The Amazing Absorbing Boy

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  Just for spite, I told him Regent Park, instead of Trinidad. He shook his head, doubled a page in his western, and went outside again with his dragging footsteps. He was grumbling under his breath and I wondered how he would have reacted if I had said, “Strange visitor from another planet.” Because Norbert was gazing at the cakes on the counter and not saying anything, I asked him, “When is your friend coming back?’

  The minute the question popped from my mouth, I regretted it because Norbert took a while before he answered. “She’s met some old friends there.” He said it in a dry voice that came from high up his throat, which made me think that the meeting had taken place on a dark bridge over a deserted tunnel. That was all he said for the entire evening and I decided to leave him alone. In the days that followed, I noticed that although he was as stylishly dressed as usual, he was no longer greeting me in his different languages. He also stopped talking about Cabbagetown and more about his German places. Once when the old grey man brought up the topic of his two dead brothers from the war, Norbert interrupted him to say that in this Dresden place, many innocent people had also been killed. The other fella hit back by saying that it was the same in London where, early in the battle, there were never any advance warnings of air strikes. Norbert said that the difference was that people were willing to discuss one city while pushing the other under the carpet.

  This argument didn’t blow up in a big shouting match as it might have done in Trinidad but that day, I felt that something had changed in the Coffee Time. More and more, Norbert took the side of Roy whenever he began his complaints of politicians who were bringing in foreigners just to get more votes, even though these people could barely even speak English. When Roy was listing off the problems in the places these foreigners came from, like Nigeria and Pakistan and Jamaica, I felt relieved that he didn’t know more about Trinidad. I noticed, too, that he always used the old-fashioned names like Ceylon and Rhodesia and Dutch Guiana. He felt that Canada was changing into an unfamiliar, dangerous place, with strange people in unusual clothes walking all over Toronto. Talking about Cabbagetown, Roy said they were lucky not to have welfare palaces like the ones along Kingston Road, and then rattled off a list of posh places for refugees from Somalia and Ethiopia. “Guess who’s paying for all this?” This became their new topic.

  I don’t think they were making up this refugee talk but sometimes while they were grumbling, I would think that the Cabbagetown stories of poor families had interested me more because I was in no better condition, and also because these people had turned out so well. I couldn’t understand why they were now discussing these new gold-digging foreigners right in front of me and one night, as I was walking to my apartment, I had to laugh when the thought hit me that they had one of these old people diseases that blanked out colour. That same night I decided that I would cut down my visits to the coffee shop because I wasn’t making any progress with the orangeish girl who worked there.

  The next day I began to explore the area beyond Coffee Time and came across other coffee shops with busy young people staring over their laptops and talking into gadgets hooked up over their ears. I would imagine myself like this, maybe five or six years down the road. I looked through the window of a Starbucks place at a girl facing away from me. She was sitting on a stool and there were tear strips on her tight jeans. I began to wonder if she was waiting on somebody when she turned and saw me gazing. I rushed away; it was not a young girl but an old lady with a stiff smile and a pointed chin. I remembered Pantamoolie saying he could tell the ages of all the Mayaro women by how high up on their waists their dresses were, as they went up half inch each year. He would have real problems here because of these thick coats that could disguise any kind of shape.

  I decided to visit this Cabbagetown place that evening instead of Coffee Time. When I crossed Gerrard and Carlton streets I tried to ask directions from a boy my age but he backed away and held up his hands as if I was going to attack him. A man with a long beard and dirty clothes pointed to the north and I walked for ten minutes or so before I realized I had not marked the buildings for my return trip. I was about to turn back when I spotted a building that could have been drawn by Gene Colan. The steeples and old-fashioned windows and solid brick walls made it look like a castle. Or maybe the Wayne Manor. I wandered around the compound until I came to a plaque that read, Toronto Necropolis. Necropolis: I had come across the word in horror comics and on my way back I imagined that all the old Cabbagetown ghosts were roaming around the place and also complaining about how much the place had changed.

