The Amazing Absorbing Boy

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  I didn’t get the opportunity to ask Danton about a typical Canadian because he never returned to Queen Bee. But on the day my classes ended, a week before Christmas, I was sitting on a bench not too far from the CBC building. On a nearby bench there were two men from Afghanistan. I was listening to their manner of clipping and hardening their words as if placing a little shield around each sentence. One of the men, who was tall and resembled my mother’s Bollywood actors, was listening quietly to his friend while staring at two dead birds not too far from the couple. Perhaps like me he was wondering if some animal, maybe a sewer rat, had dragged them here. Just then there was a little thud and a bird landed on the same spot. The tall Afghan looked up at a glass tower and his friend went to the bird. He scooped it up and held it in his open palm like an offering. He walked away with the bird in his hand, his friend trailing him.

  I sat there for another fifteen or twenty minutes, as it was not too cold that day. Flurries were drifting down in merry little spirals. Everyone was walking quickly, perhaps to put up their Christmas decorations or visit family or whatever Canadians did in preparation for Christmas. I thought of all the people I had met in my ten months here. The coffee-shop old-timers. The chimera. Barbarossa. Danton. The seminar speakers. The Regent Park crowd. My father. All the worriers.

  I got up. By the time I got to Regent Park I felt I had an answer for my uncle. A typical Canadian—or at least those I had met—was someone who fussed all the time. About everything. Toronto was getting too modern and ugly. Toronto was stuck in the past. Too many immigrants. Too few. Foreign people were living all by themselves. Foreign people were walking bold-bold in places that shouldn’t concern them. Too many American shows. Too few. Too much hockey violence. Too little. Too hot. Too cold.

  When I entered our apartment I saw my father hunched up before the television, worried and frightened like anything. I wondered what was going through his mind. From his posture I felt he might be repeating, Trapped! Trapped! Not too long ago, I felt close to hating him—now I just felt sorry for him.

  Chapter Fifteen

  CARMEN ISADORA CIENFUEGOS AND THE MAGIG LANTERN

  Maybe I was becoming a regular Canadian, because once school was closed and I limed around Regent Park, I too began to worry. It could be because I was in such close and constant quarters with my father; and worse, observing each day different groups fretting about the end of the neighbourhood they had lived in most of their lives. This was surprising, as I had never thought of Regent Park as a community, maybe because living with my father encouraged me to feel it was a place to escape from. Once I heard the Creole woman, who had given me the sheet about refugees, saying, “Just imagine that I have to start over again at my age. With strangers on all sides. That is nastiness. Real nastiness. But God don’t sleep.” She had shouted, “You hear that, Samuel? The man upstairs don’t ever sleep.” She sounded a bit like Auntie Umbrella.

  I was also worried about the preparatory course. What if I failed? Maybe I had antagonized the teacher with my silly questions and not concentrating enough on agreeable aspects of the city. I had tried to be positive on the ISU essay I submitted on the last day of class. We had to write three pages on our favourite season and I chose fall because of all the shim-mery comic-book colours: a dazzling red dash here, a splash of yellow there, a sparkle of orange peeping out like Mayaro fireflies. In Mayaro, mostly everything was green. Here the fall colours seemed wizardly and unreal. I included all of this in my essay, and three days before Christmas, when I went to Centennial to collect my grades I was worried like anything.

  I got an A minus for the essay, the highest mark I had received in my entire life. I met Javier in the office and he told me he got the same grade (though he had written of spring as a time of renewal). We walked together to the loop and he asked if I had decided on my regular college course. I told him I had not, but it was exciting to have reached the stage where I could be asked such a question. He said he planned to sign up for a diploma in Police Foundations. I thought of his limp but said nothing. Just before his bus arrived, he once again invited me to his grandmother’s place.

  I recalled Javier’s question on the bus but could not settle on a suitable course. By the time I reached Regent Park some of my excitement had dribbled away. It was a real grey day and everybody seemed weighed down by the gloom, walking with their heads down and looking real sour and bothered. In Trinidad, people sometimes felt lazy during overcast days, keeping inside their houses and peeping through the windows at the rain pelting down the sprouting, but here, they seemed to lose all life, moving like abruptly hardened sponges.

