FLOATING NOTES

  Tyrant Books

  9 Clinton St

  Upper North Store

  NY, NY 10002

  Via Piagge Marine 23

  Sezze (LT) 04018

  Italy

  www.NYTyrant.com

  Copyright © 2018

  First Edition

  ISBN 978-0-9992186-1-7

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters and organizations portrayed herein are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations in critical reviews and articles.

  Cover design by Brent Bates

  Book design by Adam Robinson

  FLOATING NOTES

  Babak Lakghomi

  For Sara

  Contents

  Floating Notes

  Acknowledgments

  I don’t remember the first time I wrote my name. What I do remember is the first time someone else was called my name. I told him that was my name, too, but he couldn’t believe it. He was a fat boy with a puffy face. He looked like a little boxer.

  Now, people call me in different names and I don’t care. Why people call me other names might be because I am not writing my name the right way, though that is how it’s written in my documents. Foreheads furrow whenever I say my name, and I have to take my papers out and show them to see for themselves.

  I sometimes introduce myself as Bob, but only where I am sure nobody knows me. I have to be careful or they would know I’m not Bob.

  Coffee shops are among the places that I call myself Bob. I sometimes forget I am Bob and my coffee grows cold. I never go twice to the same coffee shop.

  Where is this name from? This is the question that I have to answer whenever I say my real name. Cab drivers, clerks. I rarely take a cab. Then they tell me they have a friend who has the same name. I think about all the people in the world with my name and their cab driver friends.

  I don’t have friends, and the only one that I had was not a cab driver or a clerk. My name became a different name in her mouth. I want to say I loved hearing it from her and maybe I did, but any time I heard it, I feared I had done something wrong.

  I wonder how the fat boy writes his name, and if he, like me, is being called different names.

  My name is Bob, and this is what I call my life: an attic room with a yellow curtain in a narrow hallway, a spring bed on the creaking floor. Notebooks in a knapsack. Two cups of coffee per day.

  The walls of my room are thin. A French man lives in the room next to me. His bed leans on the shared wall and I sometimes hear him cry at night. Sometimes women are over and I hear them through the thin wall too. The French man says he has been a pilot in France, but I don’t believe him.

  This is my life after I left, or after she left me and I decided to leave, too.

  My landlord is a Chinese woman. She has turned one of the rooms in the hallway into a shop where she sells plastic plants. You wonder how many people would buy plastic plants, but the hallway is always full.

  In the hallway, there is a shared kitchen and a bathroom with two stalls. In the kitchen, a fridge is filled with food with name tags. I put my eggs and fruits in the fridge. I keep my bread in the drawer by the side of my bed. My eggs always go missing from the fridge, even though they have tags. I think this might have something to do with the French man.

  The good thing is the eggs can be easily replaced. The room is in the same building with a Chinese grocery store. Fruits are stacked in the front section of the store. The back part places fresh fish, clams, live lobsters. I like watching the lobsters in the buckets, smelling the smell of sea.

  My father had a small boat back home, we fished from the river there. Here, I fished on a large boat on the ocean. I remember the sound of the gulls fishing for the guts of fish that we threw back into the ocean. The smell of blood and salt. I gutted thousands of fish per day, my boots deep into the cold water. The blood from the boat left a red trail on the sea.

  I found an office job after. I also started writing again—articles that I sent to different journals. You don’t believe me? I have them here in my knapsack. But I couldn’t publish them under my own name.

  I threw all of my books in the river before I left the country. This was the same river that my father used to fish.

  Let’s say the office job wasn’t for me either. I always had my notebook open beneath the work folders. My stomach turned when they called my name. I was always waiting for a Monday morning when my boss would ask me to his office. All I remember from that place is the toilet. Spreading toilet paper on the seat, flushing multiple times, drinking from my flask. The boss started to follow me to the toilet door and wait there until I was done.

  When I don’t know where else to go I like to go to the abandoned water treatment plant. From the hill there, I can watch the ocean. I don’t remember when I went there for the first time. The grass was tall, and the wind moved the branches of the birch trees. The gulls called, and you could still hear the plant pumps. The place used to remind me of a hill we used to hike to with my wife. She hadn’t been my wife then. It was a place we went to when we didn’t know where else to go. The city beneath us, we watched the city through the clouds. Years later, in a visit back, I went there and the place had turned into a dumpster. Dust, rusted metal, syringes. Dried grass.

  Here, you can still hear the gulls and the waves crashing against the cliffs and rusted pumps. The doors of the plant building are locked now. I once tried to open one of the doors with a screw driver. But I think I need different tools. Next time, I’ll bring in pliers, wrench, a small hand saw, hammer.

  I had a photo of her until a while ago. It was the only photo I’d recovered from that negative. It was in my old wallet in the bedside table where I also kept my bread. The wallet had been there until two days ago.