  For the next week I, too, roamed around the place, looking for shops with vacancies advertised on their windows but the owners—in all types of accents, some hard to understand—each asked me about my Canadian experience as if they were setting some trap. When next I went to the coffee shop, Roy said, “Look who’s here. We thought you had gone back to Mexico.”

  He laughed in his coughing way and I decided he had made a joke. But that mood didn’t last for too long because they soon moved on to their favourite subjects: high taxes to pay for these welfare immigrants, some useless human rights group, young people crime, and old falling-apart army helicopters and tanks. This last topic set off Norbert and the trembling man about the war, and a museum in Ottawa, and Dresden, and the big holocaust. Then Jim, the truck driver, mentioned another of his trips to Carolina and said that Canada was getting too soft and unimportant, and everybody got real quiet as if this was really what they had been arguing about for the last half an hour. To tell the truth that put me at ease, and during the remainder of that session, I felt that maybe these old Canadians liked to throw out all their grievances just to see where they would hook up. Maybe they were like old people everywhere else, always complaining about how things were turning out and how much better they used to be. Uncle Boysie himself used to say the same thing about Mayaro.

  The next day on my way to Coffee Time, I made a list of my own grievances, which was easy because that same morning my father had complained about my idleness. Later in the coffee shop, it took about an hour before I got the chance to mention this big wall concerning Canadian qualification, and immediately Roy asked if I had applied for welfare. When I shook my head, he seemed a little surprised so I didn’t bother to ask about whether I could qualify or not. For the rest of that evening, the only thing all these old people talked about were their long-time jobs as cheese-makers and icecream truck drivers. I don’t know if they were throwing out advice but I was sure no one would hire me to make cheese or drive ice cream trucks. Then Norbert said that nowadays people were more interested in money than in happiness, and everyone got quiet for a while.

  I let another week skip by before I returned to the coffee shop and when I got there, the old people table was empty. I ordered a coffee and sat by myself. I noticed the orangeish girl staring in my direction but every time I smiled she looked away and I felt I was wasting all these friendly looks on the bare wall. I concentrated on my coffee.

  “You by yourself now?”

  I jumped and managed to say, “Nobody else is here today.”

  “The little one, he …” I saw her lips moving as if she was searching for a word. “Roy, you know?”

  “Yes?’

  “He feel very … how to say it … very dizzy. So they take him?”

  “Where?”

  “To ambulance.” She sat at the nearby table and began refilling the silver napkin holder. “He was nice man. Very friendly.”

  “To you?”

  “Yes, yes. He smile always.” She smiled herself and I wanted her to sit right there for the rest of the evening. “I go now.” She got up. “I have long-long shift. You work?”

  A boldfaced lie formed in my head but I told her, “Nothing so far.”

  “Yes, but you keep looking.”

  I couldn’t tell from her accent whether she was asking a question or consoling me. “Yes, I keep looking.” As she was walking away, I said, “Mum-moon,” but soft
ly because I could not remember its meaning.

  I was sorry when Norbert walked in a couple minutes later because now I would have to listen to him instead. Straightaway, he asked if I had heard about Roy and before I could reply, said that he had a stroke and was in the Downsview Hospital. I noticed the grey bristles on his face and the coffee stains on one of his cuffs as he gazed around at the customers ordering coffee and doughnuts. Jim the truck driver came in a few minutes later and both of them talked about Roy and his smoking and his unruly grandson and his wife who had died of cancer ten years earlier. Jim said that Roy was never the same after his wife’s death, and things only got worse when he moved to his daughter’s place. He lived for a while in an old persons’ home and, according to Jim, his daughter wasn’t happy when he left there to return to her place because he was forever quarrelling with her boys.

  As they talked about Roy’s younger days—when he owned a cottage near Peterborough and would go drinking and fishing with his friends, could repair all types of engines, and was a smart dresser (which was hard to imagine)—I got the idea they were feeling shaky because they were just a couple years younger than Roy. Then Jim said those days were gone forever and got up.

