The Amazing Absorbing Boy

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  I really wanted to impress him. They may have been American words but in the comics everyone looked and talked the same. Now it seemed as if all my TV knowledge, too, about hockey and Celine Dion and William Shatner might be wasted. By midday I had a bigger concern: what if he did not return? I reached for one of the boxes of corn flakes on top of the fridge. It was nearly empty, just like the other two, and I finished all three by the next morning. I am not ashamed to say I panicked that day. I was in a strange place. I knew no one except for my father. I had no idea about any of the rules or laws. The apartment looked smaller each hour and I began to feel like these movie actors trapped inside closing-in walls. I rushed to the balcony and watched people walking about on sidewalks and pavements. The soft cushiony fog was gone. I noticed the garbage poking out from a big iron container by the parking lot, and at the side of the container, two overturned carts. Even in this cold weather two boys were riding their bikes. One of them slammed against the container like if it was a stunt and he tumbled on the curb. The other boy stopped and seemed to be laughing. A police car swung out from behind another building that was boxy and stumpy and had only three floors. The car was driving real slow like one of the sharks from Jaws. The two boys rode away in a hurry. I dashed back inside.

  I opened the bedroom door once more as if my father might be hiding inside the big cupboard. This time I did not shut the door; instead I walked from the kitchen to the bedroom like a madman, over and over again. I must have travelled close to two miles if I counted all my footsteps, and on this little journey I noticed a baby cockroach scrambling up the cupboard, two hand-sized holes in the kitchen wall, a puddle coming from somewhere under the fridge, a watermark that looked like a plucked chicken on the ceiling, and a cord trailing from somewhere behind the couch. The cord was attached to a phone on top of an empty overturned aquarium. I wondered why my father had hidden the phone there and the purpose of the numbers written on the back of a handbill advertising swimming pool cleaning. My father, if he had written the note, had taken his time because FOOD BANK was spelt in neat block letters just like all the numbers on the right side of the sheet. It took a while before I actually made the call and even when I heard the man on the other side, I had no idea what I could say to him. Finally I gathered up the courage to ask if he had food there.

  “Yes, sir.”

  My heart sank fast. Why did he call me “sir”? This was a trap for sure. But it was too late to back out. “What kind?”

  “Are you asking about the types of food we have here?”

  “Yes. Dried goods or ground provisions?” This was going badly. I tried to recall what the television Canadians ate and rattled out the list that came into my head.

  “Yes sir, we do have bacon and tins of sardine but you will have to get your whisky elsewhere.”

  “And all of this free?’

  “Hold on.” I heard him talking to a woman about a pickup. He seemed harassed and I pictured a thin beaky man with a few grains of trembling hair on top his head. I put down the phone. My suitcase was resting against the living room wall and I was tempted to take out some money but I didn’t know if I should leave the apartment in my father’s absence, and in any case, I had no idea if there were groceries or parlours like Miss Bango’s nearby. In Mayaro there was always food in the cupboards and fruits in the backyard but this place was bare. I felt like calling Uncle Boysie on the phone and explaining this Canadian affair was a big mistake. Tell him that I was returning to pile pliers and can openers and fishhooks in his shop. Then I remembered he had packed away currant rolls and cassava pone and plastic packets of pickled mangoes in the suitcase’s outer pocket. They were squashed and stale but had never tasted better. The next morning it took about two or three minutes before I digested where I was. But I decided that I would not remain all day hideaway or chook up in the apartment. I put on two sweaters and followed some dark Chinese-looking people to the elevator in the outside hall. The elevator bounced a bit at each floor and by the time it reached the ground level, it was full-up with a good crop of plump children. Three of them were so alike I felt they could have been made from a fat little mould. As I walked about, I discovered a small park and webs of little roads all over the place. But the interesting thing was that on some of these roads I saw old Indians in turbans and on others, some black men in big puffed-out coats, and a little distance away these real Canadian people with their fat apple cheeks. Each group stuck to their own paths and as I pushed through a small gate leading to another set of red buildings, I wondered what would happen if the road-builder had made a mistake and all these people found themselves on the wrong path.

  Maybe I was rude to smile at this thought because I landed in exactly that situation and by the time I circled back to my father’s building, I realized that a lot of parks and buildings looked alike. The apartments were all red and boxy. I felt these were the sort of bullet-box buildings with their many closed windows where a crazy man might be chatting with his cat and aiming his telescope or his rifle outside. On my way back, I imagined Green Lantern from the DC comics surrounding all the buildings with a soft emerald fog that made the place look bushy like Mayaro. When I got to the apartment, my father was on the couch twitching his toes. “You had a nice walk?”

  “I went around the block.” I wanted to ask where he had been.

  “Around the block, eh? Nice. Very nice. You met any of Boysie’s drunkard friends? Any of your mother’s other family? Huh?” I wondered why he was talking in this Canadian accent all of a sudden. “That is why you left the door unlocked? So they could drop in and have a nice little party? A Mayaro fête with plenty rum and bacchanal?”

