Fatboy Fall Down

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  “Clouds.”

  “And what you think it have behind the clouds?”

  “More clouds. And space.”

  The driver laughed. “I forget I talking to a matter-rologist. Alright brother, this is your stop here.”

  Later that evening, Orbits listened to his mother talking about rituals she had gleaned from a pundit to guarantee Starboy’s happiness in his new incarnation. He felt this was a phase she would soon slip out of, but one year passed, then two, and Orbits saw her settling into a kind of cold, erratic jubilance, a dead joy; so he was not surprised to learn of her visits to one of the evangelical churches that was springing up in all the small villages and that had happily incorporated many of the local superstitions into their doctrines. His father meanwhile receded even further into his silence, and frequently Orbits saw him alone at home, staring into the distance. Every so often, he had to repeat his questions to get a response. Orbits wondered how his father was able to manage in his dental lab, and if perhaps it was only there he found solace and there he sprang to life.

  ***

  The notion of the uselessness of his own job never left, and daily there was the concern he would be found out and fired by Baby Rabbit. His meteorology courses had long lapsed, and he wrote the school requesting an extension. He was surprised to receive a response three months later encouraging him to continue and mentioning all the benefits from a career in this field. He folded the letter, and in his little cubicle of an office, he fantasized about chasing storms and riding into the eyes of hurricanes and reading weather reports about impending tsunamis.

  He brought the course material to the bedroom, hoping the sight of his wife marking her papers in the nights would anchor his mind. And so each night while his wife was seated at her desk and their three-year-old daughter in her crib, he would be on the bed, sitting, his back against the wall, reading his material. On the surface, it seemed a perfect little family, diligent and ambitious. And some of his wife’s affection returned too. Frequently she glanced across and asked, “How is the studies coming along, Orbs?”

  “It coming to come,” he would reply. As the tornado tore through the town and everyone was cowering in their basements, meteorologist Orbits followed the whirling mass, getting as close as he could.

  “I am glad you decided to continue with the course.”

  “Me too.” As the monster hurricane barrelled through the ocean, Orbits and his team plunged deep into its eye. He tried to calm their fears by telling them—

  “Is it difficult?” she asked.

  “It’s a joyride.” He caught himself and giggled as if he had spoken jokingly.

  Eight months later, he wrote an exam and miraculously, he passed. He had answered half the multiple-choice questions and had guessed most of those. Some of his satisfaction faded when he noticed “Stage One” on the certificate. What the hell is this? he fumed. A hurricane or something? Stage One, everything okay. Stage Two, it getting a little serious. Stage Three, get you ass away as fast as you could. Stage Four, you dogs dead. But his wife was pleased. She framed the certificate and told him to hang it in his office. “Is just a small office,” he told her. “And with all the vehicles shaking up the place, it will fall down every morning. Better we keep it here.”

  She hung it in the living room, close to her father’s desk and beneath a dozen other certificates. Orbits felt pleased that it was in the line of vision of the older man and that he had no choice but to see it whenever he looked up from his magazine.

  As the months passed, his wife asked him about completing his course, and he always replied, “In time.” He saw her frustration returning, and one night he told her, “Stage One was pure theory but Stage Two is plenty practical work.” Finally, he got an excuse for travelling about each day with the skullcap driver. “Today I noticed a nice little landspout,” he told her in the evenings, or “I wish you could have seen these rope clouds today.” He barely understood the terms and she asked for no clarification.

  He continued to visit his parents each week and was disappointed by their response to his little successes that he garnished with random prevarications. Most of the times his father was alone. Orbits sat next to him and mentioned some of the places he had visited, but the old man just swished around his dentures, not saying anything. One evening out of the blue, he said, “I never see my grandchild.” He was slightly more animated that day, reaching for and rearranging the plastic flowers in a nearby vase, straightening the doily, passing his fingers along the undersides of the table as if testing for nail dents.

  “That’s true,” Orbits said, guessing the old man would soon relapse into his regular stupor, but he asked how old the girl was. “She is four,” he said after a while. “In less than a year she will be in primary school.”

  “Primary school,” he said and resumed his touching and rearranging the flowers. He began to sing in a stuttering way a nursery rhyme. “I had a little nut tree / Nothing would it bear / But a silver nutmeg / And a golden pear.”

  Two days later during a trip with Skullcap, they passed a small primary school on a hill. This was in a village nestled in a valley and formed around an abandoned cocoa plantation. Most of the buildings were old cocoa houses with sliding roofs or Spanish-style flats of crumbling concrete. There were just four other passengers in the vehicle, two couples who, even though they were in khaki shorts and light cotton shirts, were sweating profusely. But as the maxi weaved through a little valley and up a slight incline, the shade from the interlocked bamboo and the arching immortelle cooled the air. Orbits heard one of the foreigners saying, “This is quite nice. You can smell the cocoa. And the fruits look so polished. Is that a lilac or violet shade?” The shaded road was gloomy, this gloom enhanced by the epiphytes that seemed to be crawling along the trees and the creaking of the bamboo and the stale, sugary aroma of rotting fruits. A pair of squirrels were fluffing their bushy tails as if they were preparing for a show. From a distance came a warble so cheerful and melodious, it seemed to be mocking the mournful solitude. “That is a chichichong,” Skullcap said, and when a tourist asked him to spell the word, he added instead, “I was using the local term. It is really a bullfinch.” He mentioned another bird, a pawi, which he said was a kind of wild turkey. “Just a few left in the world. Maybe fifty.” Orbits could see the tourists were impressed.

