The Amazing Absorbing Boy

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  A woman with sunglasses on top her head shouted out, “A global village.”

  The man on stage smiled, tapped his paper on the tall table before him and walked off. Everybody clapped. I felt this was going to be an interesting “mystery and riddle solving” night but next, a short woman with glasses almost as big as her pointed face, came to the stage and said, “The mist slithers.” She paused and looked over the heads of the crowd. “Slithers like an ethereal slime. Shadows stalk the slopes of the valley.” She stopped again. I know it was unfair but I felt that in Trinidad, somebody would have pelted her with a bottle for taking so long. “Tattered clouds are haunted by the ascent of so many spirits.” She went on for another ten minutes.

  The next speaker or poet, a young man a couple years older than me, was even worse. He started by saying that he had compressed his life into one single poem. “The pain, the bitter pain. The chasm, the unbridgeable chasm. The ideal, the fecund ideal.” He repeated himself like that with every line until he reached the end, “The farewell, the final farewell.”

  I thought it was a mistake to come to this place with so many unhappy people (and to be honest, I wondered whether they were pretending or had genuine problems with their fathers who treated them as if they were parasites). But just when I had written off the night as a complete waste, a small man with patches of stiff, upright grey hair came to the front, held on to the mike tightly as if it was going to escape and began to talk about reincarnation. He said he might have been a coelacanth fish because his family treated him as if he didn’t exist. Then he changed his mind and said he might have been a platypus because he had hidden testicles like that animal. I wanted to laugh but everyone around was too serious. Then he began to talk about some lizard he alone had seen. He said this lizard was never attacked by other animals, because whenever it was confronted, it would clasp its hands together and tears would stream down its face. He imitated the lizard by squeezing his hands across his chest and looking pitiful. When he knocked his head against the mike, I felt that he was still imitating the lizard but I soon realized that he was crying. A woman came to the stage and placed her hand around him but he knocked his head a couple more times before he followed her off.

  I was still thinking of this strange man and his hidden testicles and his sly lizard when the Matrix woman came up to me and said, “The world is filled with suffering. I am glad you came.”

  Most of the crowd had left and I was really waiting for her. “Me too.”

  “Do you drink?” She said this suddenly as if it had just popped in her head. I thought of the five or six times I had gone out with my friends from Mayaro to the dirty rumshop right on the beach. Although I had just two Carib beers during each of these rumshop visits, I always got drunk, and during the last occasion, my mother had said that I was turning out exactly like my father (which was strange because he was not a drinker). I don’t know why the woman asked me about drinking because she ordered two coffees instead. She took a little sip and said that she hoped to travel the world someday. Somalia and Ethiopia. From close up, her broad mouth looked dangerous and pretty at the same time. She mentioned a couple of other countries and then became quiet as if it was my turn to talk. But I had nothing to say so we sipped our coffees for another ten minutes or so. Every now and again I would catch her looking seriously at me. She asked again if I had enjoyed the night and said there was another reading (that was the word she used) the following weekend.

  The next week Paul chatted a bit about his clarinet player and then asked about the Matrix woman. I told him that she put on her coat with one smooth swirl which for a second made it look like a flowing cape. I think he was disappointed that my description did not match his rude details about the clarinet lady. He asked the location of the Art Bar and I mentioned the Christie subway and the gingerbread cottages. On Saturday as I about to leave my father asked me, “You getting ready to knockabout again? What happen, this apartment get too small for you now?”

  “I going to a reading.”

  He got mad at that. “You couldn’t do that in Trinidad? Reading, my ass.”

