Orbits tried to be polite. “Is a nice story.”
“I mean in the house.”
“Very interested,” Orbits told him.
The shopkeeper seemed disappointed. He walked wearily to a stack of bills, tore off a sheet, examined both sides and wrote a name. “This is the owner of the house. Will surprise me if he still living but you never know. Sometimes these half-dead people like to hang on until they see everybody else go. Is bad-mind, if you ask me. My own parents was different, you know”
Orbits took the paper. “Where I could find this fella?”
“That is a good question. Try the said house.”
“He still living there?”
The shopkeeper laughed shyly, hiding his mouth with his hands. “Once a month somebody does open window and door. Don’t know who and don’t know why.” He scratched his chin. “But is a good question. Why at the end of every month? Something wrong with your eye? And how you have them black patch on two side of your face?”
Orbits left him to ponder the answers to his questions, but he returned to the village at the end of the month. He pushed the gate and walked into the yard. When he knocked on the door, a hefty woman stepped out and he saw, through the open door, a frail, yellowish man, slim, tall and clad in pyjamas and slippers. Before he stated the reason for his visit, the old man beckoned him with long fingers. “Do I know you from before?”
“I don’t think so.” Orbits told him.
“Come, sit here.” He motioned to the narrow space beside him on the couch, but instead Orbits pulled a chair from a table. The woman sucked her teeth and said something he could not catch. “Are you blind?” the man asked, drawing circles around his eyes.
“No. I wear the glasses for . . . for cataracts.”
“Ah yes, cataracts. Have you ever been in a catamaran? Now, tell me what it is you want.”
“I am interested in the property.”
The man looked up and laughed in three sharp spurts. Orbits saw his Adam’s apple jumping as if it had loosened from his body. “You are interested? That in itself is interesting, wouldn’t you say?” He laughed again. “And what do you propose to do with the property once you have purchased it?”
“I plan to live in it.”
He called to the woman and told her, “Did you just hear that? This gentleman with cataracts who I have never met before plan to live in the house.” The woman sucked her teeth and Orbits felt it had been a mistake coming to the place. “Did my children send you?”
“I don’t know who they are.”
The man leaned towards Orbits so that he was almost parallel to the cushion. “And let’s keep it that way.” The woman straightened him and walked out the front door. “Now, tell me what you want?”
Two hours later Orbits stopped at the grocery. “So you meet him?” the shopkeeper asked. “From what I know he used to be a important man. Sail all over the world but he a little bit malkadee now. Have a lady who does take care of him. So what happen?”
“He agreed.”
The shopkeeper appeared alarmed. “What you mean agree?” Orbits explained that the man had agreed to sell the property, but he didn’t reveal to the shopkeeper that a search for the deed had to be made at the Red House, and they had not finalized a price, and he had not really inspected the house. The shopkeeper then asked why he was moving into this abandoned village, and Orbits revealed his house had been destroyed by fire. “So you jumping from the fire into the frying pan?” the man asked, brightening up. “You walk through and inspect the house? The backyard and thing? Sometimes these houses does rest on the edge of a caveland and all it take is a little breeze to push it down. Sometimes the wall does look nice from the outside and the inside swimming with woodlice. Who could tell if the door and windows clamp down and electrical wires get chew up by rat.”
“Maybe not.”
“Eh? Maybe not? What sort of negative attitude is that?”
At an earlier time in his life, Orbits would have changed his mind about the purchase. He would have surrendered to the scepticism of the shopkeeper or to the advice of Joe the mechanic and Cascadoo and simply rebuilt the old house or finally given up during his frustrating trips to the Red House to get the deed, or even at the late stage in the lawyers’ office when he was about to sign his name on the deed. He would have considered the size of the loan and the fact that his position as a county councillor would be up in three years, and deliberated over his status, a single man of fifty-two buying a property. Intending to live alone with no one to share, no one to inherit.