  As they drove on, a woman wondered aloud why there weren’t houses here. “So idyllic. It’s perfect.”

  Orbits had passed places like these hundreds of times, and he always felt they seemed both sad and treacherous. Yet these foreigners, dressed more suitably for the heat than people who were born here, were noticing some hidden beauty. He wondered if they were crazy or seeing some aspect he and everyone else had grown numb to. Soon they came to a stretch of teak and poui, the slim, straight trunks creating the effect of swaying bars. A little later, the teak and poui gave way to cocoa sheltering beneath immortelle and mahogany. Epiphytes, clinging to thick vines, seemed to be leaping from one tree to the other, and beneath the pine cones were daubs of wild orchids. There were a couple ravines bordered by little thickets of balisier. On the road, there was a carpet of yellow bird-shaped flowers

  “Stop here,” a foreigner said as they finally came upon a building in this desolate place. “Is that a school?” a woman asked, pointing to an L-shaped structure on a hill. The path from the road to the building was lined with palmiste.

  “It look so,” Skullcap said. “A well-known school.” He winked at Orbits in the rear-view mirror. Orbits understood his pretense, but as he listened to the foreigners, he began to see the scene through their eyes. Opposite the school was a bungalow painted entirely in dark green, which gave it the illusion of merging with the bamboo at the back and the lemon trees at the sides, from which vines stalked the eaves and jalousies. Because of this, the house appeared bigger than it was, and Orbits imagined a concrete pond at the back and some sor
t of greenhouse that attracted hummingbirds and parrots and bullfinches and maybe a pawi, too. This is the place, Orbits thought. This is where my daughter will attend school and where we will live.

  On the way back, after they had dropped off the foreigners, Skullcap asked, “You notice we only had four people today? Most of the maxis and buses nearly empty these days.”

  “Rainy season,” Orbits told him.

  “Is more than that. The tourists going elsewhere. To other islands. Just the other day I hear two of them talking about how people here don’t have a service mentality. That was the words she used. To tell you the truth I wanted to lean over and say, ‘Madam, that is because we are no longer slaves.’ But she was talking about something else. Rudeness. Laziness. The dontcaredamn attitude. Anyways, what I getting at is the talk I hear that Baby Rabbit intend to close down the depot. If that happen it will be back to hustling for me. What about you?”

  “I doing these courses. Should manage to pick up a job with the government.”

  “That is the value of proper schooling, brother. I always try to pound that in the head of all the outsides. I tell them that they mother and father will be gone one day, but the education will always remain.”

  “Very true,” Orbits said. But all his old fears resurfaced. He had neither the skills nor the confidence to find another job. At home, with his daughter as usual in her grandmother’s room, he told his wife, “Getting fed up of this job. Is the same thing day after day.”

  “Lucky you,” she said.

  “Lucky? You know that in some countries boredom is the leading cause of death.”

  “Really? Which countries?”

  “Sweden or Denmark. Maybe Finland.” He tried to recall the names of smaller European nations. “I think Bulgaria too.”

  “I wish I could buy some of the boredom from them. With all the work I have to do at school.”

  “Maybe I should start helping you.”

  “You! Thanks. I will manage,” she said chuckling. The little girl entered the room and she scooped her up. “Little Miss Smarty. What did grandma teach you today? Did she teach you about Bulgaria and all the boring people there? Eh, Chickadee?” she asked, using the grandmother’s designation.

  “Chickadee is not a good nickname,” he told her. “Twenty years from now when she is a big woman, people will still call her that.”

  “Okay, Mr. Orbits.”

  “Thank you, Miss Teapot.”

  These moments with his wife displaced some of Orbits’ apprehension, but they returned the minute he got to the depot. Ever since working at Baby Rabbit’s place, he knew that the stretch of good luck would not last. The death of his brother had confirmed the treacherous nature of contentment; bad luck was always around the corner, sometimes out of view but always waiting patiently. In the nights he frequently imagined calamity as an actual figure, ragged but graceful. Now and again, just before he drifted off to sleep, he would see a tall man with edges so sharp he could slice a victim simply by dancing with his arms spread. He tried to fight these horrific images by creating a counterpoint. He began to think of the school in the old cocoa plantation village more and more, imagining an idealized future rather than one filled with uncertainty. He felt that if his wife could just see the place, the roads with their canopy of bamboo, the stretches of teak, the small, neat school on the hill, she would know at once why he had been so smitten. In the evenings, he tried to convey its unique appeal to her, but found that he could not properly communicate its exoticness in the manner the foreigners had done.

  “A broken-down school in a haunted little village,” she said one day. “Thank you, but I prefer to remain right where I am.”

