The Amazing Absorbing Boy

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  “I don’t think that will fit in a suitcase.”

  “He could fold it up. A German Lugie then?”

  “Luger?”

  “Same thing. Or a Gatling gun like the one Django the movie badjohn had.”

  “I really don’t know. Might be illegal.”

  “What about one of these gadget that could see where it have fish below the water? Tell you exactly where to fishen.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I believe he might.”

  During the following weeks while I was packing away small tools in Uncle Boysie’s shop I sometimes imagined my father and myself together on a boat, riding the breakers until we were past the Bocas and could see Venezuela. Sometimes in these scenes we actually landed on Venezuela and chatted with the Warahoon Indians who were so impressed with all my father’s gadgets that they loaded us up with tattou and ‘gouti and rainbow-coloured macaws and playful baby monkeys. Each day I waited patiently for Uncle Boysie to tell me, “Well, boy, he coming tomorrow.” But as the months passed, I began to feel that my uncle’s promise was no different from my mother’s, when I was much younger. Just ole talk.

  I soon began to see myself living my entire life right in Mayaro. Maybe I would inherit Uncle Boysie’s shop, as he wasn’t married and had no children of his own. I would also get a big belly and sit behind the counter quarrelling with the children for interfering with the stocks and appliances. I might even go to Lighthouse rumshop by the beach every weekend for a nip of Puncheon rum. One Friday after school I did exactly that but for two beers instead and when I arrived at the shop trying to fight my drowsiness, my uncle glanced at me, pushed his hand beneath his shirt and began scratching his belly. He usually did that when he was thinking of something. In the following weeks, I saw him scratching, too, whenever I took down one of the comics fastened with clothes clips to a line of polyester twine across the haberdashery section, and when he saw my shoes muddy from searching for Loykie, my sick friend who lived in the mangrove with his mother. To tell the truth, I soon forgot Uncle Boysie had ever mentioned my father but exactly nine months after my mother’s funeral, he told me, “He sending for you.”

  “For me? Who?”

  “You father, boy.”

  “You mean to go up to Canada?”

  “Righto pappyo. Cyanada.”

  This was too much to digest. I had imagined my father would be joining me in Mayaro so Canada was the furthest thing from my mind. “What I will do there?”

  Uncle Boysie reeled off a list of jobs he had most likely picked up from his rumshop friends. He made the place seem only slightly different from Pantamoolie’s crazy land. And he kept this up during the four weeks before I left, joking about “white chicks” and some Canadian wrestler before getting serious with warnings about ownwayness. On the night before my departure, he gave me a long speech that sounded as if he had crammed it from a book, because it didn’t resemble any of his previous advice. But I was really not paying him too much attention as my mind was already far, far away. I was on a plane zooming through fluffy patches of clouds to a land where flavoured shaved ice fell from the sky. A nowhereian, at last!

  Chapter Two

  THE WONDER BOOK OF WONDERS

  In the months before she died, my mother stopped talking of my father. Uncle Boysie took over and sometimes from my mother’s quietness, I felt she didn’t agree with my uncle’s criticisms even though she once used to say some of the same things, except in a more resigned way. Her silence took me back to the time after his last disappearance from our house. I remember how she fussed about fixing this or that around the house to surprise him when he returned. She tried to convince me he was on a ship travelling from port to magical port and he would one day return with gifts spilling from his pockets and stuffed inside soft velvety boxes. She kept that up for months, even when that final disappearance lasted longer than the others.

  Once I heard a neighbour telling her, “Is the good-looking one and them who does cause the heartache, Sylvie. Real charmers but skeffy like hell.” From my mother’s little smile I felt they were talking of my father. He appeared that way in the pictures, too, with his unbuttoned shirt and long hair and stubble on his face and his bored look. But then most of the pictures were removed (one by one, the happier ones first) and my own memories of his time with us—broken up by his trips away—faded and I began to see him from Uncle Boysie’s descriptions: a lazy, good-for-nothing scamp.

  So I didn’t know what to expect when I landed in the Toronto airport and glanced around. There were a few men with beards and turbans but they all seemed to be working in the building. I walked to a bench and when a middle-aged man with a moustache sat next to me I wondered if he was my father and Canada could make people shorter and fatter but the man hailed out a woman in an accent like rolling marbles.