  “I had no keys.” I wanted to add that he had disappeared without a single word and that the cupboards were empty but felt that would further provoke him.

  I went to put the bread I had bought into the fridge when something clattered beneath the kitchen table. It was a single key. I felt angry all of a sudden. Did he expect me to pick up the key like a little dog? I went to the table and pulled a chair. I had half a mind to repeat some of my mother’s accusations, like how he was a no-good daydreamer who could never hold down a regular job or how he believed he was smarter than everybody else but had nothing to prove it. Uncle Boysie was even more badmouthing. I remember him telling me that every family had one completely useless person who couldn’t get along with anybody else and that my father was this person. Once he had told me, “You know what is the problem with you father? A dreamer with no dreams is just a madman.”

  I saw the key just beneath the table’s leg and when I looked to the balcony, I noticed my father’s toes curling and uncurling. His hand was beneath his sweater scratching at something and I heard some low mumbling but I didn’t want to look directly at him. He got up still grumbling and walked past me with dragging feet. I heard his bedroom door slam shut.

  This Canadian affair was getting worse by the hour.

  During the remainder of my first week in Canada, I tried my best to keep out of my father’s way. This was not too difficult because he, too, seemed to be avoiding me. He left just before midday and when he returned in the night he spent an hour or so smoking on the balcony. I walked around a lot those few days especially on the cold mornings. I tried to put aside my worries about the money I was wasting on doughnuts and muffins, and the busy people who never returned my smile but hurried away, and my unfriendly father in the apartment, and most of all, how I was going to fit into a place where every nut had a proper bolt. I know it might seem strange to say this, but the only comforting thing was that every single day I spotted something else about this complicated housing place that made it seem not like the mall I had imagined on my way from the airport but more and more like Port of Spain. I noticed all the different breed of children running around and the drying clothes on the balcony and the torn and spilling garbage bags and the fancy drawings on the walls. Even the dog smell that hit me the minute I stepped in the building. The only diffe
rence was the coldness and sometimes I watched old Chinese couples walking with tiny, pattering steps on the sidewalk, looking like little dragons with their frosty breath.

  Whenever my father returned from his job or wherever he had been, he would sit before the television and suck his teeth as three young men, who called themselves mythbusters, cooked up all kinds of contraptions to challenge why this or that couldn’t ever happen. I believe Mythbusters was his favourite television programme, even though he sometimes switched to MacGyver. One night while he was watching Mythbusters, he asked me, “So what you intend to do?”

  It was the first time he had spoken directly to me in days. “About what?”

  “About what.” He imitated my accent and it felt like he was mocking me. “That is the way you Trinidadians does operate? Answering one question with another.”

  As he grumbled, I remembered Uncle Boysie telling me that Canada was designed for young, hard-working boys like me. He had rattled off a list of jobs he had heard about in the rumshops: delivering pizza, watchmanning, mowing lawns, picking apples, pumping gas, packing goods, cleaning rubbish, waitering. He made it seem as if these jobs were just lying on the sides of the road waiting for me. “I don’t know anybody here.”

  “Then why exactly you here?”

  “You invited me to come.” How could he forget this?

  “You think I had any choice in the matter?” He did not explain and because of his nasty mood, I kept quiet. “But the point is you here now and I can’t do anything about that.”

  He went to the balcony for one of his smokes and when he returned, I told him, “Maybe I could get a work with you.”

  “I see. You mean in one of my big factories that I making millions from? Maybe I could hire you as an overseer to manage one of them. Oompa loompa. You will like that?” This way he was talking got me real angry and I had to remind myself once more that I knew nobody else in this place. “You have any money?”

  “Uncle Boysie gave me five hundred.”

  “And I sure he sell the property in Mayaro for a hundred times that amount. The damn chiseller. Who living there now?”

  I guessed he was talking about my mother’s board house that she always kept nice and neat with curtains and flowers like zinnias and daisies and ginger lilies. Before she got sick, she was always watering the flowers. “Nobody, as far as I know.”

  I saw him digging his teeth with his little finger. “He send anything for me? Your Uncle Boysie?” I remembered Uncle Boysie’s threatening message but I shook my head. “The damn scamp and chiseller.” He got up and put on his green coat. At the door he hesitated and told me, “You better give me forty from that five hundred. To buy some foodstuff.”

  I got out the money from my suitcase and handed it to him. He returned late in the night and from the foam I saw him placing two loaves of bread in the fridge and a little while later, sitting before the kitchen table, trying to make out the numbers from what looked like a lottery ticket. Every now and again he would glance in my direction and even though in the dark he could not see me awake, I still shut my eyes tightly. About two hours later, I fell asleep and finally had that conversation with my father where he chatted about The Wonder Book of Wonders and said he was pleased that my mother had not thrown it away. And then he apologized for not sending any money to us after his first year in Canada.

