The Void

I sit in my room, and try to read. But the light fixture keeps attracting my attention. It’s an ancient work of stained glass, beautiful in its decay, stained by a long dead artisan, stained also by time. It looks like a glass bowl, an antique you might hold fruit in, mostly for show. There are no bulbs in it, but last I checked, it worked. But the light, coming up from below, was just distracting. I only use the lamp which stands in the corner now.

The lighting fixture is a reminder of an old life. Why was it left there? Sitting in the middle of the ceiling, a hazard on those late night bathroom runs, something to be navigated in the dark as I stumble towards relief. I wish it wasn’t there, but I only rent this place. Once reminded, though, my eye starts to wander, finding the subtle ridge of molding that follows the edge of the ceiling around the room. The surface is covered in scuffmarks and stains, it wasn’t meant to be lived on. I glance up to the hardwood floor looming above. The wood slats are weathered, tempered and scratched, faded in places and stained darker in others, the memory of that old life recorded over my head – the feet of former tenants living in this same space but oriented differently. They may as well have existed in another dimension for all the sense they make to me now.

I put my book down and stand, crossing to the windows. I crouch slightly to peer up at the ground, the ceiling of concrete hovering overhead. Buildings, houses, dead trees and shrubs all dangle precariously into nothingness. Some of the buildings across the way have been abandoned, parts of them already broken free, lost to the void below. Of course, they weren’t meant to hang like that and many of the older ones started coming apart right away, only beams and a foundation, some remnant of drywall, still hanging on.

I look back at the ancient fixture.

This building should probably have been one of the first to go, somehow it’s still standing. I mean, hanging. The rents are cheep, that’s why I’m here. But there’s only so long the extra steel supports and anchors can hold us here, I know it. I resolve to move out when I save enough money, but it’s a promise I’ve made myself before and I’m still here.

I look down now, the direction few people willingly ponder, unless they are feeling fatalistic, like a man on his deathbed who is drawn to the light.

Nothingness. There is nothing below us, not even a sky, so to speak. It’s impossible to conceive distance. Depth has no meaning, it may as well be a black blanket stretched out beneath us. To ponder its true scope is to temp insanity. It’s summer, June to be exact, and that means the sun is far below and to the left. It doesn’t move across the sky like it used to. It crawls slowly, almost imperceptibly from horizon to horizon, rising in March and setting in August. Only then do the stars come out. For six months they are hidden from view while the unfiltered brilliance of the sun is visible. And yet, even during this endless day, looking out one’s window gives the impression of nighttime, all the time, the void below black and limitless, no clouds, no color, no weather.

It’s impossible to gaze at the void for long without feeling like you might go mad. You almost want to climb outside and fall into it. It seems to want you, as if your speck of a frame could fill its unlimited loneliness. Too many have given themselves to it and these days you actually see ads on TV for companies who’ll paint your windows for you, replace the horrible void with a lively meadow scene, right side up, blue sky and clouds, maybe a family picnicking near a tree, laughing at you and your gravity sickness. Public service spots advise heavy blinds on every window, closed all the time.

I can feel the building creaking around me.

Luckily, that kind of surrender isn’t as easy as it used to be. By now, most every way one could even reach the outside has been sealed off, glued shut, walled away. Our building is encased in some sort of space-age polymer, like a giant sheet of cling-wrap. It makes the outside appear vaguely hazy, like the kind of close up an actress could expect in old movies.

Our air is safely contained.

The windows have long since been bolted shut.

You don’t leave the building from the original front door. A stairwell takes you straight up through the foundation, to the transit tunnels above the city. I prefer to take the newer tunnels, the ones built after. They look normal, the way they’re furnished and decorated, letting you believe that right side up is where it should be once again. The older tunnels – the former subway lines – only provide further reminder of what used to be. The tracks still cling to the floor overhead, the station platforms appear periodically, once thronged with upside-down commuters or tourists waiting for the next train. Just behind the turnstiles, the exits are completely filled with concrete.

The nearest supermarket is a fifteen-minute walk from my building, down the old N line. Make the first right down what must have been a service tunnel and turn left at the brightly lit Atlantic Corridor. The walls of the Corridor are painted in primary colors, boldly outlined figures, over-grown children dancing, doing summersaults, holding hands. They represent the full range of appropriate ethnic diversity.

An eight-foot tall Asian kid with skin tone the color of a yellow squash is doing a handstand and every time I pass him I can’t help think that the depiction is inappropriate. An upside down boy, the artist should be ashamed.

The lights in the new corridors are achingly bright after the grimy gloom of the old transit tunnels. For a few minutes, everything is soft-focus, washed out and dreamlike.

Last year, the roof of the supermarket suddenly buckled and tore away from the building, taking with it thousands of dollars of merchandise, several dozen shoppers and six red-smocked employees. A couple of weeks later it reopened in what had been the establishment’s basement. As much as they tried to give the new space a cheerful retail environment, it looks a lot shabbier than it used to, the pockmarked concrete walls painted in a flat off white, the lighting giving everything a sickly yellow tinge.

I know that for many people, the supermarket is their favorite place. These are the most people you’ll ever see in one location. Down every isle it’s like a family reunion, people who’ve possibly never met before, excitedly conversing, paying the sloppily stacked canned carrots little heed. They’re just thrilled to be around their neighbors, to know that something of the old neighborhood still exists.

