18% Gray

by Zachary Karabashliev

  When two people turn their backs on each other, one usually looks ahead and the other—to the past. I was staring at CNN.

  *

  “There must be better places to photograph than this wasteland!” A low male voice startles me. Right behind my car, a big, black, shiny police motorcycle has pulled up. No! I’ll just never wise up. “There must be better places, huh?” Behind the uniformed giant’s mirrored aviators, there are probably irises, a retina, a cornea, optic nerves, humanity . . . I don’t see any of that. The cop is on his motorcycle, inches away from a big bag of marijuana and three yards away from a jackass with a camera.

  “Uh-h . . .” Nothing comes out of my mouth.

  “You didn’t signal before you pulled off the main road.” The cop stirs in his seat. He keeps staring at me. He pulls off one of his gloves and moves his fingers. Should I start running? Should I . . . “This is illegal, you know.” Every American cop loves uttering the word “illegal.” “It’s illegal.” I want to murder him. A man unwittingly starts behaving like a criminal simply because he is driving with a load of marijuana in the trunk.

  “I’m sorry, sir!” I mumble, while the cop takes off his other glove. Is he going to give me a ticket or what? “I’m sorry!” Cops like to see that you are sorry, that you are very sorry. “I’m very sorry.” And that you respect them. “I respect the law, sir. I’m sorry.” You can save yourself all sorts of trouble if you just keep your head down.

  “Me, too. Drivers license and registration, please.” Maniac. This one’s a maniac. “Yes, sir. Of course, sir.” In moments like this I understand why you need an unregistered gun in the glove compartment. I take out the documents and approach him.

  “Are you from the newspaper?” There we go. Am I from the paper? What’s the right answer? To be or not to be from the paper? There was a trace of friendliness in his tone. Perhaps even more? Perhaps. What if he is on very good terms with the local media? What if he is the local hero in the battle against human and drug trafficking? Has he been on the front page?

  “No, sir. I’m not from the paper.”

  “That’s what I thought.” The cop turns away slightly and pulls out a bottle of water. He unscrews the cap carefully and takes a long sip without shifting his sunglasses from me. My nose itches. I scratch it with the hand holding the car insurance policy slip. Stella’s name flashes before my eyes. “That’s what I thought.” The cop takes off his glasses, pulls out a small white handkerchief from his top pocket, and starts wiping them carefully without even glancing at the papers in my hand. Gestapo blue eyes, nothing human. “Take your pictures and drive safely. It’s a danger zone out here. The fires. Have a nice day.” The cop puts his shades on and starts his engine. My legs are shaking. “Next time, signal when you pull over!”

  *

  I met Ken in Ohio. At the bar where I worked there was a regular customer who was thirty-something. She would show up from time to time, order a pint of the local amber, sit at the corner table, and stare blankly at one of the TVs. I didn’t know her name. I remembered her face, just like I remember the faces of everyone who has ever ordered something from me. So one night she showed up with someone. He had light blue, glazed eyes and a receding hairline. He was a little chubby and wore a shirt buttoned-up to the top with no tie. She ordered the usual brew, he—a Coca-Cola. He attempted to pay the bill but she stopped him and firmly paid for her own drink, which made him uncomfortable, I think. Then, she made the surprising move of introducing us to each other. My name was obvious to everyone because it was pinned on my vest, but she created the illusion for him that she had known me for a long time. His name was Ken. Hers was still unknown to me. Pleased to meet you, pleased to meet you. They sat at the most distant table and for a while I forgot about them. In an hour, she came to the bar and thanked me for being so kind to her. I glanced at Ken over her shoulder and noticed that he was staring at the glass between his nervous palms. I suspected, by now, that his Coke had warmed up like a cup of bad coffee. She introduced herself—Linda—and explained that she had met the guy just recently and didn’t know of any other place where she would feel safe. This reminds me of a home I once had, she said.

  I thanked her for that and poured another pint of draft beer. Two weeks later, I saw them again. They looked more relaxed with each other, although Linda still paid her bill separately. Then they started coming every week—usually on Wednesdays. I suppose the idea of meeting on the weekend seemed too involving to her. The way they treated each other made me think that he had been widowed for a long time and that she had never been engaged. Later, I would learn that I had almost been right.

  It must have been a Thursday, because Friends was on when they came back in. She ordered not her usual beer, but vodka and orange juice (uh, big night?), he asked for a Coke again, and they sat at a table by the window. At this moment, they were the only customers I had. I remember that during a commercial break, I decided to run to the back for more white wine. When I returned, holding a few bottles of chardonnay and sauvignon blanc in my arms, I saw Linda, stiffened, clasping the arm rests of her chair as if trying to get up but staying glued to the seat. Ken, across from her, was frozen with some kind of a half-assed grin on his face—a leftover from the last moment of an interrupted conversation. They looked like a still from a paused video. I left the bottles and quickly ran over to their table. Ken still couldn’t peel that stupid grimace off his face. Linda, rolling her eyes, pointed to her throat. I grabbed her from behind, crossed her arms over her chest and shook her. A moment later, she noisily inhaled, started coughing, and her face eventually regained its color. She had choked on a piece of pulp from the orange juice.

