“The Cartoon Network? I didn’t know you were into animation.” Danny laughs. “That’s what we call the network, dude. The enterprise I sell dope for—the Cartoon Network.”
I get up. “Let’s go check out the art galleries.”
“I have a couple of things to take care of, so how about we meet in Chelsea? Let’s say at . . .” Danny looks at his watch. “How about . . . well, I can see you in about three hours. Let’s meet at this Italian place on West 26th.” He writes down the name and the address on a napkin. “I’ll get the key to Hito’s studio and we’ll leave the bag there until my man calls.”
*
I went out in the yard with my yellow cup. I felt her approaching. She put her hand on my shoulder. The Santa Ana winds had desiccated the canyon beyond recognition. It was quiet. I remember the powerful impulse to caress her fingers, to turn around and bury my head in her breasts, still warm from the bed. But I swallowed it.
“Can I ask you something?” I say without turning to her.
“Since when are you asking permission to ask me anything?”
“It’s about . . . Bernard that night?”
“What!?” Her hand jerks away. “What night?”
“In Paris. In front of . . . the hotel.”
“Oh, that one!? The night you got drunk, acted like an idiot and ran up to our room, and we stayed a little longer downstairs?”
“Yes.”
“We talked.”
“About what?”
“About pigments.”
*
Downtown New York. It is ridiculous to wander around the wet sidewalk of Fifth Avenue with my hands in my pockets, amidst all these people. Most of them are just like me—ridiculous—but some are not.
Some have, I imagine, absurdly huge bank accounts.
Others, I see, are outrageously poor.
And there is another group—the clearly insane.
Yes, it’s ridiculous for me to think that I belong here. It’s ridiculous to assume that I could be as happy as that couple in Central Park, or as miserable as that loner in the subway, or as carefree as the dog over there in the fat lap of the lady getting into the cab.
What am I doing here?
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.
I wonder how people faint at such sights. I can’t. The news continues with preparations for the New York Halloween parade. Danny orders vegetarian lasagna. I order ravioli with mushrooms.
*
We leave the restaurant and walk toward the car. It has just started to rain again. Where I had parked though, is now a dry rectangle. They’ve towed my car? In New York City? I run to the intersection, peek around the corner, come back, run to the other corner, looking around—nothing.
“Where did you park?” Danny still hasn’t grasped what’s going on.
“Here. Right here! Here. Here. Here!” Danny rolls his eyes, takes a deep breath, and bites his lip. He scratches his eyebrow, pointing at the sign on the fence. It reads that the parking spaces are for residents of that building only and all violators will be towed at the owner’s expense. For more information, call this 1-800-whatever-seven-digit number. Danny takes out his cell phone and dials. Half turning his back to me, he talks to someone, then takes a pen out of his pocket, looks around, picks up a smashed cigarette pack from the ground, writes something on it, and hangs up.
“It’s there.”
“Where?”
“There.”
“How much?”
“Two hundred and eighty dollars.”
“They’ll eat two hundred and eighty fucking dicks, fucking motherfuckers.” I’m furious. A cab passes, I try to flag it down but it doesn’t stop. I see another one behind it and almost jump on the hood.
A Pakistani with a turban.
Danny and I get in the back. Danny knocks on the plexiglass divider and shows him the cigarette box with the address. The Pakistani rolls his eyes like a madman and starts waving his hands, screaming.
“No cigarettes. No smoking.” Danny calms him down, points to the address written on the pack, and the Pakistani starts driving somewhere. We pass through dark, desolate places. It’s raining harder now. The red brake lights of the vehicles in front of us dwindle. We pass through grim housing projects and arrive at something that looks like a prison with a gate, prickling with barbed wire, fences, and an aluminum roof. We pull up and I pay the cabbie. We go into a trailer with barred windows. Behind a plastic divider sits an obese Arab in a white Radio Love 93.1 T-shirt, eating barbecued wings out of a plastic box, his fat face smeared with Tabasco sauce. He notices us and starts wiping himself with a pile of napkins. And he wipes, and wipes, and wipes, and wipes, and wipes without giving a shit about the number of trees felled in the Amazon just so he can wipe the orange Tabasco sauce off his unshaven, greasy face. All the jungles on the planet would not be enough for you to wipe the grease off your muzzle, freak!
“What do you want?”
“Our car, what else?”
“The Mercedes with the broken trunk?”
“Excuse me, you opened the trunk?”
“The trunk opened by itself. Your car had been rear-ended, the trunk opened by itself. We are not responsible if the car has been rear-ended.” The room spins.
“What was in the trunk?” I ask.
“A spare tire.”
“What else?”