  After Jim left, Norbert’s gloomy mood didn’t change much. He began to talk about his own young days when he played the piano with an old-time band. He gave performances at fancy clubs where one night he met his wife, who had just come from England. I thought he was talking about the lady who had gone to the States, but he described his wife as tall with red hair and a “loud bubbly laugh.” He smiled a bit as if he was remembering something about his wife, and brightened up, even while mentioning how he lost all his money during some real estate crash and how his wife left him to return to England with their son. “What’s gone is gone,” he told me, using the same stiff voice like Jim a few minutes earlier. “At least we have the memories to sift through.”

  I couldn’t understand if this was a lament because he had been talking for the last twenty minutes about his bad luck with his wife and his money and moving from job to job. And then it hit me that he was really talking about the small smiling lady. Even when he picked up some of Roy’s favourite topics about welfare and immigrants, I felt his mind was on this lady. It seemed strange but I believed he was somehow blaming these immigrants for his woman-problem. Because we were alone that day, I felt I should console him but he got up and put on his coat like if he was real tired. Then he left.

  “Any luck?” I looked up and saw the orangeish girl. I felt she was referring to a job so I shook my head. She sat and I asked her what her name was. “I don’t like to give out name. I am sorry.” I said I understood and she smiled as if she knew I was lying. “Okay, I tell you. It is Dilara. Just for you.”

  “Why just for me?”

  I hoped she would say because she knew I would soon be her boyfriend but she told me, speaking slowly as if she would change her mind at any minute, “I get in trouble. I live … byself now. I want mother to come here but too far away.” She got up. “But we have to look to future. It is all we have.”

  When she left to serve another customer I realized that she was the exact opposite of the old-timers with their conversations about their younger days and how things were changing so much and getting worse all the time. One week later, I got a job at a gas station on Jarvis Street, just a twenty minute walk from my father’s building. At the end of my first day, tired and greasy as I was, I headed for the coffee shop to thank Dilara for her simple advice, which had encouraged me to not give up, but when I got there she was gone.

  I wanted to tell her how I had walked from street to street asking all the gas station owners if they needed any help; I wanted to boast about how I eventually told one manager, who seemed fat and oily like if he had just rolled out from an oven, that my father owned a gas station in Trinidad and that me and all my brothers worked there on weekends. Maybe I would have left out the part about the manager—whose pants were unzipped—raising two fingers and saying, “Two weeks’ probation. No pay. Any fucking around and you walk. Unnerstan?” I was so happy I didn’t even care if he knew I was lying about my father’s gas station.

  I waited for a while at Coffee Time and wondered whether Dilara had left because she had given me her name or because of the trouble she had hinted at. I hoped, though, she had gotten another, better job. Several days later, I decided to visit on the off chance that Dilara had returned. Another girl was cleaning the table next to the one where Norbert was sitting alone. He seemed older and quieter too. He told me that Jim had returned to Milton but that he often spotted him at the Legion. I was thinking of the Legion of Superheroes when he said Roy had died. We remained quiet for a while and I imagined Roy buried in the Necropolis next to all his old friends. I heard Norbert saying something like, “Jen-kuo-bardso,” and adding, “It’s Polish. It’s all my parents spoke at home.” The foreign language cheered him up a bit and he dropped a couple other strange phrases, so I didn’t say what was on my mind: all his references to German cities and to his German parents. I couldn’t understand why he had changed his own history and I wondered whether he had also made up all the stories about Cabbagetown.

  On my way from work I would pass other rundown coffee shops with groups of old-timers reading the Sun and staring at the tight-jeans girls, and I would think of Norbert and Roy gazing back at the good old days, and of Dilara looking forward to getting a good job and bringing her mother to live with her, and I would wonder what, if anything, this knowledge told me about my new country. Maybe the old-timers looked down on newcomers like me because our short airplane trips could not match their long miserable sea voyages during which they had plenty time to remember all their friends who had been killed in some war or the other, while still worrying about how they were going to survive in this new country. I would have liked to throw out this observation to my father but could just imagine how he would react; so instead I settled on the simple idea that all old people were the same, regardless of where they came from. They preferred to sit among their own, polishing their memories and pretending that every change would bring a new set of bacchanal.

