Christopher Kloeble: Almost Everything Very Fast

“Hello, Fred.”

“You’re fat, Albert!”

“Thanks,” said Albert, looking him over — unsure, as he so often was, whether or not Fred was aware of what he was saying. Albert knew him well enough to sense that he didn’t really know him at all. In that respect, at least, he seemed like any other father.

Still, Albert had to admit to himself that Fred had a point. After a shower, Albert usually wound the towel around his body so that he wouldn’t have to look at his belly when he stepped in front of the mirror. Where all that auxiliary lard had sprung from he couldn’t quite explain. He didn’t think he ate and drank any more than other people. Presumably he didn’t move around enough: regular jogging, power walking, or even strolling would, as they say, “do him good.” But the notion of movement merely for movement’s sake didn’t especially appeal to him.

“Is it the holidays again?” asked Fred.

“No, not this time. This time I’m staying longer.”

Fred looked at him hopefully. “Till when?”

“Until …” Albert dodged his glance. “As long as possible.”

“As long as possible could be a long time!” shouted Fred merrily, clapping his hands. “That’s ambrosial!”

“Right. It’s great.”

“It’s ambrosial! ” Fred lifted a forefinger in rebuke. “You need to read the encyclopedia more, Albert.”

With Fred, reading bore no necessary relation to understanding; he seldom saw beyond the sounds of the words that he scanned with the aid of his forefinger, to take note of their meanings. And even when he did, most of them slipped from his memory in short order, bursting like soap bubbles.

Fred tore the suitcases from Albert’s hands and marched into the house. Albert followed. He paused in the vestibule. Though the sugary odor of Fred’s home had been there to meet him whenever he’d arrived, year in, year out, it still managed to take him by surprise.

“Albert?” Fred turned back to him. “Are you feeling faint?”

“No.” Albert drew a deep breath. “It’s fine.”

Albert draped his jacket on a coat hook beside Fred’s royal blue poncho, within whose collar a childish script warned: This belongs to Frederick Arkadiusz Driajes! A plaque by the doorbell bore the selfsame name. Nobody addressed him by his full moniker. Quite possibly because nobody knew how to pronounce it. Naturally, there were a couple of oafs in Königsdorf — permanent fixtures at Hofherr’s beer garden, where they sat nursing their glasses — who maintained he was slow in the head, and called him Freddie-are-you-stupid? But for most people, he was simply Fred, the hero of the bus accident of ’77, who spent half the day at Königsdorf’s only bus stop in order to tally the green cars that passed along the town’s main street and wave to their drivers.

As Fred set down the suitcases by the stairs and proceeded into the living room, Albert felt a fit of déja-vu coming over him; or, to be more precise, a déja-vu of many previous déja-vus.

He thought: First, they’d sit themselves down on a worn-out, cherry-red chaise longue, precisely where they always sat, and no matter what he touched, thousands of crumbs would adhere to Albert’s hands, reminding him that, now, he rather than the nurse would have to provide Fred with at least one warm meal per day, tie his shoelaces, make sure his teeth were kept spruce and the house spick-and-span. His eyes would fall on the world map fixed to the wall, where a ring drawn with a green felt-tip marker, which was supposed to indicate Königsdorf, actually encircled all of Bavaria. He would ask Fred how things were going, to which, of course, the answer would be “Ambrosial,” and the next moment Albert would be asked to read aloud from Fred’s favorite book, the silver encyclopedia, as he so often had in the past, before bedtime or afternoon naps. Fred would snuggle up to him, lay his head, pleasantly warm, in spite of the heat outside, in Albert’s lap, and close his eyes, and Albert would hardly dare to move. Still, he’d open the encyclopedia and begin reading somewhere, say at Billiards , and wouldn’t get any farther than Binary star. Fred would snore, looking much younger in his sleep, midforties at the most. Albert would flip the book shut, then slip a pillow under Fred’s head and lay a short fleece blanket over his long, long legs. In the kitchen, Albert would have something to eat, soothing his stomach with thick slabs of brown bread while running his eyes across the crack-shot window above the sink, whose lower-left corner was adorned with two taunting letters, HA. He didn’t know who had left them behind, nor when, but since they’d been scratched into the pane from the outside (six tiny scratches, Zorro style), he could only assume that they were the initials of his grandmother, Anni Habom. Albert would lean forward, his left hand braced on the sink, and breathe on the window, and on the clouded pane he would trace his own initials beside those of his grandmother— AD —thick as his finger. And watch them fade. Later, in his bedroom on the second floor, he’d make sure that there was enough of Fred’s medication left in the little nightstand by the bed. Only then would he allow himself to be wooed by the sagging mattress, and feel the exhaustion creeping over him, though he wouldn’t be able to fall asleep.

And that’s just what happened.

Though the whole time Albert was telling himself that he ought to be feeling something special — not déjà-vu , but dernier-vu. After all, he’d come home for the very last time.

Most Beloved Possessions

Albert had lain on his bed for barely ten minutes, leaden, empty, and with a towel over his eyes — the sun was still blazing in through the curtains, as though this day would never end — when Fred burst in: “Are you sleeping?”

Albert waved him over — what else could he do? — and Fred plopped himself down on the mattress.

“Tell me,” said Albert, observing Fred’s chin, “when was the last time you shaved?”

Fred blinked. “Yesterday.”

“You’re sure?”

Fred blinked again: “Totally sure.”

“You may have missed a few spots.”

More blinking.

“Frederick …”

“Mama says I look handsome!”

Fred was particularly fond of bringing Anni into play, in order to stress that this, that, or another notion hadn’t sprung from his own head, but from that of a significantly higher authority. An authority who had last said anything to Fred sixteen years earlier, when Albert had been three years old. Albert’s memories of her barely deserved the name; it sometimes occurred to him that he might simply be imagining them, since he’d spent so much time examining the innumerable photographs of her in Fred’s house, comparing her features with his own, searching for resemblances. She had lived to age seventy, an apparently hard life, saddled with chronically high blood pressure (as revealed by the cardiologist’s postmortem diagnosis). In the end, her condition had led to systolic heart failure; that is, her heart had succumbed to its own imposing bulk, and Albert’s grandmother, his last real link to the past, had died. That much he knew. In a handful of file folders, whose primary function had been to support the bottommost shelf of a rickety bookcase, he’d discovered a scrappy collection of documents revealing mainly that she hadn’t been insured. Evidently she’d never set foot in a hospital or doctor’s office. No one had ever told her how many fingers she had left.

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!”