, and it was hard to work the stopper. I couldn’t feel my hands. I wrapped a towel around myself and walked down the corridor. When I got to the door, I looked through the keyhole. There was no one there. No Ludo Bembo. I looked again through the keyhole. No sign of life.

“Taüt,” I called out, as if we had been lifelong friends. I retreated to the bedroom. The bird, that chimeric little monster, appeared immediately, like a starving dog. He didn’t fly. He walked across the floor to the edge of the bed. The bird climbed the sheets using his beak and talons. He hopped from the mattress onto the headboard. He remained perched there, staring ahead with glazed eyes. I looked at him. I said to that wretched bird: “Undoing oneself involves unweaving the delicate web of time.”

The bird opened his dark beak. I peered into that Beak of Darkness and remembered being at the cemetery watching the undertakers lower my father’s casket into the ground. I remembered looking at my mother’s blue hand, swollen and bruised. Then the image resolved itself. The devastation vanished.

In a wild impulse, I got up. I opened my suitcase and turned its contents over onto the bed. The pungent scent of my father’s death spread through the room and contaminated the air. The Hung Mallard rolled underneath the bed. The books, thrust out of my portable library, piled up like Roman bricks at various intervals across the surface of the mattress. I took a step back to observe the design from a distance. I rocked back and forth on my feet. I held my breath. The obelisk-like posts, combined with the books, created the distinct impression that the bed was an abandoned city, timeless, a literary ruin. I walked around the bed as wild as an animal. A horseshoe emerged: a big capital U, the U of Ulysses. I cupped my chin with the palm of my hand. If I had a mustache, I would have stroked it. I imagined Dalí’s mustache standing on its ends like the blades of an open pair of scissors. I gaped at the design. U, the U of Ulysses. I sucked in little patches of air. I oxygenated my mind in portions. A secret was being revealed to me about the genealogy and fate of literature: Literature was not dead despite what some have claimed, nor was it on its way to being dead. No, far from being dead, literature is the site of death itself. I looked at the archipelago of books on the bed. Literature is where the ruins of humanity are piled. And if literature is a retainer for death, how can it die? I asked. “Because death,” I cried, “is immortal.” I tossed the empty suitcase on the floor. I threw myself on my back onto the bed. I felt a sense of bliss wash over me. I felt myself begin to fade. I was on the verge of radiating back out of the matrix. I was everywhere and nowhere at once: lying in the shade of an umbrella pine in Pompeii, curled up in the navel of civilization, on a literary vessel, in a submarine about to plunge into the past.

I drifted off to sleep. In the dream, I was floating across the inky waters of the Atlantic Ocean on a mattress filled with books. I was bobbing along the waves, approaching a woolly black storm on the horizon. I didn’t feel fear. The only thing that gnawed at me were pangs of hunger. I was starving. The horizon was fixed in space; it wouldn’t recede and the swell was growing. I was approaching the storm at a perpetually increasing speed. I looked at my city of books and resolved to eat them. I opened them one by one. I ripped out page after page. There were too many pages. There wasn’t enough time. I realized I would drown before I could stuff all that language into my mouth. I had to be more discerning. It occurred to me that the best thing to do, given the circumstances, would be to eat only the sentences I loved and loathed the most, and chuck the neutral ones into the sea. I leafed through my books. I tore out individual sentences. With a steady hand, I dropped them into my mouth. They slipped down my throat as easily as fresh oysters. I felt an intense pleasure. I was ready to glide toward my death. I opened Benjamin’s Illuminations and quickly worked my way to “Unpacking My Library.” It seemed appropriate. I ate Only in extinction is the collector comprehended. I was ready to devour the next sentence, to eat Benjamin quoting Hegel, to consume an infinitely receding sequence of quotes. My plan kept evolving. I envisioned building an epic book of light and dark passions from the sentences I had ingested. I was sure that my archived language would survive my bodily death, be absorbed by a kindred channel of consciousness—just as I had absorbed my father and the part of my mother my father had absorbed upon her untimely death—and fan back out into the world. I began to eat Only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva, but I was interrupted—Taüt, gentler than usual but steady in his ways, was peering into my mouth, grazing my lips with his feathers.