Fatboy Fall Down

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  Orbits, in his confusion, could not understand what he meant and asked, “Travelling where?”

  “That part I can’t tell you. To another planet. To up they.” He glanced at the ceiling. “Down here.” He tapped the floor. “The only thing I could tell you for sure is she not here right now.”

  Mona began to sob, pressed her face against the wall, her hands on her head. “How you could do this, Grandma? How you could go so easy like this? You never say a single thing and you gone. So easy . . . so easy.”

  Orbits was not sure how he should feel, and he suspected that his lack of emotion was due to shock and that he would soon break down like Mona. But the girl’s words stuck. He put his hand on her shoulder and said, “She went easy. You right. She didn’t suffer.”

  It had been such a straightforward statement from the girl, yet it simplified everything and provided a way out of guilt and grief. But during the wake Orbits came closer to the truth: his mother’s death had finally released him from all obligations and he was, at the age of fifty, finally free.

  And the change was so instantaneous, it felt as if he had been waiting for this moment his entire life. For two-thirds of his life, he had longed for lasting connections, and now that the last attachment had been removed, he felt as if a yoke had been lifted. As the bamboo was dragged into the yard by farmers and as the tent went up and Mona and her sisters made coffee, Orbits, still searching for grief, was met only with this new liberating sense of acquittance. He had surrendered nothing and now, removed from the world, feeling no real ties to anyone, he began to observe it more carefully. He had always been prone to fantasies, but these fantasies were weighed with deceptions and without the reflectiveness that allowed any insight into himself or his place among others. During the wake, he observed how the farmers towards whom his sympathy had been receding organized almost all the details of the funeral. He didn’t say much, and they assumed he was suffused with grief. He saw the businessman Halligator, too, among the crowd, standing back, and he thought: he must believe I am drenched with grief, so why don’t he come now with his proposals? Later, during the readings that went on for seven nights, he listened to the priests offering their inadequate interpretations of the dead, one lecturing that they were now transformed into malevolent spirits that could only be kept at bay through a dose of personal chants and charms, and the other claiming their final destinations were planets and asteroids unknown to anyone. Orbits saw the farmers nodding and their wives scraping their chairs closer to their husbands. On the final night, the astronomer-priest told Orbits, “Watch in the sky for any falling star and say this immediately.” He gave Orbits a folded sheet that was stained with saffron. “Make sure you facing the east though. All the favourable planets in that position.”

  The other priest came up a few minutes later. “Crying after death is a strange thing. It does keep away the spirit, and it could draw them in. The scriptures not too clear on that one. Maybe a little tears now and again, just to be sure.”

  Orbits told him, “Grief that doesn’t announce itself is more genuine than grief that blaring like a trumpet.”

  He had no idea why he said this or if he had heard it somewhere, but the priest said, “Eh? A trumpet? That might work but it better if you use a conch shell and say the chant loud and clear.”

  During that final night among the small group, Orbits saw Moon and her husband. The husband’s legs were crossed in a relaxed pose and he was watching the canvas canopy meditatively while Moon was sitting upright to gaze at Mona, who was alone, the snow globe in her hand, her sisters and father in the row behind. With the smoke from the pitch pine and burnt butter blown this way and that, it seemed as if they were all at a distance, at some other ceremony unconnected to him. Following the ceremony, with the mourners gone, he saw Mona still on her chair, her sisters still in the row behind. Orbits wished to be left alone to sit by himself, but Cascadoo came up to him and began to talk about his daughter and his worry about her future. She was smart and intelligent and ambitious, he said repeatedly. Orbits recalled the time, a year or so earlier, when he had offered the opposite assessment. But he understood. He told Cascadoo that Mona would stay until the end of the month, during which time he would help her get a job. Cascadoo seemed surprised and almost touched. He said, “I did always know you was the sort of man like that. Some jealous people was saying why I putting me young daughter in the house of a single man, but I did always feel that if something had to happen, it will happen.” Orbits knew that Cascadoo, fastened with the simple idea of removing his daughter from poverty, had possibly expected more, but that he was relieved that she, one of six, had not been cast aside. He agreed when Cascadoo asked if another of his daughters could stay during this period. He said Mona would be scared staying in the house all alone during the day. And sleeping alone, he added.

  A year earlier, Orbits had fallen into the habit of counting his footsteps to convince himself he was alive and everything was real; now, he saw all that he had missed and avoided. He saw the world not in imperfect silhouettes that shifted their frames according to his mood, but rather in stark relief with jagged angles that, from a distance, did not seem bruised but united in a pattern that never changed. He saw this on his way to work, too: old bricks gaping from newly layered concrete, sharp sand and gravel flattening beds of croton, dangling bamboo scaffolds weaving around unfinished verandahs, incomplete houses awaiting the next oil boom. His Wingroad had a CD player with a radio, and during the morning programmes he listened to men and a few women regularly calling to complain and boast and bluster, their tones so similar they could have been reciting, day after day, from the same prompt. Sometimes he felt this perspective was a reaction to his growing vision issues, a conscious attempt to counteract this loss, and at other times he believed it was something less deliberate; that after half a century, he had achieved the balance Moon’s husband had spoken about. Not by taking any steps to remedy his condition, but simply by waiting.

