Zachary Karabashliev - 18% Gray

The streets are empty this time of day in Chelsea. I check out a few galleries, each exhibit is more boring than the previous one. I pop into a small gallery with an Armenian name. I stand before one painting — a black and white painting of that famous photograph from the seventies in which one Vietnamese man is shooting another in the head. The street behind them is empty, there are two clouds in the sky; the short-haired man with an outstretched scrawny hand holding a small pistol is General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. The other one, who’s going to be dead in a second, has longer hair, a flannel shirt, and his hands tied behind his back. His face is distorted in one last convulsion captured on film. He has no name. I grew up with that photograph. It was printed in a thick book of communist propaganda entitled Soldiers of the Quiet Front , which I often flipped through with a kind of juvenile voyeurism, each time expecting to see a different ending. But no, deus ex machina never showed up. The captured Vietnamese fighter crumples to the ground, his head blown up. His executioner, along with his family, immigrated to New Jersey, where he opened a pizza parlor and lived until July 15, 1998. He died at sixty-seven.

I stand for a long time in front of the painting depicting a photograph depicting a murder. Nowadays, every artist is expected to come up with a new gimmick to make a breakthrough in this Art Armageddon saturated with new gimmicks. The gimmick in this painting is that it was made with human hair. The Chinese artist pedantically portrays shocking images like this one, as well as iconic portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Coca-Cola, Mona Lisa, and Madonna, with the living tissue of human hair collected from the floors of Beijing barber shops. You have to be very close to the piece to notice the medium he uses.

I leave.

*

— can i at least draw while you’re taking these pictures?

— no

— please

— can you just be an object for a moment?

— no

— be patient for just a few more minutes. we’re almost done

*

The Italian restaurant.

Danny is here. The only free table is in the corner, close to the bathrooms and overlooking the kitchen where dark Mexicans knead mounds of dough. A fat man in a white shirt with raven-black hair parted in the middle and a thick, gold chain around his neck writes something down. He looks like a Sicilian. He looks like the owner. The waitress has a French accent.

A girl with short, blonde, messy hair in a tank top and backpack enters, yells ciao in raspy voice, and whispers something to the owner. His eyes open wide, his jaw drops, and his belly starts shaking with noiseless laughter. She says something else to him, he lifts his notebook from the table and tries to smack her butt with it, shouts bast-a-a-a , and keeps on laughing. The Mexicans in the kitchen throw small pieces of dough at the girl as she drops her backpack and goes over to the other side of the bar. I realize she is the bartender who is just starting her shift. She rummages through her backpack, starts taking out journals, books, a Walkman, pulls out a CD labeled with permanent marker, puts it in the stereo, and points the remote toward the small TV, which comes to life, but with no sound. The comfort of the place makes me feel like I’ve been here before.

“Danny, have we been here before?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“But what if we have and now we are simply watching the tape backwards?”

“I don’t understand.”

“What if, let’s say, the way we see our life is fundamentally wrong? What if we live in reverse? What if we all simply live according to — I’ve got a working term here— the principle of backward time ?”

“Zack,” Danny leans back in his chair. “There’s too much caffeine in your system!”

“No, hear me out.”

“It’s too early for this. What do you wanna drink?” He motions to the server.

“Uh. dirty martini, thanks. I mean, what if we are returning. .”

“Are you going Nietzsche on me now? The eternal return?”

“No, no eternal returns. There’s nothing eternal here. I’m talking about. . Do you sometimes get the feeling that your life has been predetermined? Not by someone else, but by you. For example, you meet somebody new, but you have that I’ve-known-you-my-whole-life vibe going. Or, the feeling that you’ve actually known all along something you just learned? Thank you, mmmm, nice martini. Excellent. Can I have a few more olives, please? What was I saying? Oh, yes. We teach a child from a very young age that life goes in a certain direction, and everything begins with birth and ends with death. Right? We send the kid to school where everybody reads books and watches movies in a particular way and spends their lives like that, this kid will think, no. . he or she will know that that is the natural order of things, that is the truth. Right? But, what if we’re just wound backward?” I rest my elbows on the table. “You know, Danny, my father was essentially a loser. An alcoholic, a weak man who couldn’t do a single thing right. If he had to hammer in a nail, he’d bend the nail and hurt his fingers. And still not manage to pound it in. So, on one of my birthdays — maybe my fifth one — my grandparents gave me a present, this little model battleship kit. A little battleship with a little electric motor that spins the little propellers that move it forward in the water. There’s one tiny detail, though — the ship has to be assembled from scratch. After a lot of putting it off, my father agreed to help me assemble the battleship. He pulled out a bunch of tools from the trunk of the car, we spilled everything on the floor and started gluing, building, fitting the pieces together. After a while, I can’t remember how long, we managed to put the boat together somehow and it looked just fine. So I took a tub, filled it with water, put the boat in, pushed the button to start the motor, and the boat started going backwards.”

“Backwards?”

“Yes.”

“Why backwards?”

“Well, my dad had obviously installed the motor backwards, or hooked it up funny, I don’t remember. But the battleship sailed backward.”

“So, did he fix it?”

“Nope. He said—‘Well, no biggie, you can still play with it the way it is, can’t you?’” I smile and take a sip from my glass.

“And what’s the moral of the story, Zack? That some loser — sorry — deity has put in our motors backwards?” Danny flags down the server. “One more martini, please!”

“Zack. Who would benefit from turning our lives upside-down?”

“I have no idea.”

“Man, you need help.” He says.

“Cause and effect, bro — you reverse their order, you rule the world.” Danny sighs and keeps shaking his head. I bet he thinks I’m insane. “Jesus Christ. Look what happens with Jesus! The dude knew how everything would end. Moreover, Danny, he chose how everything would end. In the principle of backward time , every choice you make now is already. . You already lived the choices you are about to make now. Get it?” A waitress passes by our table, I gesture to her to bring another round, and glimpse toward the TV above the bar. At that moment, I see our neighborhood in flames, I see fire trucks turning onto our street and firefighters putting out the fire at the neighbor’s house. Danny has his back to the TV. There is our house, whatever is left of it. A female reporter wearing a respirator interviews a neighbor whom I’ve only greeted twice, and this neighbor now points at the pile of burnt rubble atop the canyon and looks upset. There lie the ashes of all the photos I’ve taken, all the negatives I’ve left for later, dozens of notebooks filled with notes, projects, fragments, and dreams. There are the ashes of letters and postcards, the books we read, the movies we cried over, the music we loved, the bed we kept warm.