The Amazing Absorbing Boy (10 page)

On a Monday morning, after my weekend off, Paul told me that Dr. Bat had brought in his taxi for an undercoating and wax job, and then real casually, he asked, “Do you know he journeyed to somewhere close to Tibet?”

“Yes, you told me. Nepal.”

“No, no. Not Nepal. A glacier or something called Lhotse.” He pronounced the word as if he was holding back a sneeze. “One of the highest places on the planet. Home to the fabled mountain kangaroo. And that’s not all.” For the next fifteen minutes, Paul told me about shy mountain cobras that escaped by drilling holes in the ice with their stiff tails, and snow porcupines with icicles instead of spikes, and ice monkeys that had guided two mountain-men named Hillary and Tenzing up the Himalayas. “Would you believe that he saw these giant rabbits with soft bubbly flesh like cake baking in an oven?”

And yet, no Buddha? I wanted to ask. I didn’t believe it for one minute, but all of a sudden Dr. Bat was interesting once more. I began to press him about his time in Nepal and his taxi driving and his documentary and the plotting chaps and even about his ilk. Although he seemed glad I was so interested, he just continued talking about all his hardships. And I was forced to listen. He told me that he had saved up all his money to come to Canada but some doctors’ group
refused to recognize his degree so he had no choice but to drive this taxi, which he didn’t even own and which made just enough money to pay for his apartment in Brampton, where he lived with his wife and two children. But with Paul he was different. Following the weekends when Dr. Bat brought in his taxi for servicing, Paul would fill me up with all the new stories he had heard.

During Dr. Bat’s time in this Lhotse place, he had met Madonna and Michael Jackson and Elton John and Deepak Chopra and Marlon Brando. One Monday, I asked Paul what all these famous people were doing up in the mountain and he said they were searching for “the facts of life.” He took off his gloves and blew on his fingers and looked so thoughtful, I felt that these facts were some kind of top secret. The same evening during my little conversation with Dr. Bat, I mentioned the facts just to hear what he would say. “Fact, number one, is Dr. Tulip steadfast karma as permanent taxi driver. Fact number two, is abusement by snooty passengers. Fact number three, is ever present whiskery troublemakers who drag Dr. Tulip in their messy ongoing grievance. Fact number four, is that said Dr. Tulip is trapped between two homesteads with no claim to either one.” He added many more facts concerning the superintendent at his apartment and his disappointment with his children who no longer respected or obeyed him. Nothing about shy ice cobras and the mysterious facts of life or the Buddha. Every now and again I would drop little titbits from Paul’s stories but he would never take the bait.

Meanwhile, Paul continued to claim he had wriggled out all kinds of interesting information from Dr. Bat, who, while he was in Lhotse, had discovered a secret group searching for a good hiding place for the treasures they had stolen over the years. I challenged Paul on this because it sounded like an Indiana Jones movie but he answered me right off the stumps, as if the words were on the tip of his tongue. He told me the group had stolen Beethoven’s ear trumpets, which was some kind of hearing aid, and Dr. Freud’s couch from a museum in London, and the stuffed remains of Able, a monkey sent into space, and Colonel Sanders’ pacemaker, the first in the world (“looked like a small musical box”), and a hubcap from Elvis Presley’s Eldorado Biarritz, and Mao’s favourite chopsticks, and several unknown books written by famous writers. “
The Dodger’s Instrument
,” he told me, thinking deeply. “An erotic novel by Charles Dickens. Used a pseudonym. Julius Babcock. Very few people know of it.”

“Just you and Dr. Bat?”

“Believe what you want, buddy. I’m just repeating the facts as I hear them.” He pushed his hand into his dirty pants and brought up a crumpled tissue. From this tissue he took out a brown capsule and popped it into his mouth. “Goat pills,” he told me, swishing around the capsule. “Got it from Dr. Bat.”

“What does it do?”

“Anything you wish it to do?” After a while his eyes looked a little glazed and he began to smile for no reason.

