Christopher Kloeble - Almost Everything Very Fast

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 the 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.