Albert sat up, mimicking a pair of scissors with his index and middle fingers.
Fred clapped his hands over his prickly cheeks: “But my dad had a blond beard!”
Fred claimed that his father—Albert’s grandfather Arkadiusz—had been a diver. A man with extraordinary lungs who had reconditioned subterranean canal systems, who had once dived to the floor of the Baltic Sea without aid of equipment, and who, back when Fred was barely larger than the belly in which he’d spent nine months, had been snatched away by a sudden rush of water and disappeared forever into the rambling network of sewer pipes beneath the town. It may have been true, or just a fantasy, but in any case it meant that someone always had to flush the toilet on Fred’s behalf, something he balked at even more than he did shaving: “My dad is traveling forever through the pipes—sometimes he’s in America, and sometimes he’s in Poland, and sometimes he’s here, too.”
Albert stood up, stepped into the bathroom, and plugged in the electric shaver, but when he turned around, Fred was gone. After hunting through the whole house, he finally found him out in the backyard, in the BMW 321. It was a vintage model from the late thirties that belonged to Fred, even though he didn’t have a driver’s license. He called it the Speedster. Its mint-green paint looked as if it had suffered a high-temperature pressure washing. Its tire treads hung in tatters. The sound of the horn was best described as whiny. The leather upholstery smelled—in Fred’s opinion—deliciously musty, just like it did between his toes. An empty flowerpot kept the passenger-side door from falling off its hinges.
Albert climbed in beside Fred, who was sitting at the wheel. His stubble gleamed in the late sunlight, and the encyclopedia lay in his lap. He had it open to D. D as in Death. With his index finger he pointed to the illustration of a tombstone in Carrara marble. “What color is that?”
“Dove-white?”
“Do they have swan-white, too?”
“Definitely.”
“Can I have one like that?”
“A swan-white tombstone?”
Fred nodded. “It has to be a very beautiful stone, Albert.”
“Done,” said Albert. “A swan-white tombstone for you.”
They sat silent for a moment while, outside, the noise of cars passing along the main street subsided, and they were blinded one final time by the sun before it plunged behind the moor. Fred looked dreamily at the picture of the tombstone.
“Everyone always says going dead is bad. I don’t believe it. I’m sure it’s completely different. I bet it’s great. Like a huge surprise. Actually, I’m looking forward to it. It would be even better if the two of us could go dead together, Albert. Only, I think that would be hard. Because I’m faster than you.”
“I’ll hurry,” Albert promised him, and immediately Fred beamed at him like a child—a child who had gotten on in years, with bags under his eyes, gray temples, and little creases around his mouth.
Then the smile slipped from Fred’s face: “Mama says all your Most Beloved Possessions go dead, someday.” The tone of his voice had changed, as if he’d just that moment remembered what dying actually meant.
“And what would that be, a Most Beloved Possession?” asked Albert.
Fred laughed, as if Albert had asked an unbelievably stupid question: “A Most Beloved Possession can be anything at all!”
“A father, for instance?”
“Sure! Or a car.”
“And what’s your Most Beloved Possession?”
Fred snorted and rolled his eyes. He stretched out one arm, opened the glove compartment, and drew out a dented tin box in which something rolled and rattled. While opening the scratched lid, Fred bent over the box, obstructing Albert’s view, as if he wanted to make sure that what he expected to find was still there. Then he held a chestnut-sized stone, which gleamed metallically in the evening light, under Albert’s nose. “Take it!”
To call the look on Fred’s face one of pride would have been an enormous understatement.
Albert weighed the Most Beloved Possession in his palm—it was astonishingly heavy, and resembled a wadded-up, petrified sheet of rich yellow paper. An absurd thought came to him, which Fred promptly uttered: “Gold.”
“Really?”
Fred whispered, “My Most Beloved Possession.”
Even though Albert nodded appreciatively and stuck out his lower lip, he was skeptical. The stone in his hand corresponded precisely to his idea of a gold nugget, and that immediately aroused his suspicion.
“Who did you get this from?” asked Albert, and handed the gold back to Fred.
Satisfied, Fred stowed the stone back in the tin box.