I know it sounds stupid that I would continue to press Dr. Bat about Paul’s made-up stories. Maybe I wanted to
believe that this sad, quarrelling taxi driver really had all these secrets packed away in the back of his mind, safe from all the bad treatment he claimed everyone was heaping on him. And when Paul said that Marlon Brando was not part of the group of thieves but was there to film a movie in which he played the Buddha, and that when Dr. Bat first saw him in his costume he immediately bowed at his feet, I casually mentioned the Buddha to Dr. Bat. That was a mistake because it opened the pipe to all his anger. “Life is big playground illusion,” he told me, wiggling his fingers above his ears to show he was quoting some book or the other. “So all of Dr. Tulip bad luck and harassment is picture perfect hallucination. Just like poofy powder puff ghosts.” He wiggled his fingers again. “Be patient, humble seeker of reasonable job and nice apartment, because soon, nirvana will land willy-nilly on your taxi.” All this waggling and wiggling made him look like one of these classical Indian dancers I had seen in Trinidad. “Maybe Dr. Tulip conspicuous pigment cover is penance for previous life felonies. When he starve to expiration date, he will reincarnate into stout pink baby with upholstered pram. Then no more hullabaloos and, oh, the inhumanity.”

This went on for a couple weeks. I had always listened to Paul’s stories; now I decided to tell him in detail those I had picked up. So soon after Paul had reported his last instalment, which upgraded the list of treasure from the Lhotse seekers to include a dog called Owney stolen from the National Postal Museum in America, I gave him my own complete list of all Dr. Bat’s worries. He smiled a bit and said he was not
surprised because philosophers like Dr. Bat were usually tortured and unhappy because of their belief that there must be some reward for all their suffering. He made the suffering seem like a choice. Before I could say this, he launched into a story about Brando who had brought with him a big bag stuffed with butter tarts and marble cakes and frosted raisin bread and marshmallows (which turned brittle in the cold). According to Paul, Brando was mistaken for an abominable snowman by some Sherpas who pelted him with big blocks of ice. Dr. Bat had rushed to his defence. “Must have been quite a sight to see Dr. Bat and Brando too rolling down the mountain with all his cakes behind him.” He thought for a while. “Trudeau was there too. Did I mention him?”

“No. What was he doing there?”

“A walk in the snow. There’s no better place than Lhotse for snowy strolls.”

I decided to put a stop to this nonsense once and for all. During his next stop at the station, I asked Dr. Bat point-blank if he had ever been to Lhotse. He looked at me like if I was mad but my mind was made up. Maybe I had mispronounced the word. I threw out some other names: Owney, Colonel Sanders, Julius Babcock, Marlon Brando. Trudeau. I can’t say how I expected Dr. Bat to react but the last thing I expected to hear was, “Yes, quite so. My favourite lizard.”

“Which lizard?”

“Trudeau.” He wiggled his fingers and laughed, which I had never seen him do before. “Bloody riotous revenge instigated by Dr. Tulip, no less.” He told me that soon after he had
arrived in Canada and was preparing for his family’s arrival he had rented a small basement apartment from an old woman in Etobicoke. “Pleasant chatty-chatty woman but Dr. Tulip soon realized that these hammering tête-à-têtes about India were a good Canadian smoke screen and maple syrup.” The first clue, according to Dr. Tulip was when the woman renamed her goldfish Krishna, and a new turtle Tagore. Both died shortly afterwards. “A bloody game. Killing out our heroes in deep-rooted instalments. Murder most foul.” The last straw was when the old woman revealed she was going to buy a pair of kittens that she would name Gandhi and Nehru. Immediately Dr. Bat went to a pet store and brought the cheapest animal there, which was a little lizard. He named the lizard Trudeau. And each night he would pretend his lizard had escaped and would wail, “Where are you, Trudeau? Why have you deserted me, Trudeau? Don’t leave me alone, Trudeau. Dr. Tulip is nothing without you.” And Dr. Bat clapped his hand and laughed and laughed and laughed. He laughed so hard that a packet slipped out of his coat pocket. He bent down to get the package from between the brake and accelerator pedals. “Goat pills. Keeps the madam moist, so to say.” And he broke into a fresh round of laughter, driving off and doubling over the steering wheel.

