Call Me Zebra

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

  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.

  I couldn’t stand watching Ludo Bembo sit there offended, as if I had slighted him. I told him as much. “You have no idea what it means to be slighted!”

  His lips were trembling. He looked as though he might start crying.

  He said, “I went down to get us croissants, and you haven’t touched a single one.”

  I couldn’t believe it. He was offended because I hadn’t eaten? I ripped off the end of a croissant and ate it. Then I asked him if he considered himself a friend of Sancho Panza, who was also always worried about funneling food down his esophagus. Ludo’s jaw dropped. I ripped off another piece of the croissant and affectionately put it in his mouth.

  “To each his own,” I said. “But let it be known that I align myself with Don Quixote, the Knight of the Sad Countenance, for whom food is anathema because he, like me, feeds on the flesh of language.”

  Ludo was sitting there in his underwear, his elbows resting on the table, his shoulders hunched over, his hair disheveled, his glasses dirty, the piece of croissant I had stuck in his mouth hanging out like the severed claw of a boiled crab.

  “Why don’t you chew?” I insisted.

  He spat the bread out.

  “You are impossible,” he said, before succumbing to a string of Italian mutters. I heard something about the Madonna and then the word intrattabile, followed by its distant cousin inquietare and then mamma mia, mamma mia, mamma mia. He said the word mamma so many times with such profound desperation and melancholy that I began to wonder if his mother, like mine, was dead.

  I followed him into the kitchen. It was clear that I needed to break things down for him, that he needed me to reconstruct the story of my destruction, to pick myself up one speck of dust at a time and glue myself together in order to showcase for him the origins and terms of my modus operandi. So I shoved my tattoo in his face and told him that I—the final member of the AAA—am antilove. I also informed him that I am a body composed of various dispersed particles of dirt and that because people walk on dirt all the time I am constantly being stepped on and, thus, further pulverized. There is nothing I can do about my ill-fatedness, I informed him, except to retreat into the Matrix of Literature; there, I said, my mind can roam free and become extremely refined, a supraconsciousness.

  “So you see now why I don’t accept the use of the word love?”

  A long miserable pause ensued. I assumed he was formulating an appropriate response. As it turns out, I was wrong.

  “Why are you staring at me?” Ludo finally said.

  “Because I am waiting for you to display curiosity.”

  “Curiosity? After that lecture?”

  “There is such a thing as a follow-up question.”

  “To your declaration of antilove?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you like to outline the conditions under which we are allowed to relate to each other?”

  “I could ask you the same thing. Would you like to impose your love on me?”

  “Impose?” he huffed, and set his mug down angrily.

  I couldn’t believe it. The man had been drained of empathy. How was I going to drill through his dense brain?

  “Let’s go over this again,” I said.

  “Again?”

  “Time is more linear than we think,” I lied. “And the only way we can come to an understanding is by returning to the ground zero of our argument and reliving the whole thing over again even though during the reconstruction process we will come across minor blind spots—nothing drastic, but holes nonetheless, small deaths we will have to account for later.”

  He looked at me, as mute as a cow.

  I decided to barrel on: “It’s the job of the few who cherish a distrust of love and who are aware, as Pascal famously warned, that faking love turns you into the lover—or as the gentle-spirited Pessoa put it, that love is a thought—to make sure that the other weaker members of the human race are perpetually reminded that love is a senseless fabrication designed to disinherit us from ourselves, because once the loved one dies, one is left confused and disoriented with nowhere to go, like a rat in a maze. While you are loving someone, you are subject to false feelings of permanence, but love can’t keep anyone alive; therefore, it is deceitful, impermanent. So you see, my sentimental Ludo, love is a useless emotion that accomplishes little more than putting two people on a violent collision course from which they will never recover.”

  I felt a chill go down my spine. My hands were shaking. I could see that being exposed without warning to the toxic fumes of my life was causing Ludo to retreat. He was growing increasingly frustrated and angry. Is he going to leave, I wondered, and never return? Another disappearance to add to the inventory?

  “I’ve had it,” he said, and stomped out of the kitchen. He was muttering, “Impossible, impossible.”

  I followed him down the corridor. Taüt was at my heels again.

  “Why do you repeat everything twice?” I asked desperately.

  He said nothing at first. Then he turned around, bore into me with his eyes, and said: “Because it is the Italian way!”

  “The Bembo way?”

  There was steam coming out of his ears. He got dressed in a hurry and went out on a walk without brushing his teeth or washing his face. I told myself that he would be back. A man like Ludo Bembo doesn’t stay out for long if he hasn’t properly groomed himself. And besides that, there was the addictive nature of the sex we’d been having, which I knew would have him back at my door in a matter of hours.

  I leaned out the window at the end of the corridor and saw him marching down the gray sidewalk. He looked so stiff that I thought he was made of cardboard. I told him as much.