But he had stopped fighting the world. He sensed that his attitude of stolidity, of being unruffled by events, was not the detachment he had first assumed but simple and uncomplicated acceptance. He thought of this during the seven months he lived in the partially burnt house, wondering whether this acceptance was along the same resister as the villagers he met in the constituency office, the farmers he had seen at the field station. One morning on the Wingroad’s radio he heard a politician known for jumping from one party to the next excusing himself. “It better to go with the flow.” So when the pet store owner asked about Magaboy, he said it had grown independent, and when he discovered that wasps had built a network of nests on the burnt rafters, he avoided that area rather than getting rid of them. Once he told a goat farmer who had come to complain about a landslip threatening his pens, “Life is like that.” He no longer bothered to make excuses he could not keep.
On his last day in the house, while he was packing his belongings in the Kingswood he had sold to Cascadoo, Joe walked by. “I have something to tell you,” the mechanic said.
When Joe was finished, Orbits repeated the words he had spoken to the goat farmer.
The mood carried when he moved into the green bungalow, and he thought of the passiveness into which he had fallen not as gazing impassionedly at some distant room from afar, but as living in this room and watching things melt and reform around him. As he set about repainting the walls and fixing bits of the sagging fence — for the house, surprisingly, did not need much improvement, and he was determined that it should retain as much of its original appeal as was possible — his mind drifted back to the conversation with the mechanic on the day of his departure. Joe had mentioned, almost as if it were part of his general advice about relocating and had no special significance, that Orbits’ father, when he had found him wandering more than a mile from the house, had been mumbling about his son. “At first, I thought it was you he was talking about,” the mechanic had said. “But when he start talking about how the boy gone and kill himself, I remember your other brother. Nice polite fella. Good-looking too. Always hail me out when he cross my gap. You father was saying that he cause the boy to go and take his life and how on that very said day he had chase him away from the house and tell him to never come back and how he was dead to him.” Joe had moved on to comment on the cheapness of concrete as opposed to wood before he added, “Poor old fella. Talking out of his sense.”
In his office, Mona, misunderstanding Orbits’ frequent moments of reflective silence, frequently asked about his new residence and the drive to work. She mentioned at times some memory of his mother and more than once, she told him, “Grandma would have been so happy to see you in this big job.” Another day, she asked, “You don’t miss the old house a little bit self?”
He knew she was trying to get him out of what she assumed was a lengthening fugue. He told her, “Is just a burn out shell now with snakes and bats. I should try to sell it.”
The next day Cascadoo came to his office under the pretense that he was dropping off a lunch container for his daughter. But a few minutes into their conversation, Orbits realized what he was up to and he told the other man, “I will sell it to you for the cost of the land because the house is useless unless you prepared for plenty renovations. Two lots in all.” He recalled Mona’s attempts at making his mo
ther’s last years comfortable and he added, “Just pay me for one lot.”
The next evening, he walked through the property with Cascadoo, who said, “You know I could build a nice mud house on this spot. The foundation and the back still here. Lepay it good and proper. Nobody know how to lepay again, but them mud house was cooler than anything else.” While he was walking around the property looking for the red bound-flower shrub that demarcated the boundary, Orbits wandered around the house. The burnt and blackened cedar, the twisted iron that was once part of the porch’s railing, the flat-head nails swept by the rain into neat piles, the mounds of coal on the ground, the open sky above, made him think of a derelict jail. This house was never a happy place for me, he thought. Maybe for my parents, but they, too, were despairing at the end. It certainly was not happy for my brother. He recalled Joe’s confession and abruptly he walked out from the house to the yard. He was surprised to pick up a whiff of woodsmoke, the burnt cedar battered by the rain and the heat but the aroma still there, a faint presence, like slippers dragging in the mud. He had no idea why that image came to him as he looked out at the slight hill opposite the house, the wild guava trees covered with vines and, higher up, the community centre’s red roof visible between the palmiste. “I find this in a drawer.” He turned to see Cascadoo holding the iron box he had seen after the fire among his father’s other denture materials and had left behind. “You want me to put it in the car.” He nodded.