  I pulled the curtains and looked outside at the street from the narrow gap between the window frame and the curtain. A black car stopped next to the massage parlor. I put my ear on the wall to see if the French man was home, but I couldn’t hear anything. I looked out from the peephole. Two men with beards left the room with plastic plants in a box. I hadn’t seen any men buying plastic plants before.

  I went to the corner of the room where I had my toolbox on a shelf. I opened the toolbox, but instead of the tools I was looking for I found my father’s gutting knife. I didn’t know how my father’s gutting knife had ended up there. I didn’t remember seeing it since I’d left the fishing boat and found the job at the office. The hammer and hand saw were still there, but the pliers and wrench were missing. I took the hammer and saw from the toolbox and put them in my knapsack. I left my father’s gutting knife where it was.

  She was my wife when she asked me not to leave the house. We had a three-year-old son then. She said she had seen a black car on the street. I looked out the window and showed her the empty street. But she didn’t believe me. She took my father’s knife from the kitchen and put its edge on her wrist. She pressed the tip on her pale skin. I grabbed her by her wrists and twisted her arms. She didn’t drop the knife.

  I pushed her on the floor and fell on top of her.

  A sharp pain pointed to my armpit. My blood stained her summer dress.

  Our son was watching this.

  I didn’t go to meet the contact that day. I stayed home for a week. After that, we took my father’s truck and loaded all my books and notebooks into the trunk. I drove the truck to the river, down to my father’s boat.

  Two days later a black car stopped by our house when she was at work. Two men came in to search the house. They emptied all the drawers and shelves into plastic bins. I wasn’t sure if they were looking for the notebooks or not, but whatever they were looking for, they couldn’t find it. They duct-taped my eyes and took me to the car. I don’t know where I was taken. They locked me in a cell that I suspected was in a garden. I could smell the soil, pine, and walnut trees. A horse neighed in the garden.

  When I came back home, my son’s toys were still on the floor. My wife’s clothes had collected dust in the closet.

  I put my ear on the wall to the sound of somebody in the next room. The French man was not usually in the room at this time of the day. I watched the hallway through the peephole and waited for him to leave. I listened and when I didn’t hear anything, I took a piece of wire and went to the hallway, my heart flapping against my chest. I knocked at the French man’s door, inserted the wire into the lock, and twisted it until I heard the click.

  In the room, separated by our shared wall, there was a bed near my bed. In the corner of the room, cartons of eggs were stacked on the shelves. A camera on a tripod was pointed at the eggs. I opened different drawers and couldn’t find any sign of my lost wallet. Instead, I found multiple photos of eggs, a pilot certificate in French. The photo on the certificate had no resemblance to my neighbour. When I heard footsteps, I put the certificate in my back pocket. I left the room.

  Outside, women were entering the room with plastic plants.

  She asked me if we had printed the photos and I told her that the negative was over-exposed. I don’t remember if I said over-exposed or lost. I don’t think I would have known what over-exposed was then, but I might have just repeated what my father said. All I remember is that it was my birthday and my father had asked for her parent’s permission to take her with us on his boat. The camera was my uncle ’s camera. Maybe my father didn’t know how to work with the camera and that was why what happened did.

  We swam in the river and watched the birds: storks, white egrets, cranes. My father stopped the motor and paddled to a place where the seagulls had laid their eggs. He took photos of the two of us on his boat on the river. Me and her. Our arms on each other’s backs.

  When I don’t know what else to do I like to write down things in my notebook. I like to do this in a laundromat or a coffee shop. I sit by the window and write. I sometimes cut pieces from newspapers and attach them to the pages.

  Some of the notebooks were thrown into the river. Some of them were lost in a flood.

  Now, I write my notes in a very small handwriting that only I can read.

  Some nights I dream I am on my father’s boat and I’m fishing my old notebooks from the bottom of the river.

  When I saw the French man in the hallway, his front tooth was cracked. He had a bruise under his left eye. This didn’t make him look more like the photo in the certificate. I waited for him to leave his room and I followed him when he did. I was prepared to follow him for a long time, but as he left the building he entered the massage parlor. I waited there for a while and then I entered the massage parlor, too.

  There was a golden statue of a paw-waving cat on a table. A door opened and a young woman came out in a short white outfit.

  Want some massage?

  I didn’t know what to do to not make her suspicious.

  Twenty for twenty, she said.

  I fished into my pocket to take out the bills that I have, but instead I took out the pilot certificate. I could see her eyes lock into the picture before I put it back.

  I’ll come back later, I said.

  She pushed on a bell beside the cat statue and a bulky bald man came out in a suit.

  You need something? The man’s belly was about to burst the buttons of his shirt.

  I took the bill this time and put it on the table. Just a massage, I said.

  The woman took the bill and directed me into a long hallway.

  A white leather bed in a dim room. The smell of oil and candles. The sound of waves crashing against the cliffs. I closed my eyes. I liked skin on my skin. The price changed depending on how far the hands traveled. My hands stayed at the borders. I didn’t want to risk passing the border without permission. Even the borders were plump like a peach. I was happy staying at the borders. I could feel the heat there. Hard against soft. The boat rocking against the waves.