  He suspected this latter attitude was not unlike the farmers’ fatalism, but he also knew that he expected nothing, and so if nothing was delivered, he would not be disappointed. It was this attitude that carried him during the local elections when the village council members insisted he contest Halligator for a county councillor position. The businessman was well funded and in the days before election, he delivered hampers and bottles of rum during his walkabouts. During one of these walkabouts, he encountered Orbits, who with Cascadoo was giving out flyers. “Take care you don’t strain yourself with all that heavy weight you carrying,” he told Orbits. He himself had hampers in both hands and his supporters, trailing him, had bags hoisted on their shoulders.

  A supporter said, “Just you and Cascadoo? A real big party you have they, man.”

  Orbits told him, “An alligator with a proper tail.” It was a simple observation spoken aloud, but it drew a rippling titter from a group of lochos who were watching from the roadside.

  During a meeting held at the junction, a heckler shouted, “A man wearing shades in the night. You blind or what?”

  “If I was blind I wouldn’t be able to see a man making a complete fool of himself right in front of me.”

  “Who you calling a fool?”

  “I will be the first to admit my mistake. I meant a jackass.”

  And another night: “Orbits, you better come down from space.”

  He had been talking about self-help groups he had in mind if he were elected. He told the heckler, a known supporter of his opponent, “And Halligator better come out from the swamp.”

  These wry statements fell neatly in the island’s appreciation of picong, a kind of cutting riposte. And Orbits’ delivery, mechanical and swift, added to his reputation. People came to his meetings and provoked him just for these dry insults, and they were never disappointed. He didn’t care about the laughter because it was not his intention to be humorous. A week before the electio
n, Cascadoo, who had positioned himself as his campaign manager and had inducted all his daughters in the campaign, told Orbits, “A scholar like you wasting time with this local election. You should go up for the big general election.”

  He knew that Cascadoo was thinking of his children, and although he saw nothing wrong with that, he told the other man, “I not interested in anything else. I just want to help out the farmers and I couldn’t do that in the field station. So I only doing my job.”

  Cascadoo jostled between scepticism and admiration and on the night prior to the election, he told a small group of farmers gathered in a rumshop, “I know this man for so long and I still can’t figure where he coming from. Sometimes I does believe that he not in this for himself.”

  “You really believe it have people like that?”

  “Sometimes I does feel that his own self don’t know what he want.”

  If Orbits had been listening to that conversation, he would have agreed with Cascadoo’s assessment, but he was alone at home, wondering what the boys from his school days and the teachers who mocked him would think of their easy target — Fatboy — putting himself up as an independent candidate against men like Halligator who were affiliated with established parties and who were well funded. He lived alone, had no friends, no contacts, no experience in politics, no inclination to bribe. Prior to his marriage, his wife, mistaking his shyness for stoicism had mentioned that he was like one of the actors in a western. He wondered if she and her parents knew of his political ambition, and if somewhere within that family there was a twinge of pride and regret. He thought also of his daughter, who had never seen this side to him and who knew him only as an absent parent. He contemplated the reaction of everyone who had pushed him aside, not with any satisfaction or joy, but to understand the island and his place in it. He didn’t expect to win, but for the first time he had stood his ground.

  He won in a landslide.

  ***

  If, one year earlier, someone had asked Orbits how he expected his life to turn out, he would have said that he would work at the field station until retirement, and if his mother were still alive, he would be living with her. He would not have foreseen her sudden death nor the freedom it would bring; nor would he have anticipated the manner that this distance with which he now held everything would lead to an undertaking for which he had no preparation and for people for whom he only felt a slight sympathy.

  He would not have foreseen the sudden attention and respect at which he remained unmoved, the brief power to set things in motion, the competition for his attention, his growing realization that he was unsuited to the position. Once he had heard Mona reading a story to his mother. It was of a serpent that had been imprisoned in a basket and, overcome with starvation, was just waiting out its days. Then a mouse bore a hole and fell into the basket. The serpent promptly ate the mouse and, now energized with the meal, escaped through the hole. His mother had clapped at the end and said it was good for the stupid nosy mouse, but Orbits could make no sense of the story. What was the moral? Was the mouse supposed to be an object of sympathy or a character in a cautionary tale? There was really nothing to be drawn from the fable, and that was how Orbits felt about his life. He could be either animal. At an earlier time, he would have considered this abrupt shift in his life and wondered if it was some deep need to compensate for the neglect that had blighted his childhood, or if in fact there existed some nobler vein buried so deep he had never sensed it before.

