The Amazing Absorbing Boy

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  “These people are in a coffin somewhere,” I told him.

  “Exactly so.”

  I decided to not argue.

  He brought more scripts during his subsequent visit and I felt guilty for placing the entire bunch in Mr. Schmidlap’s drawer. My guilt increased as he chatted happily about the proposed movies and their long dead actors and enquired why he had not yet received any replies. I decided to use his money to help pay off Mr Schmidlap for the DVD player but each time he visited my guilt increased. One weekend while I was looking at sweaters in the Donation Centre, I saw a red cape hanging on the wall. This was the week after Hallowe’en and I got the cape for just three dollars. When I gave it to Mr. Magboo during his next visit, he tried it on immediately and flashed a smile like the Count on Sesame Street. A woman in the store pulled her son closer. Mr. Magboo left with the cape hanging from his neck. The next week he arrived with the cape flowing after him. I didn’t know what to say. At least it suited him.

  When one week then two passed with no visit from Mr. Magboo, I pictured him wandering around some park with his cape blowing behind him and terrified children running away and bawling. Maybe his family had placed him in some home for old, crazy people. I tried to reassure myself that it was only an old man wearing a cape. Who on the bus or the subway will notice? The answer was everybody. Especially the police. I prepared myself for a visit to his home.

  I never visited because Mr. Magboo appeared one Saturday with his cape and a new hat. Something else was new and as he got closer, I saw it was the obviously fake Fu Manchu moustache, so lopsided he seemed to be scowling and grinning at the same time. He also had a cane that he used to stylishly adjust his hat. I noted his broad smile and decided he had gone completely mad. “I haven’t seen you for two weeks,” I managed to say.

  “Because I become busy. Berry busy, buddy.” I wondered whether his daughter had a new baby. “When you give me cape, I went straight to CBC to complain about movies they steal.”

  “With the cape?”

  “I think it might have magic powers. Because just outside the building a man say to me, ‘Hurry up. We going shoot soon.’ So I pollow other men with tight pants and bows-arrows.”

  “You were in a movie?”

  “Many, buddy. They call me … what is the word?” He thought for a while. “Something like leffobers.”

  “Extras? Is that it?” I might have sounded a bit excited.

  He leaned closer to me and whispered, “It’s real, buddy. You better believe it.” I think this was his extra voice. He was about to leave the shop when he hesitated and said, “Parewell, priend.” Outside, he swirled his cape and vanished into the crowd. I never saw him again.

  Or rather, I never saw him in real again, for I was sure that in a couple television shows I spotted him running away from explosions and bears, and once, sleeping inside a purple pod.

  During the first week of December, with barely a month left for the completion of my preparatory course, I received a letter from Uncle Boysie. He said he intended to spend Christmas in Canada and itemized some intended sights that would not have been out of place in Mr. Magboo’s movies. He wanted to see cats frozen on trees and against windows, and playful Eskimos, and André the Giant battling midgets. Most worrisome, he instructed me to describe for him immediately after his arrival, “a regular Canadian” so he would be able to fit in.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE FEDERATION OF FOWLS

  When I showed my father Uncle Boysie’s letter he began to curse straightaway. “Why the bitch coming here for? Anybody invite him?” He glanced at me suspiciously before he continued. “He lie if he feel this is mash-up Mayaro with commess and bacchanal on all sides. Regular Canadian, my ass.” It was only when I ventured that he might be coming to straighten out the house business that my father cooled down a little. “Eh? You think so? But he could have done that right in Mayaro,” he said in a weak and indecisive voice. I could see that he was conflicted (to use Mrs. Dragan’s word for second-generation immigrants.)

  I turned to her for an answer to Uncle Boysie’s question. We were discussing multiculturalism—a favourite topic of hers—when I asked, “Miss, how would you describe a typical Canadian?” I saw her struggling and immediately regretted the question. She was sly though as she tried to turn the table. “You are originally from Trinidad, not so? How would you describe a typical Trinidadian?”

