And what is it then, if not laziness?
I don’t know, I have to think.
What is there to think about?
I have to think about it.
Wicked servant, you anger me!
I’m sorry.
What is it then, if not laziness?
What?
Don’t pretend to be stupider than you are, sly one! Don’t you put on an act with me!
I’m not putting on an act.
You are putting on an act.
I’m not. Who are you anyway?
It doesn’t matter.
What do you want?
Why didn’t you try to do something with the talent I gave you?
What talent?
What talent?! Now you really are pushing it, wicked one!
Oh.
Tell me why.
Because . . .
Yes?
Because . . .
I’m listening.
Because I was . . .
What?
Afraid? Is that you want to hear? I was afraid to lose what I had.
What you have is not yours, stupid! You have nothing . . . Nothing! Understand that and go out into the world, before you anger me so much that I take back everything you think you have. It’s not yours. It’s mine! I’ve given it to you to use. Not to bury it in the ground, you ungrateful one. Get out. Out!
Please don’t be mad. I have one little question.
I’m not mad. This is how I talk. What do you want to ask?
Isn’t there at least one servant in the parable, maybe a fourth one, who is not mentioned, who might have tried to do something with his talents but lost them? Between the first servant with the five talents and the second one with two, there might have been two more—with three and four talents, respectively, I think.
You’re thinking too much!
Please tell me what happened to the fourth servant.
What do you want to know?
What happened to him?
How should I know? I don’t keep track of those who lose, but of those who don’t win!
How about the losers?
There are no losers! The talents are mine!
I wake up. My heart pounds in my throat. The voice still echoes in my head. I don’t remember ever hearing it more clearly. Five talents—fifty thousand dollars. Two talents—twenty thousand. Danny said that the grass is worth between twenty and fifty.
God, which one of those servants am I?
*
The smell of the previous owners never left the house despite our efforts, including changing the carpet, repainting, and countless attempts with professional-strength cleaning products. The odor was most repulsive in the studio, where it smelled like rotting vegetables, perhaps garlic. Stella didn’t even bother taking her easel in there. For a while, she tried painting outside in the yard, but she said the sun was too bright. She didn’t like painting outdoors. She felt like she was being watched from all sides. She couldn’t get in the right mood. It didn’t work, it just did not work . . . She couldn’t stand the traffic on her way to work, she didn’t like the neighborhood with our invisible neighbors, and she detested the house even more than that repulsive flat in Bulgaria with the noisy planes flying over it. Stella was not happy in our new home.
*
I wake up to a slamming door. Startled, I jump. My heart races wildly. There’s no one in the room. I get up and look out through the blinds. A man in the parking lot slams the trunk of a huge Lincoln, gets in, and drives off, screeching his tires. Strange. Even stranger than that is the light. I look at the clock. Eight in the morning. Outside however, it seems to be a different time. It’s dusk. Sunset. Orange. Golden twilight. A strong wind is bending the palm trees around the little pool. I decide that the clock is broken and I’ve slept through the entire day. I go outside. The smell of smoke hits my nostrils, and I see the flying bits of ash. The air really is golden-orange. All of a sudden I realize what scares me the most—the silence. It’s silent. Silent almost as if in a dream. In the parking lot there is only one car, mine. My first instinct is to run to the reception desk, but instead I grab my camera and load a roll of color film, the most light-sensitive I have. I take pictures of the empty parking lot, the bending palm trees, the orange horizon, the American flag reflected in the orange windows of the motel . . . I feel like I am in the quiet belly of an orange balloon, which will burst any moment now, and I will see the world in the colors I remember. I take a few more shots, not knowing—and not even wanting to know—whether I’m dreaming or whether a nuclear war has actually started.