  The mood followed me the next day. I tried to imagine what was going on in Mayaro during this Christmas season. Most likely, the fishermen were strumming their cuatros at some parang fête, stopping only for a drink of rum. Uncle Boysie’s shop would be busy with children eyeing all his dusty wound-up toys on the highest shelves. Carollers would be going from house to house; and from all the windows and jalousies and louvres would drift the mingled aroma of sorrel and punch à crème and seasoned meat. In the week before Christmas, our own kitchen smelled of all kinds of cakes and curried duck and apples bought from the Mayaro market.

  In Mayaro, I always associated apples with Christmas. The fruits were packed in soft cardboard that preserved their fragrance. Once I used to dream of these Christmas postcards with snowy cottages, and reindeer, and children in red caps and galoshes building snowmen while dogs wearing funny coats looked on.

  The next morning when I headed out, I guess I was trying to recapture that feeling. I saw children packaged so tightly they lumbered like chubby little robots, and just before Parliament Street I was startled by two boys skating down an embankment. I returned about an hour later to an empty apartment. I placed the bottle of wine I had bought for my father on top of the fridge and turned on the television. Two grey-hair women were saying something about goose fat and doughnuts and pies. They were in a studio kitchen and on the walls were hollies looking like wreaths. But the women themselves appeared happy as if they had been waiting their entire lives to talk about goose fat and doughnuts. Maybe these things could only be enjoyed from afar as a fantasy, or if you were born here.

  On Christmas Eve, my father returned late in the night and went straight to his room as if he was avoiding me. After a while, I unrolled the foam but my mind kept returning to Mayaro, and to my mother. I thought of all my friends from school there speculating on their presents and stealing pieces of their mothers’ pastries from the kitchen; and closer, the Regent Park families that came from every part of the globe huddling around and maybe not saying much but just comforted by each other’s presence. In Pickering Javier’s grandmother might be telling him and his sisters some Cuban story while they listened to music similar to our parang streaming from the radio. I wished my mother was alive, even if she was away from me. I could still write her and boast of my classes and my grades and all these interesting people that popped up everywhere. When I was eight we had sat together before the television on Christmas Eve and looked at the entire Nutcracker movie.

  Ten minutes or so later I got up abruptly, ashamed that my father might hear my croaky sounds (the same as when I had tried to stop crying at my mother’s funeral). I opened the balcony door a crack and noticed the Christmas lights on a couple windows and porches. When I eventually fell asleep, I dreamed of snowy cottages along the Mayaro beach and nutcracker dancers jumping to the rhythm of cuatros and grey-hair women explaining how to prepare sorrel and punch à crème.

  The next morning—maybe because of the dreams—I was temporarily confused to awaken on a piece of foam. My father was in the kitchen wearing a coat. I told him, “You don’t have to go out today, you know.”

  He hesitated by the doorway. “I will be back in a while.”

  “I bought a bottle of wine for you.”

  “Yeah.” He had a furtive look on his face and just for a second I pretended he was rushing to get me a las
t-minute present.

  During the period when my mother still believed my father would return to our house in Mayaro I used to see her, particularly after her conversations with some village woman, gazing out of the window, with her hands flat on the ledge. A couple times I pictured her spotting him from a distance and rushing out to help drag the heavy suitcases to our house, and once they were opened, saying, “Oh gosh, Danny, this is such a nice dress. It so silky. What material is it?” Laying everything on the couch and saying, “Like you buy out half of Canada or what?”

  This was my first real Christmas with my father—as I had no recollection of him in Mayaro putting up Christmas tree lights or anything. Once I had asked for a microscope for Christmas. It was just after I had discovered The Wonder Book of Wonders and I imagined me and my father—who was in a lab coat and had unruly hair like a scientist—doing all kinds of crazy experiments. Instead I got a cheap telescope from Uncle Boysie’s shop and on my way from school I had pointed it to the ocean and pretended the barges were pirate ships. Closer to home I focused on semps and bullfinches on the telephone poles. They seemed so close I felt I could stroke them. A week before I moved to Canada I had left it for the Amazing Absorbing Boy so he could gaze out at strangers intruding into his swamp.

