Fatboy Fall Down

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  A man sitting on the far end of the bench said loudly, “It look like these people who working here forget we.”

  Orbits got up. “Some things never change,” he said to the people watching from behind their desks. “One day all of you will be without a job. A few of you might be alone wondering where the time went and the others will be looking for favours from people in the same position you in now.” He walked out of the office and diverted to the department, where he dropped off his old teacher’s application. He had not been entirely sure what he had intended to do with the application, but he was in a good mood.

  He tried to see the city from this mood. In the book he had discovered in the cardboard box, the writer Charles Kingsley had described the city more than a hundred and fifty years earlier as a sort of paradise, with a botanic garden organized in the English fashion and trees transplanted from every part of the world. There were cavorting animals and magnificent birds and flowers of every hue. Orbits tried to see this as he walked along the Savannah, and although there were still traces of what the writer had described — grand old samaan trees and flowering poui and castle-like structures — the city had moved on. The old structures seemed forlorn in this setting; the trees, no longer spreading, appeared hunched and tremulous, the gingerbread houses defensive and frightened. Soon he came to the rumshop where, the only time in his life, he had attempted a bribe. The proprietor, who was also wearing dark shades, did not recognize him, and Orbits explained that he and a good friend had come to the establishment almost every afternoon. He pointed to a table in the dark corner. The letters were from his friend who was living in Toronto. Twelve in all. The proprietor was not interested but he nodded and said, “That good,” without feeling. For old times’ sake, Orbits ordered a rum and continued talking; the proprietor shifted away.

  “You must remember him,” Orbits insisted. “He used to be here all the time. Big fella. Portogee.”

  “It have no Portogee in this place,” the barman said. “You want anything else?”

  Orbits took out a photograph from one of the envelopes and held it before the barman. “Look. This is the fella I talking about. The one in the middle. He had more size at the time you know him, but the face is the same.”

  The barman came closer and pushed up his shades with the insides of his wrists. With his fingers spread above his ears he looked completely demented. “I thought you say Portogee. Nearly everybody in the family look mix. All the women and little children.” Orbits had not noticed that, and he turned around the photograph so he could look more closely. “What you trying with me?” the man asked impatiently. “You is a health inspector or something? What is it you really want? If is a bribe then come out and say it straight.”

  Still looking at the photograph and with the rum in his head, Orbits said, “I want to know if you and the wrecker fella still running allyou scam. You catch me good and proper about twenty-seven years ago.” In spite of his tone he was not angry.

  The barman lowered his shades and peered at Orbits. His eyes, yellow, inflamed and rheumy, looked like leaking eggs. “If I catch him I will dismantle him from beak to gizzard. He disappear with more than a thousand dollars in bills.” He moved away to consult a thick notebook, cursing his former accomplice as he added and subtracted.

  Ten minutes later, Orbits left the joint. He felt that if Wally were here with him, the proprietor would have surely been friendlier. Wally had that way about him. During the journey back to his place, he went over what he would say in his reply to his old friend. First, he would apologize by explaining he had never received the letters and so had no idea of Wally’s address. He would express his shock . . . no, his joy, that Wally had written him year after year. He would obviously give him an update on all that had happened since he left the ministry.

  He would reveal that both parents had passed away — one from an undefinable grief and the other from anger at what the world had wrought — and he was now like the person Wally had imagined himself to be with no family around. His would mention the arson that had destroyed his house and the frustration with his constituents who expected too much and grew annoyed when he explained his limitations. He would hint at a belated understanding of his brother.

  By the time he dropped off at Soongsoong Japourie, he was a little surprised at the lack of joy in all that he remembered. He ordered a soft drink and the shopkeeper brought it over. “Plenty letters,” the man said. Was this the extent of his life? What had he done to leave a mark? Who would remember him with affection? The woman with whom he had had an affair believed it was as a result of a light on her head. Most of his constituents felt he had failed them. “It look like you fixing up plenty people business.” The mood of the last months, pretending to be satisfaction, hinging at acquiescence, had swept away all his failings, all the gaps in his life. “You didn’t come back with the fella who pick you up. I ever mention that he was in some trouble with the police?”

  Orbits was brought back to the present. “Yes, but you didn’t say what sort of trouble.”

  “Is not for me to say.” The storekeeper stamped on the floor, disappeared behind the counter and emerged with a squashed grasshopper. He flicked away the insect and sniffed his fingers. “Was planning some kind of coo, a nice little coo.” He whispered the words as if he were sharing a tender secret. “Is what I hear so don’t quote me on it. These fellas always talking about god like if they alone know his address. Always jumping up and down and never satisfy with anything. Me? I does go with the flow. I ever tell you about the nice craft that father reject? Now I will satisfy with anything. Even a old fowl self.” He moved away to serve a customer, an oldish man asking for torchlight batteries, and Orbits left with his letters.