  On the wall, a set of screens showed the hallway, the front entry. I heard a bell ring and watched a man enter the massage parlor. The woman left me on the bed, handing me a wet warm towel.

  On the screen, I saw the man and the woman enter another room. When the door opened, I could see two other men sitting on opposite chairs in the room. One of them was tied to his chair.

  Some nights I wake up and hear a horse neighing.

  I know you called me Bob, but that’s not my name, Lily. But if you want to call me Bob, that is okay, too. You had brown eyes, flat collarbone, a fine neck. You asked me what I was writing, and I didn’t know what to call it.

  I didn’t know if it was your mouth, or the color of your skin that made me think of birds.

  Do you like birds?

  Birds?

  Yes. Birds.

  I asked you if you wanted to go to a wastewater treatment plant to watch birds, and you laughed. There was something beautiful about your laughter though you didn’t want to go to the wastewater treatment plant. I didn’t want to insist. Instead, we decided to go to the zoo.

  The veins beneath your skin: the roads on my map.

  If you follow them, you won’t get lost, you said.

  When I looked out the window of my apartment, I saw that the black car had stopped by the massage parlor again. I couldn’t hear anything from the next room or see any light through its window. The French man hadn’t returned to his place.

  To go back to the French man’s place would’ve been falling straight into their trap. They were probably watching the hallways, too.

  If I didn’t do anything, after a while they would leave me to myself.

  I looked at my map. There was a phone number on the top corner. I showed her the map when we got off the bus, trying to tell her that we were not at the right place. I didn’t know when she’d written down her number on the map.

  She took my hands and led me to a trail into the woods. Did she know that we weren’t going to the zoo from the beginning? It seemed she was comfortable not knowing where we were going. I liked that.

  The woodpeckers drummed the dead sycamore trees. The wind moved strands of her hair. She piled them away from her face. I still had the map folded in my hand when she grabbed it from me and dropped it on the leaves. She pushed me against an aspen tree, pressed the palms of her hands on my chest, looked into my eyes.

  Dew sat on the orange leaves beneath our boots.

  We kissed.

  The taste of her mouth: rinds of lemon, forests of mountain trees, a Bach cello suite. Her tongue: the cave of forgotten dreams.

  She grabbed my hand again. She started running in the trail.

  In the bus, I talked about the birds and fish in our river. She smiled at me, holding my hand, but then became silent.

  The sun was going down. We both stared outside at the long shadows of the trees, the falling light in the red sky.

  See you tomorrow at the coffee shop, she said when we were leaving the bus station.

  She kissed me on the cheek.

  I didn’t tell her that I can’t go to the same coffee shop again.

  I looked for my wife and son after they left me. Everybody tried to hide it from me where they were. My wife’s parents didn’t answer my calls. The neighbours whispered things when they saw me on the street. For most of the day, I lied on the bed with the TV on, forking my food from a can.

  They had taken everything in the bins: my passport, my driver’s license, photos, letters. The rest, I had thrown in the river myself.

  I put on my wife’s shirts, wore her perfume.

  One day, my sister-in-law knocked at my door.

  I let her in.

  She told me that I needed to let it go. That I deserved better. She held my hand as she told me this. Move on is what she said.

  Her hands were smaller than Ava’s. She had similar curly hair and long eyelashes, but her skin wasn’t as dark.

  Ava is married to someone else, she told me.

  Where is Ava? I asked.

  She said, I cannot tell you that.

  She said, I did this for you.

  She said, No one should know that I was here.

  In order to use the phone you had to go to the room with the plastic plants. At night, nobody was in the room. Still, I looked around to make sure I wasn’t being watched, though there wasn’t a way to know if your voice was being recorded.

  I dialled the number, but nobody responded. A voice recording told me to leave my message. I wasn’t sure if the voice was hers. It didn’t resemble her voice, but voices sound different on the phone, and who knows, maybe she had a roommate. I didn’t know that much about her life after all.

  What if my only chance to see her had been going to the coffee shop the day after our day in the woods?

  I left a message.

  It’s Bob from the coffee shop. Sorry I didn’t show up the other day. I was so happy to find your phone number. Do you want to go to the trail again, or the zoo? I’ll be at the bus station on Wednesday morning at ten.

  Her name was Lily, or that was the name she introduced herself with.

  Bob and Lily, I thought.

  After I left the message, I asked, What if she doesn’t hear the message and we never see each other again?

  I was in these thoughts when I saw a silhouette moving in front of me. The silhouette reached closer, something like a rifle in his hand.

  Mister, what are you doing this time of the night?

  It was only the landlord.

  I couldn’t believe that they had left the negative in the camera behind, that it wasn’t taken away in one of the bins. The negative was the only sign of our five years together. When I printed the negative, all of the photos were overexposed, except that one.

 

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