Fatboy Fall Down

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  ***

  For half a year they spoke in this manner, moving between comedy and farce and genuine sadness. Wally revealed a visit to a nursing home where he had seen an old Englishman who was the only patient not surrounded by friends or family. “It looked like he was the last one in town. He died not too long after according to the nurse. I imagine it was a very small funeral. If they didn’t chuck him in the crematorium.” On occasion, his confessions were more personal. “When I was in high school, I was popular because I was jokey. You could count on me to come up with some odd way of describing things. The class clown. That way I could make jokes about myself before anybody else. Oops, he fall down. Oops, he get up. Oops, he fall down again. But the funny thing is that even though I was popular, I tried to avoid everybody. Even at home. If we had visitors at home, I used the back step to get away. Everybody wanted a performance.”

  On another evening, at another rumshop, Orbits told him, “One recess, I notice a commotion in the field at the back of the school. It was my brother in a fight with another boy bigger than him. My brother begin primary school just when I was about to leave. I wanted to go and part the fight and save my brother from the licking, but I was too afraid so I just stand there watching until the teachers come. You know, while he was on the ground, I noticed him looking around. He spotted me. He spotted me in the crowd. But he never mention a word to anybody or to me.”

  There were long periods of silence after these confessions, and they drank slowly, shaking the glasses, staring at the ice cubes, dusting the table, each respectful of the other’s pain. But in the late evenings, just before they were about to leave the rumshops, they made self-deprecating jokes about themselves and each other, almost as if the weight of the rum had, just for a while, pried loose slivers of honesty. Once Wally told Orbits in a half-drunken manner that he would have left years ago, but he felt a sense of duty to the department. “Every man have a task to perform and I thought this was mine.”

  Wally was the sole friend Orbits had ever had, and on the bus back to his parents’ place, he felt that this friendship was the only bright spot in a life that seemed to limp in spurts, where his happiness was constantly interrupted by the unexpected. Death, abandonment, betrayal; only Wally was dependable. One evening, Wally told him, “It look like I will be passing through your clouds soon.” He revealed that he had finally given in to his relatives’ entreaties and had decided to join them in Canada. Orbits was shocked into speechlessness even when Wally said that he had recommended him as his replacement. When he recovered he asked in a stunned manner, “But what about your duty to the department?”

  “That is your job now,” he said.

  In the three months prior to his departure, Wally recovered some of his old sanguinity as he spoke about Toronto, to which he was headed, and the nieces and nephews who lived there. He brought blurry photographs of his family posing against the CN Tower and Niagara Falls that he showed to Orbits in the restaurants and rumshops. “My sister tell me that couples could walk alone in the nights in the loneliest spots without any harassment.” Orbits pretended he was amazed. But as Wally, on subsequent days, mentioned all that he had gleaned from his relatives about the place, Orbits felt increasingly despondent. Once Wally said in a joking manner, “You should consider the move yourself, boy. Imagine living in a place where everything runs on time and in every street, it have a park just like the botanic gardens. Every street with its own buffet restaurant too.”

  Orbits had actually imagined this during each of Wally’s descriptions. “If it was possible, I would leave tomorrow. But I have my parents here. And the daughter . . .”

  Wally was a little surprised as he had spoken in a joking manner. He told Orbits, “I recommended you highly for my old job. I hope you get it. Remember the day you walked in the office? Rain was falling and I asked you to tell when it was going to stop. Who would have figured out that little shower of rain would have made us such friends?” Because Wally had spoken in a joking manner, Orbits turned away so his friend would not see his sadness.

