The Amazing Absorbing Boy

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  I don’t think Mr. Magboo too had many friends because he began staying longer during each visit to the video store. I soon grew used to his long overcoat and his accent and the little discussion of the movies we had seen. I didn’t say much during these conversations but as I grew more familiar with his movies, I felt that we were seeing them in different ways. After he had left, while I was rewinding his videos I would pause the film every now and again, searching for the magical pets or the hidden codes or the mysterious dark-skinned woman Mr. Magboo had mentioned but I could spot none of them. I wondered whether these movies were stranger than they seemed, especially since Mr. Magboo’s additions seemed reasonable and even a bit interesting. Also, whenever I asked him about these hidden scenes, he never hesitated in describing their connection with the plot. He finished off his explanations with the usual, “It’s real, buddy,” as if that would convince me.

  All of this was very puzzling. It was like searching for a stranger in a crowd, or maybe looking for the Waldo man on a crowded beach. After work, I would frequently puzzle over Mr. Magboo’s extra scenes. Stupid thoughts came into my head, like perhaps he had some special video player that could pick up all the deleted scenes. I even asked him if he had seen earlier copies of these films but he shook his head and said that life was too short and there were too many good movies.

  One evening on my way to class, I dozed off in the train and dreamed I saw Mr. Magboo running away from a sabre-toothed tiger. By the time I got off at the Warden subway station and took the 102A bus, a grop of screaming red-hair ladies were running alongside Mr. Magboo. Throughout the entire class I pictured them being chased all over the place by giant spiders and space blobs, and when Mrs. Dragan asked a question about a big-pappy name Diefenbaker I could not answer. It was Javier instead who provided the correct response. I was a little embarrassed so on our way to the bus terminal I mentioned the distractions of Mr. Magboo’s movies. Javier acted as if all of this was quite normal and he mentioned some Spanish writer fella who described goats chatting with their owners and the ghosts of husbands lying in bed with their former wives. It sounded just like my Crypt comics but I did not bring this up.

  That weekend I waited impatiently for Mr. Magboo. When he got there, I told him I had seen a randy ghost in one of his movies. There was a goat too and while he gazed at me in puzzle, I threw in a couple other animals. It’s payback time, buddy, I thought. See if you can match this. Bictory!

  He then described the baby Cyclops and the flame-spitting bunny monster and the giant bat with a winch instead of a tail. I accepted defeat. Finally, he asked about a movie he had previously requested. “Find please Bampires in the Mist.” He pushed up his lips as if they were fangs there.

  After he left I mentioned this movie to Mr. Schmidlap. He went through his index cards, slowly, one at a time, and after ten minutes or so I regretted asking him anything. The next day I decided to take a trip to the Pacific Mall in Markham, where Mr. Schmidlap bought many of his movies. On the Steeles bus I wondered if I was going out of my way to get a stupid film for a crazy old Filipino because he reminded me of these old Mayaro fishermen like Matapal, who were forever making up stories of necklaces found inside fishes, or simply to get to the bottom of these missing-scene mystery.

  The mall was more crowded than any I had seen before and there were Chinese people walking all over the place. All the stores had Chinese signs and I wondered what kinds of secret potions and magic herbs were hidden in boxes inside these places but as I got closer, I saw cellphones, cameras and gadgets with red blinking lights. The mall with its boxy shops was different from those elsewhere in the city and I lost my way a few times but the other customers, speaking in their high-pitched, scraping voices, moved skilfully from store to store. They all looked very rich, I don’t know why. Finally, I found the video store at the end of the mall. I asked the worker there, a short man with his hair plastered over his bald patch, for Vampires in the Mist.

  “Eh? Damn Piss?” It took a while before I realized he was joking because his old-baby face remained serious. When I repeated the name of the movie slowly, I knew he was going to continue his horrible joke as he dipped into a huge box and flipped through stacks of movie cases. “Aha,” he said with his head still in the box. “Umpire Want Kiss.” He laughed with small nibbling sounds the way a small animal might but I was more interested in the DVD case in his hand. “Five dollars. Just for you.”