  “Any stiffer, Ludo Bembo, and people will mistake you for a fake! Part of the 99.9 percent!”

  But he didn’t hear me. He had turned the corner by then. I stood at the window feeling empty. I was reeling from the startling crescendo of our fight. I looked around. I was alone again, far from everyone. I sat on the recamier and caressed the three crusty crevices. The clock struck noon. A moment later, my father, whom I had thought of less and less over the course of the week, was stirring inside me. His mustache had grown. Hair grows even after a person has died. It’s innately insistent, just like the ever-mutating, multiplying self. His mustache, with its frayed broomlike ends, was dragging on the floor of my void, sweeping the abyss. He wielded his cane to tap the base of my mind, and said, Child, take the wisdom of your ancestors one step further. Complete Pessoa’s sente
nce. If he writes “love is a thought,” then finish his verse by writing “love is a thought not worth having.” Then he retreated again into the deep dark folds of the void. In my mind’s eye, I saw him sink slowly, as if he were being sucked into a pool of quicksand. His mustache floated on the surface for a moment—long, white, illuminated by a ray of light. Then it, too, disappeared into the darkness. And Taüt was nowhere to be found.

  Ludo’s absence lasted considerably longer than I’d expected. While I waited for his return, I paced the corridor with this or that book in hand. After an hour, I had devised a system. I went through Quim Monzó’s shelves and picked up books by authors whose last names began with a B. This I did as a twofold tribute to Ludo Bembo, whose last initial needless to say is a B, and who, it appeared, was a man in the habit of saying certain key words twice; therefore, B, being the second letter in the alphabet, was doubly resonant for him because it complemented his linguistic tic beautifully.

  At first, I consulted the authors I had chosen—Borges, Barthes, Beckett, Blanchot—recklessly, with a haphazard air. Whenever it struck me to read a sentence, I opened the book at hand to a random page and read one. I didn’t pause to extract from each line whatever mystical message was embedded within its grammar. I had to make up for lost time. During the days I had spent with Ludo, I hadn’t consulted the Matrix of Literature. I hadn’t advanced the Grand Tour of Exile. I had betrayed the Hosseinis by allowing myself to be derailed by lust. But now that I had committed the deed, it was my duty to extract from the obscure folds of literature whatever information I could find regarding Ludo Bembo. To ask: What is his role in my miserly, ill-fated life?

  I continued pacing until eventually fate, or reason, or a breeze carrying with it the sweaty scent of Nietzsche—the perfume of action—stopped me in my tracks and forced me to reconsider. I realized that my plan was in need of further geometry. It was lacking in structure.

  After a moment’s reflection, I concluded that I should consult a book only at the completion of the second length of the hallway, the twentieth, the two hundredth, and the two thousandth. If I wasn’t consistent in my tribute to the “double,” then the books would refuse to yield the information I needed in order to understand Ludo Bembo. They would become reserved, withholding, mute—frigid texts, like the ones that passive readers pick up so casually. They would no longer operate as oracles.

  As soon as my approach had taken on the correct mathematical dimensions, the messages started to arrive with generosity, with pleasure, with a kind of jouissance that proved to me that the text itself desired me, that a two-way street existed between me and my chosen books, an open conduit, a clear and lucid channel of communication—proof that literature, as my father had taught me, is the only magnanimous host, the most charitable company, and evidence that despite my erotic digression I was achieving my goal of abolishing all boundaries between myself and the infinite, centerless labyrinth of mirrors that is the Matrix of Literature. After completing the hundredth length of the corridor, I paused to reflect and concluded that Ludo Bembo—despite his rude lack of understanding, his powerful ignorance—played a decisive role in advancing the Grand Tour of Exile and was therefore also influential in the advancement of my notebook, which, as a mirror and record, was in the process of carving out its own corner in the gossamer of the cosmos.

  But what Ludo Bembo would come to symbolize, I hadn’t the faintest idea. For now, though, I was comforted by the notion that he would be back and that we would annihilate each other through hot passion once more. Comforted? I considered this and again felt suspicion raise its wary head. I felt my void swell. It was unbearably painful. My moods were cycling. To distract myself, I continued to pace the corridor. I wanted to arrive at two hundred so I could consult the oracle of literature once more.

  The two-hundredth length afforded the following gift from Beckett, that lone wolf of language: What remains of all that misery? As I read Beckett’s words out loud, Taüt appeared at my heels. The bird paced with me like a loyal dog the rest of the way. I had to slow down significantly in order for the little beast to keep up.

  The consultation after the two-hundred-twentieth length revealed Borges, whose mind is a mirror image of the matrix itself: Fate is partial to repetitions, variations, symmetries. My suspicion that Ludo would return was consolidated. At the two-hundred-twenty-second length, weak from exhaustion, I let my gaze fall on the following quote by Barthes, playful antisystematizer: Mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.