  “Oompa loompa,” I told him, but beneath my breath. Once I got to the Art Bar I felt that my father might be less grumpy if he went to these events. I never realized there were so many interesting people in Canada. That weekend a man with a safari hat read a poem about his love for rats and weasels. He wished he could have a bacteria as a pet. He would call it, Bachy. And a virus, which he would call, Vivvy. “I feel like a randy marsupial sometimes,” he said, grinning and showing some real big teeth. The next week a woman recited a poem she called “But.” She started of by saying that the word was one of the most useful in the English language and gave a couple examples. Then midway in her poem, she claimed that she could see these buts. They were tiny, furry animals with glowing eyes and stumpy tails. When she was finished, an old Indian man with a banana drawing on his shirt, got up and said he enjoyed the poem very much. He said his name was Mr. Bhutto. Everyone laughed and applauded and the Indian man looked as if he didn’t want to sit down after that.

  Finally he took his seat and a fat man with a necktie and a soft baby face told the crowd he had invented a new language. He said, “Writers are propartarions of each other as we possess identical roticles detectable only to a trained psymodist.” The crowd applauded which encouraged him to mention places he had visited, like Taposar and Melarou and Scragibad and Dowski and the island of Ascadara. I hoped he would describe these strange places but he shifted to a beautiful woman who worked in his office building. He had never spoken to her even though every night he dreamed that he was, “Gently luftating her twin papyrons.”

  The Matrix lady nodded and played with the button on her blouse.

  I think the real reason I went every weekend was because of my conversations afterwards with her. I wondered sometimes whether her friendliness was because she felt I was an orphan but one night she said that my eyes were filled with pain. It made them beautiful and “soulful,” according to her. I wanted to compliment her too and almost mentioned her breasts, which I had recently begun to notice. Instead, I remained quiet. During these times she, too, got quiet, leaning forward and dripping out some small detail of her life. Her name was Canella, and she worked for little periods, as a security guard, a landscaper, a camp instructor and a baker. She liked the time in the bakery because she was “fat and happy then.” Once she said she would like to become a cobbler. Because of my school stories, I always placed cobblers in the same category as leprechauns, elves, and gnomes. They were stumpy old men with bumpy noses and white beards. “Just imagine,” she told me. “Repairing shoes, which are dusty with miles and miles of travel. Boots, which might have stomped along Mongolia and climbed the foothills of Bhutan. I might pluck out tiny spurs and spotted eggshells and seeds from thousands of miles away.” I liked this sort of talk because it made me forget, for a while, my father, and making so little money at the gas station, and seeing so many happy people my age driving around with all their friends. As she described her foreign spots, I would think of the beach and swamp and the mangrove birds in Mayaro. But after a while, my mind would drift to comic book places like the Negative World and the Phantom Zone and parallel universes where superheroes suddenly found themselves—maybe because Mayaro was too familiar and couldn’t match up with all her exciting places. Sometimes in the middle of a fancy description, she would begin to talk about wars, famines, floods, and “bug-eyed orphans.” Little by little, I started feeling sorry for all these people with their strange poems I had once laughed at. I began to look forward to the weekends; it was my little secret, safe from my father and the genie and his grumpy owner and everyone else who got me annoyed.

  But one night at the Art Bar, I had a real shock, because seated right at the front table were Dr. Bat and Paul. While a shorthair woman on stage was explaining why she had changed her name to Mother Man, I glanced over at Dr. Bat and immediately regretted I had mentioned the location
to Paul. I couldn’t understand why exactly they were in this place for crazy poets and writers. I sat at the last table and when Canella looked back and pointed to an empty seat next to her, I prayed that neither Dr. Bat nor Paul would spot me moving up. Thankfully, it was crowded that night and I soon realized why: some famous writer was going to read from his book and maybe give some advice afterwards.

