He had planned to avoid Moon, but not knowing who else with whom he could share his distress, he told her about his mother’s withdrawal from everything that had once sparked her interest. It was a mistake he realized almost immediately. Over the phone, her voice sounded charged with floating specks of madness as she told him that the house had to be cleansed and that the chair’s purchase was the worst thing he could have done. “You encouraging her to be alone, outside, in the dark? Exposed. What wrong with you and all?” He stopped listening when she recited a list of ingredients he needed to sprinkle around the place. He wished Wally were still around, or even Starboy, whose mere presence might have staunched his mother’s depression or whatever it was.
***
One morning when he was driving to work, he imagined himself far away, maybe in Wally’s city, where everything was surely bright and predictable. He wondered how his life might have turned out if he had been born in another village, in another country, maybe another time. During his courting days, his wife had dragged him to see a movie set in Spain where a group of children looked at the trains and imagined they were carrying a monster. He had been bored of the movie, but his wife had remarked on the village and the forest and the mountains, shot always with a long-range lens so that everything looked remote but complete. She had wondered aloud what it would be like to live in such a place, and Orbits had been puzzled by the extent of her ambition.
He was imagining these scenarios later in the morning, wondering what Wally and his family were doing and the places they were visiting, when there was a knock on his office. A man entered. He was slim and seemed a bit overdressed for a farmer. Orbits pointed to a chair and waited for the man to begin. The man seemed hesitant, even embarrassed, and Orbits asked him if he had come to file a claim or was interested in a subsidy, the two most frequent requests of his office. The man looked down at the chair’s leg and pulled it closer to the table. His sad, handsome face appeared familiar somehow, and Orbits tried to place him. The man began to talk, but in a wistful, hard-to-follow manner, about religion and culture and love and fate. He seemed to be pleading for some sympathy, but Orbits still didn’t understand what he wanted. “Sometimes I wonder if god really wanted us to love each other or just fall into a union. Or maybe not even that. Like an animal just to breed. I really don’t know.” He glanced at Orbits only briefly before his gaze returned to the ground. “You ever find yourself in a position where it have no one you could talk with? Nobody who will understand what you going through and all that on your mind? So you have no choice but to talk to yourself, but the minute the words leave your mouth, you begin to feel like is nothing and that life is nothing and everything is nothing.” As he continued talking, Orbits felt that the man was reflecting his own despair, and it was through this connection that Orbits finally recognized him from the photograph taken on the beach with his wife and two children standing at his side.
The man had closed the door behind him, perhaps because of politeness, but Orbits knew of quiet men unexpectedly shrugging off their reserve and slipping into a tightly wound, dangerous temper. Perhaps he had a knife hidden in his pants. He heard the man saying, “I always believe that if you wait long enough everything balance itself out in the end, but I have to tell you that sometimes the waiting is hard. Very hard. I wouldn’t lie about that.” He pressed his palms on the desk and got up. “Anyways, thanks for listening.”
When he walked away, Orbits looked through the window to make sure he had left in his vehicle. He had a slight stoop and seemed to walk on his toes with a springy momentum. Only when the car drove off did Orbits relax, but as the day progressed, his relief choked off and he shifted from disgust to dread to hatred and finally to impatience. So that by the day’s end, he felt it would have been easier if the man had stormed into his office and made a scene. Even if he had been overcome with melancholy and self-loathing, as Orbits imagined cuckolded men to react, it would have been tolerable. He waited for guilt and was disgusted with himself at the absence of this lacerating emotion. But he could not forget the man’s calm, almost tranquilized talk of balance and waiting, and on his way home, Orbits considered once more how much the man had seemed to be reflecting — and clarifying — his own scattered anxieties.
When he got home he saw his mother on the chair. He opened his car door but stood for a while outside. He spotted a house bird flying into the eave. Overhead a scissors-tail was circling, and at a higher altitude there were three specks that seemed to be attached to the clouds like ink spots on a painting. Then the specks detached and he saw they were mile-corbeaux, which were frequently on the telephone poles. When he was a child, he would watch these birds flying upwards, getting smaller until they disappeared. He remembered how much he had wished to be like them, so free and powerful. Now the predatory scissors-tail changed its trajectory, flew higher until he could no longer see it. Little black specks seemed to be floating in the distance, and he assumed it was a delayed reaction to watching the birds. He closed the door. His mother maintained her gaze almost as if she had not noticed his entrance.
He stood by his car for close to five minutes. He felt a drop of water on his hand and when he looked up, he noticed the ribbon of grey, so far above it made the sky seem higher, the world bigger. People are linked more by sorrow than by anything else, he thought. Betrayal, disease, other diseases, death. No one sees the chain. They treat these tragedies as separate. This is the normal state of the world. The man with whose wife he was having the affair was wrong. Nothing balances itself. We just grow so tired from waiting that we fall into a pattern of dulled expectations that strengthens each day. Soon we begin to withhold our gaze. He thought of all the houses between his and the junction. One contained a man perpetually drunk, another a low-grade smartman, another a diabetic mechanic, another a beekeeper whose wife had died in childbirth and who had grown old alone, another a woman whose husband had left her and her six children. He could go on and on until he reached the main road and there would be no improvement.