  He read the letters on the dark green couch on which he had first spotted the original owner of the house. The first letters were filled with hints that Wally had made a terrible mistake in moving to Canada. He missed the limes and the rumshops and the laughter and the confusion. “I wish I was with you right now, boy. Coming out from a rumshop and walking around the Savannah with all the poui in bloom and the fresh smell of coconut water leaking from every cart and the aroma of cassava pone wafting from a parlour.” Orbits was surprised at the descriptions — almost poetic — of all that Wally had remembered and all that he missed. They sounded almost like those of the old English traveller, and Orbits wondered whether this view was possible only from a distance. But there were no equivalent descriptions of Canada, nothing of his family or details of his life there.

  Letter after letter followed this style, and Orbits felt that Wally had been expecting some reassurances that he had made the correct move to be with the family he had spoken so often about. But it was too late for that now; the last letter was posted sixteen years ago, and he had most likely found his own way. Still he knew he would write his old friend.

  Three hours later, he reread what he had written and realized he would never post it. He had sought to console Wally by telling him that things on the island were getting worse and he had made the correct choice to leave. He wrote about the oil boom that had granted sudden wealth to people unprepared for this new freedom and who mostly feted away their money or saw it stolen by a new breed of criminals, younger and more vicious. He mentioned all the government projects — given fantastic comic book names like “The Amazing Five Year Plan” and “The Magnificent Highway Project” — that had run out of money so that there were these incomplete stadiums and glass-domed buildings all over the capital and highways that led to nowhere. He mentioned the excuses and the passing of blame onto people who were long dead or no longer in power. It was an impersonal letter that could have been written by The Seerman, a regular writer to the newspapers. He had ended by saying that the place Wally missed so much no longer existed, and maybe it never had. After two pages of this, he realized he would never post the letter, and so he began another. Here he congratulated Wally for pursuing
a vision. He mentioned the frequency with which his friend had spoken about leaving the island and his own doubts, years earlier, that Wally would actually abandon the comfort of his job for a place he knew nothing about. In this letter, he praised Wally for his persistence and ambitiousness and offered his own life as a stumbling alternative.

  The first letter had been essaylike and impersonal, but the second ran to five pages and when he reread it, he was surprised at the eloquent bitterness of the tone. “Unlike you, I could never see any purpose to my life,” he wrote. “In spite of your little complaints in the rumshops, you saw a destination that you reached for in the end. I made the mistake of thinking it was just rumshop talk, but you were serious.” He ended by stating, “Among the billions of people in the world, there are just a handful that are useful and show the way forward. But what of the others? Are we just leeches of no consequence? Or does the world need this mass to create a forward momentum pushing towards this promised land? Maybe we in these islands are just floaters and cloud-gazers. We have nothing to contribute so we simply drift along like passing clouds, hoping for the best.”

  This letter seemed written by a stranger, and he realized that his lament was a hodgepodge of complaints Wally himself had made, but in rereading it, he began to see his childhood fantasy of floating above everything as the one connecting thread along which everything in his life was strung. This fantasy had never left but had remained hidden, pretending to be something else. He was no different from everyone he knew, no different from his parents, the farmers, his constituents, the passengers on the buses, from Gums or Doraymay or Spanish — no different from anyone in the island.

  Maybe it was impossible to possess any real value in this place. People who preached about making a difference either spoke in an exalted and impractical way or were like Skullcap, whose confused sermonizing sounded like frenzied banging against tightly shut doors. How often he had heard that babble from the powerless! How often he had been struck by the same powerlessness. He thought of his brother.

  On his last day at work, the local election scheduled the following day, a group of men smoking outside his office entered after a few minutes. “You already pack up?” one of them asked.

  “Yes, I finish here.”

  “So easy you going?”

  “Is better to go easy,” he replied.

  “So you say,” one of the men said. “So you say.”

  His companion asked, “No farewell party? Not a drink self? Nothing for the throat?”

  They seemed reluctant to leave so Orbits told them, “I have to clear out everything in an hour.”

  “Fete in all the rumshop. We going to one now.”

  “We plan to hit all of them before the night finish. All the candidates buying drinks.”

  “Except for the one talking to the girl in the front. You know last week he was reading a speech and when people start to heckle him, all of a sudden he break down and start bawling.

  “I never see anything like that. Anyways, we going now. You sure you don’t want to join we? Plenty action. Two days aback a fella put a good licking on Halligator for calling him a miscreant. Don’t know what the word mean and I sure the fella who planass Halligator don’t know either. Miss-creant. Sound like a bigshot lady if you ask me.”

  Orbits knew they were angling for a free drink. He took out two twenties from his wallet and said, “Take this. If I find the time, I will join you.”

  They left immediately. Orbits looked through the window at the people going in and out of the dentist’s office and he thought of his father’s place. During a visit there, he had seen a woman, her legs apart, utterly helpless while his father drilled her. He hated the office for its smell of rubbing alcohol and the rusty clamps and pliers and the vulgar bawling of the patients. But his father seemed happy in the place. His mother, too, had been happy during that period. A perfect family on the surface, yet he had suffered through the first two decades of his life and his brother had, at some point, turned his back on the world. How was it possible that his parents could not notice any of this? How could they feel all of this was natural? One of the men he had met in the community centre mentioned that Starboy had spoken of shame as an ever-present affliction. He assumed his brother had escaped, but maybe he was doubly afflicted.

