Fatboy Fall Down

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  He had discovered, soon after he moved in, a trove of old hardcovers packed neatly in a cardboard box beneath a bed. The covers were either red or green and on the frayed cloth were titles like The Sea Wolf and The Cruel Sea and High Wind in Jamaica. He had never liked fiction and could never fully immerse himself into a world he knew was not real — and one in which he could never place himself — so those he returned to the box, and in the nights he would read, until his eyes began to complain, a chapter or two from The Nautical Quarterly, lavishly illustrated. He moved on to other books like the Voyager’s Tales by a man with the unpronounceable name of Hakluyt. He learned of sailors who were trapped by enemies, caught in terrible storms, shipwrecked, rescued sometimes and still ventured out for other voyages. He was reminded of his fantasies at Baby Rabbit’s place of diving into the eye of a hurricane or chasing a storm, a kind of recklessness that seemed unreal, but here in the books were men who had actually done more.

  One night he returned to a book by Charles Kingsley that he had put aside because he recalled his brother reading a fantasy tale by this author. The Water Babies was the title of that book, but the one to which he now returned he soon saw was not fiction but an account of the writer’s voyages through the Caribbean. In this book, Westward Ho!, he read of visits to his island by Walter Raleigh and Blackbeard, of revolts and naval battles, of plunder and treasure, and suddenly the place seemed more important, fought for by all the powers of Europe. He read from the book each night, and as he learned of the intrigue and cruelty and heroism, he recalled his boring history classes filled only with dates and laws and treaties and the horrors of slavery and indentureship.

  So, late in his life, reading these books, he began to reflect not on his own condition, as he had always done, but on a bigger, more impersonal history to which he was still connected. Wally had used the word “transients” in describing his family, but the description could fit almost everyone in this side of the world. Old civilizations gone, new ones built on the ruins. And this process would be repeated over and over. This was the way of the world. An order to the chaos that could not be seen from within. He wondered whether it had been old, forgotten books like these from which Wally had gotten his knowledge. Or whether his knowledge had been passed down from generation to generation. During his conversations with the other man decades earlier, he had been impressed with Wally’s facts and slightly ashamed of how little he knew. At that time he did not understand that it was the way of the village to pass down fables and myths composed many centuries earlier, time and distance bestowing on them a rhapsodic quality that could never be matched by remembered history. Those fables were part of a long, unending grind, of cycles of death and rebirth, of millennia enclosed always by a predetermined fate that rendered personal accounts useless.

  Sometimes, late in the night, he would place the book on his chest and would recall his frustrations with the farmers who had to come to the field station and with the constituents to his office, and he would think that to these men, the fables, composed at a different place and time, held a significance he would never understand. Like with so many other situations, he had been shut out. But more and more, after he had finished his reading, the stillness occasionally pierced by the cry of a jumbie bird or a bat ruffling above the rafters, he would think back on his time with Wally, exploring the capital, talking about Canada as if the world were new and they would find their places in it just by being aware, but he knew that these recollections, tinged with nostalgia, were really the recollections of a stranger; the young man he desperately wanted to be. Sometimes he considered, just briefly, that his life was bereft and purposeless compared with these brazen sailors. And then he would wonder if his decision to forego his office was because he knew he would not retain his seat or because of some hidden fear of Halligator and the other goons, who had simmered down since his house had been burnt, guessing he had learned his lesson. They had stopped coming with threats when he had made public his decision to end his brief fling with local politics. So, too, did many of the villagers who, thoroughly disappointed with Orbits, turned their attention to the men and women lining up to replace him.

  One of these men, a divorcee in his late thirties, came to Orbits’ office one day. He was polite, and Orbits suspected the man wanted his endorsement. He told the visitor, whose prematurely grey hair seemed odd above his flat and baby-like face, that he was done for good with politics.

  The man appeared embarrassed as he told Orbits, “Is not your endorsement I want, boss. In fact, is the exact opposite.”

  “So you don’t want my endorsement?” Orbits wondered why then the visitor had been buttering him up.

  “I will get to the point, boss. I want you to endorse somebody else.” He called the name of one of Halligator’s associates and, surprisingly, that of Moon’s husband.

  Orbits was taken aback by the request. He told the man, “As I mentioned, I don’t want to get involved in this election. I finish with that.”

  “Yeah, I know that. Things wasn’t easy, eh?”

  He thought about preparing the candidate for demand upon demand, but this man had just requested him to support another candidate because he was so toxic. “All I will say is that I am relieved that my term has come to an end.”

  “Plenty pressure, eh?”

  “I think it was my fault,” he said suddenly.

  “Eh?” The visitor was unaccustomed to this tack from politicians. “Your fault?”

  “I set my sights too high.”

  “So what you saying is that I shouldn’t promise anything? But how I will get elected then?”

  “That is for you to decide. Do what your duty tell you.”