After the Disaster, it seemed that everyone who was left had lost everyone they knew. We were a city of strangers, desperately clinging to each other. Since then, it no longer mattered if you knew them or not, you imagined that you did.

Down the produce isle, I pass a guy I could swear I used to take a Taichi class with. He’s thumbing a melon and when he looks up at me, he smiles broadly.

“Hey buddy! These are on sale!” he informs me, his eyes bright and a little watery. He imagines he knew me from a book club he used to belong to. I smile and nod but pass up the bargain, directing my attention to a pile a grapefruits stacked in a huge cardboard box further down the isle.

The produce looks strangely perfect, plastic almost.

I don’t ask how they grow this stuff anymore. I don’t remember what fruit used to taste like, but these are more or less edible and that’s good enough for me.

I don’t share the rest of the neighborhood’s enthusiasm for shopping. Being around this many people just makes me think of the past. I remember chugging my way up Flatbush Ave, working hard against the steady incline of the road. I’m leaning forward over the handlebars, my body trying to fall up the gentle slope. Sweat tastes salty my lips. It’s June, so the sun is burning the back of my neck, tanning my arms a deeper shade day by day. My lungs fill with air, real air. It smells like car fumes, fried chicken and the pungent swill that sloshed out of the garbage truck left to bake on the hot asphalt.

The sweetest perfume.

The city is swarming with life, a dizzying array of movement. People move in and out of the electronics shops, pizza places, corner bodegas. They stand on the sidewalks talking on phones or chatting in groups, old people sit in front of their buildings on lawn chairs, the streets: the best entertainment they have left. Young professionals in short shorts jog past expertly dodging the constantly shifting maze of bystanders.

All those people, they represent the full range of appropriate ethnic diversity.

In the street, cars drag race each other from one traffic light to the next, as if a prize awaits the driver who reaches the next intersection first. Music booms out of their windows: Reggaeton, Hip Hop, Bollywood. A rusting fifteen year old Camry rattles plaintively from the thousand dollar sound system installed in its trunk. The drivers are constantly jockeying for position and I have a near death experience every other cross street I pass, yet it occurs to me how normal that was then. We all took risks with our lives, all the time. There was too much living to do, and our feet were firmly on the ground.

Up head, Grand Army Plaza comes into view, the entrance to the park with its enormous triumphal arch. I never bothered to find out who the ancient horse riding soldiers where carved along the arches upper sections. The arch isn’t there anymore, so I guess I’ll never find out.

The park is an oasis after the repressive heat of the asphalt and concrete. I find a shaded spot under a tree and lay out on the cool grass, a refreshing breeze chills my sweaty skin as I peer up through the dark green canopy. Families chattering in Spanish picnic nearby. Through the clumps of leaves and branches I see the sky, light blue, whips of cloud. It’s the most beautiful blue I’ve ever seen, it glows, illuminated, brilliant.

I daydream a lot like that, but I’m sure everyone does. I’ve passed plenty of people in these isles, just standing there, looking distracted. I know what there thinking about.

I don’t remember walking to the paper products isle, but I must have known what I was doing, I can use some TP.

At least the daydreams are pleasant, the good things we choose to remember. The nightmares are the other side of that coin, the yin to their yang, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who has them either. The nightmares usually start out the same way, Flatbush Ave, good clean chest aching exercise as I climb through the Heights. When it happens, its gradual, a subtle glitch in the matrix that no one seems to notice at first, an old woman and her push cart crossing the street, a couple of young boys mouthing oversized cones of shaved ice from a sidewalk vendor, a bike messenger racing down the opposite side of the street. They start to lift up, slowly at first and then building momentum, turning sideways and upside down. Even they don’t appear to notice what’s happening at first, skyward bound and oblivious. But before I know it, it’s happening all around me, dozens and then hundreds of people. Suddenly, everyone is screaming, flailing and thrashing helplessly, eyes and mouths wide with shock, uncomprehending, horrified.

Cars, people, their little dogs too, the sky is full of them. Were there ever that many people? Luminescent blue showing through an endless dirty smudge of bodies and animals and lawn chairs, their panicked twisting and flailing growing less obvious the further away they get. And they grow smaller by the moment, their screams: a chorus the size of humanity it self, growing fainter and fainter still.

And they’re all gone, all except for me. I straddle my bike on an empty street, empty sidewalks, empty shops. Why didn’t they take me?

I don’t know if that’s how it looked. I didn’t see it. 7:20 am, that’s when it happened. I was in bed asleep. The fall to the ceiling must have knocked me out, I woke up with the bed on top of me and it was over. I heard people yelling in the hallway, my apartment was upside-down and so was the world outside. The sky was gone, now just a black void yawning below.

The void waits patiently, it has all the time in the universe. No one knows how long we have, how long we can keep growing stuff, or finding fresh water, air to breath. Nothing like this has ever happened before, everyday is a gift, I suppose.

Speaking of gifts, someone gave me this old poster once, ancient, faded. It’s a dumb joke from the 70’s or something, that kitten hanging from a tree, hang in there, buddy. The guy who gave it to me thought it was real funny. I threw it in a closet and haven’t looked at it since. But it does make me laugh sometimes, just knowing he’s in there. How long has he been hanging there? Decades? If that cute little bastard can do, why can’t I, right?

Hang in there, buddy.