Almost Everything Very Fast (2 page)

Though in fact, all he really wanted was to get away.

Two months later, after the exams, most of his friends had vanished beyond the horizon. Australia and Cambodia were destinations especially popular with orphans; when they returned from a trip to Angkor or the outback, not only had they “found themselves,” also they had an idea of where they belonged in the world, and what they wanted to start doing with their lives. Supposedly. Albert, on the other hand—who’d never been able to understand why so many people assumed that answers unobtainable in the immediate neighborhood were awaiting them in far-off lands—had decided to move in with Fred. He hadn’t known what to expect, and still didn’t this afternoon, standing before Fred’s house—he knew only that, whatever it was, there wasn’t much time.

Three more fingers, thought Albert; he rang the bell, lowered his head, grabbed the handles of his suitcases, and stood there, motionless. The heat bored down into his skull. People would remember this summer for a long time. Contrary to all predictions, there had not been a storm for weeks now. The grass in Fred’s garden was rust-brown, even the chirping of the crickets sounded feeble, and the shimmering heat on the stretch of the main street that ran in front of the property was playing tricks on Albert’s eyes.

Now the door opened and on the top step there appeared a gangling, six-and-a-half-foot-tall giant, sheepishly dipping his head.

They stared at each other.

“Albert!” shouted Fred in his silvery voice, and before Albert knew what was happening to him, he’d been plucked off his feet and pressed hard against Fred’s bony chest.

“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.

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!”

Fred claimed that his father—Albert’s grandfather Arkadiusz—had been a diver. A man with extraordinary lungs who had reconditioned subterranean canal systems, who had once dived to the floor of the Baltic Sea without aid of equipment, and who, back when Fred was barely larger than the belly in which he’d spent nine months, had been snatched away by a sudden rush of water and disappeared forever into the rambling network of sewer pipes beneath the town. It may have been true, or just a fantasy, but in any case it meant that someone always had to flush the toilet on Fred’s behalf, something he balked at even more than he did shaving: “My dad is traveling forever through the pipes—sometimes he’s in America, and sometimes he’s in Poland, and sometimes he’s here, too.”

Albert stood up, stepped into the bathroom, and plugged in the electric shaver, but when he turned around, Fred was gone. After hunting through the whole house, he finally found him out in the backyard, in the BMW 321. It was a vintage model from the late thirties that belonged to Fred, even though he didn’t have a driver’s license. He called it the Speedster. Its mint-green paint looked as if it had suffered a high-temperature pressure washing. Its tire treads hung in tatters. The sound of the horn was best described as whiny. The leather upholstery smelled—in Fred’s opinion—deliciously musty, just like it did between his toes. An empty flowerpot kept the passenger-side door from falling off its hinges.

Albert climbed in beside Fred, who was sitting at the wheel. His stubble gleamed in the late sunlight, and the encyclopedia lay in his lap. He had it open to
D. D
as in
Death.
With his index finger he pointed to the illustration of a tombstone in Carrara marble. “What color is that?”

“Dove-white?”

“Do they have swan-white, too?”

“Definitely.”

“Can I have one like that?”

“A swan-white tombstone?”

Fred nodded. “It has to be a very beautiful stone, Albert.”

“Done,” said Albert. “A swan-white tombstone for you.”

They sat silent for a moment while, outside, the noise of cars passing along the main street subsided, and they were blinded one final time by the sun before it plunged behind the moor. Fred looked dreamily at the picture of the tombstone.

“Everyone always says going dead is bad. I don’t believe it. I’m sure it’s completely different. I bet it’s great. Like a huge surprise. Actually, I’m looking forward to it. It would be even better if the two of us could go dead together, Albert. Only, I think that would be hard. Because I’m faster than you.”

“I’ll hurry,” Albert promised him, and immediately Fred beamed at him like a child—a child who had gotten on in years, with bags under his eyes, gray temples, and little creases around his mouth.

Then the smile slipped from Fred’s face: “Mama says all your Most Beloved Possessions go dead, someday.” The tone of his voice had changed, as if he’d just that moment remembered what dying actually meant.

“And what would that be, a Most Beloved Possession?” asked Albert.

Fred laughed, as if Albert had asked an unbelievably stupid question: “A Most Beloved Possession can be anything at all!”

“A father, for instance?”

“Sure! Or a car.”

“And what’s your Most Beloved Possession?”

Fred snorted and rolled his eyes. He stretched out one arm, opened the glove compartment, and drew out a dented tin box in which something rolled and rattled. While opening the scratched lid, Fred bent over the box, obstructing Albert’s view, as if he wanted to make sure that what he expected to find was still there. Then he held a chestnut-sized stone, which gleamed metallically in the evening light, under Albert’s nose. “Take it!”

To call the look on Fred’s face one of pride would have been an enormous understatement.

Albert weighed the Most Beloved Possession in his palm—it was astonishingly heavy, and resembled a wadded-up, petrified sheet of rich yellow paper. An absurd thought came to him, which Fred promptly uttered: “Gold.”

“Really?”

Fred whispered, “My Most Beloved Possession.”

Even though Albert nodded appreciatively and stuck out his lower lip, he was skeptical. The stone in his hand corresponded precisely to his idea of a gold nugget, and that immediately aroused his suspicion.

“Who did you get this from?” asked Albert, and handed the gold back to Fred.

Satisfied, Fred stowed the stone back in the tin box.

“I said, who did you get it from?”

Fred said, “It’s mine.”

“Did you steal it from somebody?”

“I never steal.”

“Was it always here? Why haven’t you shown it to me before?”

“When I’m dead, you can have it,” said Fred, and looked at him excitedly; the green of his eyes shimmered like the surface of a lake, one whose depth it’s impossible to gauge. “Then you’ll be rich.”

Albert returned his look, wishing once again that it was possible to ask Fred a simple question and receive a simple answer. A completely normal conversation, that’s what he wanted, one in which Fred didn’t sidle away from his questions. Most of all, he wished he could believe Fred, that he didn’t find himself doubting every last one of his statements.