  I tried to push away all these memories by strolling through the building. The doors were shut and there was no one on the stairs or in the elevator. On the last floor, I spotted the woman who had called me an asshole. She was standing with her cat before her open door, smoking. I quickened my pace but noticed that all the inside walls in her apartment were painted in black. Maybe it was some kind of protest, or perhaps she followed a strange religion. I don’t think she recognized me but when I reached the end of the hall she said, “Merry Christmas.” I didn’t answer quickly so she added, “It’s Christmas, asshole.”

  “Then you should get that cat a damn new owner.” I was surprised at how loud my voice sounded on the stairway. Just like her ringing curses. Maybe she was standing before her door just to provoke people. For some reason that made me smile: the picture of this fat lady with her cat just waiting to curse everyone who passed by. Or she could be my own special nemesis like the Catwoman or the Joker.

  My father returned a little after midday, the same sly and uncomfortable look he had left with still on his face. I wondered if he had been visiting some woman, maybe the ugly red-hair troll. Once a family who had rented a beach house on Plaisance were sitting on a couple of folding chairs facing the ocean. I overheard a man with a big belly flopping over his trunk saying that Trinidadians always returned with the ugliest foreigners. “Is like they does go to some ugly people street and propose to the fuss woman they spot. The very fuss.” A woman who might have been his wife pressed her fingers against her lips and shot out a laugh, each note higher than the last, as if she was playing a mouth organ. Her big bottom jiggled as she ho-hoed.

  My father went to the balcony, smoked a couple cigarettes before he returned to switch on the television.

  “Happy Christmas,” I told him.

  “Yeah.” He switched from channel to channel. Most had people praying. I had once seen a television documentary about a man who had three separate families that were unaware of each other’s existence. I dismissed that thought swiftly: my father couldn’t even keep up with one family. “You want to call your uncle?” At first I wasn’t sure whether he was mumbling to the television but he glanced quickly at me by the table and added, “Just for a minute or two.”

  As the phone was right next to the television I couldn’t help notice him watching me point-blank as I dialled over and over. Each time I got a busy signal—I guessed too many people were calling their families in Trinidad—I saw his face tightening. Maybe he just wanted me to call so Uncle Boysie could tell me something of our old house. Eventually I gave up and a couple minutes later, he went into his room. I heard his mattress creaking as if he was shifting from side to side.

  Around three in the afternoon, I got out a pen intending to write a letter to Uncle Boysie but realized he would be here by the time the letter arrived in Mayaro. I took out my Centennial booklets, read of the real college courses, put them away and walked around the living room a few times. I wondered how the place would look with photographs. This got me thinking once more of our old house and of my mother so I quickly turned on the television. People were still praying as if they had nothing better to do. I felt really, really bored. Some years earlier, I had watched two men carrying a neighbour, Popo’s son, into his house. It was a Christmas day and the men were holding his arms and legs and swinging him like a sugar bag. They noticed me gazing and shouted merrily, “Today Popo boy come a man. You don’t tunna man till you ass get drunk and tote home.” I don’t know why I missed that sort of spectacle too.

  The next morning I decided to take up Javier’s invitation. He lived in Pickering so I had to take the eastbound Go Train at Union. On the train I got out his directions I had written on the back of an old transfer ticket. He said the house was on Liverpool Road, close to the station, but I must have walked about half an hour before I actually got to his address. I wondered how he managed this distance with his limp. The house was on the brink of a gentle hill. This was the first strange thing about the house, as Toronto seemed mostly flat and I just assumed it was like that all over. The curve reminded me of Bucket Corner just after Rio Claro. The second strange aspect to the house was the number of plants the family had managed to squeeze into the small yard. Most were winter-dead, so I couldn’t tell if they bore fruits or flowers.

