He seemed to be looking for some sympathy. This enraged Orbits, and he asked him, “And why you telling me that? I look like I interested?”
Another day he told Orbits, “Really looking forward to retirement. Spend some more time with the family. Get to know them better. What about you?”
He smiled, and Orbits noticed his yellow teeth through his moustache. He snatched a nearby folder. “Me? I kind of busy right now.” He only looked up when the other man had gone. Orbits couldn’t understand Doraymay’s game. Was he looking for forgiveness and now trying to strike a connection, or was it a trap, trying to draw him in with friendliness before another assault? In any case, he decided he would not bite: he had no intention of clearing the other man’s conscience or falling into a crude trap. One morning, Spanish told Orbits, “Is common for friend to fall out after a little rum drive somebody head crazy. But they does always patch up. You know how much times me and Gums fall out? I know you is a different fella from we, but Doraymay trying.”
Orbits felt his irritation rising. “Trying what? To draw me in with laglee like a semp?”
Spanish took this as a joke and laughed. “Alright, Mr. Bookman, I just saying.”
The more Doraymay tried to be friendly, the more Orbits put up his defences. One midday he surprised himself by thinking, Chaos. That is the only way these blasted peasants know how to behave. All this knife-and-fork jealousy! It was an uncharacteristic assessment, and later in the day, Orbits recalled where he had heard the judgment; the man who had taken over the office following Wally’s departure had mentioned it in a taunting, punishing way. “The bitch was right,” Orbits mumbled. “He send me to a hellhole.”
Orbits did not want him to be right, and he wished he could follow Spanish’s advice. Yet each time Doraymay uttered a greeting, he found he could not respond with any equivalent cordiality. “Look, man, I busy right now.” The phrase sprung out the minute he spotted Doraymay.
From Gums, he heard of Doraymay’s other side, increasing outbursts in the rumshops as if he had found an outlet to make up for Orbits’ aloofness. “He pulling rank,” Gums told him one day. “Threatening the hunters now of all people.”
One day Doraymay did not turn up at the office. Midday his wife called to say he had not been home that night. Gums told her that he was probably drunk in some rumshop, but in the afternoon, he told Spanish in a worried manner, “I call all these other places. It look like Doraymay went out with some hunters last night.”
“But he don’t hunt.”
“Yes, I know. They say that he went out with a group who tell him that poachers had a camp full of dead ocelot and these tamandua anteater. But it was a setup.”
“He went by himself? That is craziness. These hunters will eat him raw.”
When Doraymay was found by a forest ranger the following day, badly beaten and bound to a tree, Orbits recalled his rebuffing of the other man and dragged himself along with Gums and Spanish to the local hospital. The sight of the disengaged doctors and nurses and the sound of groaning reminded him of the night of his daughter’s birth, when he had run three miles to get to the hospital. He recalled his in-laws’ treatment of him, and in spite of his earlier decision to be as polite as possible to Doraymay, he felt his mood souring. And when he saw Doraymay racked up on the bed, his head bandaged and his face blue and swollen, he wanted to rush out from the place. Doraymay turned to look at the visitors and a trail of red spittle ran down his neck. At the foot of the bed, a bloody bandage sneaked down like a battered snake. One of Doraymay’s feet was slung up at an angle that was sure to cause more pain. Or maybe it was broken, Orbits thought, as he pretended to not notice Doraymay’s beckoning gesture. He felt Gums gently pushing him in the direction of the injured man, and when he bent over the bed, Doraymay reached out, faltering, and Orbits saw one of his fingers was broken and twisted. Orbits stepped back; he felt overpowered by the odour of clotted blood and urine and antiseptic.
Chaos! Laglee! The bitch trap me!
He rushed away and ran down the steps. He took the following day off from work and when he returned, Gums said jokingly, “We thought you and all had gone to the forest.” As Gums related his visit to the hospital the previous night and assured Orbits that Doraymay would recover and soon be at work, Orbits recalled the sour odour of urine and clotted blood. He spent half an hour in the washroom. In the evening as he was driving home, the odour returned, and he pulled to the side of the road.
