ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LAURENCE KLAVAN wrote the novels, “The Cutting Room” and “The Shooting Script,” both published by Ballantine Books. He won the Edgar Award for the novel, “Mrs. White,” written under a pseudonym. His work is forthcoming in The Alaska Quarterly, The Literary Review, and Gargoyle. LaurenceKlavan.com.
Bomb Shelter
By Laurence Klavan
Was it the beating of his heart? Maybe it was nothing at all, this thumping he heard around him. Or maybe it was something approaching on big fat footsteps. Or something that just announced an approach: a drumbeat, a fanfare, a—what was the word?—a herald.
Whatever it was, he could not deny the sound in the empty apartment. There was no furniture left to absorb the sound, no lights for him to identify anything making a sound and, since he sat on the floor of the ground floor apartment and knew it wasn’t beneath him, its source remained a mystery.
Shivering, Selwyn pulled the blanket around him. Sometimes, beyond his bloody face, he could see his breath now and, fascinated by it, he said a few words to watch the little cold clouds form.
“Now I know,” he said, the “N’ sounds particularly good at propelling the, what was it, condensed air? steam?—that didn’t sound right; he was so ignorant about everything—out of his mouth.
He didn’t know why he didn’t just get up and go: everything had already happened, and he had to be out by morning, six hours away. But in truth he felt as if he was awaiting something now, and the sound—which, as he’d already thought, was premonitory—seemed to bear him out.
“Now I know.” He’d said it automatically, but he’d obviously meant it somehow, so he had to wait, also, in a sense, to catch up with his unconscious, to learn the origin of why he’d uttered it. Besides, there was no easy way to stand, nothing left to hold onto—another unconscious allusion to his present circumstances— no chair or anything to hoist himself up, so he stayed where he was.
Selwyn’s teeth started chattering, as in a cartoon. It was colder in the country: a banal observation, he knew, but one he had never stopped thinking—or saying, when he still had people to talk to—and now he thought it again. He had thought it the day he showed up from the city, fleeing after it happened—and here he wasn’t being coy, just so hated considering the actual event by name, that’s how sensitive, high-strung, thin-skinned, call it what you will, he was about it—and the country had only gotten colder, in all ways, since then.
“You want to copy the whole thing?” Ray the computer man had asked, the day before he fled, “whole thing” meaning whole hard-drive, and Selwyn had agreed. What was he leaving, anyway, besides the possibility of imminent violent death along with everyone else in Manhattan? What had he ever accomplished there, in a place where “accomplishment” meant only one thing (making money) and “where everyone is big-time,” in the words of his father—who hadn’t been born there as Selwyn had, who had come there seeking this very kind of accomplishment, challenged by it, unlike Selwyn, who had only been intimidated, and who had actually become a famous novelist well before Selwyn’s current age of forty, and who would have surely considered leaving the city like this the worst kind of cowardice, public violent cataclysm or no, and who had only himself “left” two years ago at the late age of eighty, unwillingly, and brutally escorted by the bouncer, leukemia.
So why not just put his whole hard-drive onto a “zip,” the very name connoting speed and a cocky, comical, what was the word for when you washed your hands of everything?
“Okay, here’s how you do it then,” Ray the computer man had said, and explained right there in the store for free, that’s how nice everyone was being in the first few days after it.
Why not just copy his bank records, personal letters, unsuccessful attempts at every career from journalism to academia, put them in his bank pants pocket and fly as far as fear would take him?
It turned out to be about ninety miles north. Even now Selwyn could see the black and hunchbacked mountains through the curtains he had kept (paid for and so not had repossessed) and only partly closed, the skiing area that gave the place its history, glamor, and cachet.
None of those fancy digs had been for him, however, no house, of course, he could only afford to rent an apartment much like the one he had just abandoned (at six months penalty) in the city, though bigger and cheaper and located not in a walk-up, run-down, six-floor brownstone, but in a little development of eight shabby mock-houses, “Gleeful Terrace,” on the first floor of three and one of six other flats. His bomb shelter.
Most of his neighbors were elderly and seemed both glad and confused to see such a healthy (though pale) single man in early middle-age (with no car) in their midst. Had he moved up there for a job, his aged upstairs neighbor wanted to know?
“Uh, yes,” Selwyn said, even though he had just up and quit his job proofreading the backs of cereal boxes, a gig that hardly paid at all, and he was living only on a small inheritance from his father.
