Almost Everything Very Fast

by Almost Everything Very Fast Christopher Kloeble

  Their breakup was already half a year behind them. Albert hadn’t expected that the mere thought of seeing her would stir up the desire for something that was officially in the past. It made him think of the warning you saw printed on the side-view mirrors of American-made cars: Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

  The same thing applied to the past.

  A year before, in the autumn of 2001, Albert had been sitting on the bus, reading the backs of heads. On a good, that is, a busy day, the selection would surely have been larger. But given the slim offering on hand, he began much as he did when watching TV: by flipping around. The asymmetrically shaved nape of the teen to his left simply bored him—it wasn’t evidence of a cheap hairdresser, an underprivileged family, rather the opposite: the homemade shave on either side of her lime-green hair was an expression of rebellion; she was probably on her way back from hanging around the provincial train station, frightening elderly people, flinging beer cans, and kissing the new Alsatian pup her daddy had bought her for Christmas.

  And that woman whose little chignon resembled a puffy sandwich roll? How completely tickled she’d be if somebody plopped down in the seat beside her. To loosen her bun and let the long hair tumble free, how divine that would make her feel! She certainly didn’t have it easy, what with two kids and the house to look after, and her husband, whom she called “the old man” while talking on the phone with her girlfriends, just as her mother had done with her father. I certainly don’t have a smooth time of it, the tilt of her head declared, but what can I do, the world’s hard on me, I give it my all, but nobody’s interested, except maybe you—yes, you. Won’t you sit next to me and loosen my bun?

  Albert yawned and pressed himself into his window seat in the last row so that he wouldn’t appear in the rearview mirror of the bus driver. Sheer habit. On this October 7, 2001, his last escape from Saint Helena was months behind him. There was no reason to run away any longer: he was of legal age, nobody could force him to stay there. But, as it is with things you’ve done for a long time, whether willingly or not, it was difficult to break a habit. To let himself appear in rearview mirrors, to deny himself chess duels with Sister Alfonsa, to forgo Sister Simone’s goulash or Fred’s newspaper report fixed to the upper slats of his stealthily squeaking bunk bed, would have been a violation of the rules of the past fifteen years of Albert’s life. The orphanage was his home—where else was he supposed to live? With Fred?

  The bus pulled to a stop and Albert glanced away from the aisle, so as not to ruin his game if someone new should get on. Outside, a line had formed in front of a dry cleaner’s. Three of the waiting housewives carried IKEA bags filled to bursting. Nobody was chatting, they consulted their watches, they rolled their eyes: they weren’t happy. The bus drove on, and only then did Albert notice the small female head in the row before him. Dark-blond hair screened her neck and hid her ears. It was unusual for someone to sit directly in front of him. In his experience, people generally took the seat that would allow them to be as far as possible from their fellow riders. Someone should write a dissertation on that, he thought. The young woman was wearing a washed-out gray shirt with a soberly cut collar. She was doing something to her face with one hand. Gnawing her fingernails, applying lipstick, scratching her nose? No. She had a cell phone. Albert couldn’t tell what she was looking at on the tiny screen. Not texting, that was for sure, her thumbs weren’t moving. In 2001 not everyone in the Bavarian uplands had a cell phone. Her clothing suggested she could hardly have afforded a cell plan. It was more likely a gift from her not-especially-imaginative boyfriend for their one-year anniversary. If she were from the city she would have long since found herself a new man, but since the selection out in the country was humbler, she had to content herself with the kind of guy who compensates for lack of imagination with kindness. The only question was, how much longer? As soon as graduation was in the bag, and she’d enrolled at some Bavarian university, various fellow students would become keenly aware of her sassy way of tucking her naturally blond hair behind her ears. And said enticing fellow students would be in direct competition with her carpenter boyfriend, who expected nothing more from life than a solid mortgage and healthy offspring.