  “Only five dollars?”

  “Okay. Ten then. Brand new. Direct import.” I gave him five dollars. As I was leaving, he shouted, “We got this kind of movie too.” He placed his hands behind his head and pushed his waist backward and forward. It was funny because he still had the serious look on his old-baby face.

  I could barely wait for Mr. Magboo’s next visit, and the minute I spotted him shuffling through the door I held up the DVD case. He took it, gazed at the cheaply photocopied jacket, opened the case and gave it back. “Not work on home telebision, buddy.”

  He looked deeply disappointed. “Why?” I asked him.

  “Bideo, bideo only.”

  “You don’t have a DVD player?”

  “Upstairs only. Not my concern.”

  “Don’t you want it then?” He shook his head and I felt I had wasted my time going to Pacific Mall. During his Wednesday visit, I didn’t bother to chat too much and after he left I felt I should have explained that it was not because of the DVD business but only my preoccupation with a recent essay that would count for 25 percent of my final mark. The class had to write a three-page paper with the title, “The person who most influenced my life;” and during the entire week, I had been stuck. I thought first of all about my mother but I felt embarrassed to reveal how she was afraid I would run away like my father, how she burned my comics, and all the parables she threw my way. I thought next of Uncle Boysie but felt the teacher would laugh at his crude Mayaro suppositions. Finally, my mind turned to my father.

  In Mayaro, I sometimes pretended that his absence was no big thing, and that it gave me more freedom to lime and knockabout with no drunken quarrelsome father hindering my every move, but now, thinking of the essay, I realized that every significant event of my life had been marked by his absence: passing my common entrance and listening to the other successful boys boast of the presents given to them by their parents; my first day at Mayaro Composite, walking by myself and gazing at the other students dropped off from their fathers’ cars; discovering my friend Loykie, the Amazing Absorbing Boy, living deep in the swamp and trying to make sense of his disease all by myself; receiving birthday presents my mother pretended had been sent by my father (even though I had previously seen these same items in Uncle Boysie’s shop); moving to my uncle’s house after my mother died and depending on him to straighten my life. It seemed that my father had influenced me more by his absence than if I had seen his face every day of my life.

  In the end, I wrote of my mother.

  As I expected Javier got the highest mark and he was asked to read his essay aloud. He had written of his grandmother who took care of him and his sisters ever since they came to Canada. She used to work all over the place but when she returned tired in the evenings she always put on a happy face for all of them. Sometimes she told them stories from Cuba, one of a creature called a “Curupira” that protected the forests. According to Javier’s essay, his grandmother was uneducated and could barely speak English even though she had lived in Canada for fourteen years. She had a laugh like “coins tinkling on the floor.”

  When he was finished, everybody clapped, the teacher the loudest. After class, I said that his grandmother seemed an interesting person and he asked if I wanted to meet her. I didn’t know what to say; no one had invited me to their house before. We walked quietly for a while and I told him that his Curupira creature was similar to the Trinidadian Douennes. He asked about my grade and I said I had passed though I did not mention the teacher’s comment about “not focusing enough on positive details
.” Maybe she just wanted happy stories.

  I reread the essay at home and I saw that the teacher was right: it seemed as if I had concentrated too much on my father’s disappearance and on my mother’s sickness. When my father came home, he asked immediately, “That is a letter?”

  “Is an essay from class.”

  “So is not a letter from Boysie?” He looked at me suspiciously.

  I don’t know what came over me but I said, “Read it for yourself.”

  He glanced at the title and the grade, seemed about to return it but instead walked to the balcony with the essay. After five minutes or so, I wondered what section he was now reading. Was it the paragraph where I mentioned that most of the Mayaro people felt my mother was real pretty? Where I described her glancing out of the front window while viewing her Bollywood movies? How I missed not having a father around whenever the other boys boasted about their hunting and fishing trips? The five minutes stretched into ten and when he returned, the essay was neatly folded. He placed it on the table before me, carefully set a cup above it—as if a sudden gust might ruffle the pages—and without a single word walked out of the apartment.