He passed his mother straight. There is nothing special about her. She is one of many. As am I. As is everybody. Thinking in this simple and straightforward manner, as a child memorizing the lines of a poem, everything made more sense. I was fat and unhappy and I had a brother. Then I became thin and happy with a wife and daughter. Then I became fat once more but without a wife and daughter and brother. Now I have lost my fat and my wife and daughter and my friend and my father and most of my mother. What have I gained in the meantime? A secure job and a woman. But Moon is not mine. I must let her know.
In the night, everything had seemed so simple and rational — like neon signs along a long road, he thought — but when, the following morning, he revealed over the phone that their affair could no longer continue, Moon misunderstood and launched a series of accusations. “So you get what you want . . . all my sweetness and you feel you could just call me over the phone and say, ‘We breaking all the laws of the universe?’ You wasn’t breaking any law when you was deep inside me and bawling like a pig? Eh? And who is you to break up with me? Me. You ever take a look at yourself and ask why a woman like me will go with a man like you?”
“Why?” he asked obediently.
“Don’t ask me any damn nonsense. You get what you want, you lick the kettle clean, and now you think you could just leave and go?”
Still caught in the simple and literal mood of the previous night, he told her, “Was you who was doing most of the licking.”
She called him a snake and a dog and a quenk, a wild hog. Then she began to weep. Yes, it was her fault. She was too easily manipulated. She was weak and despairing. She gave in too easily to temptations. She was shameless. He agreed with her, which caused a fresh burst of curses. Then she grew threatening and hung up.
She came into the office the next day. “How was the morning?” she asked as if the previous day’s quarrel had never happened. She closed the door behind her.
They made love with her against the filing cabinet, her hair spread on the upper drawer pulled open, one leg on the lower. Then she turned around and pushed him on the chair. She was rough and grunting so loud through her clenched teeth that he was relieved that Gums and Doraymay were in the field. As she was leaving she fiddled in her purse and brought out a tiny essence bottle. “Take this.”
“What is it?” Orbits asked. The bottle had a pungent sulphurous odour.
“Something I make for you. Hing and googol. Keep it with you at all times. You could make a necklace and wear it like that.”
After she left, Orbits chucked it in the filing cabinet. He felt it was anger rather than passion that had been at play during their lovemaking even though her departure was similar to her arrival in that it had ignored the previous day’s argument.
And that was the pattern for the next three months, savage arguments followed by bouts of savage coupling. During one of their arguments, she clarified what had been on his mind for a while: she had chosen him because she knew that he would keep their affair a secret. He was friendless and safe and reserved although the disparaging term she used was conumunu. After every episode in his office, he would swear it would be the last, his determination strengthening as he drove to work the following morning. Then she would show up and all his promises would fall away, and in the aftermath, he would blame himself for his weakness. He went along with everything; his only faltering request was that she visit him in the early afternoons, when the other workers had already departed for a rumshop. Whenever she left and before the guilt took over, he would try to convince himself that what they were doing was normal, that he was a single man conducting an affair with a woman neglected by her husband, that nothing was given unwillingly by either party, that he was doing what his former wife had once done. Maybe, he thought, this is the balance Moon’s husband had spoken of.
One Friday she showed up at the cook-up. Orbits was alarmed, and as she chatted with Doraymay, he wondered how she knew of this weekly event. When she came over to him, he noticed Doraymay watching them carefully, watching how she stood next to him, leaning against his shoulder intimately while making suggestions to Spanish, who was stirring the pot. Orbits folded his arms and tried to appear detached even when he felt the tip of her shoe scratching his foot. She accepted a drink from Gums and finished it in a gulp. Orbits, too, took a drink, drawing a little cheer from Gums, who said, “The one-drink man start and finish his dose.”
But the drink loosened him a bit, and he felt that since he had not invited her, there was no harm in her appearance. Besides, she seemed familiar with everyone, laughing at Spanish’s glum way of speaking and at Gums, who was trying to flirt in a deliberately ridiculous manner. Then Spanish began to talk of his spirits and she got quiet, and after fifteen minutes or so, she said to Orbits, “I still didn’t get that thing.”
Gums said, “What you waiting on, boy? Give the woman that thing.”
“It in the office,” he said, the rum in his head.
She followed him, and once in the office she was unexpectedly tender. She stroked his hair and pressed her hands against his cheeks, but when he loosened his belt, she held his hand, stopping him. She was making less sense than usual, and when she left abruptly after five minutes or so and he was returning to the cook, he tried to understand what she meant by saying, “I cast out everything. I clean.” He was pleasantly surprised at this tamping down of their relationship that had recently been so volatile. Some of this relief was in evidence when he loosened up at the cook, uncharacteristically laughing loudly at Gums’ description of “knife-and-fork people,” which, he explained, was a term for country bookies who tried to imitate the mannerisms and habits of town folks.
He noticed Doraymay looking at him and stroking his moustache and drinking straight from the bottle, tipping back his head and banging the bottle on the table when he was finished. Later, when they were eating, Orbits told Spanish, “This duck tasting real good.”
