“Careful it really turn over,” his mother would reply with a smile.
After his meal, Orbits waited on the bed while his wife marked her papers on her bedroom desk. Frequently he fell asleep before she was finished. But on occasion he was struck by her discipline, marking papers and preparing work late in the night. And he marvelled that he was married to a teacher, a profession he had always hated and feared. Sometimes she would say, “Hey sleepyhead, come and keep me company.” He would pretend to be snoring and would hear her giggling.
One night while he was waiting on the bed, he recalled a swift drizzle earlier in the day that had annoyed Baby Rabbit and Lilboy before it was established it was simply a passing cloud. This is how my job is, too, he thought. Insubstantial and shifting and temporary. He tried to laugh it off, but the comparison stuck. He was getting paid for doing nothing. It was a scam that would be discovered shortly by Baby Rabbit or Lilboy. How could they not notice this? Any fool could do his job. Maybe they wanted someone to blame in case a vehicle filled with dazed tourists overturned in a flooded river. He knew from the movies that in some countries bad luck was blamed not on spirits or the hand of god, but on real people who had fallen asleep on their jobs. So every day he approached the compound with the fear that it would be his last and that Baby Rabbit would pull him aside and point his finger like in the Apprentice television show and say, “You are fired.” Occasionally this fear would be displaced by the greater panic that something would go wrong, and he would be led off in chains.
He tried to immunize himself by sprucing up his forecasts with little bits about the possibility of fog and mist and flash flooding, or with terms he got from his studies and which he never really understood. Baby Rabbit was not impressed. “You have the possibility of everything except snow happening here.” He glanced at the sheet. “And what is this nonsense about cumulus and citrus clouds?”
“Cirrus,” Orbits said weakly.
“Citrus!” Lilboy shouted.
“Look man, don’t harass my ass with this nonsense. Just tell me if rain going to fall or the sun going to shine.” He walked away with Lilboy in tow, and Orbits’ fear deepened. He has seen through the forecasting scam, he thought. He knows it is so simple a child could look up in the sky and say sun today or rain. But in the evening when he related Baby Rabbit’s mixing of cirrus with citrus, his wife laughed and said in a pouting manner that she was so sorry he had to work “with such stupidees.”
The next day in the compound, the fear returned. I am going to be fired soon. It will be back to the swamp and the caves for me. This stretch of good luck, marrying an attractive and intelligent woman, employed at a place where he finished before noon and where his job description was simply looking up at the sky, had to be an anomaly. Something would snatch it all away. But what? He began to refocus on his online course; and in the nights while his wife was marking her papers at her desk, he would be on his bed struggling with some description, trying to keep his eyes open.
During a dinner, she said to her parents, “We are like two scholars every night with all our reading and preparations.” Her father glanced over his spectacles and Orbits thought: He knows. He has seen through everything. He began to dread these family dinners, expecting at any moment an unanswerable question from one of the parents. He soon realized that he hated the clean house, passing both parents on his way in, the predictability of the evening scenes, the formality of the dinners, struggling to be smart and cultured. One morning he heard his father-in-law reading aloud from a thick novel: “Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.” He began to hate these Russian novelists, feeling they were complicit in the other man’s sly accusation.
One afternoon he went from his work to his parents’ place. It had been six months since his marriage, and he had never visited. His father, who was on the porch patching a pair of shoes with a strip of bicycle tube, spotted him and shouted, “Mamoose, come fast. It have a stranger walking down the street.”
Both seemed genuinely happy to see him. His father asked about his work with Baby Rabbit, and his mother commented on how skinny he had gotten. “This girl not feeding you or what? Or is all the hifalutin food they giving you?” She pinched the skin on his wrist and he yelped.
“Where is Starboy?” he asked, rubbing his hand.
“Come inside,” the father said. “And let your mother cook some good healthy food for you.” While his mother was in the kitchen, his father told him that Starboy had taken up with the wrong crowd, and he came home each night smelling of ganja. He had passed one subject, failed another and had not turned up for the third. “Boy, I thought he would be the one to make us . . . to take his studies further, but all that finish now.”
“I doing a course in meteorology,” Orbits said.
His father continued as if he had not heard. “The boy get so ungrateful. He say that all me and his mother did was bring him in the world and that was a big mistake as far as he concerned. After all the care and attention. Your mother breastfeed him till he was nearly four, you know.”
“I know.”
His mother pushed her head out of the kitchen. “Who you all talking about? Starboy? He just passing through a phase. Give him some time. All bright children like that. The brightness does make them nervous.”
The talk of Starboy continued during dinner.
“He was doing so well at school. First in everything.” The father put on his dessert dentures.
“The boy never wanted to leave my breast. And now . . .” She sighed loudly. “What about you? When you going to give us a grandchild?”
“You making the boy blush, Mamoose,” the father said, stretching his lips and adjusting his dentures with his tongue.
