Call Me Zebra(69)

I turned my attention back to Agatha. Why beat around the bush when the sensitive beings of the world are so scarce? Agatha was clearly one such being, and she was very pretty, too. She had lilac-colored eyes and high cheekbones and a wide mouth, inside which were two rows of perfectly aligned pearly white teeth that seemed to smile at the world.

“I’ll tell you where I’m from,” I said.

Her eyes widened with delight.

“Please do,” she exclaimed with an old-fashioned charm. She reached out and petted Taüt on the head. The bird fanned his crest.

“I hail from the land of not belonging, directly beyond the frontier of any nation.” I unabashedly delivered my truth. “Your home is my periphery,” I said.

Ludo intervened stiffly. “None of us are at home here. Can’t you see we’re all Italian?”

After that brief moment of tenderness, he had gone rigid again. I didn’t want to compromise my positive outlook, which seemed to have presented itself in conjunction with Agatha’s curious and welcoming nature, so I comforted myself by thinking that the two Ludo Bembos I’d been searching for, one austere and the other a hopeless romantic, had returned to my life.

Agatha sat down on the couch. She leaned into its flower-patterned surface, closed her eyes, and thought deeply about what I had just said. Ludo marched across the living room and walked out onto the terrace. I looked around. The room was sparsely decorated. There was a dying plant hanging from the rafters, a makeshift table, and a bookshelf bursting with books and papers, many of which appeared soiled. The walls were bare, and the cracks were full of gravel and dust. I noticed a filthy aquarium on the coffee table next to the sofa. The glass was covered in algae and slime; something orange was swimming through the murky water. I decided to join Ludo on the terrace. I found him clutching the banister, his knuckles white. Taüt, still perched on my shoulder, opened his beak to inhale the morning air.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. “I haven’t heard from you in weeks.”

“I’m moving in with you,” I said.

He said nothing, but I noticed his grip relax.

In the distance, the sky was beginning to open up. The fog, which had thickened through the night, was dispersing. It was rolling over the mountain range; the wind was pushing it out to sea.

“Strange way to go about it, don’t you think?” he inquired, squinting as he looked at me through and through.

“I suppose,” I said. “But I’m no stranger than you are. My strangeness is on the surface while you keep yours out of view. I applaud your methods. They are diligent, meticulous. But I have tried to warn you of the dangers associated with being cut off from your many selves, showing one face to the world while others lie hidden within you.”

“You’re one to talk.”

A yellow sky emerged, smoky at the edges where a trace of the morning mist lingered.

“We can go on like this forever, passing around the ball of blame. But it’s a terrible bore,” I declared.

“Fine, let’s change the subject. How have you been?” Ludo asked with the somber precision of a psychiatrist.

His question echoed in my ear. How had I been? As I scanned the sky, I felt myself grow wary. No one had ever asked me that. I wondered if he was feigning interest in order to gain information about the aftereffects of his unethical interference with my notebook. I decided to quote Nietzsche, the best armor in the world.

“As summa summarum,” I said, “I was healthy; as an angle, as a specialty, I was a decadent!”

“Can’t you ever produce an answer that’s yours?” Ludo scowled, letting go of the banister and crossing his arms. He looked me straight in the eyes.

“Produce?”

“Yes,” he said. “Produce.”

There was something going on with the drunk men downstairs. Some disturbance that caused them to let out intermittent cries of anguish.

“I don’t produce answers,” I said. “Unlike you, I consider my speech acts very carefully. Besides, most of them come from beyond the frontiers of life. They are”—I swallowed—“sepulcher messages.”

“Madonna santa,” Ludo cried, looking away.

“Are you religious?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “No, look.”

He pointed his finger at the group of drunks. They were circled around a body. There was a great commotion outside, but I couldn’t see or hear anything clearly. Just then, Bernadette reappeared wearing a furry pink onesie and proceeded to close all the windows and shutters, to draw the curtains. Her arms, covered in the pink, furry pajama suit, flailed about as she stomped around trying to seal us in.

Down below, the drunks emitted a long, steady howl. That howl was echoed by a weaker, whinier voice that seemed to emanate from whomever was lying at the center, supine on the ground, beneath their greasy heads.

I took advantage of the chaos to spy inside Bernadette’s room. It was narrow, windowless, gray; it resembled the room portrayed by my great-great-grandfather, Shams Abbas Hosseini, in The Hung Mallard. All I needed to restage the painting in three dimensions was some rope and a dead duck. I took this as evidence that Bernadette’s room was my room. Nothing could have been clearer. I inspected the space carefully. The closet was empty, the desk bare. Bernadette had packed her things in neatly stacked boxes. She was moving out. The only personal object left in view was a magazine cutout of Ratzinger, which she had pinned to the wall above a narrow bed with white sheets neatly tucked around a thin mattress. The bed looked like a gurney.