I load my belongings in the car calmly, shove the sack of marijuana in the trunk, and open a Toblerone. I bite off two triangles, and, with Juanita’s knife in one hand and a chocolate bar in the other, I head off toward the reception desk. War or no war, one must remember what needs to be returned and to whom. Then I see the fire trucks. And the police cars. A man in uniform, Sergeant Somebody, blocks my way. His glance is fixed on the big knife in my hand. I explain that I have to return it to the receptionist and pay for my stay in the motel. This area, he says, is an evacuation zone and you have to leave immediately. That damned Santa Ana has blown the wild fires all the way here. But . . . I have to return this. You have to leave immediately! I promised to return . . . Next time—the sergeant interrupts me. We are just a few miles shy of the most severe fires in California. Don’t you watch TV?!? He tells me that I can use this road and that road before they are shut down. I-8 is blocked, 63 South is jammed. A state of emergency has been declared.
I finish up my Toblerone in the car, put the knife under the driver’s seat, and take off.
*
I must have made the decision to buy that house subconsciously, hoping that its fireplace would warm up our relationship. At first, Stella was totally against the whole idea of buying a house, but then she gave in and let me do whatever I wanted. I regretted this. I had allowed the real estate propaganda to lure me in, cash out its commission, and then ditch me in this frigid house.
One of the reasons we didn’t sell it right away, once we realized that we couldn’t live there, was that we would have lost a load of money—the real estate market was growing bitterer by the minute. The other reason was the canyon next to the house. A creek bubbled through it and, depending on the year, it would reach the ocean, or disappear amidst the rocks a few miles down. Birds chirped in the bushes and trees, and cicadas buzzed incessantly in the grass. At night, the soundtrack was taken over by choirs of squalling frogs. The proximity to this amazing oasis, even though it was surrounded by dull, identical suburbs, made us inclined to keep the house a bit longer.
Stella kept her studio in that dilapidated building downtown. Her paintings were stored away, actually piled on top of each other, dusty and covered with bed sheets. I made her promise time and again to bring at least a few home so we could hang them in the house. She never did.
As if she had anticipated the fires.
As if she had seen them.
As if she had provoked them.
*
On one side of the road, more and more houses are engulfed by flames. Over the hills in the distance, I see burning avocado farms, blackened orchards, smoldering fields. I refuse to photograph them. Instead, I take a few shots of the marshlands on the other side of the road, the deserted trailers, and the old rain gullies. I pass a trailer park with erect antennae sticking up toward the sky. They look like enormous caterpillars with their legs randomly pulled out. I photograph that, too. Then I keep driving east.
I can feel the desert now, even though I’m still driving by harvested fields filled with hay bales. At one point, the traffic stalls completely. The cars crawl one at a time under a giant pillar of smoke hovering over the highway. It’s my turn now. I pass under the dirty rainbow.
*
We met with the Artist one more time. Those days I had started giving Stella expensive, and often useless, gifts which she accepted with feigned en
thusiasm. After two years of working for the company, I managed to scrape together a few days off, used the many thousands of free miles on my MasterCard, and surprised her for her birthday.
It was fall in Paris. We roamed the city all day long. It seemed that I had never seen so many people kissing. I had brought my camera but felt no need whatsoever to look at this city through the rectangular eye of the viewfinder. Everything looked boring, banal, and oh-so-déjà vu. We spent the afternoon at the Louvre. Later, I pulled out Bernard Foucault’s business card, and, despite Stella’s protests, called him. She didn’t want me to do it, insisting that he had invited us only out of courtesy. It didn’t mean that we should actually call him three years later. Besides, he would hardly remember us. But I had the feeling that the cold weed creeping through my relationship with Stella had sprouted during our first menacing meeting with that man. Something made me believe that I could turn our life back if only I settled the score with him at another meeting. That is, if I could only manage to tame my overwhelming urge to annihilate this unsuspecting man. I had spent months preparing for this rendezvous. I had spent countless hours rehearsing my lines. I had to present myself as a loving husband, a fan of the Artist, and a devout art aficionado.
We met at a small family restaurant somewhere in Montmartre. I behaved myself all through the second bottle of cabernet. But then the Artist started talking about art, acts of creation, and such, and everything went to hell.
“You know what Bernard . . . romanticizing the act of creating a painting is the same as exalting the flight of a bird.”
