Almost Everything Very Fast

by Almost Everything Very Fast Christopher Kloeble

  “That’s your dad,” said Tobi to Albert, soberly.

  To Albert, that dad sounded like dead.

  “That’s your dad,” Tobi repeated, “isn’t he?” Fred was half-hidden behind Tobi, whose loafers were pointing at Albert now.

  Fred glanced back and forth at the two men, as if following the ball at a tennis match.

  Though he didn’t need to clear his throat, Albert did so anyway. “Get lost,” he said. His injured hand throbbed in his pocket.

  “It doesn’t hurt at all,” Fred said, and clutched his nose, which was dripping blood. He rubbed the red between his thumb and index finger, then displayed the hand, saying, “Look!”

  Albert wanted to go to him.

  Tobi stood in the way. “How long have you been squatting there?”

  Albert could feel Fred’s gaze on him, and turned to Tobi: “Can we talk?”

  Tobi’s feet were perking up again. “So why didn’t you do anything? I mean, he’s your dad. Hey, Freddie, this wonderful Albert of yours didn’t do a thing.” One of Tobi’s feet was pointed at Albert, the other at Fred. “He must not care, Freddie. Guess you don’t matter to him.”

  “Of course I matter to Albert,” said Fred sorely, and that disturbed Albert, because he should have said so himself.

  “You think so?”

  “Come on.” Albert extended his hand to Fred. “Let’s go.”

  Fred, whose blood was now running freely over his upper lip, didn’t move.

  Albert didn’t know what to say.

  “Albert?” Fred’s nose was gushing.

  But now a midnight-blue tractor had appeared on the road, and was bearing down on the trio at a good clip. Its approach shook Albert from his stupor. At once he was wide awake. As they stepped aside to let the tractor pass, he moved closer to Tobi, waited for the cover of the engine’s noise, and then, once they were completely enveloped by it, spoke quickly but clearly and unmistakably, because he had only a couple of seconds. Fred, he said, was terminally ill, had no more than three months left, and if he, Tobias Gruber, the milk truck driver, wanted to be answerable for the premature death of Albert’s severely disabled father, then he should simply carry on as before.

  As he pronounced his last syllables, the tractor passed with a boy hugging the steering wheel, dragging behind it a wind as hot as the foehn, and the roar of the engine and crunching of gravel subsided.

  At a mute command, Tobi’s feet turned, and he walked away with the double-time pace of someone less than eager to display how much he wants to run.

  “There’s a lot of blood,” said Fred, making a cup of his hand and holding it beneath his chin, without managing to catch even one drop.

  “Lie down. On the grass.” Albert gave him a handkerchief. “Hold it under your nose.”

  “Thank you, Albert.”

  “No. Thank you.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you know why he ran away?”

  “Because he was afraid of you.”

  Albert moistened his shirtsleeve with saliva and began to wipe Fred’s face. The fabric went pale pink. “No, of you.”

  “Of me?”

  Albert nodded.

  Fred smiled. “I am a hero after all.” He coughed, flinching a bit, spitting blood. Fred’s right eye was slightly swollen, his skin waxy.

  “You have to lie down,” said Albert.

  “I’m already lying down.”

  “At home.”

  Fred sat up again. “We have to go down into the pipes, Albert!” Fred was looking at him seriously. “I want to do it today!”

  Albert knew it was a dumb idea, but how could he turn down a request from someone who had only three months to live? “All right. But you have to tell me if you aren’t feeling well. And if I want us to turn around, then we’re turning around.”

  “Okay,” groaned Fred.

  Albert set Fred’s Tyrolean hat back in place. “What did you say to him?”

  “What did I say to him?”

  “When Tobi hit you, you said something to him.”

  They stood up, gathered the tote bag and backpack.

  Fred buttoned his poncho up to his chin. “I told him that he had feet like Thumper.”

  “Who?”

  “Thumper, from Bambi.”