Early the next morning as he was leaving for his office, he saw the box in the back seat and he wondered why his father had secured his plastics and polymers and acrylics in a locked box. Perhaps in his declining years he had forgotten about it as he had everything else. From his office’s second-storey window, he could see the patients filing into the dentist’s office opposite. He recalled when he had been apprenticed by his father and his horror at the dentures swimming in the pot. “What you see so funny in the dentist office?” It was Mona who had heard him chuckling.
“Something I remembered. Dentures inside a big pot of boiling water and looking like crabs.” He glanced at her puzzled look and added, “You have to see it to notice how funny it is.”
“I don’t have that imagination like you.” He was about to remind her of the stories she had read to his mother when she added, “Daddy always say that in his next life he want to born back as a crab because they live so long and I always tell him that is a curse not a blessing to be hang up for days in a stall and put in a fridge for another week and then to get throw into a pot of boiling water and still be living through all of this. Who would want to go through all that torture? If I was a crab and I know the life that was in store for me, I would crawl out in the road to wait for the next truck. Better to die than to put up with all that heartache that in store down the stretch. Daddy always saying that animals have an instinct that tell when they going to die. You think these poor crabs have any idea?”
“I doubt it.”
In the evening while he was driving home, he recalled her simple determination and felt a twinge of worry for her. At his home, he got out the iron box and placed it on the floor of the kitchen, next to a pile of tools he had used to renovate the house. He was about to cut a barbadine fruit when he stooped and used a hammer and a flat-head screwdriver to pry open the box. It was shut tightly, and not from the rust as he had assumed, but after some solid taps the top gave way. Stacked neatly were his father’s implements: his pliers, needles, bowls with hardened resin, clamps and drill bits. In a plastic bag he saw cuff links and tie clips he had never seen on his father. Beneath these, he saw a copy book, its cover smeared with some fibrous fruit. He expected to see a list of his father’s clients when he unrolled the copy book, but the writing was unfamiliar. It was not his father’s or his mother’s. Puzzled, he began to read. When the day closes I will stand before the night. When the night falls I will stand against the morning. When the world ends I will stand alone. There were scratches that made the rest of the poem or whatever it was impossible to read. On another page, he saw: The boy saw the dead body washed up on the beach. He walked up shyly to begin a conversation. He was thinking of what to say when the body spoke. I have been waiting here for six months. Each day I look at the sand and wait for you. Have I been dead that long? the boy asked. Once again there were scratches over the following lines. And on another page, The boy told his father he could not believe in god. All lies he said. I see, replied the father. If you are so smart to come up with this nonsense and you believe everything is a lie I also want you to relate to me a lie the first thing each morning. But it must sound like the truth or you will be punished. Each morning the boy related a lie to his father. The father was disappointed and angry because the lies were all perfect. One lie was bad people were always punished and good ones rewarded. Another was to live for today and tomorrow will take care of itself. Yet another said to know yourself and others will glimpse what you have discovered. The father’s patience was fast running out. Yet he could not help feeling a trace of admiration even as the simple lies grew more puzzling. Morning after morning he heard aphorisms like, Pain that is shared ceases to burn. Then one morning the boy left a note instead. It said, death is simply a place not yet visited. Aha, said the father as he rushed into the boy’s empty room. This can neither be true nor false because it cannot be proven nor disproven.
In this case the cryptic story or parable was incomplete because the bottom of the page had been torn off, and Orbits wondered what the father may have felt when he uselessly, frantically searched for his son. As he flipped through the pages, he noticed guava seeds stuck on the inside cover and at the centre, between the staples, mango threads that looked like an intricate tattoo.
He took the book onto the porch. It was 5:30, the sliver between day and night that Orbits appreciated because all the brisk colours that instigated his headache were muted, the sounds then only of the distant parakeets and, closer, a carolling semp or blue jean. There was one sense enlivened during this half an hour before night dropped its coat, and usually he would close his eyes and try to separate the tart aroma of guavas from the pulpy sweet fragrance of Julie mangoes and cherries and plums.
