Bodies Up Ahead

Marc Kaufman

He hadn’t worn a suit in three years—not since his father’s funeral—and in that time, he’d gained just enough weight to make the sleeves and the shoulders tight, the waist constrict. A life selling office furniture to companies in Tokyo.

At each stop, even when it seemed another person couldn’t find their way in, another did. Then another. Trains were instruments of time, of speed and more speed, made by those bound to their limits.

The lights of the next underground station flickered. There was still a transfer to make, a distance to run.

After 9:00, the office is too busy. Their words.

His father had loved walking to work or riding his bicycle. Avoid the trains at all costs. Never live too far from where you work. People, he said, were complex Swiss movements, needing constant motion to stay wound. When he was young, his father’s phrases, so often repeated, sounded frail—echoing in the desperate way one generation talks to the next.

The train pulled into Yoyogi Koen station. At each of the doors, thirty or more pushed, ready to pack in. It was the whole city, a mass of force, singular in their purpose. They wanted where he was, all of them. They wanted to be on their way. They wanted to begin. They wouldn’t stop wanting.

That night, when asked, he would tell Haruna, I didn’t make it in time. The train stopped because there was a body up ahead. What could I have done? The doors began to open, the music began to play, the mob began to come. And then the push of summer air—stale but so alive he couldn’t resist.

Marc Kaufman grew up in Monticello, New York. His work appears in Narrative Magazine, Silk Road Review, F(r)iction Online, Isthmus Review, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Tokyo and is an associate professor at Sophia University, where he teaches writing and serves as the faculty editor for the student writing journal Angles.