  I recalled Uncle Boysie’s gripes. “Someone who likes bacchanal and carnival.”

  “I see. Is there a typical Latin American?” She walked to the back of the class.

  Javier answered. Stories and a history of struggle.

  She turned to other places and students, most likely from these spots, provided answers. Poetry and Guinness. Caste divisions and “sparkling poverty.” Tea, crumpets and a dry sense of humour. Inventiveness and patriotism. I believe some of these normally quiet students felt it was a game as they went on and on. The teacher didn’t play though and when she abruptly moved on to another topic I decided that there was no such creature as a regular Canadian. I would have to tell Uncle Boysie that.

  Nevertheless, I thought of my uncle’s question in Mr. Schmidlap’s video store. I had to discount the owner first of all because he was too gloomy and he seemed on the verge of expiry. One by one I also dismissed the regular customers. Too porny. Too tame. Too crazy. Too foreign.

  Which left one tiny sliver of hope. Danton. His full name was Danton Madrigal and he regularly mentioned Canadian places like Owen Sound—which he called “the elephant’s bottom” because of how it appeared on the map—and Longlac and Haliburton and Bolton. I felt that all these spots were far away so I was surprised when he revealed that he frequently visited his old friends there.

  His first appearance in Queen Bee coincided with the flurry of meetings in Regent Park, organized by people worried about where they would be moved, so—just in case—I always listened carefully to his descriptions of places that seemed both strange and interesting. His farmhouses and abandoned copper mines and Indian reservations and bundles of rivers. It was only later that I began to also notice his appearance, the tiny eyes peeping from behind round wire glasses and the few grains of hair on his head pulled into a tight ponytail. His round face reminded me of parakeets from Trinidad but I would never mention this to him, because first of all, he never gave me a chance to put in a word and secondly, I could never tell what was going through his mind. In the beginning, it was difficult to catch up with him because he was always jumping from topic to topic. Sometimes he would be talking about a movie explosion and then switch to some accident in Owen Sound. He had many accidents with motorbikes and boats and these little snow-cars. These accidents never went well for him because he talked about the insurance companies and police as if they were movie crooks.

  The weekend after I asked Mrs. Dragan about typical Canadians he came into the shop riding one of these scooter chairs used by old people. I thought he had another accident but the minute he entered, he parked his chair next to the row of science fiction movies and jumped right off. “What do you think?” he asked me. “Like my new car?”

  “What happened?”

  “What happened, my friend, is that I got tired of walking.” He laughed in his scratchy way and I spotted Mr. Schmidlap awakening from his nap in his corner table.

  “I thought you had another accident.”

  “Samuel, you crack me up.” He usually said that whenever I asked a question he found, for whatever reason, funny. He leaned across the counter toward me. “Don’t tell anyone but it’s payback time.”

  I tried to recall his long list of enemies. Doctors, lawyers, insurance people, police, and more mysteriously, a shadowy group he believed was controlling everything from electricity to water. He hinted the group was based inside one of the big buildings on Bay Street. He called them “the federation of fowls” and he once mentioned he had rigged up his computer to tap into their network. When I mentioned that conve
rsation to Javier, he said that Danton belonged to a special kind of mad men who were dangerous because they didn’t know they were crazy.

  “Want to go for a spin? C’mon, it’s faster than most bikes.” This was another thing about Danton: I never knew when he was joking or not. He walked across to the science fiction aisle and returned a couple minutes later with a movie named Vendetta. “Seen it about five times,” he told me.

  “It that good?”

  “It that good?” He imitated my accent and laughed. “Yes, Samuel. It could be my life story.” As usual he shifted to the fowl federation before he got going on another of his favourite topics: how nice things were in the sixties with everybody singing and dancing as if the fête wouldn’t end. He went on about these people like Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendrix, as if he knew them personally before he said suddenly, “I think the scooter has made me too mellow. This is very dangerous.”