  Ken claimed that I had saved the love of his life, for which he would always be indebted to me.

  *

  Before leaving California, I cross a vast field with hundreds of huge windmills, lazily masticating the desert air. Behind them is a row of hills, softened by the distance and the haze and spotted with white, round rocks like a leopard.

  And then, at that moment, in the dry sky with no trace of a cloud—I see the rainbow. Seven small, mother-of-pearl brushstrokes, and not in the usual pastel colors, but in their saturated versions—from electric blue, poison green, and golden yellow to tangerine orange. If God has painted this—I smile and adjust my sweaty ass, which is stuck to the seat—he is nothing but a child. There are a couple more cars sharing the long drawn-out highway, but I get the unerring feeling that this rainbow is meant for me. This cutout up in the sweltering sky is absolutely out of place. At the same time, I’m sure that I’m not hallucinating and that it is not an illusion. I don’t even bother photographing it—some things are not meant to be captured on film.

  *

  Six months after we met the Artist, Stella bought a ticket to Paris. “I can’t stand this any more, Zack. I have to find myself and I have to do it alone.” I didn’t know what to say. There was nothing I could say. Could I stop her? When somebody is getting ready for their personal trip, the only thing you can do is help with the luggage. My pain in those last few days was unbearable, but I think I managed to conceal it. The morning before she left, we had coffee, I sent her off to the airport, and went to work. When I came home, I noticed her coffee cup with the pale lipstick mark on the rim. I didn’t wash it. Why did I put it away unwashed? She had left everything here—her paintings, her poems, her youth, everything . . . Why did I make a fetish out of this particular trace of her? The two weeks during which she was gone, I spent my time at airports and in hotel rooms. I stayed late at hotel bars drinking martini after martini. I listened to strangers’ bullshit, then went up to my room, watched porn, CNN, and fell asleep hugging the pillows. During the day, I perused protocols and data, looking for the tiniest discrepancy to catch. Around that time, I started eating Toblerones.

  *

  If I were to travel long enough in one direction, I’d pass through deserts, mountains, and seas, and get back to the point where I started.
The spaces—even this road rushing toward the horizon—no matter how flat they look, are, after all, parts of one globe which can be walked around. We know that. But what about time? Does it still remain so incomprehensible?

  In the distance, on the roof of a wooden building, I see a big white sign reading: JESUS CHRIST IS LORD. Smaller letters underneath it read: Pumpkins and corn for sale.

  And what if we just have the wrong idea about time? More precisely, about the direction we are moving in it. We have been taught to believe that life begins with birth, goes through maturity, aging, and, inevitably, ends badly. According to this universal outlook, things move from new toward old, from pleasure toward pain, from passion to indifference, from beauty to rotten teeth and Alzheimer’s. In this natural order of events, every relatively reasonable, thinking individual would have to be a pessimist, since that is the only possible attitude given the system in which we exist. In this natural order of events—birth, childhood, youth, old age, death—any more optimistic theory would have to be regarded as a sign of a psychological disturbance, or fiction. It wouldn’t have been in unison with nature. But what if all of it is wrong? What if we actually live our lives backward? What if we live in—let’s call it—the principle of backward time? What if everything starts with death, whose cause we choose, goes through old age (in most cases), sickness, habits, middle age, crises, youth, disappointments, love, adolescence, hopes, childhood, and ends up in the womb? What if this is the natural order of things and optimism is a residue of one natural way of thinking? What if what they taught us in school is simply a superstition? It’s been clear to poets who have predicted their own deaths down to the last detail, to artists who painted future cities and machines, to psychics describing events with incredible precision, to prophets of all kinds of religions all over the world. And if this isn’t enough, children cannot be wrong. Babies, for example, cry when they are born. For no other reason than they are mercilessly clear that their lives are just ending. With time however, they become used to the rules of the game. They pretend to understand backward living, they learn to forget who they are, and only from time to time, at a playground, you can hear a kid starting a story with the words, “Once upon a time, when I was a grownup . . .” What if we live not our real lives, but a reflection of them, in which everything is upside down? Maybe, with every new decision we make, we try to correct events from the past, which is impossible, and thus we are sentenced to failure. Every single plan we make for the future is inadequate because it’s pointed in the wrong direction.

  Under the principle of backward time, everything has already happened.

  *

  America is still one of the few places in the world where a person can make a decent living with honest work and perseverance. I did it otherwise. Here is what happened. After the choking incident, Ken and Linda became more frequent visitors to the bar. Something like a friendship started to form between us. And while she was still reserved, or maybe embarrassed by the episode, Ken stared at everything I said with his blue eyes wide open and a smile ready to glide toward his old-fashioned sideburns at any moment. When I talked to him, he had the annoying habit of moving his lips, as if he were listening to me with them.