  This famous writer who said his name was Kelvin Raspail looked shy and quiet in his round sunglasses, a little like a cross between Elton John and a fat raccoon but what he read on the stage was not bashful at all. He said, “True progress can only spring from tumult. Consensus just breeds laziness.” He coughed into a handkerchief that he flapped right over the head of a woman seated at the front and continued, “I have spent my entire life embalmed in the pleasurable stupor of hatred. I felt a pure rush each time I discovered another hateful person. I prowled the street, turned up to unsolicited interviews, sat in bars just for that one expression.” He glanced around and I looked away, just in case he saw his look on my face. Canella’s eyes were bright and her nostrils opened and closed a bit like someone tired from climbing stairs. Then the writer finished his reading and asked if there were any questions. To my surprise, Paul got up. He said he had been writing a story for seven years and could never get beyond the opening line. He read this line: “It was on the seventh day of nineteen seventy-seven, when my crippling disease was finally diagnosed as incurable, that my mind turned to murder.” The writer suggested that he change this sentence but Paul said it was set in his mind like stone. Next, the writer suggested he change the date or the disease or the diagnosis or his reaction but Paul had a ready answer for all of them. The writer was getting real mad and I think it was this anger which caused him to be so rude to Dr. Bat, who got up next with a pile of paper in his hands. His story, he said, was about ice kangaroos, snow crabs, blind terrorists, one-armed dacoits from Bombay, many spicy foods, weeping Bollywood brides, and a superhero named Captain Hindustani. Surprisingly, he was speaking in a Canadian accent and I wondered if he reserved this voice for special occasions. But the writer would have none of it. “Utter offal,” he said when Dr. Bat was finally finished. “Nonsense of the highest order. All this exotic stuff is fouling up our bookstores and giving writing a bad name. My one bit of advice to you would be to stop writing immediately. And burn what you already have.”

  Dr. Bat sat down. He was trembling and I felt he would have many more conversations with his Trudeau lizard. At the end of the function, the writer left immediately and so did most of the crowd. While we were drinking our coffees, Canella asked me, “So what do you think?”

  Maybe I wanted to impress her. “I know two of the writers.”

  “Really? How come?”

  “A little group.” I felt that mentioning the gas station would somehow lessen my connection. I was relieved neither man had spotted me in the dim light.

  After a while, Canella told me, “I met Kelvin once. I was very young. He felt that yeasts were the source of all life. Did you notice the pained expression on his face? It’s the look of the premature ejaculator.” That night she mentioned many other famous architects, poets and sculptors she had met when she was young. Though she didn’t give too many details, I imagined her lying naked in her plump beige couch while her important friends stroked her cat and said weighty things between puffs of their pipes. And every night during that week, I imagined this scene but with me instead of Kelvin Raspail and other old people.

  I began to think of her differently and frequently during our conversations, I would glance at her nice breasts and her broad mouth and the way she would bite her lower lip while she was thinking. I can’t say whether she noticed this new interest and whether it might have caused her to ask about my first girlfriend and my perfect partner and my thoughts about white women. These questions were really awkward, because in Trinidad, nobody ever talked about these things except in a boastful way. Once she said that I blinked quickly whenever I was ashamed. She looked at my face and said that long eyelashes were a sign of sensitivity. She slid her chair closer and told me about a Lebanese poet who would bury his face in his hands afterwards. “As if he was ashamed of his transgression.” Though she did not explain what this transgression was, I had a good idea.

  I began to dress differently each Saturday. I bought a striped turtleneck jersey and a grey wool jacket and light brown leather shoes from the Donation Centre. I was tempted by a blue beret, which many of the crowd wore but felt I would look like a perfect fool in it. My father got a fit the first time he spotted me in my new outfit and quarrelled about the rent and groceries and all the other bills. “Less than three months in the place and you already become a little follow-fashion locho. Monkey see, monkey do. Typical Trinidadian locho.” Maybe he forgot that ever since my first paycheque I had been buying all the groceries.

  The genie and his master also noticed. One night as I was about to leave, I met them both in the elevator. The man shook his head and his genie did the same. To tell the truth, that little gesture got me real mad and I wished they would choose some other person to criticize. If the older one was my genie, I would command they both be sent back to wherever they came from. Set them in a field surrounded by one-eye and hook-arm maniacs. However on my way to the Art Bar, my mind returned to Canella.