***
On some days for no apparent reason and with no provocation, a deep panic overcame Orbits. It displaced his decision to keep to himself, to ride out the years, to manage. He tried to regain his temporary and troubled calm by repeating the phrases lodged in his mind over the last few weeks. I am forty-four years old. I have a reasonable job and an office. In sixteen years, I will retire with a pension. It could be said that I am secure. But this time the simple restatement of convenient facts, rather than bringing comfort, introduced more troubling concerns. I have done nothing of substance. If I die tomorrow, no one will miss my presence. I have no one. At times, while he was driving home, from habit he looked up and thought: I am just like these drifting clouds, turned this way and that by the wind and melting to nothing in an instant.
Day after day, he considered his circumstances. At intervals, he imagined finishing his course in meteorology or applying for another job, but he made no move. Instead, he thought of the house opposite the school in the cocoa village and more frequently of Wally and his family in Canada.
He knew that these options were unavailable to him because he could not leave his mother, who had also retreated into another world. One evening while driving from work, he had this image of finding her dead, and although he felt guilty and a little shocked at the relief this picture brought, he could not help but consider how much the tragedy would release him. Every evening he saw her on the porch, sitting on the chair he had brought, her gaze straight ahead, even when he turned the slight corner into the driveway. He felt he was trapped in a jail that grew smaller each day. Once he had read of inmates in solitary confinement remaining for months in a cell with the lights never turned off. He had felt that particular punishment did not seem too horrible, but this is how he felt now: perpetually agitated, unable to relax, shifting to untenable fantasies. Frequently he would stare at the walls for hours, not conscious of the time passing until there was a knock on the door. In the middle of the day, he would catch himself muttering for no reason. “The strands of cobweb over the cabinet look like a silky hammock. If they are brought together, they can form a strong rope. The patterns of the tiles on the floor resemble a diamond. But yesterday it was a pyramid. Can the inhalation of diesel cure the body of worms? Of cancer? Why was Doraymay so pleasant with me? Was his violence towards me karma or did it happen because I wished for it? What has happened to the woman?”
At odd intervals, he saw shapes on the wall that recalled his childhood fantasies of twisting the clouds into fluffy animals. But these new shapes were alarming: spiders that appeared to grow extra legs, freakishly bandaged serpents, baby animals that mutated into blobs of fat that wobbled helplessly because there was no skeletal structure. He tried to fight these bursts of paranoia by providing a countervailing delusion, ratcheting up his fantasies of flying through the clouds on his way to a country that he knew only from gossip and boasts. Gradually he began to see anything that potentially stood in the way of his repose as deliberate and malicious. In this manner, he wondered why his co-workers were holding a raffle to pay Doraymay’s medical bills, why farmers and fishermen daily came to him with simple problems they could easily handle themselves, why his mother was still hanging on.
One morning while he was leaving his car for his office, instead of mentally reciting his now-useless statements, he counted his steps. Twenty to the front door of the building, nine to his office and three to his desk. Thirty-two steps. He wrote the number on
the back of an application form. In the evening when he was leaving, he counted thirty. Why were there two less? Was it because he was in a hurry to leave? Did he miscount? He returned to his office and walked in a manner that he would match the morning’s steps. When he got home, he did the same. Ten steps to the front step and seven to his room.
This measuring of his life — which is how he thought of it — intruded into and separated his fears, the simple ritual of counting numbing and then stabilizing him. He discovered that with his sunglasses he could mark his steps with no one noticing. He was aware that the little towns he passed on his way to work were filled with crazy people who marched about mumbling to themselves. He had heard Gums and the other workers talking about a former teacher who, fired from his job, walked around with the ends of cardboard boxes, writing equations and beseeching the onlookers to follow his calculations. “I solve the puzzle of life,” the man would shout to frightened women and children. Orbits knew every small town had its own crazy person.