“I said, who did you get it from?”
Fred said, “It’s mine.”
“Did you steal it from somebody?”
“I never steal.”
“Was it always here? Why haven’t you shown it to me before?”
“When I’m dead, you can have it,” said Fred, and looked at him excitedly; the green of his eyes shimmered like the surface of a lake, one whose depth it’s impossible to gauge. “Then you’ll be rich.”
Albert returned his look, wishing once again that it was possible to ask Fred a simple question and receive a simple answer. A completely normal conversation, that’s what he wanted, one in which Fred didn’t sidle away from his questions. Most of all, he wished he could believe Fred, that he didn’t find himself doubting every last one of his statements.
“Hmm,” said Albert.
“Hmm,” said Fred.
At that precise moment, the neighbor’s rooster unleashed a wild cry. Fred grimaced and rolled up the driver’s-side window. “He never knows when to be quiet!”
Albert tapped on the stopped dashboard clock beside the speedometer. “It’s late,” he said. “The Sandman is making his rounds.”
Papaaa
That evening Albert couldn’t sleep. He lay there with his eyes fixed on a luminous, fingernail-sized, star-shaped sticker on the beam above the bed. When he was younger he’d looked at it every evening until his eyes shut; he’d found it comforting that this tiny light had shone for him, shone defiantly against the blackness of the country night.
From a drawer in the nightstand he drew a yellowing newspaper article. The second April edition of the Oberland Messenger from 1977. Right on the first page there was a report by one Frederick A. Driajes, a story that as a child Albert had read over and over again before falling asleep. It bore the title:
The Day the Bus Attacked the Bus Stop
On the day the bus attacked the bus stop, the rain was stronger than ever before. Every drop was separate! I never wait in the wooden house they built so that people don’t get wet. Inside there’s a big picture of a clown from the circus, whose name is Rusch. His eyes are black and shiny and you can see all of his teeth. I’d rather wait in the rain. That’s why I’ve got my poncho! The Königsdorf bus stop is right on the main street. Everyone who drives through Königsdorf drives past it. The cars are all different colors. But I only count the ones that are green, like my eyes. Once I counted almost fifty green cars—that’s almost more than fifty green cars! There’s also a sign there. Which says 479. Farther off, there’s the church’s bell tower. When it strikes twelve times, it’s twelve o’clock, and I go home for lunch. The 479, which arrives at 6:30, was the bus that attacked the bus stop. But that day it arrived at 6:15! The 479 certainly was driving two hundred miles per hour. Because I wait every day at the bus stop, I can calculate that easily. Even if I’ve never ridden on a bus before. I will never ride on a bus. After all, a bus can make you go dead.
Apart from me, Herr Strigl was there, too. Herr Strigl is a little man with a mustache. He used to work as a driving instructor. But he worked too fast, and now he has to take the bus. Frau Winkler was also waiting for the bus with her little baby. Mama says that Frau Winkler is ambrosial. When you see an ambrosial person, then it’s like you don’t see anything else. You can’t see anything else. And if you do see
something else, it looks like nothing at all. And then, there was a man in an overcoat waiting for the bus, too. Mama doesn’t know him. I’ve always thought funny things about him. That he was like the spider in my room. I always imagine that it walks across my face while I’m asleep. It was like that with the man in the overcoat. I didn’t think he walked across my face while I was asleep, only that he was the kind of man who did things I didn’t like. He never smiled. He was always next to the picture of the clown, and he never talked.
I’d like to hold on to the point before the bus attacked the bus stop. So that it never moves on, and the bus never comes. But time is not something real. Time isn’t like the Speedster, or my encyclopedia. You can’t touch time. You can’t hear time. You can’t smell it, either. Or taste it. Or see it. Not really. A clock is a clock, it isn’t really time. So a person can’t hold on to time. But I can take it apart into little pieces. And that’s what I did, too, when the bus attacked the bus stop. And if I close my eyes, I can do it again. Then I see everything, I see all the little pieces of time. I see the bus coming toward me very slowly, even though it was really going very fast, its wheels spinning and its windows gleaming with rainwater and its headlights much brighter than normal. I see the picture where the clown’s mouth laughs as if it’s swallowing air. I see how the bus wobbles so strangely left and right. I see Frau Winkler clutching her stroller, but she can’t push it out of the way because the man in the overcoat slams into it as he tries to run off. I see Herr Strigl shouting at the man in the overcoat as loud as he can. I see many black birds in the sky. I see Frau Winkler’s little baby in the stroller, making his hands into little fists. I see the bell tower.
