Christopher Kloeble - Almost Everything Very Fast

The street he’d come down, still damp with dew, ran past the barn into town. From the opposite direction, a new Beetle, solar yellow, was approaching — it slowed, and finally drew to a stop a few steps away from him. The engine cut off, but the driver’s-side door didn’t open. It made Albert think of a scene from some sort of Upper Bavarian mafia flick. Violet clearly wanted him to come to her. He obliged. She had her head turned away, he had to knock on the window, and then she took her time rolling it down, and turned her face only halfway toward him, as if she hadn’t come out of her way to Königsdorf just to see him, as if she got up early every Saturday morning and drove out across the foggy moor to the airstrip, as if she hadn’t lain awake all night wondering what could be so important that he couldn’t tell her about it over the phone.

“Hello, Albert,” she said, looking at him and then away again.

Albert couldn’t explain it, but now, seeing her again after so long, he doubted whether he’d made the right decision back then, not answering her calls anymore. To his own surprise he realized he wasn’t just glad but happy to see her; he wanted to give her a hug.

“Hello,” he greeted her, uncertain whether he ought even to ask her to get out of the car, because he didn’t believe she’d do it. From where he was standing, all he could see of her was her smooth, white left cheek.

“Albert,” she said, clutching the wheel, “why am I here?”

He laid his hand on the side panel of the Beetle. Maybe this was a beginning: “It’s nice that you’re here.”

“You think it’s nice here?” She pointed at the airstrip. “It reminds me that I gave you two tickets once. Tickets we never used.”

“Shit. I hadn’t thought of that.” Albert withdrew his hand. “How’ve you been?”

Violet looked at him again, but didn’t turn away this time: “Totally great!”

He read the real answer in her red-rimmed eyes.

The previous day, fifteen minutes before his call had reached her, Violet had been on her way to the office. Stuck in traffic in the firm’s car, a Jeep Cherokee, still umpteen one-way streets distant from the production company’s parking lot, on a Friday evening. It was one of those lonely situations in which thoughts of Albert resurfaced, thoughts she did her best to chase off by saying “Violet!” loudly to herself. But it didn’t help, and so she edged the Jeep to the right of the Munich ring road, turned off without using her blinker, and stopped at a gas station. She didn’t get out; the tank was two-thirds full. Her right hand gripped the engaged emergency brake. The cinnamon bubblegum scent from the car’s last cleaning filled her nose, and she rolled down the window to replace it with the odor of gas. For the hundredth time, she read, on a label affixed to the visor, K&P Commercial —a commercial advertising agency her father had a good relationship with, and which had allowed her to snag, without even having to go through an interview, one of those internships that every other media and communication studies student yearned for. Though she couldn’t understand why they did. She spent most of her time ferrying actors, camera operators, directors, and friends of the producers, or rattling stacks of film cans across Munich. This was supposed to help her make “contacts,” so-called. Since she’d had her license for only half a year, she had her hands full simultaneously studying the Google driving directions, shifting gears, steering, and obeying traffic signs and one-way streets, which had a way of funneling inexperienced drivers to the most remote corners of the city in no time at all. Violet had already had to call the office two times, with a lump in her throat, begging for help. And alongside all that, she was supposed to make “contacts”?

When she’d started the internship, only a month after graduation, she’d assumed that the people at K&P Commercial were smarter, more interesting, more open-minded — in every sense above and beyond the product they produced. An overoptimistic judgment, as she’d since found. When Violet came into the office in the morning and was asked how she was doing and answered, “Not so good,” she always received the same response from her colleagues: “Great! Me, too!” Violet wished it was meant to be sarcastic. Of course she missed the old Violet, the one who’d rebelled against everything, left, right, and center, but she also observed how much easier it was to protest and do the right thing when one’s parents paid for the train ticket to the demonstration. After knocking off for the evening, a group of her coworkers, 80 percent of them interns, gathered regularly around a Mac to applaud a few of the recent commercials — except for Violet, who was easily able to contain her enthusiasm for cappuccino advertisements featuring cowboys and sea monsters. Accordingly, she’d been pulled aside by the producer and encouraged to show a little more spirit. So that now, in the mornings, when the inevitable question came, she always answered, “Totally great!”

Now, behind her, a Mercedes honked. She stepped on the brake, and wanted to shift to “drive,” but her hands were shaking. That happened once in a while. She couldn’t drive on like that. She got out and topped off the tank, to buy time. In the snack shop she wandered aimlessly along the aisles, without buying anything. She paid for the gas with her credit card, and bent low over the receipt as she was signing, so that the cashier wouldn’t notice her shaking. She couldn’t read her own signature. She went back to the car, saying “Violet!” again to herself, then took a deep breath and slipped behind the wheel, started the engine, and steered back into traffic. By the next stoplight, the Jeep began to judder and buck. She had to floor the gas pedal to get the thing moving. Midway through the intersection the engine flooded, and the Jeep stopped short. She turned the key, the indicator lights flared, the engine coughed. A terrible suspicion crept over her that she should have refilled with diesel rather than unleaded. Pairs of headlights rushed toward her and flashed. A concert of horns. She didn’t dare get out of the car. A soft melody tickled her ear. She dumped her handbag out on the passenger seat and managed to get hold of her cell phone. The screen read: Albert.

“I’m really sorry about the airstrip.” Albert swallowed and crouched, so as to be at about eye level with Violet. “Listen, I need your help. I have to get to Helena.”

“And?”

Albert took a breath. “I wanted to ask if you’ll drive us.”

“Us?”

“Fred and me.”

Violet looked him in the eye, and he took a step back. “Take a bus!”

“You know he won’t do that.”

“Then leave him here!”

“I can’t.”

“Why not? I mean …” She leaned out the window and her hair fell in her face and she flicked it aside. “Why not? How far away can this Helena of yours be? Four hours by car? Five? What’s the problem with leaving Fred alone for that long?”

With a stuttering squeal of rubber brakes, a glider touched down behind them, and at the same moment, Albert, holding up a pair of fingers, began to explain.

You Don’t Go Dead Every Day

The sky seemed to be mulling the pros and cons of rain and sunshine, as the Beetle followed a country road through thick pine woods. Violet cut a good number of curves, not altogether unintentionally. And in particular, whenever Klondi gave a histrionic groan from the backseat, or asked exactly how long it was that Violet had had her license. And Violet, almost without moving her lips, would answer, “You don’t go dead every day.” The argument came from Fred, who had refused to accompany them to Saint Helena if Klondi didn’t come as well: “You don’t go dead every day. But when I go dead, Klondi has to be there, too.”