  On the day of Wally’s departure, Orbits hired a taxi to take him to the airport. As the driver passed the mountain range, which was perpetually shrouded with clouds and trails of mist, Orbits wondered if this was how a snowy vista looked from a distance. Soon Wally would be in a place like that, with a family and, shortly, with new friends. He felt like asking the driver to turn around; Wally was moving towards a new life; he had no use for debris from his old. As they passed stretches of vacant lots and others filled with warehouses that reminded him of Baby Rabbit’s place, he felt he would embarrass himself before his friend. It would not be a fitting finale to all the expansive limes they’d had. Without thinking, he asked the driver to stop at a rumshop. It was an old, dusty building, but it was crowded with students from the nearby university. They were all dressed in loose clothing that made them seem carefree and nonchalant and stylish. Orbits ordered a beer and sipped slowly. Then he ordered another.

  When he got to the airport, he asked the driver to wait in the parking lot. Wally’s plane was already speeding from the tarmac. He walked around the airport as if the plane had not left, as if Wally were somewhere among the families and groups walking to and from the departure gates. When he stood at the gate, a small hunched man who looked like a turtle in his brown coat asked him to read the sign above the gate. Orbits told him it was the departure gate, and the man, as if he didn’t believe, asked him to spell the word. When he did, the man said in a voice that seemed to be bouncing around his tongue, “My son and his wife. I am waiting for them, you see. It’s a bloody bother.” When Orbits moved away, the man followed him. “Can you read the flights on that board? I am seventy-five percent blind, you know. Just last year I was fifty percent. Next year will be one hundred percent. So it goes. I am not complaining. Nothing much to see. Are you waiting on someone too?”

  The man seemed in a mood to chat, and Orbits felt he had lived alone and was impatient for the arrival of his family, who would soon grow fed up of him if the visit was longer than a week. “A good friend just left. I think I miss him.”

  “Do you mean to say that you were late or that you regret his departure?” He spoke in the manner of a retired teacher, and some of Orbits’ sympathy evaporated.

  “I have to leave now myself,” he said suddenly. When he got to the taxi, he saw the driver slouched on the seat, one foot outside the open door, the other on the dashboard. He threw away his cigarette when he saw Orbits. “I thought you and all had gone to Cyanada. I nearly smoke a half pack waiting here for you.”

  “My friend was very emotional. I had to cheer him up.”

  “Yeah, some people like that, but the majority does be acting as if they leaving a refugee camp. Happy like pappy and mouthing off about all the fancy thing they going to do and how they new life will be so rosy as if the pope going to meet them in Cyanada or America. Some of these people wipe they hand clean and you does only see them when they come back for some visit looking like if a steamroller pass over them, but still they insisting in they new brogue that life real sweet in the cold and this place going down in a hole. I drive plenty of them. Families with miserable complaining children. Dengue and malaria, my ass.”

  The driver spoke in this manner for the entire trip, and with each new outburst, Orbits’ melancholic mood lengthened.

  Wally had hinted that his job might be given to Orbits, but it went instead to the worker with the quivering nostril. Orbits had never interacted either with him or with the woman because they both left after a few hours, during which time he was busy at work. A week following Wally’s departure, the new boss, who had never hidden his dislike of Orbits, summoned him and the other worker, the woman who wore the same old suit each day, for a meeting. “Change is in the air,” the boss said in a high-pitched voice. “I am not Wally,” he repeated several times. “I intend to whip this department into shape.” He spoke as if he w
ere addressing a huge audience, walking around the table, leaning onto his knuckles on the desk, standing upright with his hands folded against his back. The woman applauded after each of his pronouncements. And Orbits asked him a question that was not provocative but really to clear up his genuine confusion. He asked how the new boss was going to accomplish these things when he disappeared for three hours each day. “I will brook no insubordination. Meeting finished!” he screamed. The woman got up in a huff, her chair scraping the floor.

  The next morning, Orbits saw several handwritten signs on all the walls. Think outside the box. Hit the floor running. On the wall facing his desk he read another saying A glutton lives to eat, a wise man eats to live. Whenever the woman passed the sign, she chortled, a low jumbled jangle that sounded to Orbits like a huge bird trapped inside an accordion. The boss and the woman left at 11:00 but returned at 2:00, when Orbits was about to leave for home. He began to suspect they were conducting an affair, but it was hard to tell because they rarely spoke to each other at work.