  “You mean the rabbit? Who does this the whole time?” Albert stamped his foot a few times as fast as he could.

  “Just like that!”

  Albert laughed.

  “Was that wrong?” Fred asked.

  “No, Fred, it was right on the mark.” Albert adjusted his hat. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have left you alone.”

  “That’s right,” said Fred, without making any effort not to sound reproachful.

  “Frederick Arkadiusz Driajes,” said Albert, reaching for the crowbar, “sometimes I ask myself who you really are.”

  Fred shrugged in an entirely Fredish way. “Me.”

  “You don’t say,” said Albert, slipping the bar beneath the manhole cover, and wrenching it out of its slot.

  A minute later, they were both beneath the street.

  Damn It All

  They stood at the foot of the metal ladder, and Fred looked bewildered. Albert knew this was no cause for alarm. This expression, mouth hanging open as if in disbelief beneath reddened eyes, simply meant that Fred was thinking. And thinking, as Albert very much hoped, about which direction they should take. Thin columns of light fell through the holes in the manhole cover above them. To Albert’s surprise, the sewer pipe had a rectangular shape. The humid air down there was difficult to breathe, a sort of oxygen porridge, and the story its stink told was highly unappetizing. Gleaming, glutinous water dripped and rippled down the walls, whose slick surfaces called to mind a reptilian skin. It emerged, this water, in a thin trickle out of the darkness behind them, vanishing again into the darkness before them.

  “Well?” The reverb repeated Albert’s question, imitating the acoustics of the rambling corridors at Saint Helena.

  Fred pulled a flashlight from his backpack and flipped it on. “There.”

  They proceeded at a slog, because Fred was forever shining the flashlight up and down, back and forth, but scarcely ever in front of their feet.

  “I think Tobi and his wife need to have a child,” said Fred.

  “Sure. He’d be a model father,” Albert said.

  “Klondi told me Tobi and his wife can’t make a child.”

  “Since when do you talk with Klondi?”

  “I talk with Gertrude, too.”

  “Klondi told you the guy can’t have children?”

  Fred paused. “Albert, do you think I can have children someday?”

  “You want to have children?”

  “Yes.”

  “Real children?”

  All of a sudden, from out of the blackness ahead of them, a menacing roar was approaching, shaking droplets of water from the ceiling, making the sewer pipe quake. Albert pushed Fred aside, grabbed the flashlight, and aimed its beam into the dark. Then the noise was upon them. And then, just as quickly, behind them.

  “A car,” said Fred. “Sounded green.”

  Albert tugged at his ear. “Let’s keep going.” He held on to the flashlight, and for a while they proceeded at a steady splish-splash pace, whose echoes swelled and redoubled, like the massed footfalls of a tour group. Albert tried to breathe only through his mouth, and followed Fred without complaint.

  He hoped in vain for a “Here!” or a “Finally!” from Fred whenever they hit a fork or junction. Why the hell did a little town in the alpine uplands have such an extensive network of sewer tunnels, anyway? He couldn’t get used to that unsettling rumble of cars above them, any more than the irregular gurgling in the distance, the sound of fresh deliveries of that substance the word sewer always immediately calls to mind.

  “Do you come down here often?” asked Albert.

  “Yes.”

  “And what do you do?”

  Fred snatched th
e flashlight away, and shot Albert a look as if he’d already explained it thousands of times: “I look for my dad.”

  “You know, he might not be down here,” Albert ventured.

  Fred blinded him with the light. “He is here.”

  Above them something ponderous set itself in motion, slowed down, then rolled on again. Albert thought, for some reason, of a wheel from the Stone Age.

  “How do you know?”

  Fred let the flashlight sink, and looked him in the eye. “Because the gold is his.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “So we’re going to see him? Right now?”

  “Almost exactly.”

  “What does that mean? Yes or no?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  “Damn it all—”

  Albert’s foot hit something slick, and slid: the sewer tunnel spun counterclockwise, and he crashed down on his back. When he opened his eyes again, his gaze fell first on a bundle of tightly bound cables on the tunnel’s ceiling. Königsdorf’s veins, he thought. Fred sat beside him, supporting his head.