  His office was set in the upper floor of a building that housed, at the far end, a pet store with a small sign — My Family and Other Animals — at the centre a locksmith, the doors perpetually shuttered, and a bookstore, the Book Swami, specializing in local self-published tracts. From his window, he could see across the road a dentist’s office and a fast food place, and during his first month at the site, he was fascinated whenever he saw men and women holding their cheeks and rushing from one of these places to the other.

  Not far away were three rumshops situated in a sort of triangle and he was fascinated, too, at the transformation of the men filing into his office, these men who, when sober, were bashful and agreeable but were demanding bullies after a few drinks. Sometimes he heard them arguing with Mona, whom he had hired as his secretary, and she, who had been so good with his mother, wilted under the assault of the drunkards who wanted landslips and potholes fixed, water delivery stabilized, roads cleared, drains cleaned, boundary disputes solved, pests eradicated, jobs for their children, promotions for themselves, reproval of their competitors. When they brushed past Mona into Orbits’ office, he patiently explained the protocol for getting things done, the sluggish bureaucracy, the limits to his position, the problems that could be handled without his help. Still they brought bribes of fruits and vegetables that he gave to Mona, and the next morning she would bring him a container of the cooked vegetables or the fruits sliced and sprinkled with salt and lime.

  During the first months, he believed that he was learning the ropes and would gradually understand the correct protocol for getting funds from the various ministries, but he soon discovered that everything operated according to party lines. He had been the only independent candidate elected in the entire island, and there was no one to whom he could turn for assistance. At the monthly meeting with the other councillors, he witnessed the hardening of these party lines, the excuses and the rancour, the downgrading of serious issues into rumshop bacchanal, the violent outbursts, the trivialization of tragedies.

  The chairman of the constituency, a tall, dark man whose age was difficult to guess because of his long curly hair that flopped around his ears and his stylish glasses and bright silk shirts, seemed bored with the meetings, only coming to life when a reference was made to the prime minister or when a question was levelled directly at him. It was Orbits who asked most of the questions during the first couple months, but he could never fully grasp the man’s responses. Once Orbits told him, “Some of the people in my constituency have been complaining about the road workers bursting the water mains and the water repair workers leaving big potholes on the road. It’s like two opposing armies.”

  There was a little titter at his description, but the chairman said, “All this da-da-da” — he twirled his fingers above his ear as if trying to pluck out a word — “happening all over the island so we have improvise and da-da-da the best we could. People have to decide if they want roads or if they want water.”

  “I think they want both,” Orbits mumbled.

  And during another meeting, six months later: “Mr. Chairman, nowadays, increasingly, we have the situation of young women working in the town and getting back late in the nights. If we can get a couple streetlights on the back roads it will make everybody feel more secure.”

  He glanced at Orbits sleepily. “If we put streetlights on all these back roads we won’t have money for any other da-da-da. Landslips and school repairs and drains and rubbish removal.” The fingers began twirling. “Oil money done. We have to da-da-da and da-da-da.”

  Sometimes Orbits felt on the verge of storming out of the meetings. But the chairman was right in one respect: the money which had sustained all the vices of the island for more than two decades had dried up. Windowless glass-domed buildings, incomplete stadiums, sprawling hospitals and schools with no equipment were scattered all across the island like relics from another place. Some of the empty buildings had been occupied by squatters and vagrants and in others, the plumbing and electrical fixtures were stolen. But it was not just the money; the projects begun by one party were always abandoned by the other, which had its own grandiose plans, its own monuments to construct. And this had been going on for as long as Orbits could remember.

  He began staying in his office after Mona had left, testing and rejecting solutions. He was preparing to leave late one evening when a man entered. He was a farmer who Orbits knew was genuinely poor. “I don’t understand how you operating
so,” the man said almost apologetically. “We vote you in and you doing nothing for we. Maybe we should have let things remain the same. The last fella use to thief plenty but at least he would give help every now and then.” Orbits explained the operating finances of the county council had been halved and furthermore, in order to get an immediate hearing, he would have to operate from the rumshops, passing bribes along an endless chain that ended somewhere in the capital. He explained this to the man who, clearly unsympathetic, asked him, “So what you drawing a salary for if is not to help we?”

  “I will do my best,” Orbits promised.

  Each week, he was reminded of traits he had forgotten. He saw how quickly flattery was transformed into impatience when he explained the limits of his authority, how impatience grew into annoyance when he offered facts and figures, how annoyance blossomed into rage when he suggested alternatives to bribery and shortcuts.

  As the months passed, Orbits discovered how much he was unsuited for the position and frequently he left the councillors’ meetings without saying a word. About a year after he had been elected, on his way back to his house, an old and familiar feeling descended on him. He felt that his job was a sham, he was not doing anything and soon he would be discovered. He tried to fight this mood by considering his recent successes. He had fought the election with many disadvantages, which, if he had rationally considered, would have encouraged him to drop out. And he had won. Some people still respected him, and Halligator’s cronies still came with their demands that he felt pleased to deny.