“And . . . uh, Zacque, what’s so bad about that? Why not look at the world from a bird’s eye view?”
“Monsieur Bernard, birds don’t fly because they desperately need to see the world from a bird’s eye view, but simply because they cannot find what they are looking for on the ground.”
“And what is that, Zacque?” I loathed, absolutely loathed, the way he pronounced my name, adding that short, soft “que,” that diminutive suffix fused with garlic breath.
“Bernard, listen to me! Are you listening? Listen now, the creative act of an artist and the flight of a crane or a blackbird have one sole purpose—survival. Survival!”
“And why do you think, uh, so?”
“Even the most beautiful bird, Bernard, doesn’t fly for pleasure, but for practical reasons. And actually, Bernard, I’m talking about true art, the art of your own countrymen—Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Gauguin, Matisse . . . about true art, not some kind of post-postmodern, neo-minimalist, monumental shit.”
“Everybody creates art the best they can.” Bernard tries not to be hurt.
“Excuse me!?” I’m already furious. “Bernard”—I slam my fist down on the table—“art is not doing what we can do! Art is doing what we can’t not do! No matter how well we do it. Actually the better you do it—the worse! This turns us from honest amateurs into jaded professionals. It turns us into craftsmen, tailors, bricklayers, shoemakers. What? I’m making no sense? Of course I’m not. What makes me happy? What about ha . . . ? Happiness? O-o-oh, happiness, shmappiness, love, God—these are all probably functions of the liver. Or the brain, same fucking difference. Simply pheromones, hormones, chemistry . . . It’s been proven. Read scientific literature!”
I spilled wine on my shirt, ordered one last bottle, stuffed my face with crème brûlée, paid the bill, and we left.
The full moon outside energized me even more. I somehow remembered a verse by François Villon, shouted it in Bulgarian, and three youngsters in leather jackets cussed me out, I lunged at them to fight, Stella and Bernard stood between them and me to separate us, he told them something, and his soft voice managed to calm them down.
Then he walked us to our hotel, we said good night, he kissed me (French, how French), and I headed up the stairs wobbling, expecting Stella to say good-bye and follow me. Disgusted with myself, I went into the bathroom right away to take a shower and stood under the warm Parisian water for a long time. When I got out, Stella was not in the room. I sat in the chair next to the bed for several endless minutes before I dared peek through the curtains down at the little courtyard where I left them. The cobblestones of Montmartre bluishly reflected the ample moon light.
And then I saw the Artist and Stella pull away from each other. She shot a quick glance up toward our window and disappeared into the shadow of the entrance.
*
I turn on the radio. Every station is broadcasting the fires. Apparently they started yesterday. The first flames had been noticed at daybreak in Potrero, a small town north of the Mexican border. Some David Finley called 911 and said that he could see flames at a neighboring ranch, which was uninhabited. He also said that he’d stay to protect his home if things became critical. Twenty minutes later the fire was out of control. David Finley burned to death in his ranch along with his handicapped son. Forty miles north of there, a little while later, another fire had been spotted. A few miles to the west, the forests of Witch Creek blazed up, those flames were heading to the southwest, after just an hour they had reached a height of fifty or sixty meters and were moving so fast that no living creature in their path had even a prayer of escaping. In Steel Canyon, another fire was raging across the country, picking up speed, and, if it had reached Descanso Valley, hundreds of homes could have been destroyed. Bandy Canyon, Rainbow Canyon, San Martos Canyon, Palomar, Sorrento Hills, Pomerado . . . Highway 15 in northern San Diego is experiencing traffic delays because of low visibility due to the smoke. The Harris Fire roared west all morning across Rancho Bernardo and Poway, destroying hundreds of structures and forcing thousands of people from their homes as it followed the same path taken by the disastrous Cedar Fire a few years earlier. Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated. Those fires—I come to understand—are being pushed by strong Santa Ana winds. The same winds are expected to ground firefighting aircraft for a second straight day. The Santa Ana winds make taming the fires impossible.
People who have lost their homes call the radio stations.