But this evening he kept his eyes open, his focus not on the book on his lap but on the sky. The lobe-shaped clouds ignited by the setting sun looked like metallic bubbles poised ominously in the sky. He recalled a name. Mammatus. It was a strange name for a cloud formation, and during his time with Baby Rabbit he had been tempted to write this name on his weather prediction sheet just to hear Lilboy, the all-purpose janitor and traffic warden, screaming it aloud.
This celestial spectacle lasted five minutes at the most, and soon the sky was grey, then black. Yet he kept looking up, and he felt he saw, on this vast black screen, his brother walking to the guava patch lastro opposite the house, a copy book shaped like a funnel in his hand. His mother had assumed the trip was a replacement to using the toilet, his father ascribed another, more private vice, and Orbits felt it was simply to smoke. He recalled one of his brother’s casual criticisms about no one possessing any imagination, but he assumed that had been just an aspect of his morose and sarcastic personality.
He turned some of the pages of the copy book and looked at a couple of cartoonish drawings, done perhaps at an earlier time, and he wondered what it was about his family or the village or the island that had stolen the life of someone who could imagine his own future. Maybe Wally, who had criticized the short-term vision he saw everywhere, had been wrong. And maybe all these singers, the calypsonians and village bards, were right when they sang of feting and wining and drinking rum until they were stunned into blissfulness. He recalled a stanza from a calypso: “Drunk and disorderly / Always in custody.”
Late in the night, on the porch, he wished he had known his brother, who had died a stranger. Maybe his brother knew him better though: on one of the pages, he saw a cartoon of a boy sitting on a cloud. Beneath was a smaller figure, look
ing up, his hands outstretched, either waving or trying to hitch a ride.
He did not go to his office that week, and as he had done following the deaths of his parents, he waited. He felt along his entire body weariness as stroking fingers one moment, as a crushing hand the next. He was not sure on what he was waiting, but the tiredness dipped and resurfaced during those days. He wondered what would happen if he just sent in a letter of resignation even though he knew it was not easy to resign from an elected position. But these were idle thoughts. He was waiting for the moment he would feel grief and sadness and guilt, and from this mix, he would perceive some new way of looking at this world: a vision that was temporary and deformed and fraudulent, but one that would allow him to carry on.
As a preparation for this epiphany, he imagined the world was filled with suffering that served some mysterious purpose. He then reflected as to whether there was no grand purpose but just a series of coincidences and random events that made men and women either lucky or blighted. He recalled his mother’s view of the reincarnated form’s existence as payment or punishment for the last life. But these were all beliefs he had read or heard of, so they came to him impersonally, as a remote conversation or drained words falling off a page. They offered none of the personal anguish for which he was searching, and which would agitate a sudden insight that was so simple and obvious it would clarify everything.
He barely ate during the week and on the morning of the third day, he felt a ravenous hunger he had not experienced since his time with Wally. There is food in the kitchen and I am famished. But I am not eating. Why? He waited. Other questions arose. Some so digressive and childlike, he could barely understand their purpose. Why did the previous owner sell the house and where is he now? Was he waiting all the time for someone like me to make an appearance? What will happen if I allow the vines along the trees to continue growing? Will it soon cover everything? And he waited and waited. His hunger increased until it felt like a solid thing, a metal ball caught beneath his chest, rolling up and down like a pinball. Soon he could no longer feel it, and he feared it had looped somewhere else, hiding above an organ, waiting for him to fall asleep. One night he awoke in a panic; the ball had splintered and was crushing him from inside, hollowing him out. The following night, he was jolted by another nightmare in which a former teacher was telling him, “You brought down everybody in your family with your lickrishness.” He sat up in his bed. A teacher had actually used those words. He walked outside, close to the road, facing the abandoned school. How did I, of all people, manage to escape? What will be the cost I must pay later on? I blighted everyone and everything I touched. But I escaped. Why?
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