In one of these little towns, he met Moon. He was on his way to the bank and was annoyed that someone had called his name and disrupted his counting. He glanced back and memorized the last number. Fifty-five. Moon began talking. She and her husband had just returned from a family outing. Things were really good between them. She had visited a pundit who had removed the light from her head. She was now herself once more, the evil spirit banished. Fifty-five. Orbits tried to focus on the number. She had heard about the incident with Doraymay eleven months earlier. He had been her husband’s drinking partner and now her husband spent more time at home. Did so much time pass? Orbits wondered. Eleven months? What was that number again? Fifty or fifty-five? She was saying something about her seven-month-old son. Seven, she repeated. They were now a perfect family.
“Fifty-five,” Orbits told her and sped along.
But the spell was broken. He could no longer measure his steps; random numbers interrupted his summations. Most began or ended with seven. Reluctantly, he returned to the real world and immediately felt its burden, flattening and crushing. For this, he blamed Moon, who, viewed through his sunglasses, had seemed haloed by concentric rings of mauve and salmon. She had described their affair as a light on her head, placed there, no doubt, by her malicious aunt. Orbits knew she believed this completely, and with this immutable belief, she had been spared any guilt or regret. The spirits were to blame, and she was just a vessel. Did she actually say this, he wondered? Her belief in this unseen world was similar to Skullcap’s view of his god. Blasted savages, he thought. Yet he wished he, too, had some invisible entity or deity in his back pocket, but the years of praying futilely for his childhood bullying to stop and the tormenters to be punished had erased every trace of religiosity. He was a nonbeliever not because of any rational determination, but because of what he saw as constant betrayals.
One evening when he got home, he told his mother, “Nobody willing to accept blame for anything.”
It was the first time in months he had spoken directly to her, and although she maintained her gaze, he saw her eyes welling up. “I want to go.”
“For a drive?” She shook her head almost imperceptibly and raised one hand tiredly. The fingers fluttered in a dismissive gesture. “You shouldn’t be cooking any more. I will bring something every evening for us.” Now she looked at him in a studying way. She drew circles around her eyes and cackled sadly. He put his briefcase on the floor. “What is it you always looking at on the hill? What is it you seeing?”
Her lips were still twisted from her grin, the features, like those of many old people, taking their time to transition. “Is my fault.”
“Your fault about what?”
“My fault that Starboy get murdered. My fault that your father fall and damage himself. My fault that you not with your family. My fault with everything.”
“When I mention that nobody want to accept blame I didn’t mean you—”
“My fault. My fault.”
“Ma.”
She wiped her eyes and her face hardened once more, shutting him out. But he remained there, leaning against the railing until she got up and went into her bedroom. He tried to recall some pleasant memory from his childhood during which his mother had displayed a special affection towards him and, failing to recall anything, wondered if her affection had really been so one-sided. She had made fun of his weight, his fascination with clouds, his moroseness, even his humiliation, and he had seen her behaviour as either indifference or spitefulness, but now he considered it may have been simply part of her general bantering that included jokes about her husband’s dentures and the junk he stored in every corner and, in his later years, his forgetfulness. Sitting alone in the dark, his sunglasses still on, Orbits was sure of only one thing: his mother had suffered enough. In this mood, unexpectedly, he was touched by the remembrance of the silliness that had once offended him at the dinner table.
In his office, he asked the farmers about cheap lumber and labour, and these men, eager to please, expecting some favour in return, descended on Orbits’ house during the following weeks, and they pried loose and knocked away the slack boards and the railing around his mother. They waited until she went inside before they shifted her chair to complete their job. They did the same when they were building a new porch, hammering and laying railings around her and painting the ceiling above the chair Orbits had brought.
