Laurence Klavan has been published in more than thirty literary magazines and a collection of his short work will be published in 2014 by Chizine.

He wrote the novels

The Cutting Room and

The Shooting Script and is co-author with Susan Kim of the current YA series, Wasteland and the graphic novels, City of Spies and Brain Camp. He is an Edgar Award winner and a Drama Desk nominee for his theater work, including the libretto to "Bed and Sofa" (Vineyard Theater, NY; Finborough Theatre, London). His web site is Laurenceklavan.com.

ATMAN

posted Feb 25, 2014

The first things Davey noticed were the flowers; it was hard not to notice them, they filled virtually the entire front counter. Near them was propped a photo montage laminated upon a piece of cardboard. It said, in magic marker, "We Missed You." No one had corrected the mistake, the imprecise use of the past tense. Davey thought of saying something about it, but then decided he'd hold off; it might not be appreciated, might be considered insensitive.

He had mixed feelings; the day defined mixed feelings, for before he'd entered the store, he had been—well, there was no way to say it that wasn't a cliché—"walking on air," "feeling like a million bucks," "on Cloud Nine": being paid for the first time as a professional had made him elated. Even though he was only twenty-eight, the five years it had taken had felt like forever, all that writing and mailing of his opinion pieces; even the few magazines or websites that had used them had never paid until now. Sure, one hundred and fifty dollars was nothing to some people, but not to him: the money—at that moment, "burning a hole in his pocket," another cliché—was a crucial validation. So go ahead and laugh. Everyone's life, Davey thought, was a joke to someone else.

And this small store had been a big part of it: "Dazzling Printers" had been his place to make copies before mailing, and the three men who ran it his "co-conspirators," wishing him luck every time on what had seemed a—what, quixotic?—quest to make a life out of expressing what he thought. Their caring had mattered; sometimes it seemed they cared more than anybody else, which sounded absurd, but again, not to him, so go to hell if it seemed silly, especially today.

How could he not have come today? Davey had been hearing the story on the news all week, how a man had been pushed in front of a subway car and killed by a crazy fare-jumper, a woman babbling racist nonsense. It had taken him awhile to realize who the victim was because the picture they used on TV was so bad, a driver's license photo or something. So now it was three days after the incident that he had finally arrived at the store, to pay his respects: it had been one of his men who had been killed, one of the men who cared about him.

Davey hadn't even known the man's name, that was the amazing part: the three were all Indians, from India, and he had had a hard time hearing their names at the start, and then too much time passed for him to ask again; it would have been too weird. Now the news had announced the name—Anil Seth—and Davey saw it on the laminated sign that said, "We Missed You." (Davey had originally thought "Seth" was his first name; then he realized it was his last; he was glad he figured it out before saying it wrong to someone.)

Davey had always felt—and more emphatically now—that he and Anil and the others had so much in common. While Davey was white and had been born here, he worked as hard as the men in the store, doing his day job at the software company and then writing his pieces at night—and his pieces were about this very subject, too, about self-sufficiency and stick-to-itiveness, not needing aid from the government or others, rising by your own bootstraps (even though that was such a hokey phrase he made sure never to use it). He copied (or had Anil and the others copy) his pieces on machines that were the very point he was making, because the machines had been bought by men who had earned them by their efforts: there was a poetic justice to the process of the pieces' reproductions: the light that multiplied the pages was an X-ray revealing that inside they were the same. Davey knew it sounded dumb, but he believed it, so make fun of it, he thought, fuck you.

It was like what the three men believed—well, if they were Hindu—that we were all part of one big soul or spirit or part of a bigger soul or spirit, that there was a "unity of individual souls with the plentitude of Being that is the Absolute": Atman. That's what it said on Wikipedia; Davey had read it before he came.

He walked farther into the store, past the one other customer. Behind the counter, he saw the two who had helped him along with Seth, with Anil. He realized that he still didn't know their names. But it didn't matter: how much he cared was what counted, not what anyone was called.

With raised eyebrows, Davey got the attention of the plumper and balder of the two, that's how he had always differentiated them (the thinner and more hirsute one was busy helping the other customer). Davey had to make an effort to be heard, had to raise his voice, for expressing such emotion was hard, as it would have been for anyone, he thought.

"I'm sorry," he said, indicating with a side nod the flowers and the photos. "It's awful. I am so, so sorry" (which was a cliché, too, but what else was there to say? Had anyone ever come up with something better?).