  The third unusual feature of the house was the girl in the living room. She was sitting on a spongy-looking sofa and her legs were curled up below her bottom. While I was talking to Javier—who seemed surprised at my visit in spite of his numerous invitations—I sneaked a couple glances at her and met her eyes looking at me point-blank. Each time I was forced to look away. When Javier went to get his grandmother, I fished around for something to say but it was the girl who asked the first question. Now I had a legitimate reason to gaze at her. She had tattoos of butterfly wings on her wrists and some kind of trailing plant on her ankles. As she was sitting, it was difficult to get a good gauge on her shape but she reminded me of these tough breed of girls from Mayaro Composite who wouldn’t give me a second glance, preferring instead to hang out with taxi drivers twice their age. She asked her question again, with a wicked smile this time. I guess she was probably accustomed to boys casting little glances at her breasts.

  “Yes, I am Javier’s friend,” I told her. “He’s very smart.”

  “Javier?” She put her hands to her mouth and her eyes widened. When Javier returned with a short woman who looked like a pale, grey-hair version of Auntie Umbrella, she repeated my statement to both. The old lady, who had a cane, said something in Spanish and the girl responded also in that language. From the tone of their voices, it seemed like an argument. This was the pattern for the next fifteen minutes as the four of us sat in the living room. I wished I could understand Spanish so I could tell if Javier and the girl were translating for the old woman what I had just said in English. Finally, the lady leaned on her cane, uttered a tiny groan and got up. She spoke swiftly gesturing with her free hand. Go away fast, old lady, I thought, which was unfair because of all the sacrifices she made, according to her grandson’s essay. Now the girl got up to guide the lady to a dark hall and I saw tattoos of what seemed like lotus flowers creeping down the back of her pants, to her nice round bottom. There was also a tiny hummingbird on one shoulder. Maybe because of the way this girl was swaying her bottom, I remembered some of the terms used by the schoolgirls in Barbarossa’s antique shop, and I felt that banging her would be like making love to a pond. With her lotus flowers and trailing vines and birds. I crossed my legs hurriedly and placed the sheet with directions on my lap. Think of something else quickly, I told myself. “Do you miss your parents at Christmas?” I asked Javier.

  “Not so much again. But C
armen does. She’s a year younger than me.”

  The girl returned and Javier repeated my question to her. “You?” she asked.

  “I miss the village mostly. My mother passed away.”

  “So do you live with your dad, then?”

  “We … we share the same apartment,” I told her.

  “Meaning?” She sat on the arm of the sofa, next to her brother and stared down at me.

  “I hardly see him.”

  “Why not?”

  “I will bring him for my next visit and you can ask him yourself.” I didn’t like all these questions but Carmen laughed at my answer. She may have felt it was a joke or something. Her brother looked embarrassed.

  “Sam likes superheroes,” he told her.

  I expected this tough girl to laugh at this but she asked me, “Really? Who is your favourite?”

  “The Amazing Absorbing Boy.”

  “I have never heard of him.” She leaned forward and I noticed the gold nose ring that matched her colour exactly.

  “He lives in a swamp.”

  “Swamp Thing?”

  “A swamp in Mayaro. My village.”

  “Ay, caramba!” she told her brother, laughing. “Your friend is funny.” All of a sudden she seemed prettier and more interesting. It could be because she seemed to be paying me attention or because of the curve of her lips as she smiled or maybe just her poking out nipples as she leaned forward. She looked a bit like Rogue from X-Men. Now she flopped down on the sofa and sat cross-legged like a Trinidad pundit.

  “What do you miss the most of Cuba?”

  Carmen answered. “My parents.”

  “How come they remained in Cuba?”

  After a while Javier said, “They were killed. That’s why we left.”

  “Didn’t you know?” Carmen asked. She leaned her head onto her brother’s shoulder. It seemed a private scene and I wondered if all siblings behaved like this. I felt sorry for asking the question and during dinner, I felt that her mood had changed. I tried to hurry up but when I was leaving, Carmen walked out of the house with me. She said something to her brother—who was standing on the doorstep—and translated for me: Tell Grandma I will be back in two hours. She was going to the Pickering Town Centre, she told me, and as we walked in the direction of the Go station, it struck me that this was the first time I was strolling with a girl. Really strolling. In Mayaro where neighbours were always gazing from their windows it was impossible to publicly put the moves on a girl. I couldn’t count my detour with Canella, as I was too tipsy at the time, and Dilara was always accompanied by her friend. In any case, Canella was maybe eight years or so older than me, and Dilara was too remote.