  After ten minutes or so, I went outside but the place was too cold so I returned to the bench. Could my father have forgotten the date of my arrival? Did Uncle Boysie’s letter somehow get lost? This was worse than getting stranded in Port of Spain or San Fernando with no money for passage. Then I remembered the five hundred dollars Uncle Boysie had given to me and I cheered up a bit. In any case, I had a visa for six months. By then most of the people from the flight had disappeared with their families so I dragged my suitcase once more outside.

  “Your name is Sam?”

  It was a man leaning against the wall and smoking. He looked a little like Lee Van Cleef from the Westerns, sort of grim and calculating but then I saw the person from the pictures in our living room. I told him yes and followed him to a bus a little distance away. I hauled my suitcase up the steps and we sat on opposite seats. While we were waiting for the driver I expected that he would ask about the trip or about Mayaro but he just gazed outside. Maybe was feeling shy just like me, rehearsing what to say because we had not seen each other since I was six, which was eleven years ago. Then the driver who was well dressed for a bus man came in and we took off.

  I remember how the driver on the Mayaro to Rio Claro route always stopped midway for a drink of Puncheon rum, not caring about the passengers cursing and bawling at him through the windows: “Bring you ass here, nah man. Is government property, not you mooma bus you driving.” But this driver announced our stops on a mike like if he was a pilot. Dundas. Harbour Castle. Royal York. Everywhere looked neat and organized with lanes and parks bordered by wavy concrete banks. The trees, which didn’t have any leaves, were planted in a straight line. People with coats were walking briskly, not chatting in groups like in Trinidad. They all looked faded, like dematerializing comic book ghosts. This was so exciting: I could almost believe Pantamoolie’s talk of flavoured ice falling from the sky. I wished my school friends could be with me now to see all the tall buildings and highways with so many lanes.

  I glanced at my father. In the evening light he looked pale and sad, like someone sitting in a dark, damp place like the Batcave, and knowing his schemes were slipping away, one by one. When the bus dropped us off at Union, we took a tramcar, which was like a train running on the streets. It was colder than the bus and my father must have seen me shivering because he asked me, “You know what season this is?”

  “March,” I told him.

  “I see. March is a season now. Nice. Very nice.” It sounded like a Mayaro joke but he didn’t laugh.

  It was dark when we got to a place with big, boxy buildings. There were many lanes and a sign before one said Regent Park. While I was dragging my suitcase up the steps in front of a red building, I almost told him that I had discovered the book he had left behind—The Wonder Book of Wonders—but I thought maybe he would be vexed at me for leaving it behind.

  We walked down a long corridor and he opened a door near the end. “Only a damn fool will come to this place wearing just a raincoat and khaki pants,” he told me. He went into a room and returned with two sweaters and a coat. The sweaters were a muddy brown colour with loose threads like a sucked-out mango seed and the extra large coat
couldn’t zip all the way up. He also gave me something he called mittens, which sounded like little, round animals hiding beneath stoves and fridges.

  That first night I sat at the kitchen table expecting him to start a conversation and maybe explain why, after so many years of silence, he had asked me to join him in Canada. I felt it might be rude to ask especially since I knew nothing firsthand about him. When he came into the kitchen, I prepared myself but he just went to the fridge, poured out some reddish juice into a mug with Niagara written beneath its rim, and walked over to the couch. He placed his bare feet on the small laminated table and I saw his toes twitching like river shrimps.

  I felt he was preparing some explanation and when he got up, I straightened again and glanced at the chair opposite, but he returned to the kitchen and opened the top cupboards, shifting their contents about. The lower shelf was lined with old newspapers. He got out a package of some sort, sniffed it, and threw its contents into a bucket between the stove and the fridge. There were bread scraps on the tiled floor and a crumpled box of fruit juice that he kicked towards the bucket as he returned to the living room. When he walked past me I looked down at the holes in the plastic tablecloth that made it resemble a Chinese checkers board. Apart from the skinny couch, the laminated centre table, and the box on which the television rested, there was no other furniture in the living room. Two large bricks stood against the far wall and I tried to imagine their purpose. Maybe he placed a trestle there when he was working on his inventions.