  He missed Wally more with the passing of each month; he missed his friendship and the daily sojourns to the restaurants and rumshops where they had sampled almost every type of food the city had to offer. Wally had no real drive, but he was straightforward in the manner that few people were. Orbits went to some of these places after his work, but sitting by himself the rum and the food didn’t taste the same. Besides, he was now forced to remain at his job until 4:00 in the evening.

  A few times, he got out a sheet of paper from the Xerox machine and began, “Dear Wally. It’s more than half a year since you left and I have been thinking every single day of moving to Toronto. There we will resume our gourmet meals and our sparkling conversations.”

  He always threw these into the dustbin. One morning, just after his arrival, he heard laughter from the desks of the two workers. They were at the opposite end of the room and the view was obscured by a filing cabinet. The words sounded familiar, so he paid more attention. He heard the woman saying, “The food has lost its taste without you. In Toronto, I imagine us sampling pizza and poutine and other exotic fares.” She stopped to chortle before she continued. “And listen to this one. ‘I believe you were wrong to say the island was going both uphill and downhill at the same time. Now it’s heading in just one direction.’”

  Orbits felt his rage boiling. He began to sweat. When the woman began reading again, he got up and rushed past the filing cabinet. He saw her and the boss with several crumpled sheets on the table. “Allyou two macos! Who give you permission to read my private correspondence?”

  “People don’t put their private correspondence in the dustbin,” the woman said, her stern look now reappearing.

  “And I won’t tolerate that tone from a junior officer,” the boss added.

  “I see! I see!” he sputtered. But he could think of nothing else to say. He stormed back to his desk, and he heard the pair laughing derisively, a sound that sent him straight back to his childhood. He felt like pushing over the filing cabinet onto the pair. When they left at 11:00, he got a sheet of carbon paper, placed it between two pages, and began to write. “Dear Wally. You have left me here with the two most disgusting individuals it has been my misfortune to know. I believe you know who I am talking about. A hard-faced old fowl and a man who looks like a mongoose. They should be natural enemies, but each day they leave at the same time and return at the same time. I believe you always knew about their nasty illicit affair but you was too polite to mention it. I am different from you because I am already drafting letters to the permanent secretary and the minister of agriculture.”

  He walked across with the original and threw it into the woman’s table and the other he flung into the man’s. When the pair returned at 2:00, he told them, “I have worked four hours. The same as both of you will do today.” And he walked out of the office. His rage weakened by the time he got into the taxi, and even though it returned in spurts each time he listened to a piece of mauvais langue, idle gossip, from the other passengers, by the time he arrived home it was gone altogether.

  His mother told him, “You get home early today, Orbits. Everything okay?” He nodded and she continued. “You sure? I don’t like how you losing so much weight these days.”

  He realized that following Wally’s departure and the end of the daily feasting, his pants were slacker around the waist, but he did not think it was noticeable to anyone other than himself. He was in a good mood that evening not only because of his mother’s observation but because for the first time in his life, he had taken a stand. “Let’s go for a drive,” he said.

  “Is weekend already?”

  “Hush, Papoose. Is not weekend but who say we can’t go on a weekday.”

  In this mood of self-satisfaction, Orbits ventured into the small town where his father’s old lab was located rather than to a village. His mother kept up a stream of commentary about all the construction taking place. When they got to the location of her husband’s old lab, she said, “Oh gosh, Papoose, what happen to your place?”

  Orbits glanced at the spot. “It look like they pulled it down to make way for a new building.”

  Unexpectedly, his father began to cry. He repeated several times, “They pull it down? It not there again? Why they do that?”

  Orbits’ mother said, “Boy, I don’t know what happening to your Papoose. A few days aback he asked me why he not seeing Starboy again.”

  “Me?” his father asked. “Not me. Starboy kill himself.”