  In the morning, with the dream still fresh in my mind, I remembered how I used to sit on the balcony railing in Mayaro and listen to my mother telling some of the other village women that my father always posted letters with Canadian money; and the women, as if they knew that my mother was lying, just rubbing their hands and saying, “So it is, Sylvie. So it is.” After these conversations I would catch her gazing at the framed photograph on top of the old safe that was set close to the window, alongside the sewing machine. The picture was of a couple. The man had longish hair and a scrawny patch of beard on his chin that made him look like a Mayaro pimp. The woman didn’t look special in any way except her eyes were shining as if she was excited about going to a party later on. Whenever I asked my mother about this couple, she always said it was of two people who had disappeared. That made the picture interesting and mysterious and I sometimes made up little stories to explain their disappearance. The most interesting was they had moved to one of the misty hills in the forest, past the radar station, where they looked down on a river flowing into the beach and the manatees playing among the water reeds. Even though I knew the couple was my parents.

  The next day, with this picture in my mind, I felt a tiny bit of happiness and decided I would try to understand my father’s coldness. But I never got the opportunity because he disappeared, just like that, for a full five days. There was no warning except for a note stuck on the fridge. Written in bold letters was: Don’t open the door or answer calls from strangers. And scribbled underneath: This is not Trinidad. So you better learn the rules real fast.

  Chapter Three

  MOTHSKI THE MOLEMAN

  When you are cornered inside one place, with just one view, nothing seems interesting after a while. By the second day of my father’s disappearance, I had memorized what I could see of our slice of the neighbourhood. I could make out the tops of rows of tall buildings that looked like an unfinished dominoes game. I knew where the school must be because I could see children with bookbags come running home across a big street nearby. The smaller children, bandaged up in coats and fluffy hats, and gloves that looked like paws, would be met by women in veils while the bigger ones loitered around their buildings a bit and shoved each other as if they were about to fight. They never did. I could anticipate when the sidewalks would get crowded, though couldn’t say why. I knew when the men with turbans and the little stooped ladies would walk slowly to one of the buildings. Once I saw an old man sitting on a bench feeding pigeons. He had a bag at his side and as the birds got closer, I felt he would snatch a couple and push them inside but he just continued feeding them. Later, a fat lady came and sat next to him but they didn’t seem to know each other.

  In the beginning this was interesting because it was all new and I compared the view with that from our house in Mayaro, where each day I would see the spindly coconut trees and the narrow asphalt road and the low concrete houses across the road and the bushy backyards livened with hibiscus and crocus and fruit trees with swinging cornbird nests. After four days, this comparing business became boring and to shut out the dullness, I tried to imagine Spider-Man and Batman swinging from the crane that stood on top of a several-storey building a little distance away. I pictured the Joker or maybe some half-mad Canadian murderer talking to his orange cat inside one of the red boxy buildings and laughing at nothing in particular.

  I wanted to get out and roam the city but I remembered all my father’s warning so each day I stared at the young boys playing basketball nearby, and fat women holding their grocery bags in one hand and their cigarettes in the other, and every now and then, an old-timer riding one of these scooter-machines. When I got tired of the view from the balcony, I turned on the television. One of the channels talked about the weather, which was far more interesting than the Trinidad weatherman, who said the same thing day after day: sunshine with a possibility of rain.

  Then one night the phone rang. I ignored it but it rang again and again. Finally, I picked it up but before I could get a chance to say that my father was not at home, the voice on the other end said, “I will pull out your tongue.” I almost dropped the phone but I was too shocked. “I will kill you over and over. Then I will kill you again.”

  I managed to say, “The owner of the place is not at home.”

  “Who is this then?” I heard some heavy breathing as if this murderer was puffing a cigarette.

  “I am staying here for a while.”

  “Then you give him this message. Tell him that I will kill him every single day of the week until I get back my teeth.”

  “Teeth?”

  “Exactly.” He made a g
nashing sound.

  That was the end of my boredom. And of following my father’s rules about keeping inside. If the murderer knew the phone number then he might also know our address. The apartment was no longer safe.

  As I walked through all the lanes and the paths between the houses and the curbs, where there were bicycles hooked onto metal ramps, and posters stuck on lamp poles advertising community meetings, and huge metal boxes overflowing with garbage, I tried to push away this new worry by watching the heap of children all over Regent Park. They seemed to be from every country on the earth and they sometimes shouted in their strange languages as they ran about. This was comforting in a way, because it reminded me of all the different types of people squashed together in the bus from Mayaro to Rio Claro. I always stopped at the edge of Regent Park though, opposite Shuter Street, where the buildings reminded me of the cramped office blocks in San Fernando. Apart from this teeth-murderer, Canada didn’t seem to be all that different from Trinidad.