  He went out to the balcony and asked, “So where you going to sleep?”

  The question confused me. I didn’t know if it was a challenge or a reproach. I saw his cigarette glinting as he hunched over the railing. When he returned I said, “Anywhere that convenient.”

  “What you said?”

  “I will sleep anywhere.”

  “You sure about that?” The way he looked at me made me feel like this was some trap he was setting but again he didn’t wait for a reply as he disappeared into the bedroom. I wondered if this was a Canadian manner of conversation but I felt uncomfortable talking to an empty, grey wall. He came out with a rolled-up tube of foam and tossed it where a dining room table might have stood. “The blankets in that top cupboard.” He motioned with his chin to a built-in cupboard in the hall. It seemed there were so many storing places in this small apartment. I tried to make it more interesting by pretending he had hidden some of his inventions in secret cupboards somewhere. Maybe machines to transform mittens into sweaters and thin socks into warm fluffy boots.

  That night I lay on the foam, stared at the ceiling fan and tried to imagine my new life in Canada. The fan was creaking in a regular pattern like an old man coughing some distance away. My mind stalled again and again; I didn’t know anything about this place and I could picture nothing of tomorrow or the day after. I thought instead of my Uncle Boysie taking me to the Piarco airport in his pickup van and saying that my mother would have been pleased by this “Cyanadian affair.” He had chatted as if I might return in a few hours but that was Uncle Boysie. When, during the trip to the airport, he talked about my mother’s funeral, it sounded as if she had died a few hours ago instead of nine months earlier. My father’s betrayal—neemakararam was the word he used—could have happened yesterday. The way he squeezed all these events into little tubes had lessened some of my worry about this unexpected move to a country thousands of miles away.

  I don’t know when I finally fell asleep but I had a dream of my high school near to the Mayaro cemetery. My English teacher, Miss Charles, was describing a place called Corfu from some boring novel while Pantamoolie was gossiping about Rita, the pretty girl who sat one row before us. At the back of the class, sitting alone, was Loykie. It was strange to see him without the old sugar bag he always wore when he came out of the swamp. In the dream, Loykie’s skin became a milk-white colour from rubbing a stick of chalk and then brown from grazing his finger on the mahogany desk cover and even darker still as he touched a spilled drop of ink. He really was the Amazing Absorbing Boy.

  The dream of Mayaro, the seaside village, with all its rumshop and churches and wooden houses peeping from behind breadfruit and coconut trees made me a little worried about this strange new place. That I should then miss Uncle Boysie, and Auntie Umbrella who was forever running from the sun, and Matapal the fisherman and Sporty who was always with his Kid Colt comics was easy to understand. This new place seemed too organized and judging by my father, the people too quiet. I didn’t know if I could fit into this big mall of a country where everything was so new and so properly arranged.

  I got up from the foam, put on an extra sweater, and opened the balcony door. We were on the fourth floor of a six-storey building and even at this late hour, many buildings had their lights on. I couldn’t make out the houses and trees properly though, because of the thick fog all around. I had never seen anything like this: it seemed as if we were on an ocean floating to some unknown place. The tips of the trees looked like peeping-out masts. I felt giddy and stepped away from the railing. From the apartment above I heard the sound of a woman’s reckless laugh and a man’s low voice. I tried to imagine what they could be doing outside on their balcony at this late hour. A police siren seemed to get closer and farther at the same time before it disappeared.

  Everything sounded different from Mayaro, where every night I would hear the wind lambasting the branches. There, every bit of noise was familiar: the dog howl from the neighbours’ yard, the conversation in the night from drunkards returning from the bars, the misfiring engine from the coconut husking factory close to a mile away. But here it seemed as if these sounds, coming from afar, were squashed and packaged so I could not get their range or their distance. The fog and the washed-out lights from the building opposite made all of this seem very mysterious.