  That night was one of my loneliest in Canada. I couldn’t understand this, as I had been alone in the apartment so many times previously. I had a job, a friend, and would soon be in regular college. Then it hit me: Javier’s description of his grandmother and his sisters and all the stories running through their house made this apartment seem dry and bare by comparison. Later, on the foam, I felt that people might be happier if they had nothing to compare to their own situations.

  The mood followed me the next day in Queen Bee. I stared at the old movies and remembered Mr. Magboo saying that “upstairs was none of his business.” I fished out his index card and wrote down his address: 4 Chartland Boulevard. That night I left with his address in my pocket and an old DVD player Mr. Schmidlap rented for fifteen dollars a week. As an employee, I got it for three weeks. The next morning I set off for Chartland Boulevard, but by the time I got to the Scarborough Town Centre I wondered if Mr. Magboo might be mad at my appearance with no invitation at his apartment. An hour later, when I got off the Brimley bus, I began to hope he was out, maybe taking a stroll or in the pharmacy or some other old people place. Chartland Boulevard was lined on both sides with big, grey houses. Maybe I had the wrong address, I thought hopefully. Perhaps the bus driver had stopped miles away because of my constant reminders to him about the address. I always imagined Mr. Magboo as living in an old dingy high-rise or some retirement home where he looked at his movies alone in a little room. His house was at the end of the crescent. There were fruit trees at the sides and a Lexus parked on the long driveway. I was sure I had made a mistake but when I rang the doorbell, the woman who came out looked a lot like Mr. Magboo, even with her fancy jacket and mauve hair. “Yes?” She had a polite voice but her eyes looked over me quickly and I felt she was already thinking of some excuse.

  “I am looking for Mr. Magboo,” I told her quickly.

  “He’s out at work.” She stepped away from the door.

  “He works?”

  I thought she was going to shut the door but instead she said, “Yes, I am about to join him. I am already late.” She had none of Mr. Magboo’s accent.

  “Could you give this to him then?” I held out the DVD player.

  “Oh, Dad. Did he rent this?”

  “It’s a loan from the shop. He is a regular customer.”

  “Wait here.” She shut the door. I felt foolish. Maybe she was calling the police. I almost walked away but when she opened the door, I saw Mr. Magboo with her. He was in pyjamas and seemed confused by my presence. He glanced from me to the woman who told him, “I am going to the office. If Mike calls tell him I will be home at five.” Then she got in the car and drove off.

  “I brought this for you.” Mr. Magboo still seemed confused so I added, “It’s a DVD player for Vampires in the Mist.”

  “For me?”

  “A temporary gift.”

  He shuffled into the house and because the door was left open, I followed him down to the basement apartment. He walked slowly, holding the railing and breathing through his mouth, as if he was tired. I wondered why I had never noticed any of this at the video store. Because of this new mood of his, I didn’t know if he was simply going down for his afternoon nap and would be surprised that I was following him. He opened the door to the apartment and eased himself into a couch. The place had an odd smell, like mouldy socks and nasty old-people bottoms. “The light switch is by the wall,” he said. I wanted to leave.

  I switched on the light and all at once the place looked exactly as I might have imagined. Seated next to Mr. Magboo on the old plaid couch was an enormous orange cat that looked as if it could materialize here and there like Nightcrawler from The X-Men. The coffee table was really an old chest and on its top was an assortment of metallic action figures I had never seen before. The rest of the furniture, the rocking chair and the black table and the four-poster bed stuck in the corner, was out-of-date and dusty looking. But most interesting of all, were the pictures stuck on the wall. There were sea monsters and slit-eyed aliens and huge bats and all the usual red-hair women with their mouths wide open. I removed my hand from my nose and told Mr. Magboo, “You have even more posters than our video store.” He stroked the cat but didn’t reply and once more I felt he was not happy with this uninvited visit. “Well, I have to go now. Enjoy the movie.”

