The Amazing Absorbing Boy (19 page)

“Cancel out what?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

It seemed like an opening to some explanation but his face got hard as usual. However, he was wrong. I
did
understand. In Mayaro, people only went to real doctors in emergencies, after they had visited wrinkly old ladies for scented oils and special herbs and secret prayers and a load of other nonsense. The most popular quack was not a wrinkly old lady though. His name was Amos and he made concoctions from vines and barks and roots he claimed he got from secret trees in the Guayaguayare forest. Once I heard one of our neighbours, a woman who could balance a basket of plantain on her head with no trouble at all, telling my mother she should see Amos. As far as I can tell, my mother never took the woman’s advice.

Me and a couple of my friends from Mayaro Composite went to his board house one evening. We were curious because that day, our history teacher, Mr. Chotolal, had shifted from his slavery topic to a discussion of voodoo and
obeah
. First, we pelted a few stones on top of Amos’s roof to make sure he was not around before we entered the building. I have to say that it was exactly as we had pictured it, with the junk he sometimes collected from people as payment scattered all around a long table. On the table were also little heaps of crushed-up herbs. We noticed some mildewed copybook pages at the side of each pile. It took a while to read the
crapo
-foot handwriting on the pages but we were able to decipher a couple instructions like, “For woman who man leave them,” and “For ugly
squingy
man,” and “To stop
horning
,” and “Getting rid of
ownway
children.” We left Amos’s house laughing because we had rearranged all the pages.

This memory must have caused me to smile because my father glanced at me, uttered something about traps and went to the television. There, he settled on a channel where a man with a big puff of hair was talking about magnetic charm bracelets. This was the first time he had chosen a show other than
MacGyver
or
The Mythbusters
, and as he leaned forward to place his hands on his lap I felt that after all his years in Canada he was no better than these people from the Guayaguayare forest.

I got more curious about this woman’s sudden appearance in our apartment. It couldn’t simply be because my father was afraid of my necklace.

Five nights after I first saw her, I woke up from a sudden noise and as my eyes adjusted to the dark I saw that the balcony door was open a crack and the wind was whistling through. I closed the door and returned to my foam but before I fell asleep I wondered if my father was trying to exorcise me from his apartment. In Trinidad “putting a light” on an enemy’s head was a common enough practice, and everybody knew that all the mad people who roamed about the streets in Rio Claro had been “lighted.” Maybe I was pushing my father too hard with my college talk. The next evening, I waited by the curb until the lights were off in our apartment before I entered the building. I speculated about what they were doing in the dark, my father and this strange woman with her red hair and her high heels. All of a sudden I thought of my mother. The elevator stopped at the third floor for a woman who was holding a cat in one hand and a shopping bag in the other. I moved to the corner.

“Thanks for holding open the door for me, asshole.”

I was the only other person on the elevator. I looked at her. The cat was scratching at a red boil on her arm, maybe to escape from her clutch. “I look like a blasted slave to you?” The minute the words left my mouth I was sorry. I bolted out of the elevator at our floor and before its door closed the woman shouted out some nasty curses in a whining but musical voice. When I entered our apartment the lights were still off so I coughed a couple times to alert my father and the woman, if she was still here.

“You just break the kissmeass rainbow.”

I turned on the kitchen light. “Which rainbow?”

“It not visible to jackasses.”

My annoyance returned and I tried to pack all the mockery I could muster up into my voice. “Only to you? Nice. Very nice.”

“Yes, only to me, you little bitch. Only to people with a clean heart.” I swear he said that.

The next day I felt really awkward and out of place in the library. I looked at all the boys bent so seriously over their books and computers and thought: all of them have some plan. They know where they going and how to get there. Their lives are set. I wished I knew where they were living. I was sure there were no cursing elevator ladies and
obeah
women and horrible fathers. Another thought came to me: this library is too organized for somebody like me. To be honest, I felt real sorry for myself then and I left the library after ten minutes or so. As I was walking to the subway, a stupid Mayaro rhyme kept ringing in my head.
Loser, loser, stupid little loser
.

I remained on the subway train for a while and I recalled how, just seven months earlier, I had pretended that all these tired factory workers were really molemen. For a minute or so I wished I could still think this way. Then I landed at Union Station.

I got off there because I didn’t want to return early to our apartment and so followed a rush of people out of the train and into the Union building. And the minute I entered the big hall all my loser feelings dropped off. Everybody was walking and walking and moving and moving in a long,
never-ending stream. Some had briefcases, and others were dragging suitcases behind them like boxy puppies. Maybe they were leaving the city or going for a vacation or just returning from their jobs, but all this constant motion made everything feel temporary. Even my school worries.