  The bus hadn’t stopped, but the young woman stood up, and the way she was clutching the support strap scared Albert, since it meant she was going to twist her body to the left, that is, away from the exit, and toward him. Her gaze struck him like Sister Alfonsa’s when she caught him attempting to escape. Her face was shockingly beautiful. She came over and sat down beside him, blocking his escape route. How she managed to keep a straight face was a riddle to Albert. Seconds passed without her saying a word. Albert understood none of this, and therefore he didn’t like it.

  “I’m going to Königsdorf, too,” she said.

  Albert acknowledged this information in what was to him a reasonable fashion: he nodded. Under no circumstances would he show that she’d ruffled him, he’d play it cool, as if young women he’d never so much as set eyes on before sat next to him daily to make some disturbing communication or other. Albert was the observer, the head reader, he never lost his perspective.

  “This is the part where you ask me how I know that you’re going to Königsdorf,” she said.

  Albert turned to face her (making his appearance in the rearview mirror): “Or the part where I ask you to find another seat.”

  “That would be unfriendly.”

  “Frankness is like that, sometimes.”

  “And what if I refused to go?”

  “That would be even unfriendlier,” he said.

  “But frank,” she said.

  Albert tugged at his ear. He hadn’t counted on having to conduct an aimless, meandering Fred-dialogue before even reaching Königsdorf.

  “My name is Violet.” She offered him her left hand, he reached out his right, and she took it in hers. “And you’re Albert.”

  Albert often thought that he and Violet would never have gotten together if he’d known in the beginning all he found out about her in the course of time. The more she divulged about her life, so different from his own, the greater his fear grew that a relationship with her would never work out.

  Once, when Violet was five years old, she’d been asked by her parents to use her fork when eating spaghetti, and she had replied: “Children, if you love your life, shun scissors, candle, fork, and knife.” At six she captured the attention of the grown-ups’ table with jokes about Honecker and Franz Josef Strauss. One year later she wrote a letter to George H. W. Bush, counseling him not to invade Iraq. Ever since childhood, Violet had been surrounded by an aura of self-confidence—it was as if she knew something no one else knew. Her first boyfriend put it like this: “What do you think, that the sun only rises for you?” He was immediately demoted to her first ex. Violet was the girl who asked questions that no other kid in the class would have dared to ask. She was the girl who never did anything just because she could, only because she thought it was right. She was the girl whom all the boys were intimidated by, and of whom they dreamed. She was the girl who played hooky to protest the Gulf War. She was the girl whose life, portioned out in videocassettes, filled a whole wall of shelves.

  Her father, a television producer, had owned a video camera as early as 1980—the kind you had to lug around on your shoulder, unwieldy as a sack of potatoes, connected with a tube-like cable to a backpack that held a hundredweight battery. Everything was documented. Especially first times: Violet sleeps on her back. Violet gets swaddled. Violet takes a bath. Violet screams. Violet eats solid food. Violet laughs. Violet spits up. Violet sleeps on her belly. Violet says something. Violet crawls. Violet trips. Violet walks. Violet speaks. Violet sings. Violet swears. Violet sleeps on her side. Violet swims. Violet rides a bicycle. Violet goes skiing. Violet goes to kindergarten. Violet goes to elementary school. Violet sleeps on her other side. Violet wins the spelling bee. Violet rides a horse. Violet is in love. Violet reads. Violet gets a pierci
ng. Violet has a skin infection. Violet has a boyfriend. Violet has a driver’s license. Violet films. Violet sleeps sitting up.

  Every second of her life, the camera told her, was valuable: you are precious—her father’s declaration of love. The camera—the Cyclops Eye, as he called it—was a part of him. No way for Violet to think it away. In the evenings, after work, when he returned home from his stressful back-and-forths with unimaginative TV editors (on the door to his office hung a little plastic sign with his favorite saying: I always wanted to be an etidor—and now I are one!), Violet would sit down on the couch between her parents, and together they’d fly into the archived past. Even more often she’d watch the films alone, letting them run in the background while she dispatched her homework or drafted an article for the school newspaper, in which she exposed one of her teachers’ racist remarks. All the pictures. All the direct quotes. Violet was her own role model. She expected nothing less of herself than to act as Violet would have acted. She didn’t know how life would have been if she hadn’t had herself to aspire toward. Sometimes it struck her that maybe she wasn’t the way she would have been if no one had been recording her. Then again: who was ever the way they might have been?

