Christopher Kloeble - Almost Everything Very Fast

“Albert is present,” said Albert, and mentioned yet again that it might be better if Fred stayed behind. They’d be gone for only twenty-four hours.

“But I want to come, too!”

“That’s not an especially convincing argument, Fred.”

“What isn’t an especially convincing argument?”

“You don’t have to come.”

“I do have to come!”

“Why?”

“Because I want to meet your mom!”

Albert looked accusingly at Alfonsa.

She shrugged. “He has a right to know what’s happening.”

Albert felt a tingling at the back of his neck, he knew that any second now his thoughts would take off, and then he’d have to think about things he found deeply unpleasant to have running loose in his head. So he said, “Fine. Let’s get going.”

And so after three days they left Saint Helena with Alfonsa and a new destination, and without Klondi.

Love Story

This woman scratches at the back of her unwashed head, which must be my mother’s head, no question about it, and asks: Who? And I repeat: Your son! And she repeats: Who? And I ask: Are you deaf? And she says: Very good! And I start again from the beginning: I’m your son. And she says: From where? And I say: That’s what I wanted to ask you. And she says: Not today. And I say: It’s me! And she says: Not that I remember. And I say: Can I come in? And she says: Sorry.

Or: This woman explains that the woman I’ve come to see was her sister, and that her sister is no longer with us.

Or: This woman grabs her shotgun as I introduce myself, and shoots me in the chest, and I think to myself: what the hell’s happening here? And then she shoots me in the head.

Or: This woman scolds me, saying, It’s about damned time, where’ve you been roving around all these years? She screams, Get inside this minute and wash your hands and go straight to your room, no supper for you, you’re grounded!

Or: This woman throws her arms around me and says she’s so sorry, she says it’s all her fault, but she was young, and now she’s older, she says, can’t we start again from the beginning, and I tell her I’m sorry, but I’m much too old to start again from the beginning.

Or: This woman has drool dripping from her mouth. She grins, finding just insanely ambrosial the fact that she’s the one who made me.

Albert sat in the passenger seat, reading his chess notebook. Violet steered with her left hand. Curve upon curve. Her right rested on Albert’s upper thigh. Which didn’t bother him. They weren’t far from the goal now, and no matter what he’d hoped to get from it, hoped to achieve, getting it over with would be a basically good thing, he told himself. The same went for a woman’s hand, like Violet’s, on his upper thigh: basically good.

Her fingers stirred almost imperceptibly. “It’s lovely to be with you,” she said.

Albert glanced over his shoulder. Alfonsa’s eyes were closed, but he didn’t believe she was sleeping. Ever since they’d hit the road, she’d been conspicuously reserved.

Fred, on the other hand, sat staring out the window, his eyes flicking left to right, again and again, as if he were reading an encyclopedia. Pushing the world , that’s what he called it. Fixing on something — a street sign, a tree, a license plate — holding it fast with his gaze, and shoving it aside with his eyes. Maybe he was right, thought Albert, maybe we all only believe we’re moving, when in fact we never really move at all. We simply push life past us.

“Thanks,” said Violet.

“For what?”

“You got me out of there. That internship at K&P was hell.” She told him about her days at the production company, confirming what he’d read in her eyes at the airstrip. “I don’t know what I want to do now, but there’s no way I’m ever going back there.”

“A few days ago you sounded completely different.”

“You, too.”

“What do you mean?”

Now she pinched his upper thigh. “You know exactly what I mean.”

There was too much expectation in her grin for Albert’s liking. On the other hand, a grin, too, was basically good. Why ask questions and risk breaking the mood?

The same thought occurred to him three and a half hours later, on the sagging mattress of a motel over whose front door the word Gasthof floated in black letters against a light-blue ground, as Violet sat on him, naked, rotating her hips. But there was one question he simply couldn’t suppress: about the pill he hoped she hadn’t forgotten to take. Violet just laughed, leaned over him, licked his upper lip. Which hardly reassured him. Forgotten pills were a by-no-means-insignificant part of their common past, as were small-hour journeys back and forth across the Bavarian uplands in search of the nearest twenty-four-hour pharmacy, and the patronizing commentaries of the smart-aleck pharmacists who’d clearly never made a single mistake in their whole lives, and finally, forty-eight hours in the company of an unbearable Violet, plagued by nausea and intestinal cramps, cursing, sweating, and smelling oddly of leeks.

Albert grabbed her shoulders. She stopped short and merely chuckled a single word: “Rough!” Then kept going, even more eagerly. Dark-blond hair tickled his chest. A basically less-good feeling crept over him. It wasn’t so easy to separate himself from Violet, she took his efforts for play and clung tightly to him, giggling that they were “making serious whoopee,” and pressing him into the mattress, until he finally tossed her away with a bounce and jumped from the bed.

“Did you take it or not?”

She was still grinning. “Albert, calm down.”

“What?!”

“Let’s stop with the little game.”

Albert slipped into his boxers. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Violet rolled her eyes. “Just come back to bed.” Her voice took on a salacious tone. “Want to read the back of my head?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“All right, fine.” She stretched herself. He knew that she knew how much he liked the way she looked. “What do you suggest?”

“Have you taken it, or not?”

“Would it be so terrible if I hadn’t?”

“Are you nuts?!”

Now for the first time her grin flickered. “Okay, look, this is getting ridiculous. Truth is, you’re afraid of losing me, and I’m afraid of losing you. Neither of us can imagine ourselves with anyone else. We need each other. We love each other.”

And suddenly, as she was expressing it so unambiguously, it became clear to Albert: he didn’t love her.

Violet took his silence for agreement. Her grin was bright white again. She leapt from the bed and threw her arms around him. Her cheerful breathing brushed his ear. “Of course I remembered to take it.” He could feel her heartbeat clearly, and her skin was much too warm. “But maybe — in the future, I mean — I shouldn’t take it anymore?”

He could have answered her honestly. He could have confessed that the mere idea of having children struck him as absurd, that he certainly wouldn’t be producing any offspring, not in this life. He could have explained that he felt differently than she did, yes, that he asked himself whether what he felt for her wasn’t simply the blind clinging of a two-thirds orphan to another human being. He could have explained how incomprehensible it was that she still wanted him. He could have ended this love story, which was more substantial in their heads than in reality, once and for all. But what did he do?

He returned her hug.

The problem, thought Albert, when someone loved you the way Violet loved him, was that you were always being pressured to ponder whether it was possible for you to love her, too. And when you arrived at the conclusion that you didn’t love her, you started asking yourself whether you might not be able to, after all. If maybe all it would take was a little effort, a few relaxed days spent together, some heart-to-heart talks, a couple of tender interactions with each other.