One evening when he got home, he saw that her hair matched the green paint on the ceiling. “You looking like that Joker man from the comics,” he told her, but he was angry at the workers’ carelessness. When he confronted them, they told him they had had no choice because it was difficult to communicate with a mute.
“She is not a mute,” he said, but too softly for them to hear.
In the evenings, he could smell the fresh paint and he saw the print of her slippers on the floor. He bought a length of carpet that he laid from her chair to the door and potted orchids and dahlias that he hung from the rafters on the porch. He returned from work with pommecytheres and custard apples and papaws and pineapples, the fragrance of the fruits mixing with and then displacing the petroleum odour of the new paint. Mother and son sat side by side for an hour or so with no words exchanged. Now and again, he would imagine another car driving into the yard and his daughter emerging with her books and his mother standing to receive a hug before both women disappeared into the house. At times, too, he pictured his wife sitting on the couch and planning her lessons.
He linked these imaginary scenes with periods he had long associated with turmoil and distress, and he was surprised that he now thought of that time with fondness and even regret. His former wife planning her work on the desk while he studied on the bed. Even the drive to the cocoa village where she had condemned the house he admired as haunted and the school as abandoned. And he convinced himself that at some point, backward glances at these evenings he spent alone with his mother would unexpectedly be tinged with the same longing. In this way, knowing that soon all of this would be gone, that his mother would die and he, too, would grow old and feeble and wonder what had happened to his life, the hour or so with his mother became less an obligation than a period of appreciative calm.
Side by side they sat, not saying anything, and Orbits knew that a passerby might look at this forty-seven-year-old man sitting every evening with his mother on the porch and believe, in the village manner, he had nothing better to do. A locho and a peong waiting for her to die so he could inherit the property. Yet he began to look forward to these late evenings, just sitting there, watching the lizards sneaking into the space between the boards and hummingbirds buzzing around the orchids and semps and bananaquits alighting in a line on the telephone wires. He observed the swift drawing of night, grey clouds turning red before they were swallowed up by the darkness.
The approach of night was always signalled by a drop in the temperature, and during the occasional thunderstorm
s that came with such abrupt force, the gutters overflowed within minutes and the winds, hoarse and tortured, walloped the trees so that blowing leaves clipped the ground and rose at once in jousting funnels. Within this frenetic energy, it was easy to imagine he was in another country. But the fierce storms soon expended their energies and tapered into light drizzles, the patter on the roof so faint it seemed to be coming from a great distance. Orbits would look at the drenched orchids twisting like snakes lapping up the droplets and the birds returning to the telephone poles, flapping their wings and dipping their heads into their bodies, and imagine another scene. But this was a scene he could only imagine imperfectly because he had glimpsed it in movies and magazines. Snow, at once powdery and spongy, fluffing up the ground and red burning leaves hanging in the sky like frail jewels before they plummeted. Somewhere in the background was an ice-capped mountain, its reflection glistening on a lake. Into this imperfect scene, he imagined himself walking along a road, and because he was never sure of the colours, the landscape was, at intervals, white and bare and at other times vivid and sparkling.
On Christmas Eve, when from all the houses in the village came the sound of parang, a kind of Spanish Castilian music played on a three-string guitar, a cuatro, and the malls built with oil money and stocked with foreign paraphernalia were crowded with families, Orbits was returning to his home with fruits and gifts he had picked up at a small store. A lamp with a dimming switch, slippers, a light raincoat, a basket of aromatic oils, a decorative rug and a snow globe that enclosed a white cottage surrounded by two pine trees. His mother displayed no interest in the other gifts, but she took the snow globe and held it before her, tilting it from one hand to the other and watching the white confetti spread. He remembered her during past Christmas Eves when her entire family was around, chatting with her husband while she changed the curtains and decorated the tree and checked the oven. In the night, the aroma of sorrel and cakes and imported fruits drifted throughout the house, and he could barely wait for the morning when everything would be laid on the table.
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