It’s only at the beginning that I think I might have to make someone go dead. That’s a feeling that’s very far from ambrosial. There really isn’t a word for that at all. The man in the overcoat shoves Frau Winkler so he can run off. Herr Strigl grabs Frau Winkler and pulls her away. The bus is already twice as big as a normal bus, and its headlights as bright as a sun and another sun. The man in the overcoat runs away from the bus. Behind the bus’s window sits Ludwig, who I used to play with when I was little. The clown on the poster looks so real, like a nasty man, and laughs, and says nothing but words that you mustn’t ever use. The hands on the bell tower haven’t moved yet. There’s a terrible taste in my mouth, and my belly hurts. Herr Strigl makes a face that doesn’t look like him, because Frau Winkler doesn’t want him to pull her away, because she’s trying to get to the stroller. The man in the overcoat runs into the wooden house. The bus makes a noise that’s almost so high that only dogs can hear it, but I can still hear it. The words that the clown is saying are very bad, they give me a hard feeling in my belly, one like I’ve never had before, and his eyes are gleaming completely black. Frau Winkler’s baby no longer has fists, it’s fidgeting like usual. The birds in the sky are still flying. Herr Strigl won’t quit pulling at Frau Winkler. Where it comes from I don’t know, but I hear Mari or Marine or Mina. I feel sick. Frau Winkler’s eyes are red and wet from the rain, but maybe she’s crying, and she punches Herr Strigl because he won’t let her go.
Now I want to do something, like my dad would, I don’t want to be nothing, I want to tell Frau Winkler and her baby and Herr Strigl that they have to run away, and tear down the poster with the clown, and I even want to help the man in the overcoat, but I know I can only do very little, because the bus is much too fast, and everything is already much too late.
But I notice that I’m not wearing my poncho anymore, it’s lying beside me, and then I think that maybe without the poncho I can be faster, and then I start running. With the hand he isn’t using to hold Frau Winkler, Herr Strigl tries to grab my shirt, and I really believe he’s just trying to be nice. The clown goes Harr-harr-harr, he goes Harr-harr-harr, and he sounds like Peg-Leg Pete. The black birds are acting as if the bus isn’t attacking the bus stop, they’re circling like they always do because, Mama says, they’re waiting for more birds. I punch Herr Strigl in the face, so that he lets Frau Winkler go, and I feel all my fingers, and feel very briefly ambrosial, even though I know that you’re supposed to feel very bad when you do something like that. Frau Winkler is free now, and falls to the ground. The bus’s window breaks and Ludwig flies through it, as if he could fly, and all the tiny shards of glass glitter beautifully. Herr Strigl’s eyes are huge. The bus is much slower now, and little pieces of fire spray from where its wheels are, but the bus is still much too fast for a baby and for me and for Herr Strigl and for the man in the overcoat. I think I see the big hand on the bell tower move a little. The man in the overcoat hides himself in the wooden house. I take Frau Winkler’s baby out of the stroller and it screams so hard my ears hurt, and it feels like a little dog, and I wish, I wish my dad was here to help me, to carry us away. It’s so hard not to be nothing. Ludwig flies into the pipe on the wooden house where the water from the roof flows through, and all the little shards of glass from the bus’s broken window that no longer exists look like hail. Herr Strigl just stands there staring at the bus and he looks like a tree that doesn’t know what is going to happen when the bus will hit it. Harr-harr-harr, goes the clown. I scream to Herr Strigl that he should run away, but he just stands there as if someone has done something to him, like that thing men with turbans do to snakes. Frau Winkler, lying on the ground, stretches her arm out to me. The man in the overcoat is in one corner of the wooden house, and I shout to him that he should run away. Man in the overcoat, I shout, go away, I shout, the bus is coming, but the man in the overcoat doesn’t move. The big hand on the bell tower moves a little. Ludwig falls to the ground beside the wooden house, and his throat looks as red as real blood, but there’s a big smile on his face. I feel like I don’t have any strength left, and