  Once, when she and Albert were talking about their first meeting, she sidestepped the question of whether she’d liked him right from the beginning. Violet explained that she didn’t believe in love at first sight. “How can you love someone you don’t even know?” Actually, she wasn’t convinced by the concept of love. Love—what was it, anyway? She wasn’t going to let herself be led down the garden path on a search for definitions. The countless aperçus on love dropped by various minds, more or less clever, sounded good, no question, Violet said—they spiced up every discussion of the subject and lent depth to Valentine’s cards. “But what,” she said, “if love’s most significant quality is that it eludes definition?” A definition that, in the end, Violet found as superfluous as any other.

  What had awakened her interest in Albert, the red-haired boy in the last row of seats on the bus from Wolfratshausen to Königsdorf, was that Violet had never before met anyone who went to such trouble not to be seen. And what had astonished her even more: when she’d boarded the bus, he hadn’t looked at her, but rather out the window. She’d learned his name and destination from the driver. After she’d sat down in the seat in front of him and the bus had pulled out, she’d felt his gaze on her. With her cell phone she’d taken photos of his reflection in the window: he’d been looking at her like a book whose genre one isn’t too keen on, and so merely skims—and yet, for some reason, one doesn’t just set it aside. It hadn’t been any great struggle for Violet to sit down beside him. His facial expression, when she’d said his name, had been priceless.

  “And the kiss?” interrupted Albert.

  That had crept up on her, she hadn’t planned it, and looking back, she found it, to be perfectly frank, neither tender nor intense, rather tight-lipped, poorly aimed, almost pathetic, she would have apologized for it if he hadn’t preempted her with his own “I’m sorry.” As if he’d kissed her! Or as if he’d been so irresistible. And that had spurred her on, she couldn’t let herself stand for that, and so she laid her hand on his neck and kissed him again, kissed him, so that there’d be no mistake about it, and this time, yes, this time there had been some kind of feeling, nothing especially intense, her knees wouldn’t have been weak if she’d stood up—though it was good enough, she stressed, to ensure that they saw each other again the very next day—but it had made her close her eyes and for a moment forget that she was riding bus 479 down Highway 11 on an overcast afternoon.

  The distance that Violet and Albert had overcome at their first meeting they built up again during the course of their second. Sitting across from each other by a window hung with toast-brown curtains at the Hofherr Tavern in Königsdorf, neither of them said what they most wanted to say. Albert kept silent about his life at Saint Helena, about being a two-thirds orphan, and about Fred. Violet, for her part, kept up with him. She didn’t have much of a talent for lying, but pretended to be a college student (even though she was, like Albert, in her last year of high school), making an argument for communal living (though she still lived with her parents in a four-thousand-square-foot villa on Lake Starnberg with a private dock and a sailboat) and demonizing Germany, particularly its publicly subsidized TV (which had—indirectly—funded her entire life, as well as having paid for the coffee that, in their nervousness, they both drank so quickly that they burned their tongues).

  It probably would have been their last meeting if, as they were leaving the restaurant, they hadn’t run into Fred, who was on his way to the bus stop.

  “Hello, Albert!” chirped Fred.

  “Hello, Fred,” said Albert, tugging at his earlobe.

  Violet looked at him, but he made no move to introduce her. So she stepped up to Fred, extended her hand, and said, “I’m Violet.”

  Fred considered the hand. “Who are you?”

  The question struck her—the valedictorian, the star of family videos, the editor of the school newspaper, the only child—with unexpected force: her second Violet had an interrogative lilt to it.