  “You know ever since I was wearing short pants, I see myself in politics. Crazy, eh? Anyways, I sorry to barge inside your office without a appointment. When I get elected I will . . .” He seemed undecided about what to say, this indecision on his baby face registering as childlike wonder. “What I mean to ask about is what you just mention about promise and thing. How you manage to deal with all these people over the years? What tips you have for me?”

  “Well, let me see.” Orbits mentally went through the list of his frustrations over the years. They don’t like to be corrected. They believe that any apology is a sign of weakness. They believe that rumours have more weight than facts. They argue not to prove a point but to show off. They are offended by trivialities. He saw the expectant look on the visitor’s face and added, “I don’t think I was suited to the job.” After a while he said, almost as if he was talking to himself, “I don’t think I was a complete failure. If nothing changed during my time it was because nobody wanted anything different. Maybe everybody happy in their own way.” A few minutes later, Orbits heard the man chatting with Mona. He walked out to the front desk and told the man, “This girl father is a influential man. You should get to know him.”

  Mona was blushing, and Orbits couldn’t figure if it was the praise for her father or the conversation he had interrupted.

  ***

  Soon the campaign got under way and Orbits was forgotten. This was a relief. The baby-faced candidate came into his office frequently, but only to talk to Mona, and he seemed embarrassed whenever Orbits stepped out to ask about his campaign. From his window, he spotted the mikes set upon vehicles, and he could hear the blaring of pre-recorded messages. Each lamp pole was pasted with photographs of the candidates. More and more, he began to miss the quiet of his bungalow, and he began to count down the weeks before the election. He also imagined improvements he would make to his property. The bungalow he would leave alone, but he could dig a pond at the back and plant a variety of fruit trees.

  One midday from his office he heard over a loudspeaker a candidate promising to install traffic lights at every intersection if he was elected; on the following day an opposing candidate questioning whether his opponent was also planning to build an animal college to t
each bison and buffaloes to understand traffic signals. Soon after, he wandered to a small congested pharmacy to get eye drops. He heard the chairman of the meetings he had attended saying over a loudspeaker, “The people from the other party only promising a set of da-da-da, but while they only promising, I want to ask who you trust to build your roads and bridges and da-da-da.” His speech was frequently interrupted by applause. So it went, day after day, and Orbits sometimes felt that if he were observing this from a distance, he might even find the ridiculousness funny. Yet there were these coded racist taunts, too, made by all the candidates, and Orbits was sometimes puzzled that he had managed to win as an independent candidate close to four years earlier.

  In his last month as a councillor, he was visited by a man of advanced years who still possessed an athletic figure and a full head of white hair. Orbits recognized the man immediately, and he waited for some equivalent gesture that suggested the visitor also knew him. But he sat in the chair opposite without an invitation and said, “I want you to do something for me.”

  “What you say? I didn’t hear you,” Orbits said, trying to control his voice.

  The man leaned back to withdraw a rolled-up sheet of paper that he pushed across the desk. “Read it.”

  Orbits was usually patient with the villagers, who he knew could be quite brusque, but he told the man, his former teacher, “I don’t have the time. What exactly is it?”

  “You don’t have the time?” He still had the look of stabilized frenzy as if a spiral of divergent emotions had smashed into his face. It was that look that had made him such a feared teacher and he had lived up to it, soothing one minute and maddened the next. “So I waste my time coming here?”

  For a second, Orbits wanted to reveal the reason for his uncharacteristic curtness. He still couldn’t understand why the man had not recognized him even though it had been more than forty-five years earlier and in another village. Orbits had been eleven or twelve at the time, the period during which he had been trying to persuade everyone to call him Orbits rather than Fatboy. He was not the only one picked upon, but the others could run away from the bullies while Orbits’ awkward attempts at escape only drew more laughter, so he just stood there and pretended he had heard nothing and was looking at the clouds.

  That day Orbits had been chewing at the warts on his fingers and the teacher had hauled him to the front and brought down his rod ten times, each blow on a different finger. The warts, perhaps softened by the blow, dropped off soon after, but for months the taunt — Fatboy fall down — had followed Orbits. Later, in another class, the teacher had begun a story about a land called Fatlandia from which a stupid fatboy had been banished. He had been sent to the world of normal people as a punishment for not obeying the rules and not paying attention. In this normal world, he would be perpetually mocked and scorned. “Look at the cannibal. You think we should send him back to Fatlandia?”

  “Yes,” the class chorused.

  Orbits had begun to sniffle, and the teacher had asked, “What you say? That you missing Fatlandia? I didn’t hear you.”

  Now, more than forty-five years later, this teacher was before him, and in spite of all he had achieved and all the years that had passed, Orbits felt a mixture of anger and shame at the instigator of this childhood humiliation. Perhaps if the teacher had not maintained so much of his old arrogance, Orbits’ reaction would have been different, and when he took the cylinder, removed the rubber band and read of the constant digging of the roads and the dry taps and the failure of the water trucks to maintain a regular schedule, he told the teacher, “I can’t help you. That area is developing and roads have to be built, so—”

  “So what you expect me to do? And where you expect me to go?”