Although he knew he would be sick afterwards, Orbits ate most of the oily food heaped onto his plate. Fried eggplant, curried mango and paratha roti, soya textured and flavoured to resemble chicken, a thick broth of split peas, sweetmeats simmering in oil. During dinner their mood lightened. His father made his old comments about teeth, remarking that a client’s mouth was so deformed with thick brown teeth, it seemed as if it were stacked with toes instead. His mother said, “You remember when you apprentice with Papoose, boy? We had a nice sign ready for the two of you. Swallows and Son.” Orbits remembered and was surprised that the uncomfortable period seemed remotely pleasant, even funny.
He left the house soon after dinner. When he got to his room, his wife was already there. She was looking worried. “Where were you? I had to return to school to . . . to get some papers. I called your workplace from there and they said you had already left.”
“What time you called?”
“Well, it was after work.”
“Oh,” he said relieved. “I too got a call at work. From my parents. They were worried about my brother, so I decided to pay them a visit.” He was surprised at the swiftness and fluidity of the lie. His parents’ village did not have phone lines, and he hoped she would not ask.
“What’s the matter with him?” He repeated what his parents had mentioned, and she told him, “I suspected that during my visit there. You remember how he was bad-talking school and education and all that? I knew at once he had a serious chip on his shoulder. Maybe your mother showered all her affections on you and neglected the poor boy.”
Orbits remembered the visit. He also remembered how much he had resented his brother for the misappropriated affection. Yet he told her, “He was so bright at school. First in everything.”
His wife came over to him and unbuttoned his shirt. “That’s why you are not looking so well. It must be so hard on you.”
“Yes, it hard,” he said.
“Poor baby. I believe you.”
“Ouch.”
From then he visited his parents each Friday. He chose that day because he had heard from his parents that Starboy alw
ays disappeared until Saturday morning, and also because the Friday dinners at his wife’s place were more prolonged. The time alone with his parents recalled the few years before the arrival of his brother. Maybe if he had had a little sister instead it would have been different, with the parental attention equally shared. He liked the mingled odours coming from the kitchen, his parents’ nonsensical bantering, even the way his father casually replaced one denture with another. There were no rules here: dinner was served at arbitrary times and because the food was constantly replenished, it was done only when his mother or father had run out of things to talk about.
In time, he realized that what he really enjoyed about his parents’ place was the lack of predictability and structure, the disorder and the chaos. All their questions were posed in the form of jokes, even their most frequent about the arrival of a grandchild. “You noticing any morning sickness?” the mother asked. “She asking only for sour things to eat? She spitting all the time? You remember how it was with me, Papoose?”
“You eat out four mango tree clean before Starboy born.”
Orbits always shifted the talk to Starboy or to his father’s lab, but eleven months after his marriage, he was finally able to give them an answer. His wife had displayed none of his mother’s stated symptoms, and he was startled at the casual manner in which she broke the news. “Guess what?” she asked him one evening after she returned from work.
“You got promoted?”
She shook her head.
“A student got expelled? A teacher was fired?”
“No, silly.” She raised her bodice and told him, “Feel here. No, not there! Here.”
“What is it?”
“A baby. A little baby.”
“When did that happen?”
She laughed and pushed him playfully. “I took the afternoon off and went to see the doctor to be sure. Mom and Dad don’t know as yet.”
When his wife broke the news, her mother hugged her and launched into a long lecture about pregnancy and about child-rearing. The father glanced sternly over his spectacles at Orbits during his wife’s speech.
The reaction of Orbits’ parents was more predictable. “A baby!” his mother shrieked.
His father said, “I always know you had it in you. Your mother thought the jaundice you had as a child damaged some of your inside apparatus, but I never believed that.”
“Is true,” the mother said. “You was a sickly little child. Not like Starboy.”
“Who the hell using my name?” In his haste to share the news, Orbits had visited on a Saturday. When his brother emerged from his room, Orbits was surprised at how much he had changed. He had developed a slouch, and his sunken eyes seemed wary and suspicious. His long hair was tied in a ponytail and he had a straggly beard. When he saw Orbits, he said, “So, Mr. Married Man finally decide to pay a visit?”
“Hush, Starboy,” his mother chided. “He came every Friday but you never around.”
“You will be a uncle soon, boy,” the father said.
“Another parasite,” Starboy said. “As if the world didn’t have enough already.”
Orbits tried to change the topic. “How everything with you?”
“How everything with me? Let me see. I high from morning to noon. I wish I wasn’t born. I hate everybody in my sight. I—”
“Boy!” Orbits had never heard his father raising his voice. “If that is all you have to say then leave now. Go back to your drug-pushing friends.”
“No, Papoose, don’t say that. He don’t mean anything. Starboy, go back to your room, son.”
“Fuck everybody! And these weed-pushing friends you talking about smarter than the three of you put together. At least I could talk to them. At least they fucking understand what—”
“Boy! That language.”
“Language? The problem with all of you is that you have no imagination. Today just like yesterday and yesterday just like all the days before. None of you could see further than you big toe. Peasant mentality. Spinning top in mud.”
The quarrel continued and Orbits was forgotten. They barely noticed his departure.