“Is the seasoning. People don’t realize that is the seasoning, not the cooking, that is the commander in chief.”
“You season anything recently?” Gums asked mischievously.
“Me? I am not a cook,” Orbits replied.
“Yes, we know. You is the bookman,” Spanish said.
“The bookman,” Doraymay repeated with a viciousness that drew glances from the other men. He got up suddenly, scattering the food from his plate. “The blasted bookman.” He reached for the bottle and finished it. “The bookman who feel that he so smart he could do anything. With anybody.”
“Take it easy,” Spanish cautioned.
“Don’t tell me to take it easy, man. Is not me you should be telling that.” He advanced towards Orbits, the bottle in his hand. Orbits noticed how red his eyes were. “I didn’t do anything. Is he!” He pointed to Orbits and flung the bottle at him. Orbits felt the bottle whistling against his ear, and he was about to get up when Doraymay kicked away his plate and fell upon him. He received several jabs before Spanish and Gums managed to pull away the other man. Orbits steadied himself against the chair and managed to sit up. He wanted to leave but felt it would be inappropriate to do so now. Why did this happen? Was there something that I missed? Why was I and not the others the source of Doraymay’s violence? The simple and childish manner resurfaced. He heard and saw the other men as if at a distance. Doraymay seems confused. Why is Spanish consoling him rather than me? Why is Gums still smiling? Is my ear still in place? He felt his ear and was reassured.
Eventually he got up. He felt a sharp pain in his left shoulder. “Where you going, man? It still have food in the pot,” Gums said.
“Yes, man. Don’t let the lime spoil like this.” Doraymay had spoken without sarcasm or malice.
Don’t let the lime spoil? Orbits thought. What the hell is he talking about after he nearly take out my ear? And the others? Did they witness the assault or did I imagine everything? He felt his ear. The pain was real. But the friendliness was fake. And suddenly he was enraged. “All of allyou witness what just happen.” He advanced towards Doraymay, and Gums and Spanish came between them. “I never do him one damn thing!”
“Yes, is true. You never do me one damn thing.”
Once again, Orbits could detect no sarcasm in the other man’s voice, and this stirred his rage anew. He recalled the times when the bullies at school had smiled serenely whenever he complained to a teacher. “This not going to end here,” he said. “I have a friend in the town. Portogee lawyer.” He was too enraged to see the ridiculousness of the lie. “He going to hear about this.”
Spanish put his hands around Orbits, and as he was leading him to the car, he said, “He will cool down by the morning. He going through a rough patch. It eating him up.”
“And he choose me to get over his rough patch?” He wanted to break loose but Spanish — remarkably strong for such an old man — tightened his grasp.
When he was in the car and the headlights on, Spanish told him, “What Doraymay do was a stupid thing.” He hesitated and added, “What you doing not smart either.” Orbits wanted to tell the older man that his little affair was over, but his ear was hurting, he was still fuming with rage and he was not sure of anything at that point.
In the morning the pain in his ear had receded, but his left eye, which he assumed had been spared the blows, felt raw and itchy. In the mirror, he saw it was black and swollen. He placed his hand over his good eye to be certain his vision had not been affected. “Just like the shopkeeper,” he mumbled, his anger now renewed. He wondered if he could really sue Doraymay but knew that the object of an assault was viewed with derision rather than with sympathy and the bad-john as a flawed-but-heroic rebel. The police could barely contain their amusement whenever reports were made. Women beaten by their husbands, children by their parents, students by their teachers, and the general consensus was that the victims somehow deserved thei
r fates. The weak paying a price for their weaknesses. “This blasted place,” he mumbled, using a phrase from his last weeks with Wally. He remembered, too, Wally saying that the island had been built upon violence. Tribes wiped out and their shackled replacements flogged into submission.
He did not go to work that day but drove instead to a Chinese shopkeeper who stocked all sorts of odds and ends, and he bought cheap sunglasses. He put it on and from habit glanced at the sky and marvelled how the world had suddenly become a darker and unstable place. The trees had a faint purple tint, the asphalt road seemed to be rolling in the distance and the pothound he almost hit looked decidedly green.
“Nice darkers, man,” Gums said when he returned to work the next day. “It suiting you real nice. You looking like a real barrister now.” Orbits walked to his office without replying; he had already decided he would keep to himself and not associate with anyone at the station. He didn’t care that Doraymay, too, seemed changed by the incident. On succeeding days, he was either friendly to the point of fawning or sullen and silent. According to Gums, “The man singing sweet Jim Reeves tunes and all of a sudden he buss it up with reggae like if is the most natural thing in the world.” From Gums, he heard that Doraymay’s property battle with his brother had escalated, and, after losing that battle, he had picked arguments with arbitrary farmers. One afternoon, a fisherman who was as short and stocky as Doraymay was tall and skinny had pulled out his cutlass and threatened to slice him up. But to Orbits, Doraymay was unceasingly polite. The week of the incident with the farmer, he stood at the doorway to Orbits’ office and said, “What happening to this place?” He smiled shyly like the Doraymay of old and added, “But I still walking. Just two years again for pension. Wifey looking forward to it. Have to get out from this commess before it too late.”
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