From then on, the minute he spotted me he would clap his hands and say, “Oh Trudeau. Why have you deserted me? Please, please come back, Trudeau.” I never told this to Paul because I knew he would come up with a bigger story, but I was happy that I had at least brought a little fun and laughter into Dr. Bat’s unhappy life.

One rainy night as I was walking home it occurred to me that he and Paul had done the same for me. I felt that all their strange stories had pushed away my worries about my father’s mean behaviour. For a few hours every day I was immune. The rain gave the traffic lights at the intersection of Regent Street and Saskville Avenue a washed-out look, as if the city was about to melt so slowly no one would notice. While I waited for the lights to change I remembered my mother, too, making up stories of my father’s trips and the gifts he would return with. I was about seven or eight then and I believed every word. During that time, the entire house had been covered with photographs. They hung over doors and windows and vases. Soon after I discovered comics I tried to read the photographs in that manner, panel by panel but I couldn’t. They were happy and sad and happy and sad. Then one by one the happy ones were removed.

T
he following day I was in a quiet mood and when Paul came up with one of his stories, instead of adding to it or displaying any interest I just continued eating the sandwich I had packed earlier in the day. He fished out a crumpled cigarette from his shirt pocket and cupped a hand to light it. After a couple minutes he flicked the cigarette to the back of the garage and took out his gloves from his back pocket. He put them on carefully, opening and closing his fingers slowly, and I felt he was looking at me. During that entire week we were like that: me chewing quietly and Paul smoking in deep puffs.

I was glad he had not asked what was eating me up because I couldn’t really explain how miserable I felt whenever I thought of my mother, and I would be too embarrassed to mention anything of my father. For instance, his comment the first time he had spotted me in my uniform: “A gas station
boy now. Nice. Plenty ambition. Your uncle will be real proud. Oompa loompa.” I was not really immune, after all.

On Thursday night as I was preparing to leave, Paul began to talk about some girl he had broken up with. He said she was a “terrible kisser but a great fiddler.” He had accompanied her to rallies across Toronto where she would play the fiddle “like a goddess.” One night she had told him that she no longer loved him and moved out. It was beginning to feel like a sad story but he said that a couple weeks later he moved in with her friend, a clarinet player. “Your own orchestra soon,” I told him and he nodded as if he had taken my joke seriously. It was only when I was walking home that I realized Paul must have misunderstood my quietness. Yet one thing from that conversation stood out: these rallies all across Toronto. In Mayaro the only rallies were during election time when motorcades rolled though the roads with loudspeakers blaring insults at opposing candidates. Once two motorcades met at the main junction before the police station and bottles began to fly. The police locked up the station, turned off the lights and didn’t come out until the next day.

I was sure these Toronto rallies were different. I couldn’t picture these people—who walked with their gaze straight ahead, not bothering to smile or anything—cursing and pelting bottles all over the place. On Friday I asked Paul about the rallies. I waited until he was finished boasting about his clarinet player who was “a terrible player but a great kisser” before I inquired about the locations. He mentioned Queen’s Park and Nathan Phillips Square and a couple other places.

The next morning I took one look at my father on the balcony and decided to head out but the minute I stepped out of the building I realized I had no idea where Paul’s places were. Just outside the lobby a fat boy was tying his shoelaces. He looked a little like a panda and when I asked him about Nathan Square he pointed to the east and then to the west before he resumed his lacing. I stood there for a while until I noticed a stocky man in spectacles staring at us. He was standing next to a skinny old-timer wearing a brimless cap and some kind of white robe with white pants underneath. The old man also had on curling-tip shoes, which made me think of a grandfather genie. As I walked over, the glasses man held his gaze, seeming stricter with each step I made. I almost changed my mind but it was too late so I asked him the direction to Nathan Square. He fixed me with a strict glare and his lips twisted down as if he was about to
bouff
me up like an old schoolmaster.