  Fatlandia. No, Oldlandia. But he did not say what was on his mind. Instead, he told the teacher, “You can go wherever you choose.”

  “You expect a pensioner, a man almost eighty, to suddenly pull out and relocate? That is the advice you giving me? You know I spend nearly my entire life teaching and that some of the children who pass through my hands holding very important positions? You know that?”

  Orbits replaced the rubber band around the sheet, snapping it in place. “Then you should take this issue to them. I am sure they remember you.” He got up and held the sheet before him.

  “I know people like you,” the teacher said, looking past the proffered sheet and straight at Orbits.

  “And I remember people like you.”

  He stood up. “You think just because you holding this important position you could talk how you damn well like?” The teacher was furious. “I hope you know that one day all of this will get taken away and you will just be an ordinary man walking the street. A blasted ordinary man.”

  “And I looking forward to that day.”

  “You know if I was twenty years younger, I would—”

  “Would what?” Orbits asked, raising his voice. Other questions raced through his mind. Strap me? Make me eat all my warts? Laugh at me? Give everybody an excuse to say “Fatboy fall down” again? Tell me what you would have done.

  The teacher glared at Orbits for a full minute before he said, “I would have handled everything myself and wouldn’t have to depend on any blasted councillor who can’t understand his duty is to people like me. Duty! The word fill with shit now.” He turned stiffly as a soldier, as he had done at school, and walked out the door.

  Mona came up from her desk outside his office. “Who was that mister?”

  After a while he told her, “An old man who want me to do my job.”

  After he closed his office, Orbits walked down the hall to the bookstore, the Book Swami. The owner, who was usually hunched over a chair too low for the table, his furtive eyes magnified by his thick glasses, seemed startled, as always, to see a visitor. “Anything in particular, boss?” the man asked in a rustling, almost sinister voice. Orbits glanced around the shelves stocked with slim periodicals and tracts, almost all self-published, almost all written by the owner of the store. “Something for the glands? Something for the brains? I have plenty of those. Or if you interested in lists I have plenty of those too.” He gestured to a wall with books bearing titles like The Complete Lists of Things to Do, The Complete Lists of Things Not to Do, The Complete List of Good Foods. The Other Complete List of Good Foods.

  “Just looking around,” Orbits told him. “Any visitors today?”

  “Yes, man. A old fella was here not too long. He buy a book on deading properly. Not one of mine and I never did expect to get it sell. You know I have a book on exercises for the eyes. I notice like you don’t see too properly with them darkers you always wearing.” Orbits left the store with The Complete Book on Seeing and Blindness. At his home, he flipped through the fifteen pages of cartoon drawings with accompanying injunctions like “Watch the sun. Watch the ground. Watch the sun again.” On the last page was an illustration of a bearded and bespectacled man sitting cross-legged. Above him was a comic book balloon saying, “Watching the sun is like watching god in all his glory. The Book Swami.”

  Orbits placed aside the book and thought: if I had a book like this in primary school, I could have used it as an excuse for staring at the sky. It was a funny thought, and it reminded him of his teacher’s visit and of his time in primary school. It was a period he hoped had been pushed aside and buried for good, but the appearance of the teacher had dislodged the memory of those torturous years. He had had no friends and was always suspicious of anything resembling friendship because it had often been a ruse, a preparation for some trap. Maybe there were other students he could have drawn close to. A boy everyone called Sixtoe Changoe, who had been dropped into a ravine. A girl who sucked her thumb until she was seven or eight. A stutterer whose father was a mute shoemaker. There were others, too: quiet, furtive boys and girls who kept to themselves and hurried to their homes. He recalled how often he had scanned his ne
w classes for children like these, not with the intention of forming any bond, but hoping their presence would remove the target on his back.

  Unexpectedly, Orbits felt a gentle tap of sadness that, as always, was tinged with a grainy, undefinable regret. He was not sure if it was the memory of his own beginning or that of other misfits whom he had studiously ignored and whose distress may have been equal to his own, or if it was the visit by the teacher, so feared and respected, now broken down by age and disease. He recalled Starboy’s brief fascination with comic books like X-Men and Suicide Squad, which he had seen around the house. Orbits had liked the idea of orphans and misfits and the despised rising up against big, powerful bullies, but he could never get any sustained pleasure from fantasies that were so far removed from his own condition. Once he had come across a superhero called Bouncing Boy who, as his name suggested, had the stupidest power and shape in the world. That had ended his brief interest in comic books.

  Starboy had persisted with the comics, and Orbits had always believed it was because his good-looking and confident brother could, however dimly, still see himself reflected on the pages. One night, with a book of mutinous sailors on his chest, Orbits recalled the incident where his brother was on the ground with a bigger boy on his chest, pounding away, and his brother’s split-second glance at him among the onlookers. Did his brother somehow sense that he had been too afraid to get involved, to step in and part the fight, or did he see it act an act of betrayal? It was Starboy’s first year at school, so he must have been five, and that afternoon walking home alone, Orbits expected to be chastised by his parents for his indifference. But his brother never mentioned it to anyone.