  “Are you weak?”

  “No.”

  Fred raised his eyebrows, and Albert had to smile: “Okay, maybe a little.”

  The sweat stains beneath the arms of his shirt had merged with those on his back and at his throat. The dull ache in his shoulders heralded soreness, though the tote bag weighed only a fraction of what Fred’s backpack weighed. Only a single drop of sweat pearled on Fred’s cheek, then vanished into his beard. He’d managed to last for sixty years; now there were only three months left, and he was still overbearingly fit.

  “Rest a minute,” he said, almost fatherly. “I’ll look for the way.”

  “Wait!”

  “Don’t worry, Albert.” Fred smiled confidently. “I’m a hero after all.”

  Before Albert could contradict him, Fred was off.

  Righter

  A banana peel lay beside Albert in a pool of stagnant water, to one side of the sewer pipe. Albert sat on Fred’s backpack, smoking while he waited. This was par for the course. Whether it was the next trip to Königsdorf, some sign of life from his mother, his graduation exams, Fred, or death, Albert was always waiting for something.

  Sister Alfonsa called it “living in the future tense.” Fred, for his part, put it like this: “Albert, you always want something to start, and once something has started, you always want it to end.” And Violet, the only girl Albert had ever dated, had once claimed he was waiting because it was the “right thing.” Albert found this implausible. The underlying message of the numerous films that Violet recommended to him, and that he downloaded on the sly in the computer lab at Saint Helena, was simply: do something because it’s the “right thing” to do. Which Albert didn’t get. Naturally, nobody would do something because it was “wrong.” And even if you came to terms with the fact that many things were righter than others, what was the point? What was the point in searching for his past yet again? To bring Fred back home, or simply to remain squatting here, to throw away Fred’s medication, or mix it into the salad—what difference did it make? Ultimately, thought Albert, knocking his ash into the sluggish stream of water and watching it drift away into the darkness, ultimately, it all came to the same thing: Fred would die, and it didn’t matter if he ever grasped who Albert was, and what Albert himself might be to Fred, Fred would die whether or not Albert called him Papaaa, three more months and it would all be over, and it would be foolish to give any credence to the feel-good justification that Albert had done the “right thing” just because he’d set out with Fred on this wannabe odyssey.

  It was hardly the “right thing” to expose one’s father to such serious health risks.

  He would have been glad to hear Sister Alfonsa’s opinion of this business. Whenever he thought of her, it was with a mixture of incredulity, exasperation, and melancholy. When dealing with orphans she was magnificent, in her way, though she had the irritating habit of doling out bits of wisdom that generally trailed behind them that most annoying of all promises: “You’ll understand that someday. When you’re grown.”

  Albert was grown now, in fact was somewhat on the heavy side, and a smoker, and he had squired his father—who had no idea that he was a father—down the rectangular sewer pipe of a small Bavarian town on far too hot a summer day, in order to discover where his gold came from. And he had only five cigarettes left. And he wasn’t sure how much time had passed since Fred set off on his own. Thus far he hadn’t responded to Albert’s shouts. What if Fred needed him?

  Hoping to distract himself, he opened Fred’s backpack and rooted through it. The first thing he found was the silver encyclopedia. He’d figured it would be there. And the tin box with the gold didn’t surprise him either. The condolence card, however, brought him up short. There was a picture of an outspread hand on it—five fingers. It was a reproduction of a charcoal drawing. Strong contrast of light and shadow, dirty-gray foggy background framed with heavily drawn lines. But something wasn’t right; the hand seemed imprisoned in the picture, as if it hadn’t been laid down on the paper from above, but rather was pressing up against its plane from the opposite side. Upon closer inspection, Albert realized that the drawing wasn’t a reproduction at all, but an original, and he asked himself how such a work could have wound up in Fred’s possession. On the other side of it, in spidery handwriting, he read: Mama says getting older still always means being younger but I don’t know if that’s good or not..