  When I got there, I spotted a brown folder in her hand. There were drawings of animal faces on one of its side. She seemed a little unsettled that night and I soon realized why: soon after an old woman with plenty beads read a poem filled with unusual recipes like baked babies and scrotum soup, the host called Canella’s name and she walked to the stage in her Matrix manner. I thought she would recite a poem about shoes or the healing echoes of this and that but instead she read a story. The woman in the story worked at a museum and was “fixated on slender men with childlike features.” She had affairs with a couple of sick and dying people and once with a dwarf from Florence who drew only the “corpses of birds with live intense eyes.”

  It was an interesting story and I told her this at the end of the session. That night she ordered two beers and she seemed more in motion than usual, waving her hands and crossing her legs and playing with her hair. She talked about her father who was dry and evil and her mother who got drunk on wine and imagined that everyone she knew had been replaced with impostors. I ordered two more beers and when mine was finished, two more. I began to feel tipsy and when she asked about Trinidad I told her about my mother waiting all these years for my father to return and pretending to everyone in the village that he was regularly sending her money and gifts. She leaned closer when I revealed that just before she died my mother returned from my uncle’s place to our house where she began to dress up like a woman going to a party. Don’t ask why I felt so sad and angry at the same time—maybe it was the beer or recalling all these events—but when I reached the point where I met my father at the Pearson airport, I couldn’t continue. She reached over and took my hands and stroked my fingers one by one as if she was trying to take off an invisible ring. I looked at her breasts frankly and when she noticed and smiled, I didn’t look away. She leaned over and brushed her broad mouth against my cheek and squeezed my fingers and wrists.

  Sitting with her on the streetcar, her eyes opening each time the vehicle stopped, I prayed that my father would be away. As we walked towards the apartment, I was suddenly struck by this dangerous thing I was doing. I opened the door nervously and saw an empty plate on the kitchen table and a Popular Mechanics magazine on the couch before the television. The balcony door was closed which meant that he was not outside, smoking. Canella went to the washroom and for a moment, I had this dreadful thought that my father might be in there. When she returned, she took off her coat, placed it on the kitchen table, and walked over to the couch. She laid back her head and closed her eyes. As I sat next to her I noticed her breasts poking out from behind her shirt. She made a little tired sound and slid her head onto my shoulder. Some of my t
ipsiness returned—or maybe it was nervousness—and I played with the collar of her shirt and its top button. She placed her hand over mine and once more squeezed my fingers. But I was determined to get to her breasts and I loosened the button and slipped my hand down. I felt her hands over mine guiding me. Her skin felt soft and slightly oily, or maybe silky and from the dim balcony light, it seemed really pale. It was strange then that I should remember Paula who was two years older than everyone from our fourth form. She had showed me her breasts while we were walking home from a school bazaar but laughed and ran away when I tried to stroke them.

  When Canella suddenly stiffened, I thought I had reached that point with her, too. “Stop,” she told me in a quiet voice and when I glanced up at her I saw her staring at the door. I turned around. The door was open and it took a while before I saw the shadow of my father framed against the doorway. I froze. Canella buttoned her blouse and slid upright. I wondered how long he had been standing there, gazing at us. Without saying a word, he went to his room.

  Canella got her coat and in the hall she walked with long strides. On our way to the streetcar, I spotted the old man and his genie sitting together on a bench in the park. Canella didn’t speak for the entire five minutes it took for us to get to the streetcar but at its entrance she held my hands, looked at my face, and pulled me towards her. She told me softly, “We are always hostile to those who reflect our weaknesses.” Then she walked away. On my way back, I wondered if she was talking about my father, or me, or her dwarf from Florence or her Lebanese poet. Or herself. On my way back, as I passed the genie, I heard his handler saying in his mocking voice, “This is the new way. Always games and foolishness,” and the genie cackling and saying, “Phoolish-ness.”