His wife, too, shifted her attention. She spent most evenings talking with her mother in the living room. One night a thought hit Orbits: Was this his only purpose? He knew it was mean-spirited to be thinking in this way, but he missed the attention and the little flirtations and even the recounting of the school day. She also grew slightly irritated with him, especially when she had to explain a symptom of her pregnancy he could not fully grasp.
Yet there were benefits: no one seemed to notice his presence at the dinner table or if he left early to the bedroom. No one would notice, too, if I were not here, he thought. He briefly considered and discarded the idea of daily visits to his parents’ place. One rainy morning, he hopped on a maxi taxi that was always the last to leave the compound.
“You going to the museum today with we, brother?”
“Yeah,” Orbits told the skullcap-wearing driver. With his headgear and yellowish colour, it was impossible to guess the man’s ethnicity.
“You is the weatherman, not so? You fellas have to have plenty brains to study all this weather business. Where your parrot?” He didn’t wait for an answer but continued, “Me, I just happy to drive this maxi and do me little prayers and keep out of trouble. Used to sell drugs at one time, you know. Then one night I see a bright light coming from the sky and a voice telling me that the devil, shaitaan, fixing up a room for me. I thought it was the coke talking but for one week, I keep getting the same message. Shaitaan waiting. Shaitaan waiting. From dog and cyat and once a goat. Stop eating goat after that. So this is the story of my life. What about you?”
Orbits did not have a similarly dramatic story to share. He told the driver, “Wife pregnant.”
“She full!” He laughed scandalously. “Don’t take it the wrong way, eh brother. I have nine myself. Four with the madam and five outside. Children is the salt, brother. The salt.” He continued chatting until they picked up a few disgruntled-looking tourists from a hotel’s lobby. His tone and his accent changed whenever he responded to a question about the destination or some other local point of interest.
The museum, which Orbits had never visited, was a disappointment. There were a few cannonballs, a rusty anchor, and some knives in a glass case. Many of the cases were empty. The tourists seemed interested, though, and Orbits felt it was because they were so wet and miserable. After Skullcap had dropped off the last tourist, he told Orbits, “You see how these people making fuss about all these museum things? What you think?”
“I really can’t say.”
“Is because they does see far. We does only see the piece of ground we stepping over, but they does see miles ahead.” Orbits recalled his brother’s observation, and he wondered if Starboy would have been happier if he had grown up in some distant country where people could properly imagine things.
The next day, Orbits went to a mud volcano and the following day, to a heritage site. Over the following weeks, he visited with Skullcap a monastery in the mountains built by St. Benedictine monks more than a century earlier, a zoo with curious, bright-eyed monkeys and a temple that had been built somehow in the ocean. He heard Skullcap telling the tourists, “The man who build this temple, a sadhu we call him, do everything by hand. Brick by brick, he alone. He had to understand the drift of the waves and the tides otherwise everything would have washed away. It take him his entire life to build it. Brick by brick.” While the tourists were taking photographs, Orbits asked the driver, “One person alone build the temple?”
“Is true. But we lose all that now.”
“What you mean?”
“Everybody living for themselves, brother. Living for today. Tomorrow dead and gone. People here only concern about they little plot of land. They does talk as if a nearby village is on another continent. Who
is not friend is enemy.”
The next week, they went to the bird sanctuary. Orbits decided to wait in the maxi with Skullcap because he did not want to meet the boatman who had been so mean to him. He expected the tourists would return miserable and itchy, but two hours later when the boat swung into view, they all seemed happy, and Orbits wondered if the spectacle of flamingoes and ibises had been saved only for foreigners. The boatman didn’t recognize Orbits and he told Skullcap, “Bring back these tourists any time you want. Is flamingo season now.”
“Not mosquito and sandfly season then?” Orbits blurted out.
In the vehicle, Skullcap told him, “That was a good one, brother. I didn’t read you to be funny. Next week we going to a Amerindian grave site. You know a couple hundred years aback, these Spanish fellas force a group of native Indians to build a church, and when the Indians couldn’t take the jamming any more, they rebel. Slice up all these fellas who was whipping them. Well, when word get back to the capital, the soldiers hunt down these Indians one by one and dim they lights. We need people like that now.”
“The soldiers or the Indians?”
“That is a good one. You does be funny sometimes.”
***
Each day Orbits went somewhere new, and as his wife’s pregnancy progressed, he felt that even as she was becoming a stranger, he was growing to know the island better. He enjoyed all the stretches in remote villages shaded by teak and immortelle and those bordered by coconut trees on the coasts. Intermittently, little villages appeared out of nowhere and disappeared just as quickly, swallowed by a forest of immortelle and cedar and hardwood. There were areas of cocoa, the polished pods looking metallic in the sun, and of cashew and tangerine he could smell from the vehicle. He passed ancient towns with Spanish-style stone buildings hugging the narrow roads and little enclaves that led to fields of waving heliconia and ginger lily. Spanish street names gave way to French and French to English and English to Amerindian and Amerindian to East Indian. He couldn’t believe there were all these points of connection, and he felt that if he had remained in his village, never venturing out, he would never have suspected there were all these convergences right on this little island.
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