A-Void by Babak Govan (phonics readers txt) 📕

The trails of my tears remained on my face for years. The nurse told me she cried before she died.

I rip my shirt off but begin to shiver from sweat. I fall back against the storefront as Cleveland paces. I see a homeless man stare at pennies in a cup by the cash register in the café and, hearing music upstairs, I crawl to the street and see my dead niece dancing in a frilly dress beside the window. Above her, a widow looks at the clouds that cast shadows over the long sea.

Ahead, I see a group of people running away. Jasmine is with them! She’s holding a suitcase with one hand and Isabella’s hand with the other. “Jasmine! Jasmine! Isabella!” Finally, I’ve found them! I stutter up and run toward them as fast as I can.

They turn a corner, and I jump and climb over wreckage so as not to lose them, turn the corner, and pick up my speed.

“Jasmine! Isabella! Where are you going? Jasmine! Isabella! Can you hear me?”

I see clearly Jasmine’s hair swing side to side, but she does not turn around. And then, Isabella looks back at me!

“Honey!”

Jasmine pulls her, and they turn another corner, but when I turn there, they are gone. Where did they go?

Tired woman

Your eyes are weary

Too weak to even see

That you are becoming a zombie

Feeding on stimuli

Walking in a desert

Swimming in a barren sea

Like everyone else, I can no longer think. I prepare for my solitude.

… to return to the mother’s womb,

where there is no such painful disharmony …

—Sandor Ferenczi (Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality)

I have lost Cleveland. I have left the mynah bird, Willie, Zebra, and all of my possessions.

I pull myself against the conjugated steel bars lining the concrete slab tilted beside me. It is the only way I find warmth.

“Cleveland! Cleveland!” Uncertain of how loud I am yelling, I remember as a boy cupping my palms over my ears in the shower to increase the sound of the water dropping on my head.

There is nothing else but to go forth alone. I let go of the bars and, still shaking, I begin to walk south on Broadway to the end of the island, to New York Bay. Water is steadily rising as I approach.

To my right, I pass another subway stairwell and remember riding into Times Square with Jasmine, her first time, taken by the cold. We would hold on to each other as the cabin shook. Bundled under coats and scarves, we kicked the cotton candy snow with our boots as we admired the Christmas window displays and children having an afterschool snowball fight. The street-corner hot dogs and honey-roasted peanuts smelled wonderful together.

My vision blurry, I cry into my beard and shirt. I want it all back. I want the rainy schooldays of my childhood, when we would dig up board games in the classroom and eat lunch in the auditorium. I want to smell construction paper and the perfume of my first-grade teacher. I want to win goldfish at the park fair and to buy bubble gum from the ice cream truck for my first girlfriend. I want to tear open a new pack of trading cards to see whom I got and to assemble army men battlefields with my neighbors. I want to discover rock ’n’ roll for the first time in my uncle’s music collection. I want to hear my dad whistling his slow song as I build a nest for the parakeets he bought me. I want to read the notes my mother left in my lunch bags and to see what she packed for me. I want her to tuck me in on all sides. I want to see Isabella looking at me before she sleeps.

I bite my wrists. The teeth marks and saliva I leave are beautiful. I remember my father waving as Jasmine and I left for our honeymoon. I look back and see him standing inside the doorway, outlined in the gold interior. We were late; she had smudged eye shadow on her eyelids.

Where is she? I want to squeeze her and suck all her air into me. Without anyone else, is there an “I”?

On Whitehall Street, I turn left and, making a right from there onto State Street, I see the water beyond Battery Park, higher than on our last visit. My knees loosen, forcing me to drag my feet.

Then, I start to dance down the street, fanning my arms in the air. I look up at the sky and watch sunrays coming down over the edge of the little cloud above me. All I’ve been doing is attempting to recapture the feeling I had as a child.

And then, I hear something crashing into the docks.

I wake up.

My eyes feel chapped. My cheek is touching something cold. I reach to check for my beard, and then I lean up and look at my hands. All of their veins are protruding; dirt outlines my nails. My lips are stuck together; a water bottle beside me is empty. How long have I been asleep?

There is a breeze and I hear seagulls fly around me. Snow patches splatter from the tree branches above. I look up and see in front of me a metal guardrail with chipped red paint. I hear waves crashing below it and smell the seawater through their rising mist. I see the Statue of Liberty and smile.

I sit up on my knees, turn around and find green and gray tents—atop one of which a handwritten sign reads “We remember California”—mounds of blankets, coolers, camper’s barbecues, pots and pans, and plastic toy balls. A perimeter fence sections off a playground with a blue swing set.

There are dead bodies all around me: children, women, and elders, from whom a putrid stench rises.

I remember. I remember all the carcasses I saw along the way,