  By the time Orbits returned home, both parents were sniffling in the back seat. In his room, he calculated that his father was seventy — exactly twice his age — and his mother was sixty-four. They had both changed following the death of his brother, but while his mother, who he assumed would be permanently inconsolable, had recovered in most ways, his father had remained stuck inside a foggy prison from which he occasionally peered out. He knew that his father believed his brother’s death was due to suicide, and he wondered if it was that burden that had so afflicted him. Perhaps the silent guilt, the self-reproach associated with the contemplation of a self-inflicted death, was even worse than the horrors of a murder.

  That night he forgot about what had transpired at his workplace and for the first time he tried to think of his brother’s passing in a rational manner. What had driven him to drugs and to suicide if that were the case? Was it a rebellion against the suffocating tenderness imposed upon him by their mother? Was it the company he kept? Did it have anything to do with the imagination he always boasted of? Something that he alone was able to see? Orbits realized he had no clear idea because at that time he had already moved out. But his brother had always been a stranger, and Orbits couldn’t tell who had shut out whom. He remembered the day of his brother’s death, the scene at his former in-laws’ place and his marathon to the hospital to see his former wife and their newborn. So many things had happened all at once, and he reflected as to whether the absence of one could have pre-empted the arrival of another. Before he fell asleep, he contemplated the purpose of his marriage. The last time he had seen his daughter was three months earlier, their visits curtailed to the beginning of each school vacation.

  He carried this mood with him the following day to his work. He saw another poster on his wall and without reading it, he tore it down. His boss was saying something to him, and he was aware the woman was listening, but Orbits was thinking: what is the purpose of my life and why am I struggling? At 2:00, he gathered his container and his file, placed both into his briefcase, and walked out. The next day he came to work, filed his papers and left at the same time. A dispassionate observer would have seen him as a diligent employee of the ministry because during his time at the office he busied himself with his work, rarely looking up.

  Yet the daily grind of his job, the numbing efficiency, could not remove the notion that he was on borrowed time; when his boss asked for copies of his diplom
a for record-keeping, Orbits remembered the day Wally had hired him without any vetting of his qualifications. Perhaps his boss knew, he thought. He sank deeper into his work, began to pay more careful attention to all the applications for grants and subsidies. He saw how the sums had expanded over the years, and he knew that while many of the submissions were genuine, most were either inflated or bogus.

  The final approval had to be authorized at another department, but he knew from his conversations with Wally that most were approved. So much money was changing hands in the island while he, one of the overseers of the transaction, had almost nothing. Perhaps, he felt, it was this unfairness that had driven away Wally, all the talk of his relatives begging him to leave just a sham. His old romance about leaving was rekindled, the flames nourished by his boss, who each week reminded him that he could be fired if he refused to provide the appropriate certificates. Orbits did not know that in the civil service, still operating on antiquated legislation, it was almost impossible to fire an employee, and so he prepared himself for the worst.

  He continued to work at the ministry for another three years. Before Wally had departed, he had spoken about duty as if it were a solid thing that could be hefted and weighed, and Orbits had not completely believed him, but as the months went by he found that this reflexive completion of his tasks — the depletion of the stacks of files on his desk, the addition and subtraction of numbers, the careful vetting of applications for fraudulent claims, the letters that offered bribes, written with ink pens on the pages of copy books — tore away at his sadness. One midday he felt that barricading himself with his daily tasks could be considered an approximation of Wally’s duty.

  When he was transferred to an agricultural station at the opposite end of the island — for while it was impossible to fire, it was still possible to transfer — his boss felt that he had finally won. On Orbits’ final day, he told him that his demotion was well earned. “This is what happens when you are insubordinate,” he said. After so many years of working with the other man, Orbits realized that apart from his quivering nostrils and rubbery lips, he had never observed him properly. Now he saw that his pants were hitched high, almost to his shallow chest. He saw the callouses, black and spreading, on his elbows and the acne marks, so deep they were like scars from an icepick, on his cheeks. Up close, he noticed, too, that he was older than his full head of hair had suggested and that the corners of his eyelids had already begun to sag.