  He left before I could ask him about a typical Canadian.

  He came every weekend so when he returned Vendetta and borrowed The Parallax View I decided to pretend more interest in his federation business. That was a mistake.

  He told me, “You’ve been thinking, Samuel. That’s a good sign. I think you’ve just booked a place in the commune.”

  “Which commune?”

  “The one I am forming, silly.” He pointed to his scooter. “And believe it or not, that is the key.”

  “Really?” I think this was my most common word in our conversation.

  “Yes, really. Do you want to know how it’s the key?” His little eyes seemed soft and watery behind his glasses. “You have to promise not to tell a soul about this. It’s payback time.”

  “But for what?”

  “You haven’t been listening to me, Samuel. For the false reports, losing my job and my entire pension, my divorce, garnishing my wages, the accidents, the insurance guys. Should I also mention the cabal?”

  “What’s a cabal?” It sounded like a tiny exit at the end of a long tunnel.

  “Do you see that asshole with a briefcase outside? Well, he’s part of it. Everyone in that building across the street too. And the one next to it.” I noticed his finger pointing to building after building. I wanted to ask if everybody in Toronto with a briefcase was in his cabal but he seemed too angry then. I remembered he had said once that dreams couldn’t find a place to grow in the city because there was too much concrete. “I hold all of them responsible for my present condition.” He got on his scooter and gazed up at me. “The federation of fucking fowls.”

  He went on for another twenty minutes; and during that week whenever I spotted anybody with a briefcase and a suit, I thought of his cabal. The journalists who descended on Regent Park. The two politicians who collected a list of petitions. Even the little group formed to fight the relocation. I felt that their leader was a huge bald-headed man with pinstriped clothes and shining shoes. Someone like Kingpin from Daredevil.

  When next I saw Danton he was on foot but his glasses had been replaced by dark shades and he was limping on a walking stick. I was about to open the store for the day and did not recognize him until he pushed his stick through the half-open door. “Trying to ignore me, Samuel?”

  “I didn’t make you out with your shades and stick.”

  “I didn’t make you out.” He laughed and pulled back his ponytail tight. “That’s good though. It means it’s working.”

  “Doing some undercover work?” I asked him lightly.

  “You give me too much credit.” He pushed a finger behind one of the black lenses and rubbed. I could hear his eyelids clacking. “It’s my eyes. They are developing holes.”

  I felt I should challenge him. “Take off your glasses and let me see.”

  His little smile got stale all of a sudden. “You can’t see them, silly. They are not visible to anyone but myself.”

  “So you see these holes from the inside then?”

  “Exactly. There’s about five in all.”

  “It sound painful.”

  “Well, Samuel, I am used to that. But it’s more inconvenient than painful. For instance, I might be looking at that row of movies and completely miss the one I’m searching for.”

  “That happens to me sometimes.”

  “This morning a cyclist almost ran me over. He was in my blind spot.”

  Now I don’t want to sound heartless or anything but Danton had told me so many bad-luck stories, this new one just rubbed off me. “You think the cyclist might be from the cabal?”

  He stared at me from behind his shades before he said, “That’s good. Very good. You are beginning to understand the matrix. Can I trust you with something? Don’t tell anyone, but I think they are on to me.”

  “The fowl federation?”

  “You know of them?”

  “You told me about a dozen times.”

  “Yes, I may have. I think the holes are spreading upwards. I seem to have these memory lapses.” He took a deep breath. “Time is running out, Samuel. I have to move fast. I need all the help I can get.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Keep your eyes open. Someone wants something from me.”

  Me too! But it was too late, he had already left.

  I think it was then that I noticed this man wearing a brown plaid hat. He was drinking a Tim Horton’s coffee and the minute Danton pulled off, he did the same, slowing down every time Danton stalled, speeding up whenever Danton quickened his pace.