Actually, Selwyn couldn’t say why he had come—panic—because, in the country no one actually understood how bad it had been in the city, and those who suspected refused to accept it. Here things seemed to have stayed the same for centuries, regardless of the trends and changes “down there”: the disaster to them was like when they first installed that subway or those electric traffic lights down there, a distant, modern event, the ripples of which would eventually reach them, but not now, not yet, wait a few years, why don’t you? Also, everybody there acted so laconic and countrified and self-sufficient-like that to give off even a trace of his actual trauma was to appear horribly, hopelessly weak, and what kind of a way was that to move in?
So “uh, yes, I’ll be working here,” he said again, to the excruciatingly cute and dangerously young college student/waitress at the town diner, who seemed oddly attentive to him. Since he’d never received any kind of attention from similarly cute and young-acting student/waitresses in the city, he assumed it was his very newness and maybe even his age that made him exotic and of interest. Still, as he always had at home, he mumbled so quietly that he had to repeat himself several times to be heard.
“Yes, I’ll be working here. I said, I’ll be working here.” And finally, lying very loudly, “WORKING HERE.”
Still, it was safer not to engage her, and safety was, after all, what he had come there to find. It was safer, too, not to actually ask the bookstore owner if he had a job for him instead of just assuming, from the relative emptiness of the place in the two and a half hours he spent browsing in it, that he couldn’t possibly need another hand. (It was the only local place he could even conceive of working, since his other jobs, such as they had been, revolved around correcting other people’s writing—most recently “The Story of Spelt” on the back of the Succor Flakes box, which had had only one grammatical error, anyway, which he considered too unimportant to even dare mentioning.)
In his new home, he was no more assertive. The heat was faulty, the toilet kept running for forty minutes after being flushed, there were nails sticking up at the entrance to one closet after a carpet had been removed and not replaced, and a paint job of the kitchen had never been completed. His super assured him that these chores would get done soon, but Selwyn didn’t press, said in fact, “No rush,” even though the bottom of his left foot was covered in band-aids after he had first entered the closet barefoot—and so the super, a tall, skinny, bearded man who could have been anywhere from forty to seventy years old, believed him and did nothing. Similarly, his aged upstairs neighbor, apparently still nimble enough to move his fingers up, down and across, often practiced a mournful cello until well into the wee hours, but Selwyn let that go, too, apart from a few timid taps on the man’s door, which might have been answered if they’d only been heard.
Most days and nights he just spent sitting alone in the apartment, which he had begun to furnish with nice pieces bought on credit—why punish himself further by looking at unpleasantness all day? hadn’t life been unpleasant enough recently?—and marveling at how absolutely silent it was at night outside cities. On New Year’s Eve, for instance, which had been deafening until dawn in his old digs, and which he now spent in the same solitary idleness as every other night, he counted only one dim, distant, drunken cry of “whee!” outside, which on closer consideration, could have been a coyote being hit by a car.
Now, as he sat, waiting and shaking in the dark, covered in blood, there were no such sounds from outside—or upstairs, either, the cello man having died weeks before and his apartment yet to be rented, and besides, he would never have mistaken the thumping or whatever it was for the old man’s music, even for the occasional merry slapping of the cello he did when his sad song would suddenly for a strange second shift into a jazzy little tune before sliding back to sadness again.
Selwyn, of course, could not forget the last time he had heard the music. It had been on the night, a few feet away from where he now sat, he had first gone into his new laptop to retrieve the copy of his hard drive that Ray the computer man had helped him create. He had intended to use funds left him by his father to pay his first month’s rent.
The file was empty.
At first, he thought there was some sort of mistake. The title of the file was there, so was the little cartoon image of the file—and that’s as far as he could go in describing it, “little cartoon image”—but, inside, where all the information about his finances had been, there was nothing.
For several minutes Selwyn could do no more than pace and clap his hands, impotent and infuriated. Where was the file?—and again, his knowledge of how and where things were actually “located” on computers went no further than the word “where.” Then he decided to check the copies of all the other files to make sure they at least had been made.
His personal letters, some sent in response to receiving condolences on each of his parents’ deaths, others apologizing to women he’d dated who thought him too mild or too “nice,” his applications for employment, unanswered or rejected, his abandoned short story, novel, play, screenplay, sitcom pilot, piece of “creative” nonfiction, and poem—all appeared to be present, for all retained their little cartoon images and titles (“Jennylett,” “Alicelett,” “Untitledshorstor”) but, like a contaminated neighborhood where the names and addresses remain outside of houses with no one left within, all were empty, too.
Published April 2008