His friend nodded, muttered, "Thank you"; his lips pursed together and then came apart. There was a strained silence in which one heard only the hum of the copy machine, so Davey kept talking to fill the silence, for it made him feel funny.

"Some people are just fucking crazy," he said, referring to the fare-jumper, the pusher, the woman who had railed to the police later about foreign "free-loaders" and "leeches," knowing that using an obscenity under the circumstances was not great but it was too late, he had done it, without intending to. The man didn't answer, didn't even nod this time, just looked down and away from Davey—who wished to tell him about his payment, the first success he had had and felt he shared with them; but he had no way to introduce the topic without seeming self-involved, without its being misinterpreted a callous "moving on" from the other man's—Anil's—death. So he thought of what linked them—how they were part of one big soul—and asked himself: what were the men in business for? Why had Anil come to the country in the first place? What had he died—been killed—for? Then Davey looked at the shelves of stationery supplies and impulsively picked up a roll of Scotch tape and placed it on the counter.

The heavyset man, whose face had seemed to grow fuller and puffier—more pulled down, like a dark drawn curtain—every minute, stared at the object and blinked once or twice. Then, without a word, he rang it up, and Davey paid—$2.49, which was only a symbolic amount, a way of saying, this is where it all starts and this is how it and we will go on.

"Would you like a bag?" the man asked, and it seemed as if he had not been impressed by the gesture, which was strange, under the circumstances.

"No, no," Davey said, a bit discombobulated. "Thanks."

Afterwards, there was another pause during which Davey wondered, had he made a mistake with the tape? Should he have bought something more? Then the man interrupted it with a side nod of his own. He indicated a receptacle on the counter which was really the bottom of a cardboard box, below which a sign written in pencil said, "Funeral Contribute." (It should have been, Davey knew, "Contribution" or "tions.")

Guilty now, after the thing with the tape, feeling he had no choice, Davey went into his wallet and placed a bill in the box. He deposited it without looking and without remembering that, when he'd cashed his special check that morning, he hadn't asked the teller to give him small bills and so had only gotten three back. Now he saw at the same time the man did that it was a fifty he had left bent in the box, as if lounging idly upon a one, a five, and a few scattered coins.

The man smiled at Davey, and his new nod seemed to imply that it was a good thing to have done. Then he went to attend to another customer who had entered, after a little bell tinkled, as if an angel had gotten his wings, Davey thought, in that old movie about how bad the world would be if you hadn't been born.

*

As he left the store, Davey felt rattled—not by the atmosphere of death that had permeated the place (for they believed in reincarnation, too, correct? in Karma, not just in one big soul, in Atman, so they accepted it with equanimity) but by the fact that no one had said—known?—his name, seemed to really care that he'd come, or been inspired by his buying the tape. He felt the loss of the bill from his wallet and imagined that he was—literally—lighter, that's how great a weight he had relinquished, and not in a good way, in a way that made him weak. He stood at the bus stop and the wind rustled at his pants legs as if blowing right through him, that's how little of him was left.

Davey couldn't help but sense that the man—that both, that all of them—had believed themselves entitled to his money, as if they were owed it, whether they knew him or not. He thought of the woman who had pushed what's-his-name, Anil Seth, Seth Anil, onto the tracks. Then, he saw the bus in the near-distance, its blue lights blinking.

It was the Select. On it, the driver didn't take your fare; you had to get a ticket from a machine on the sidewalk and then hold onto it; it was an honor system. Davey had always bought the ticket, even though he could have gotten away with not; no one had ever asked for it, no transit officer or whomever was supposed to—sometimes—show up and do so, the thing to scare you to comply. Today was different: feeling unfettered without his fifty dollar bill, he flew, like a ghost, onto the bus for free.

The doors closed and the bus moved. When it stopped and they re-opened, a man got on, wearing a uniform different from the driver's: it was all white, like what someone wears at heaven's gate in a hokey film. He went down the aisle, checking the tickets of the passengers, all of whom had theirs, all of whom had bought one before boarding. When he reached Davey, what could Davey do but shake his head, with disgust?

"You've never been here before," he said.

"We always been here," the guy replied. "I guess we missed you."

Davey remembered the photo montage with the stupid ignorant mistake. "Is that right?"

"Yeah." The guy tore off a page from his pad and handed it to him. "The fine's a hundred bucks."

It was all Davey had left of his pay. He pushed the officer who, after a second for surprise, pushed him back. Davey rushed forward on the platform and was propelled onto the tracks, shoved hard and was run over by the train, became both people, in this life and the next, everyone in the world always and only himself: Atman.