  Chapter Five

  TRUDEAU AND THE GOAT PILLS

  At the end of my two-week probation at Petrocan I got a blue overall and a cap. They were both greasy and I had to wash them twice in the laundry room on the last floor before the smell of oil disappeared. When I wore it for the first time I felt a little proud because it was a uniform; not the same as a fireman’s or a cop’s but a uniform nevertheless. I wished my father was at home so he could see me. In the elevator I saluted a group of little boys with a fast flick of my finger like in the movies. They broke out laughing and one said, “What the fuck?” As I was getting off, another stood upright, saluted me, and almost in the same motion slapped the palms of the other boys.

  I don’t think they knew I was joking in the Trinidadian manner by posing a bit, and later at work when I repeated the incident to Paul, the tall, greasy-looking wash operator who had been working at the Petrocan for close to ten years, he got serious as if I had stained the name of the Petrocan uniform and should be court-martialled. Paul seemed to know all sorts of secrets about the regular taxi drivers who came twice a week to refuel their tanks and sometimes to get an underbody wash.

  When I told him that I was from Trinidad he told me he was from Newfoundland and that he knew much of the island I was from, but everything he mentioned—like the word “poo-nanny”—came from Jamaica. Which was why I wasn’t sure how I should react to what he called his “inside info.” He said that the strapped Sikh had been a wrestler and had developed a special cobra hold, and that the fidgety man with the neat moustache was once an engineer who had to rush out from Iran after some dam he was building washed away a royal palace straight into another kingdom. To listen to Paul, these taxi drivers were all doctors and lawyers and inventors and refugees and terrorists and Nazis and escaped criminals from other countries. Once he told me
that a stocky man, whose head seemed to sink into his fleshy body like a moroccoy while I was filling his tank, was once the best cook in Poland. “Papa Perogies,” Paul called him, and I can’t say whether this was the name he was called in Poland or one Paul had given to him.

  Now I should say straight off that Paul must have picked up his information from unseen sources because I rarely saw him talking to any of these drivers. It could have been his slack style of walking or all his beads and bracelets or the way his eyes would droop after one of his smokes in the garage, but no one really trusted him. Me, I enjoyed his stories even though they resembled some of the old movies I had seen at the Liberty cinema in Trinidad. Paul reminded me a little of my old school friend Pantamoolie who was always inventing stories about our teachers.

  One of Paul’s most interesting was of Dr. Bat. According to Paul, his real name was Bharanbose Atambee Tulip and before he came to Canada to drive his taxi he had moved from India to work as a doctor in Nepal. I never asked Paul how he knew that Mr. Tulip was once a doctor and when exactly his name had been shortened to its initials because I knew he would come up with some fancy explanation. Still, I was glad to see these ordinary-looking taxi drivers another way, and on evenings when my hands were freezing and my ears felt like frozen biscuits, for just a little while I would forget the cold.

  Sometimes when I was cleaning the windscreen of a fancy van with a pretty woman and her son sitting inside, I would wonder about the kind of house they would return to and try really hard to imagine the fancy furniture surrounding them as they ate from expensive dinner plates while some sort of music played in the living room. I would picture the offices of the men who pulled in for gas with their ties and suits and the boyfriends of the women who fixed their lipstick in the rear-view mirror while I cleaned their windscreens. So close to them while they were doing this personal thing! I even pretended a few times that I was sitting next to these young women, but those pictures couldn’t hold, because my mind would be empty about what would happen after they had pulled off. What we would talk about and where we would drive to. Occasionally I imagined that I was driving a red sports car and Dilara, in the passenger seat, was gazing at some other boy filling the tank. But this picture couldn’t hold either. Sometimes I felt a trace of sadness, especially when I saw youngish people who I guessed had happy families and nice houses and cottages and who felt at home in this country they were born in. Which could be why I bothered to listen to Paul’s stories of those who were not so lucky. People like myself.