  I too had to move fast: it was just two weeks before Christmas and Uncle Boysie’s arrival. Things were picking up in Regent Park also, as notices of community meetings were daily stuck on the lamp poles. And every night as a rule my father asked me if Uncle Boysie was still coming or had changed his mind. The week before the end of the semester I got an airmail from the mailbox downstairs and when I gave it to my father he seemed relieved to read that Uncle Boysie intended to come on New Year’s Day instead of Christmas because “the flights cheaper as nobody does want to fly on that day.”

  The flight postponement was a reprieve but Uncle Boysie’s question about typical Canadians lingered in my mind. Auntie Umbrella had asked the same question and when I babbled on about albinos she didn’t seem satisfied. I couldn’t be blamed then as I was sort of green, but now, nine months later, I felt I should be more informed. I couldn’t once again bring up the topic in the class so I looked for clues on the streets and in the newspapers. In the Sun, a whole batch of journalists was complaining that “Christmas was under threat” but all they mentioned was a couple of people refusing to sing carols and say, “Merry Christmas.” I decided these reporters were like the old-timers from Coffee Time, Roy and the others who were always grumbling about how things were changing and making up their own stories to prove this.

  Soon after my first visit to downtown Toronto I had watched everyone walking all apart and wondered if they belonged to different clubs that met on weekends, where they would throw off their quietness and mingle to make clubby jokes. I had to laugh at the notion, just a couple months earlier, that I would always be an outcast here until I managed to join one of these groups. I had invented all types of nonsense clubs and pretended that I had managed to scam my way to an invitation.

  I now decided to return to the library and suffer myself through one of the downstairs seminars. After two useless seminars on architecture and writing (during which a short man with snarling whiskers declared that “The novel is dead, stabbed through the heart by brittle coquettish munchkins”) I lucked upon a meeting discussing diversity. The speaker, whose name was Mr. Pelicano—he was thin and lanky and the complete opposite of a pelican—began by building a house. He talked about grouts and trowels and tiles and single-colour buckets. When he was finished he said proudly, “There you have it. A perfect mosaic.” He never mentioned who this builder was, gazing at his materializing house.

  The next day Danton came to the video store with his right arm and his left foot hea
vily bandaged. “I hope you are keeping watch,” he said, placing on the counter his three films: Blow Out. Winter Kills. Three Days of the Condor.

  “What happened, man. You look like you returned from a war.”

  “Samuel, you crack me up.” Then he got more serious. “You see that gentleman before the coffee shop? The insurance guy?” He glanced at the Tim Horton’s man who was tracking him. “I don’t pay him any attention. Do you know why? Because he is not the enemy. He is not even a foot soldier. The generals are on the top floors of all the buildings you pass every day. That gentleman, Samuel, is just a pawn.”

  “A pawn for who?”

  “For the generals.”

  “Which generals, exactly?”

  “The ones on the top floors, silly.”

  “The federation of fowls?”

  “Did I mention them to you? Anyways, I may have to take a little break. Lay low for a while.”

  “Are you going to Owen Sound?”

  He placed a finger against his lips. “Not so loud. There are spies everywhere. I think Schmidlap used to be in the SS. Spent some time in Argentina before he came here. Can I tell you a secret?” He did not wait for a reply. “I am working on a movie too. It’s set in the future. Everyone is dying from some mysterious ailment. All the scientists are stumped. Everyone but for this—” he leaned over and whispered “—this counterinsurgent. He discovered it was because technology had allowed everyone to complete their tasks faster. You know the rest.”

  “Not really.”

  “C’mon, Samuel. Attention spans diminished. Minds grew conditioned to more abbreviated tasks. It was only a short time before the body caught up. You understand? The counter-insurgent was mocked for this view and so, single-handedly, he set about destroying computers. He sabotaged trains and elevators and sports cars and soon he set his sights on the federation of fowls. It was a grand battle.” He chuckled. And I thought of never-ending comic book explosions with thousands of vowels.