  Albert was familiar with the aphorism; it belonged to Fred’s standard repertoire. What irritated him was the two periods. They stared up at him like a pair of button eyes, neither ending the sentence nor indicating something further. They sat beside each other, stubborn, disturbingly wrong. Albert licked his thumb and attempted to rub one of them away, but merely blurred them, endowing them each with a sort of tail.

  What if Fred needed him now? Albert called out to him again, listened, heard no answer. He put the card back. Every child knew that when you got lost, you shouldn’t go wandering off, but should stay in the same spot, waiting, thought Albert—and set off into the dark.

  That struck him as righter.

  Berlin-Tempelhof

  Albert ran and paused, ran and paused. The diffuse light falling at intervals through storm drains and manhole covers only ever illuminated a couple of feet, then quickly dwindled again into darkness, leaving Albert to grope on with outstretched arms toward the next source of brightness. The sewer pipe’s walls were as greasy to the touch as they looked. To begin with, Albert kept to the right at every bifurcation of the tunnel, but soon gave up on this tactic, realizing he was going in circles.

  Each of his calls was answered by an echo of E-ed.

  At the end of a narrow duct, he saw light. He moved toward it and discovered an exit covered with a metal grate, in which some sort of vegetable matter, looking and smelling like kelp, had gotten tangled. Beyond it, forest. Albert inhaled, savoring the fresh, cool air. For a long while now, he hadn’t heard a car above. It was possible he’d made his way out to the moor. All roads out of Königsdorf led to the moor. He shook the grate; it gave just a little, its mounting didn’t seem particularly stable. Maybe he could get it open. Albert wasn’t too keen on risking his life by ascending a shaft that emerged who knew where, maybe in the middle of some street where the locals went tear-assing around curves at eighty miles per hour. He took a step back, then kicked as hard as he could at the grate. It gave a little more. As he wound up for another kick, something stirred at the edge of the forest. A fox separated itself from the shade beneath a birch, and stood there staring at him. It hardly moved, only curling its tail a bit. Albert had never seen a fox in the wild before. The animal lifted its snout, never taking its eyes off of him.

  “Albert!” came a shout from behind him. Fred arrived at a run, lugging both his backpack and Albert’s tote bag. “You shouldn’t run away!” he said, exasperated.
>
  Albert glanced back over his shoulder. The fox had vanished. “Where’ve you been?”

  “I was sleeping,” Fred said as if stating the obvious.

  “Why?”

  Fred passed him the tote bag. “Because I was tired. It’s very hot.”

  Albert almost didn’t dare to ask, “Are we moving on now?”

  After a brief pause, Fred nodded. “It’s very far.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  Fred’s eyes fell on the grate. He pulled the plant matter from it. “My papa wants this to stay clean.”

  “Now that that’s taken care of,” said Albert, “where to?”

  Fred looked at him, surprised. “You aren’t very strict.”

  “Oh yes I am strict!”

  “No, Albert,” he said, grinning, “you’re ambrosial.”

  “Maybe. A little,” said Albert, and smiled. “Because you’re doing okay. That’s important, understand?”

  Fred nodded. “I always understand everything.”

  They went back up the little duct. Fred was in the lead with his flashlight. Albert wasn’t feeling annoyed anymore, but optimistic. Soon they’d reach their goal, and then he’d be able to wash away this endless summer afternoon with a cold shower. How long could it possibly take before they’d threaded their way through the whole sewer system? It was only Königsdorf.

  They made two more turns, and Fred shouted, “Ah!” They retraced their steps, made yet another turn, and ran up against a cul-de-sac. The treasure chest sitting there at the end of it did, in fact, look just like you’d expect a treasure chest to look: dark, moldy wood, battered edges, rusty lock. Fred indicated it with a sort of may-I-introduce-you gesture, and said, “My Most Beloved Possession.”