  On the way to the Piarco airport, Uncle Boysie had talked about bears and penguins and dog carriages and Eskimos dressed up in animal clothes, which had made me smile because I knew he had picked up this nonsense from the rumshop. Yet when I looked at the covering of fog outside, it was not too difficult to imagine all of Uncle Boysie’s creatures walking about cool-cool under the cover of the fog. Some of my worries melted away. This was Canada, where people came for a while and never returned. They sent home money and boasted in their letters about the apples and snow and crazy ice-skating games that ended with serious fights. Some of Uncle Boysie’s regular customers like Cockort and Latchmin couldn’t believe I was actually moving here. They thought the trip would take a month, like if I was flying to the moon or something. I closed my eyes and tried to separate all the fresh smells brushing up from the fog. I must have remained there for an hour or more.

  “Hello.” It was my father in a thick, wavy sweater. “People here don’t leave the door open like if they still in some mash-up Trinidad village, you know.” He pointed to a long vent near the floor and I noticed a big tear in the arm of his sweater. “That heating unit there is not just for decoration.”

  In the morning he added other rules: turn off the lights in the night, don’t bathe for too long, wear a sweater in the evenings, never answer the telephone when he not around, don’t wait for him to make meals, and check all the appliances whenever the smoke alarm goes off. He told me that children here never depended on anyone but learned to take care of themselves the minute they crossed ten, and by the time they were seventeen they moved away. I wondered whether he knew I had turned seventeen less than a month earlier.

  “Where do they go?”

  I was just making conversation but the question put him in a bad mood. “Where the hell you expect them to go? Following the Pied Piper to a river? To a chocolate factory singing oompa loompa? Eh?” I decided to ask no further questions but a few minutes later he said, “Nobody does starve in this place. It have shelters and food banks.”

  I felt this was the speech he had intended for my first night but I soon learned its real purpose the following afternoon. He was
poking around in the lower cupboard and grumbling about tins of this or that he was sure he had stored away. I walked over to help him but I saw only the paper packages, their ends tied with rubber bands. The cupboard smelled old and cockroachy instead of ripening plantain and breadfruit. “What you looking for?” I asked him. Maybe I was still thinking as if I was in Trinidad because I expected the cupboards to be stuffed with tins of Ovaltine and jars of guava jam and all kinds of fruits.

  He got up without answering and a few minutes later he came out from his room with a green blowup coat that made him look a little like a long turtle. “I going to the super market to get some stuff.”

  I kept on the light late that night even though he had warned against it. While I waited, I made up my mind to finally ask why he had sent for me to Canada. I also intended to ask if I had gone against some Canadian habit for him to be so annoyed with me. He had not even noticed the Timex watch I was wearing.

  I got the watch for my tenth birthday, and when my mother said it had been sent by my father I gazed for hours on end at the rotating outer frame and the compass close to the bottom and all the fine writing on the brass back. I fiddled with it so often that it broke after a few months but I continued wearing it for more than a year. Finally I put it on top of The Wonder Book of Wonders. I really hoped he would notice and be surprised that I was still wearing the watch and maybe pull out a tiny toolkit and have it up and running in less than five minutes.

  Early the next morning I knocked on his bedroom door but there was no answer. I opened the door a bit and peeped inside. I saw his mattress on the floor and a blanket sprawled around a pillow. There were two pairs of pants at the foot of the bed and a couple more hooked over nails in the wall. A small table was pushed against the window and there were a few Popular Mechanics magazines on the chair. Beneath the table were cardboard boxes lumped against each other. I closed the door carefully, remembering all the halfway gadgets he had left behind in Mayaro, pushed beneath her bed by my mother. By midday new questions were forming: when was he going to return, and what should I do in the meantime? This wasn’t the way I had pictured our first days. I imagined he would tell me about his years in Canada and maybe bundle all his adventures for telling like Uncle Boysie did. I felt he would be nervous and sad at first while he asked about Mayaro School and my mother, but then as he got accustomed to me he would apologize and give some sensible and unexpected reason for leaving. Finally, I would tell him I used to read his Wonder Book of Wonders, with all its crazy experiments, and he would say seriously, “They not really crazy if you understand their purpose. For instance …” In the weeks before I left, I had practised secretly in Uncle Boysie’s little backroom some Canadian words I had picked up from my comic books. Oh gosh. That’s swell. Thanks, buddy. How awful. You gotta be kidding. Great Scott.