Zachary Karabashliev - 18% Gray

I just need to leave California.

*

I started traveling often. The company paid me ninety dollars an hour for my business trips and the time I spent out of town. So I started choosing more indirect flights.

In order to get to Illinois, for instance, I’d fly to Texas, which added eight more hours at airports and planes. Money-wise, this was more than my grandma’s annual pension back in Bulgaria. The thought of it was absurd, but also entertaining in a way.

I’d fly to Florida through Chicago, which extended my journey by six to seven hours, even though there was a more direct flight from L.A.

To New Orleans I’d take a layover in Sacramento.

The longest way to New Jersey was through San Francisco.

I spent less time with Stella and our silences.

The company policy was that travel time shouldn’t exceeded seventy-five percent of the time spent at home. I began to appear as an exception. Scott the manager did not miss an opportunity to mention my professionalism and loyalty to the company. In fact, I felt fine in this new endeavor of mine — among people who needed my expertise, with employers who appreciated my efforts, and with a bank account which for the first time in my life looked promising. I felt strangely fulfilled. This was it — fulfilled. For the first time in years, I liked the idea of calling my mom and chatting with her. I’d mostly do it from airport coffee shops between flights. Those conversations were gifts from me, and she was happy and proud that I, her only beloved son, traveled so often, that I was succeeding professionally in America, while my friends back home could hardly make ends meet. Of course, I would conveniently neglect to mention the reason for my frequent travels, and it never even crossed her mind that I would be anything other than a photographer, writer, or artist of some kind, at the epicenter of something exciting. I don’t know how she would have taken the truth that I was visiting clinics, collecting data, and writing business reports instead of stories.

*

I’m driving southeast. Eventually the populated areas yield to vast wheat fields. The prices of the newly built houses advertised on the billboards along the freeway become lower and the landscape — more desolate. On the road I’m always fascinated by the ever-present wooden utility poles, the barbed wire fences all along the way to the East Coast — evidence of an America I fell in love with so long ago. Far, far away on the horizon rise murky, bluish mountains that don’t get any closer, even though I’ve been driving toward them for a while now. Between them and me lie acres of farmland. I pass huge yards where all sorts of combines, tractors, machinery, cement trucks, caterpillars, bobcats are covered in gray dust. Places like these frighten me. Further on, I pass an outdoor enclosure with enormous concrete pipes piled on top of each other, colored green, red, yellow, blue, and black like a huge art installation. Here and there to the left of the road, satellite antennae jut into the air, beneath them stand small houses, trailers, and bungalows. Alongside the asphalt there are yellowing patches of grass, burned thorns, tumbleweed, gravel, blown-out tires, beer cans, broken bottles, papers, shattered stop lights, oil stains, plastic bags waving in the wind — the remains of passing humans. From time to time, tall trees appear — slim, with light-gray dolphin skin and small, hard leaves, in groups of three or four. I don’t even know what these trees are called. I drive for a long time through uninteresting, flat places. No matter how unpopulated everything looks, though, from time to time I see the unavoidable Taco Bell, Shell, McDonald’s, Burger King, even Walmart, Pizza Hut, In and Out, Dunkin’ Donuts, Mobil, and Chevron — corporate calluses surrounded by tall palm trees, imitating oases.

I now figure that for the last couple years, I had been working hard to make my bank account pretty and my days unbearably boring. I know that this is also the case with all my co-workers and their co-workers’ co-workers. I haven’t met interesting people in a long time. I haven’t read a book in a long time. In fact, I now think that Stella had begun leaving me long before I saw her off last week. I had noticed those shadows of absence — first in her gaze, which withdrew from mine more quickly than before. Then, in our most intimate, still-occurring moments of closeness, one invisible part of her would remain half-turned away, as if to see whether someone was calling her. In our now rarer kisses, I’d feel that trace of coldness, like the breeze at dusk in late August. As a kid, I remember the old fishermen in my hometown saying that the sea was turning . Stella’s physical projection left me last week. But the larger part of her had left before then. And that’s the part I miss most.

I exit the freeway and pull over. At the foot of a yellowish hill scattered with large oval rocks, the shadow of a utility pole has cast a dark, elongated cross. A group of slender, dark green cypresses stand to the side like sentinels. I take the camera and carefully compose the picture in the viewfinder. I finish the roll, take it out, put it in my pocket and load a new one. I get back in the car.

An hour later and it’s still California. As far as my eyes can see, there are different nuances of yellow. The foreground is a freshly harvested field, as bright yellow as a punk hairdo. The hay bales are lined up in long, neat rows. A little further on is a murky-brownish field with huge heaps of straw dozing in the late afternoon. The air is yellow-brown, dyed by the desert wind. Yellow. Brown.

Then, from a dirt road adjacent to the freeway, a white convertible appears with a woman dressed in white, wearing a fluttering white scarf and dark sunglasses. Behind the car, a yellowish dust trail stretches for as long as my eyes can track it. I try holding the steering wheel with my left hand as I take a couple shots with my right. For a short while, the convertible and I drive at the same speed, and I get the feeling that I’m on a train, following my favorite movie star through the window. I’m not on a train. And the woman out there is no movie star, but perhaps the wife of a small-town accountant. Whoever she is, a moment later she turns right onto a perpendicular road and drives away. Drive away as much as you want, unknown lady. I will go on.

The foot of the mountains starts turning dark violet and the peaks — milky orange. Imperceptibly, it has begun getting dark. I pull off the freeway and stop in front of a small motel named Mirador. It’s quiet. A girl with a Spanish accent and a name tag that says GABRIELA checks me in. The motel is almost empty. I take the key and find my room.

I get in.

I turn on the light.

I toss the Nikon on the bed and flop down on the bedspread.

I get up and check the bathroom. Well, it needs an intervention, there’s no getting around it. In most American bathrooms, there is a fan in the ceiling. It’s usually connected to the light switch. So, every time I go into a bathroom and turn on the light, the noise these fans make drives me nuts. No comfort or intimacy whatsoever. I pick up the receiver and dial 0.

“Hi Mr. Kara. . bash. .” My name shows on a display apparently, but she can’t pronounce it.

“Hi.”

“How can I help you?”

“I need a screwdriver, please.”

“May I send our maintenance man, Mr. Kara-sh. .”

“It won’t be necessary, Gabriela. I just need to tighten something here on my suitcase. For just a minute.”

“No problem, Mr. Ka. .”

“You can call me Zack and you don’t need to do it all the time.”

“No problem, Mr. . errrrrr. . Zack.”