  “Wait. You hook it up.”

  While I was attaching the cables, he stroked his orange cat and said softly, “Aah, Igor. Today you get a special gift.” He seemed especially happy when the movie appeared on the screen and he sat forward on the couch saying to Igor, “It’s real, buddy. It’s real.” The only time he slumped back was when he heard the upstairs door closing and footsteps creaking on the floor. He glanced at his cat and said something in Filipino to the animal. After ten minutes or so, he told me, “They don’t hear me any more.”

  “Who?”

  “Entire pamily. But mostly grandson.”

  “Because you are busy with your interesting movies?”

  He didn’t like this light remark one bit. He got up from the couch and walked over to the table and fiddled with an old lamp that flickered before it settled into a buzzing half-glow. “For fifty-six years I live happy in Manila. One by one, all my children disappear to Canada and Australia and Singapore. Years pass. Wipe die. Then I get a letter from Angela, my daughter here. Come up, she say. This place is design for retire people. Lakes and parks and libraries and no mugging. So I come.” He pulled a chair and sat next to me. The dim light traced and deepened his wrinkles. He was squinting as if the lamp was bothering his eyes. “Pipteen years ago. Pipteen.”

  “It don’t sound so bad.”

  He tapped the base of the lamp to hush its buzzing. “Angela and husband Mario were busy all the time but I had two grandson to care. I take them to school and in evenings, we play games and listen to songs and laugh-laugh until parents came in nights. I say to myself, ‘Toktok, in truth the letters don’t lie.’” As he spoke, I noticed Mr. Magboo’s accent was becoming stronger and stronger. He got up.

  “What happened?”

  “They grow up, buddy.” He raised his hand from his waist to his shoulder then above his head. “No use for this old man again. Nobody want to call me by my Toktok nickname again. They even give me new Canadian name por when I pick up children from school. Costco.”

  I was disappointed. “Toktok is not your real name?”

  “In Manila ebbybody have nickname. I don’t lie. It’s real.” He laughed, which was the saddest thing about the conversation. “Now I become a low-rate creepy-crawly swampy monster.”

  When I left Mr. Magboo I worried I had awakened his deep resentment about his family. He had been happy just viewing his movies. The film we had viewed had a scene of a mummy strangling an entire family and I had this horrible image of Mr. Magboo climbing up the
stairs with his bandages trailing, and strangling his family who had ignored him once his usefulness was over. In most of the B movies it was often an innocent act that led to the awakening of the creature.

  After the next class at Centennial, I mentioned this fear to Javier and he just laughed. He told me old people played with a different set of rules and once you understood these rules, everything was usually okay. I felt he was talking of his grandmother. Maybe she was not as pleasant as his essay depicted. Before the bus arrived, he invited me once again to his home.

  But Javier was right. That weekend Mr Magboo walked in with a list of movies written in a crapo-foot handwriting. “Now I look at all these mobies in DBD.” His tiredness was completely gone. “And this you send to mobie people.” He brought out a clutch of rolled-up papers from his coat pocket.

  “What are those?”

  “All the stories I make. For mobie people. You post for me.”

  “But I don’t know the producers—”

  “You get it from case.” He gave me a twenty-dollar bill. “For stamp.”

  “Look, I just work in a video store. That is all.” I returned the money.

  “You not send?”

  “I am just a video clerk,” I pleaded.

  He became angry. I saw his eyebrows disappearing behind his glasses. He said the world was filled with stupid, ungrateful young people. He wished a sabre-tooth or a volcano god could be let loose on all of us. His hands were trembling as he left with his movies and his money. But he returned on Wednesday with the rolled up scripts, the money, and the complaints about young people. Midway through his accusations I decided to take the money and return it when he was in a better mood. I would think of some excuse later. He seemed happy and wondered whether they might get Boris Karloff or Humphrey Bogart to play the lead roles.