  One evening, Ken showed up earlier than usual, looking nervous and excited. Linda arrived at the regular time and they withdrew to their table in the corner. Ken never stopped glancing at me, as if he were afraid I might leave. Then they left. I was surprised later to see him entering the bar just before closing time. He said he had something important to tell me. The information he wanted to share with me was “extremely important.” I kept on doing what I was doing—closing the bar and listening to him inattentively. Ken was the chief buyer for an upholstery-producing factory, how important could that be? It was a small business, quite conservative. The son of the owner had just taken over the company and had been promising serious changes. No one, however, expected them to be this serious, said Ken, signaling to me to come closer and listen carefully. As far as I knew, Ken didn’t drink, which made this otherwise inebriated gesture somehow significant. I leaned over the bar.

  “Don Simons,” whispered Ken, “the new boss, has signed a contract with Honda.” I didn’t know what to say, so I shrugged.

  “Well, good.”

  “For supplying the interior upholstery of the new cars made here for the American market.”

  “So?”

  “Don signed the contract for the new model, which means that we have to increase our production by at least five hundred percent. He doesn’t have that much capital. That’s why he’s selling the business to an investment company in Cleveland.”

  “What do you mean, selling it?”

  “I mean, selling it—with all its assets.”

  “What about you? What about the workers?”

  “Listen. Only a few people know this, believe me, only a few. You don’t need to know how I know it. What you need to do tomorrow is go to the closest stock exchange, or do it over the Internet. Now . . . listen to me carefully. The investor company is called INSTALLMATIC. Buy as much stock in INSTALLMATIC as you can. Their index is . . . get something to write with . . . their index on the New York Stock Exchange is JPI. You got it? JPI. So right now, their stock is selling at about four dollars a share. The day after tomorrow they will be worth at least three hundred percent more. At least. Zack, you understand? Do this. Do it for yourself and your wife.”

  “And how about you?” I ask. “Are you gonna do it?”

  “No, I can’t. If they catch me, I’ll go to jail. This is no joke.” I start wiping the counter for a while.

  “Ken,” I say. “I have a better idea. I’ll scrape together some money, but I don’t have a lot. If you lend me some, I’ll buy stocks for you, then we’ll share the profit.”

  “Three hundred percent, Zack. I’m telling you.”

  After closing the bar, I went home and spent a sleepless night. Without telling Stella, I gathered up everything we had in the bank. I pawned the car and the few valuables we owned. Before noon I had eleven thousand dollars, with which I bought shares of INSTALLMATIC. I borrowed twenty more from Ken, bought more shares and started waiting. The next day, Don Simons announced the sale of his company. The shares went up. Not by the predicted three hundred percent. Five hundred.

  Two days later I sold the shares, walked into the photo store on High Street and bought all the photo equipment I needed. And for Stella, I bought the biggest easel from the art store. I went home and told her everything. That night, we went to a fancy restaurant, we ate the most expensive steaks, drank expensive wine, expensive cognac, and champagne as the city lights sparkled in the quiet waters of the Ohio River. We went home late, staggering and undressing each other up the stairs. We made love slowly and passionately, falling asleep embracing, woke up, and made love again. We were winners. It was delicious.

  *

  —aren’t you sometimes afraid that this will remain here between us? all of these words, thoughts, silences . . . all this will remain unshared?

  —is that why you’re taking pictures of me?

  —maybe

  —no, i’m not afraid.

  *

  I catch up with a red pick-up truck. In its bed, two plastic black and white bags, whipped by the wind and speed, violently beat the crap out of each other. After a few moments of combat, one prevails and the other flies out and sticks to my windshield, right under the left wiper blade. I turn on the wipers to shoo away the intruder and switch on the radio, hoping to distract myself from my thoughts. I search the stations and I pause at a country song, “pray, pray, pray” sings the man, lamenting over his nights without his beloved woman. I step on the gas so I can pass the red pick-up. Just a second before I leave it behind, I notice the weathered bumper sticker that reads PRAY. What is this? Yet another coincidence? Or yet more proof that everything is just a set up. Why did I have to listen to country, a style I never liked, and what are the odds of hearing and seeing the same
word at the same time in the middle of the desert? Do these coincidences play into the backward time I was thinking about before I caught up with the red pick-up? Is it possible that this synchronicity is another reminder (like confusing déjà vu) that I don’t think straight? What is straight, anyway?

  I take the exit toward a small town. I need to eat something. At the second light, the street narrows—one of the lanes is under construction and some pipes jut out of the asphalt. I drive slowly past sign that reads MEN AT WORK. Then I see the men at work. My eyes are drawn to one guy, who is ferociously beating the asphalt with a sledgehammer. I’d like to be a worker now, too; with a sledgehammer and an orange helmet; with a sweaty, once-white T-shirt and jeans worn out in the crotch. I want to take a hammer and beat the earth with it until it cracks open and I find Stella. Then I won’t mess up my head with theories anymore.