“An emergency kit.” You will need an emergency kit now, you fucking pig-face! I shove my head through the small window and try grabbing the fat freak by the throat. He swings back surprisingly quickly, the chair flying out from under him. Half-eaten chicken wings, Tabasco sauce, celery, napkins, and dressing fly up in the air on the other side of the plastic divider and land on the dirty linoleum. My head is inside, behind the fiberglass. I want to squeeze my shoulders in like a rat, to crawl inside, knock the Monstrosity to the floor, grab the fire extinguisher from the wall, and bash his head with it, just like in that horrifying French movie, to release the world from his weight (Five hundred pounds? Six hundred?). I’m sure the world would be a better place, a far better place, if this pile of meat dies, rots, and turns into soil, fertile soil in some cemetery, upon which green grass will grow, clean morning dew will fall, the sun will shine, and harmless bugs will crawl. Swine-man, however, is in the corner of his little office, a safe distance from me. Centrifugal forces have pushed out the jelly around his neck. Grunts and snorts come out of his mouth as a walkie-talkie appears in his hairy hand, decorated with a heavy golden chain.
“I’m calling the police!” Wheezing.
“There was a bag in the trunk of the car,”
Wheezing. “That’s not my problem.” Wheezing.
“It will be your problem in a second.”
“Are you threatening me, huh? Are you threatening me? I’m calling the police!” Danny pulls me by my legs into our half of the office.
“I need my car.”
“It’s two hundred and eighty dollars.”
“Pay him,” He says. “And let’s get out of here!”
“Danny,” I whisper. “These fuckers took the bag of marijuana.”
“All the better,” says Danny, “Now you won’t have to deal with it. Just pay them what they want and let’s go!”
“Danny, are you kidding me!? I expect fifty grand from that pot and you want me to leave it here in this pigsty? I crossed the whole continent, rain soaked me, fire burned me, frost frosted me . . .”
Danny whispers even more quietly. “These fucks . . . you can’t reason with them. There’s nothing you can do.”
“They’ve just brought the car here, the bag is around here somewhere. It’s here, you understand?” The fatso looks at me, looks at Danny, swallows, and snorts. He lifts the walkie-talkie to his mouth and says something in his language.
“Hey,” I yell. “Hey!” I gesture for him to get closer to the fiberglass. “How much?” I rub my fingers together rigorously. “How much?” He’s quiet. “Hey, listen. I’ll leave you the car. I’m giving you the car, man, give me the bag that was inside.” The swine-man pulls out a calculator the size of a notebook from the pocket of his sweatshirt, digs his chin into his fat neck and starts calculating. “I’m leaving you the car, hey, hey . . . What are you calculating? I’m leaving you the car!” Fatfuck lifts his head and says:
“You leave the car plus thirty g
rand.”
“What!? You fat Arab swine!”
“I’m Persian.”
“Well, go back to your fucking Persia that’s not even on the fucking map, you fat fuck. There’s no Persia on the map, there is Iran, but no Persia! And there’s an ayatollah ruling Iran, but soon there will be neither an Ayatollah nor an Iran, nor a Persia, because there are even more radical fucks than all of you dirty Arabs, right here in this country.”
“I’m not an Arab.”
“You are too, dirty Arab! I’m leaving you a Mercedes, a sports model. I paid over thirty grand for it two years ago.”
“Those Kompressors lose value quick.”
“You’re nuts!”
“Yeah, I’m nuts? And you aren’t—keeping drugs in a car trunk that opens by itself!”
“Fuck you!” I try to calm down a little.
“I’m calling the police.” He grunts.
“Listen,” I say. “I don’t have any money. I just don’t. I have about three, four hundred cash. I’ll pay my fine for parking in a tow zone and that’s it.” At the door, on our side of the office, two Arabs with gaunt faces, blue Adidas jackets, gold chains, and white sneakers show up.
“Hey, get the Mercedes here, ’cause I’m in a hurry.” I yell. They are all silent. “C’mon, bring the car. The bag, too . . . I’ll share some of it, no problem, we’ll make a deal, ok? I’ll give you a deal. I’m leaving you a Mercedes, it’s a Mercedes, boys.”
“Ten grand each.”
“Are you nuts?”
“Ten grand each.”
“But I don’t have thirty grand, people! I’m not a drug dealer!”
“Then you don’t need no drugs.”
“I don’t. Here’s 280 dollars, no, here’s three hundred, keep the change and the keys, we’re leaving, I have work to do . . .” Fatso picks up the walkie-talkie.
“I’m calling the police.” It’s pouring outside. I look at the amber light of the single street lamp out there, the barb wire. Winter’s in the air, I can feel it. Why don’t I just give up? Why do I have to agonize in this world that doesn’t really need me? Why do I keep entertaining the gods with the twists and turns of my self-inflicted fiasco?
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