  Daylight was waning. The vast darkness of night was approaching. I looked down at the ground. The bird, I noticed, was looking more haggard than ever. I wondered if he had absorbed my father. If somehow the fumes of my father’s death had seeped out of my pores and gone into the bird. I felt as if my lungs were filling with water. I collapsed on the red recamier. I needed to cry. No. Cry was too mild a word. I needed to sob. I needed to wail. But I couldn’t. My eyes burned from the dry sting of arid tears. Eventually, I slept. I awoke right before dawn, those early hours when the light is soft and silver and tinged with a faint yellow by the emerging sun. There was a knock on the door. It was Ludo Bembo. The water drained out of my lungs. I could breathe again. I stared at that curly head of his through the keyhole. He was holding a stack of books in his hand. For a moment, hopeful, I thought he had gone out to study, to open himself up through reading to the redundant nature of the universe. But then I suddenly remembered the Tentacle of Ice, that vampire woman, and felt myself clam up with distaste. I wondered if he had gone to sleep with her in order to lighten his load, discharge himself of any built-up sexual tensions, and if the books were just a cover for the time he had spent with her. I knocked back to let him know I was on the other side of the door.

  “So you’re there,” he said tenderly and somewhat desperately.

  “Were you with the Tentacle of Ice?” I inquired with rehearsed detachment.

  “Who?” he whined.

  A liar and a bore.

  “That icy lady with the long curls and the sexy shoes you were kissing at the market.”

  “You saw that?”

  “You know I saw that. This is the second time I’ve caught you lying to yourself. In a short span of time, too.”

  We exchanged all this through the thick wooden door. Our voices were muffled, distant. “I was at the library,” he exclaimed. “Then I saw my friend Fausta. She’s a rare-book dealer.”

  “Fausta, as in the female version of Faust, related to Goethe?” I asked with intrigue.

  “You can look at it that way if you want,” he murmured into the wood.

  He begged me to open the door. Through the keyhole, I could see contempt in his eyes but also foreboding, helplessness, fatigue—a man reeling from sexual withdrawal. I told him I was reluctant. I told him that I had perceived a few things in his absence. For one, that he was a man with a dual nature. In other words, that there were two versions of himself encapsulated within a single body, but that rather than acknowledging his multiple selves, as I had, he was forcing one self to hide self-consciously within the other because he refused to be at ease with the contradictions of his character. This, I warned him, would be his greatest downfall. This refusal to be multiple. If he insisted on switching masks, from rigid to tender, cold to passionate, he would forever give the false impression of being a fake even though he was one of my own, an ill-fated man sorrowfully living out his days in exile. Why else would he be attracted to me? After that, I told him it was clear he had some healing to do. The ill-fated, I lectured him, gain their power by being subtle, bold, detached, messy; in other words, by being many things at once. I assured him that even though he had a long way to go before he could accept his own fragmentation I was sure he would get there through diligence and hard work. I told him I would be willing to help him along. All of this came out of my mouth so naturally, and with such warmth, that I could see the positive effects it had on him. He was listening attentively on the other sid
e of the door. He had his ear pressed up against the seam, and he kept nodding. I could see his curls bouncing up and down. I warned him to step away; I was about to open up.

  We collapsed into each other almost immediately. It was the best sex we’d had yet. I experienced, simultaneous with his, a long sweet spasm that took me beyond the limits of my body and then brought me back again. When he had finished, he muttered something through his lingering ecstasy.

  “God,” he said. “Oh God, that was so good.”

  I had no choice but to issue a second warning. I made sure to be gentle. I said the bare minimum. I quoted Stendhal through Nietzsche.

  “God’s only excuse is that he does not exist.”

  “It’s just a figure of speech,” he said.

  Over the next few weeks, Ludo came over with increasing frequency and always stayed the night. He often cancelled his classes or sent someone—I don’t know who—to cover his lectures for him. Most likely the Tentacle of Ice. Judging from the brief but telling exchange I had witnessed between them at the market, she was desperate for his attention. After all, she had ornamented herself as if she were a Christmas tree. It seemed to me she was perfectly capable of driving sixty miles to stand before his pale-faced students and lecture on the etymology of words in order to ingratiate herself with him, Ludo Bembo, singular man whose head is, according to my diagnostics, subdivided into containers designed to avoid all manner of cross-contamination between thoughts, feelings, impulses; a man in possession of terrifying amounts of self-control; a man who, paradoxical to his inherent interest in literature, invests a great deal of his psychic energy in negating the void. A man like Ildefons Cerdà.

  But still, I thought to myself, he was drawn to me in order to become multiple and to pasture, as the ill-fated do, on contradiction, pessimism, pain. He was drawn to someone who, like him, had gone through the ringer of exile. One of the many who munch on manure, where the earth’s darkest humors lie; who are loud, messy, content to live in contradiction, both alive and dead, composed of a thousand shimmering fragments and as slender as a ghost at the same time. Those who haunt their hunters.