An out-of-breath, raspy voice: “. . . the Devil’s wind, the Devil’s wind came . . . Not Santa Ana, it’s Satana!”
A calm voice: “. . . have no idea where I’ll spend the night. I have to be in court tomorrow morning, but all of my suits are gone.”
A high-pitched voice, a little crazy sounding: “. . . the most important thing is that we managed to save Becky . . . Becky, say ‘Hi,’ say ‘Hi,’ Becky, say . . . ruff, ruff . . . Good girl!”
*
What happened between Stella and me in France was as sudden as love at first sight. We spent the second night in Paris avoiding each other’s glances and behaving matter-of-factly like accountants who have worked together at the same company for a long time. On our way back to the States, at the airport, we read magazines. I was secretly spying on her over the pages to make sure that I wasn’t imagining things. She was staring at an article that she was either reading for the tenth time or hadn’t started at all. Her face was impenetrable. We boarded the Boeing. I remember I was looking at the small green airplane on the screen before me, swallowing hard on the airplane food. While we were climbing above Paris, everything still seemed as serious as if it were make-believe. As if we were playing some kind of a game for grownups. And if one of us had started laughing, the other one would have immediately joined in, as had always happened during all of our years together.
This time, however, neither she nor I would give in. We both felt that this time, it was different.
While the little plane on the screen was over England, we still seemed to have a chance to avoid everything that would follow.
I tried to take a little nap over the Atlantic.
I woke up over Iceland, only to find her staring at the back of the seat in front of her.
Over Greenland, the suspicion that things had irrevocably changed settled silently between us.
Over Canada, I knew for certain that down below a cold and alien
continent was waiting for me.
After all those hours in the air, we landed in California like two strangers who merely helped each other with their luggage.
*
On an adjacent dirt road, against the background of some distant bluish mountains, I notice a dense swirl of smoke with a motorcycle flying in front of it. This fascinates me for some strange reason. I pull over on the shoulder abruptly, hit the brakes, and jump out of the car with the camera. A cloud of dust engulfs me. I snap three or four shots and run out of film. I reach in my pocket for more.
*
—have you ever been unsure about whether a memory, story, or dream belongs to you or me?
—no
—yesterday, i started telling something and suddenly i hesitated. i wasn’t sure whether it had actually happened to me or if i’d heard it from you
—darling, i know my memories
—mine seem like memories of memories. ghosts. as if i’m made out of ghosts
—stella?
—yes
—i’m in love with you
—you’re in love with my ghost, silly
—you just can’t be a ghost with these goose-bumped boobs, this long, tousled hair, these lips, and these blue eyes. you are sweet as milk and honey. there are no such ghosts
—there aren’t?
—no
*
After our return to America, Stella fell into something of a fever. She spent the first twenty-four hours in her studio, didn’t come home at all, and finished eleven paintings. She painted during every single minute of her free time. She came home exhausted, spattered with paint, and distant. At night, she stayed up late in front of the computer, writing. She withdrew, disappeared into her inner self, and, without giving off any negativity whatsoever, she began leaving me and everyone else around us. I noticed that she started walking straighter somehow. Her skin, despite the sleeplessness, was firm. Her face radiated softness—an unaddressed, different softness. Her eyes were both lively and cold at the same time. Stella explained nothing and wanted nothing. She painted. She didn’t talk. I, on the other hand, tried to find peace on my business trips. I monitored clinics that were recently visited and found reasons to conduct more and more site visits. I took up extra work and started moonlighting as a private consultant for another firm, thus violating my work contract with ICONIQ. I zealously chose to go to more and more distant and dull clinics. I spent hours and hours at airports, staring at TV screens, tuned in to the compulsory CNN. The same old news from the Near East. The same old dark stringy arms holding AK-47s above their heads. The same old white men getting off airplanes, wearing expensive suits. The same old explosions, same old anger, same old analyses, same old real estate problems, same old stock markets, same old natural disasters, same old advertisements of the same old companies that made sure everything was the same old same old.
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