  Albert shook himself out of his stupor. “This is Violet, Fred. A friend.”

  Fred looked at her for a moment, as if trying to reconcile Albert’s information with what he saw in front of him. His sudden grin was spectacular. “Friends are ambrosial!” He embraced her, and Albert wanted to intervene, but she shook her head: It’s okay.

  “I’m Frederick Arkadiusz Driajes,” said Fred, letting her go.

  Violet smiled. “An ambrosial name.”

  Fred gave a start and looked at Albert.

  “Did I say something wrong?” she asked.

  Albert shook his head. “On the contrary.”

  Fred whispered something into his ear.

  “Don’t do that, it’s rude,” said Albert. “Anyway, you can ask her yourself.”

  Fred struggled visibly to lift his gaze from the ground. “Will you come with us?”

  Violet asked, “Where to?”—though she’d already decided.

  Albert nodded in the direction of the bus stop. “To count green cars.”

  They counted over fifty of them that day, not because traffic was heavy, but because they stayed so long. While Fred noted the individual vehicles in his journal, Violet questioned Albert about his life with Fred. Albert noticed that Violet’s hands were shaking, and she stuck them into her pockets as she confessed that she liked him—which clearly sounded, to her, once spoken, much too moderate, so she added that she was sure she’d always remember the time they’d spent here today, and Albert sat stiffly beside her, because he wasn’t sure what she expected from him. Violet asked if she could spend the night with them (he presumed she hadn’t said “with him” in order to sound less obvious), and he was so delighted to hear it that he forgot to work in a cool, strategically placed hesitation before nodding yes.

  Albert moved up his next visit to Königsdorf, returning later in October and inviting Violet over for lunch. When he went to dish up his homemade chili con carne, he found little shreds of paper in it, and confronted Fred. “Why is there paper in the food?” he asked, and Fred widened his eyes: “It wasn’t me!” and Albert raised his voice: “Don’t lie, Fred,” and Fred screamed, “I never lie!” and Albert said, louder, “You can’t mess around with the food!” and Fred declared, “I didn’t want to mess around!”

  Violet’s more understanding approach elicited from Fred the confession that there was a question he hadn’t dared to ask, so instead he’d written it on a piece of paper, torn it up, and mixed it into the chili.

  “You can ask me anything,” said Albert.

  Fred ran a hand across his face. “Why do you two make such funny noises when Violet is here?”

  Albert gulped. Violet laughed, and said, “We’re making whoopee.”

  “And when do people make whoopee?”

  She glance
d at Albert, who, drinking a glass of water, avoided her eyes. “When they feel very, very good.”

  “Ambrosial?”

  “Completely ambrosial.”

  That night, Albert was woken by odd noises. Violet was already awake, sitting upright in bed. “Making whoopee,” she said, pointing toward Fred’s room and chuckling, and after they’d made love a second time that night, Albert admitted that had he been alone he’d have found Fred’s imitation annoying, but with her everything was different, with her he was different, as if, since he’d known her, he could see Fred better, or was able to make more of an effort. Now he traveled to Königsdorf because he wanted to, not because he was obliged to, and for that he was grateful to Violet, he whispered to her, very grateful, and Violet replied that nobody had ever given her such a beautiful compliment, and she kissed him, and they made love a third time, and Albert felt so happy that for the first time in his life he wasn’t yearning for a different life. Everything could stay just as it was.

  The following evening she introduced him to the Cyclops Eye.

  The Cyclops Eye

  October 27, 2001

  Blurriness slowly gives way to focus. Rumpled bedding. Light of sunrise or sunset. Albert blinks. He has bags under his eyes. The scar on his cheek is shimmering. He asks, “And what am I supposed to do now?”

  Violet’s giggling from offscreen. “Be yourself.”

  “How can I not be myself?”

  “Plenty of people are only rarely themselves.”