  He continued to plead his case in this half-hearted manner right up to the moment his daughter began to attend the school in which his wife taught. Each morning he waved to both as they made their way to school. He then walked to the junction for a taxi. One day a new fear positioned itself alongside the anxiety about losing his job; he was watching both walk away and he felt: I may never see them again. He tried to examine this dread on his way to work, trying to convince himself it was nonsense, but the fear remained. What if a car knocked them down? There were always drunk drivers slipping into ditches. What if a snake was hiding in the grass, waiting patiently? What if they were kidnapped? What if his wife decided she would not return?

  He grew obsessed with the thought of an accident, and every morning he reminded his wife to stop and watch whenever she heard an approaching vehicle. He used the company’s phone each morning to call the school to ask if his wife had arrived safely. She requested him to put a stop to that, explaining that in the mornings the other teachers were busy with the assembly. Cell phones had recently been introduced to the island, and he badgered her to purchase one. After a few months of this, she told him, “I have a better idea.”

  The following week he saw a used Nissan Bluebird parked in the yard, and each evening his in-laws took his wife to practise her driving. He was put in charge of his daughter during that period, and whenever she asked about her mother, Orbits would say, “Your mummy gone to knock about with her mother and father.” On occasion, he would add, “By now she knocked down two dogs, three cats and a goat. How much animals your mummy killed?”

  His daughter would count on her fingers. “Six.”

  “Very good. You could count. Thank god you didn’t take after me in brains. And don’t let anybody call you Chickadee. Tell them to call you Chick. No, you better tell them to call you Dee. And make sure none of them ever call you Pusskins. You ever hear that story about the gnome that resemble your grandfather? What was his name again? Rumpeltilskinskin?” At other times, he would point to the sky and say, “How many clouds you see there?” One evening he told her, “Once upon a time, it had a little bear that used to climb on the moonbeams straight to the sky. And there he used to float on the clouds, happy as was possible.” He enjoyed this time alone with his daughter, and he began to see that she had a personality of her own. She was serious and persistent but would giggle whenever he said anything funny.

  One midday as he was leaving his office for Skullcap’s maxi, Baby Rabbit handed him the phone. “Hurry up. This is a business phone.”

  He took a deep breath before he placed the receiver to his ear, but he heard his wife’s voice. “Guess what? I got my license this morning. I took the day off and now I have nothing to do, so I am coming to your work.”

  “Here?” He glanced at his little cubicle and he recalled telling her that his office was stocked with all kinds of equipment. He tried to make excuses, but Baby Rabbit was glaring at him, so he said in a whisper, “Will meet you at the front gate.”

  She arrived half an hour later. “Hop in. Where you want to go?”

  “I know exactly where,” he told her. And even though they got lost a couple times, eventually they arrived at the old cocoa village. “Drive a little farther,” he said. “Okay, stop here. What you think?” He pointed to the house opposite and added, “And look at that cottage there. Just a tiny walk across the road to the school. It look abandoned so it wouldn’t cost much. We could fix it up and—”

  “Are you serious? That house is probably filled with snakes and bats, and the school was closed more than ten years ago.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  She drove off and he said nothing as they passed the fruit vendors on the road, the stalls with breadfruit and purple pommerac and the little parlour with bottles of sauce and spices on the front ledge and the old shop from which he had smelled molasses and sugar during a previous trip. Now he saw just poverty and neglect. When they emerged from the village into the main road, she said, “Thank god.”

  Something in him broke during that trip. He realized how much his wife was different from him, how much he had been pretending. Just before they arrived at her parents’ place, he asked her quietly, “How long w
e going to live here?”

  “I have been paying them a rent ever since. They didn’t want to accept it but I insisted.”

  For the second time that day, he told her, “I didn’t know.”

  He grew more quiet and moody at home, deferring the trips in the Bluebird to the groceries or the malls, and frequently he was left alone in the house. At times, they returned late in the night, his daughter, Dee, already asleep. He, too, pretended to be asleep, and he would hear his wife humming a song as she changed her clothes or sat at her desk.

  He tried to compensate at the depot. He showed off with technical terms he barely understood from his courses, and the drivers glanced impatiently from him to their watches. One day he told Skullcap, “I thinking of applying for a job with the television station. Or maybe with the government. I fed up doing the same thing day after day here.”

  “I know how it is, brother. If I had your brains I would have done the same thing. To tell you the truth, I happy with this job here.”

  These conversations temporarily displaced Orbits’ disquiet, and in their immediate aftermaths, he returned to his old fantasies of riding a storm somewhere in the ocean or forecasting a hurricane that everyone else, all the real meteorologists on radio and television, had missed. He imagined being interviewed by grateful government ministers who testified he had saved the island from certain ruin. He was gracious in this fantasy, explaining that it was simply a matter of observing the unusual cloud formations and the velocity of the wind. Who would ever imagine that a simple thing like the clouds could tell us so much, the prime minister would say admiringly. You deserve a medal of valour for identifying what all these glorified meteorologists missed. In his fantasy, he made an earnest and stirring speech about unsung meteorologists like himself. We never expect praises even though the island rests on our shoulders. We, my friends, are all that stand between catastrophe and progress.