  A van with clearly drunk men waving banners drove by, almost hitting a woman who had stepped out of the dentist’s office. She watched the van roar along and held a palm against her cheek as she crossed the road to the chicken and chips joint, where she passed two men sitting on cardboard ends. One of the men had his hands out even though with his head down and his eyes closed, he seemed to be sleeping. Another van with banners from an opposing party screeched to pick up a group from the chicken and chips place. An old man walking with a cane stopped and looked up at the building where Orbits’ office was housed. He watched for a full five minutes before he moved on.

  Orbits remembered the scene at Doraymay’s place and the image of ants crawling around and over their dead comrades. During the visit, he had felt that it was the natural way of the world for the injured, weak and helpless to be pushed aside and forgotten. He recalled a conversation with Cascadoo, the other man speaking about reincarnation, which he was convinced extended to animals. “Eef you see a cockroach mash it one time. Eef you see a dog in the road bounce it down. All them animals paying for their sin in they last life.” He had moved on to impoverished men like himself, and Orbits was uncertain if Cascadoo wanted him to argue otherwise. But Orbits had seen how other men had used this belief to stave off guilt or passivity. “How I could change anything that set by higher powers? The script already write.” Did someone actually say this?

  A pickup truck with Halligator and some other men standing on the tray drove by. Halligator’s hand was bandaged and he was waving with the other at nobody in particular. If he had glanced up at the office he was hoping to soon occupy, he would have seen Orbits looking through the window, but he was focused on the men and women on the road. Already I am forgotten, Orbits thought without bitterness. He hoped the new councillor would be more helpful to his constituents than he had been. He had swiftly discovered that the men who barged into his office were not always the sad, oppressed peasants he had first imagined, but often the architects of their own tragic lives. He had seen how much they were bound by tradition, comforted by its rituals, softened by familiarity but always, always trapped by the rules. They had excuses for everything: excuses that had been handed down from generation to generation and that had lost all meaning.

  He heard a knock on the door and saw Mona. She seemed anxious, and Orbits recalled the promises he had made to her father four years earlier. He had not seen Cascadoo for a while, and he guessed the other man was busy campaigning for one candidate or the other. He prepared himself to console the girl, but it turned out her anxiousness had nothing to do with her job. She thanked him for helping her, a complete stranger with no qualifications, first by giving her a job as a caretaker and then at his office. “I still remember Grandma, you know. How she used to pretend to be vex all the time when all she wanted was a little attention. Somebody to show she that she still living.”

  Orbits, overwhelmed, told her, “She was lucky to have somebody like you.”

  “She was lucky to have somebody like you.” And Orbits reacted as he always did, with unexpected tenderness; he felt his eyes burning. He hugged the girl. She said, “Don’t worry about me. I will be okay.” She told him that he could stop at the house whenever he wanted.

  The owner of the bookstore came out to look at the pair, and when Mona was gone, Orbits walked across. The owner pretended surprise at his approach. “So you come to pay a last visit? How was the book on blindness that you buy? Sometimes these books work and sometimes they don’t work. That is the thing about cures. They don’t obey any rules. I have some good books here for a man in your position. How to Retire and Relax. How
to Retire and Keep Busy. How to Forget the Past. How to Prepare for the Future.” He walked through his tiny store, pointing out this and that book. Orbits wondered how he managed to survive with so few customers. “So what you going to do now?” the owner asked.

  “I not too sure,” Orbits replied. “I will take it as it come.”

  The owner looked offended. He repeated the phrase in a sarcastic way. Eventually he said, “I have exactly the book for you.” Orbits glanced at the title. How to Live. But beneath the slim tract was another. How to Die. “Take your pick,” the owner said, shuffling both books.

  The book Orbits bought for thirty-five dollars was How to Live. It was just sixteen pages, each page representing a decade and on the opposite page, an accompanying illustration to the statement.

  “What will happen if somebody live past eighty?” Orbits asked.

  “I been thinking of that and I already have a sequel to the bestseller in your hand. How to Live Past Eighty. You think is a good title? Or how about How to Live. Part Two? The title of a book is the most important thing, you know. Is like if you see a pretty girl and you fall in love at the first sight. You know I always had my eye on that secretary of yours, but she didn’t have any time for me. People does see me as a big writer and bookstore owner and feel I could make sweet magic, but sadly, that is not the case. Going to write a book about that one day. Already have the title. How to Force People to Like You. But maybe that too strong. I should choose something like How to Trick People to Like You.”

  Orbits left him to speculate on the titles. On his way home, he spotted scenes of merriment in every rumshop. In the morning, half these men would be happy and the other half disappointed. Winners and losers. Soon, some from the losing side would jump ship and others who had supported the winning candidate would grow frustrated and regret their support.