I imagine that it’s not me who’s inside me, no, my dad is inside me, and with all of his muscles he has plenty of strength, so much that he can save everyone, before the big hand on the bell tower stops moving. And then I am my dad, and that’s a very terrible feeling, because I realize how little my dad is here, and then I jump, and the bus blows thick air, which pushes me to the side. The bus comes and falls crookedly and takes Herr Strigl with it, and the stroller, and hides the man in the overcoat. A squealing bashes me in the ears, and now the bus attacks the bus stop, and the clown, and that Harr-harr-harr finally stops, and the bus breaks the wooden house and gets stuck there, and it stinks like at the gas station, and the wood makes a noise like it’s not doing too well, and then it collapses onto the bus, because it’s completely kaput, and then there’s still a kind of snake-noise, and then it gets softer, and I hear Frau Winkler, she’s crying, and I give her her little baby, and I look at the bus and the wooden house that isn’t there anymore, and Ludwig and Herr Strigl and the man in the overcoat aren’t there anymore either, and I’m sorry for that, I’m sorry, I’m not like my dad at all, I’m nothing, that’s very true, I’m nothing and that’s the whole story, that’s all, that’s all I saw, and I’m sorry about it, I’m sorry, and I never want to say any of these things ever again, and also not tell them to anyone, no.
When Albert read the report today, as a nineteen-year-old, he recognized in it some of what bothered him about Fred: most of all, the way he exaggerated, describing things so that you could never be quite sure if his mental disability was responsible, or his character, or some combination of the two.
But as a child he remembered he had loved Fred for this more than anything—that people called him a hero. Back then he’d seen Fred as an even greater hero than He-Man or Raphael, the turtle with the red bandanna, named for some other Raphael that Sister Simone was all gaga over. At Saint Helena, Albert bragged about Fred, thereby drawing the envy and hostility of all the other orphans who not only didn’t have heroes for fathers; they had no fathers at all. Why did he live in Saint Helena if Fred was so great, they asked him, and shook their heads maliciously. Albert ignored that. Sister Alfonsa had prepared him for such situations; he followed her advice, didn’
t stick his tongue out at the other kids, and told himself that because they didn’t have anyone, they wanted to be like him, they were just being jealous, petty. And that helped Albert, who was the only one of the younger kids in the orphanage who knew what petty meant. At Saint Helena, Albert favored the lower mattress in the bunk bed, on the one hand because he was no lover of heights, and on the other because he could decorate the underside of the bed above him with what he wanted to be the last thing he’d see before falling asleep: Fred’s newspaper report. Even back then he had never called Fred Father. As a one-year-old he’d called him Ped, then Fed at two, and a few months later he was proudly gurgling Fred. Anni had told him to. And after Anni’s death, Sister Alfonsa wanted it to stay that way. Which confused Albert. Often he wanted to call him Papa, with an elongated second a that opened the throat and cleared the mind. Whereas Fred curled his tongue and sounded like an out-of-tune doorbell. Yet he trusted the nun, for in spite of his precocious mind, he was still small enough to believe that adults, among whom he counted Fred, knew everything, and always did what was right.
It wasn’t until age five that he realized how wrong he had been.
During a visit to Königsdorf he and Fred lay, as usual, on the chaise longue in the living room, in front of the television set. Albert couldn’t recall anymore which program had been playing at the time. He’d never cared much about that, for him the important thing was snuggling up against Fred and feeling his inextinguishable warmth. And that’s how it had been that evening when Albert, needing to go to the bathroom, had worked himself loose from Fred, whose gaze never slid from the TV even for a moment. After Albert had pressed the flush on the toilet, he stood there waiting, for Fred’s sake, until the sound of the rushing water had subsided, before opening the door again. When he bounced back into the living room, feeling almost perfectly happy, he saw it.
Almost Everything Very Fast Page 2