The next evening, sitting on a bench near to a Muffins place I discovered another reason for its appeal: it reminded me of these
Star Wars
bars with all sort of strange aliens sitting right next to each other and not noticing all the snouts and fish faces and extra eyes and antennae right on the opposite table. The walls and ceiling looked like the building where the big X-Men movie fight had taken place and while I was gazing at a flashing schedule screen I pretended that some of the trenchcoat men bent over their laptops and the pretty women reading magazines from behind narrow moleman glasses were just waiting for some kind of action and would jump out of their coats and throw off their glasses to reveal capes and tights and tall boots.

I wandered around the upstairs floor—where the suitcases were bigger and the people better dressed, as if they were travelling farther than the downstairs crowd—and came through some fancy Spartacus columns to Front Street before I returned to the Muffins place. This building seemed a perfect place for an entrance to a secret underground city (and an hour or so later I walked through a long tunnel that led to an Air Canada Centre).

When I got home it was quite late and I noticed on the fridge a handwritten note with a drawing of a cat saying, “A
million little secrets shall tumble from my lips.” The cat seemed conceited to be saying this and I felt that the only secret I was interested in was how I could get my father to understand my college worries. I thought he was asleep so I was startled to see the woman coming from his bedroom carrying an ugly little dog. The dog had the same conceited look like the cat. The woman put down the dog and said, “Go, Jezebel, go.” The dog wagged its stumpy little tail and walked to the fridge. The woman and my father followed it. The woman sprinkled some of the stuff from a vial beneath the fridge. The dog strolled to the couch with my father and the woman following. Once more she sprinkled the vial over the couch. Then the dog looked up as if it had now noticed me. It came over wagging its tail. Without any warning the woman emptied the vial straight on me. In my surprise I kicked away the dog.

That night I washed my clothes over and over in the basement laundry area, trying to get out the smell of cat shit and ginger. To my surprise when I got back, my father didn’t scream at me, and at first I wasn’t even sure he was in the apartment. I took a long shower and was about to settle on my foam when I heard, “You was always bad luck. Always.” The voice was so soft I felt I had imagined it but then I noticed his cigarette glinting by the porch door.

“I don’t believe in luck.” I said the words quietly.

“Bitch.” He matched my quiet voice.

Cult!

The next morning I saw the woman walking on the main
lane. I don’t think she would have noticed me if her dog hadn’t starting barking in my direction. She came across and asked, “How is your foot?”

I didn’t know how she expected it to be but in any case I told her, “It normal.”

“When you do harm to any of God’s creatures, that same harm will spring back upon you.” She patted the dog and said, “Shh, Jezebel. Everything is going to be all right. Kiss it.”

It took a while before I realized she was talking to me. She was holding up one of the dog’s paw. “I not going to kiss any dog foot.”

“Kiss it.” I now saw how much she resembled a slowly boiled frog. Her eyes were bulgy and in the wind her hair seemed like red, wavy seaweeds.

“No. Absolutely not.” I backed away.

She kissed the foot herself and told her dog, “Don’t worry, dearie. In his next life, he is going to reborn as a dog and every single day, someone will kick him.” She said this in a happy voice. “He is just a bad luck boy.”

You ugly old troll, you. Froggie too.

A tall black woman with big chunky breasts came up to us. I tried to walk away but the black woman sidestepped and blocked me.

“We have something we would like you to sign,” the woman told me. I thought it was some type of nonsense connected to the troll lady so I shook my head. This got the black woman mad and she said to the other woman, “This is the way it is with these people from India and Pakistan. They not
interested in anything that don’t concern them. This is the way it is with them.” The troll lady nodded at this.

I got mad at the two of them, carrying on this conversation as if I wasn’t right in front of them. In Trinidad black people were called Creoles but this woman wasn’t moving like a Trinidadian Creole one bit. “Look, lady, I not from these places, and I not going to sign any damn paper that I know nothing about. So leave me alone.”

The troll lady seemed offended by my tone, but the Creole woman really surprised me by saying, “That is a Trinidadian accent, not so?” She told the troll in a whispering voice, “He worried about his status. The poor boy frighten to put his name on any paper.” She fished around in her alligator purse and brought out a crumpled sheet of paper. “What is your name, boy?”

I went through a list of made-up names but eventually told her, “Samuel.”

“That is a nice name, boy. An upstanding name. Here, read this when you have the time, Samuel.”

“Thanks.” I took the paper and hurried away. I opened it at Union and saw a photograph of a Nigerian man and beneath, in bold letters with exclamation after each sentence: No One Is Illegal! Reunite Families! Know Your Rights! Refugees Are People Too! Contact Mr. O Omewale! LLB!

Refugees. I wondered how many people wandering around here were refugees. Was there some way to detect them? Something in their clothes or gestures? What about the Ethiopian man sitting by himself? He was too well dressed
and had an expensive briefcase besides. The woman from India with a dot on her forehead? She looked too fat and happy. The pink, stooped man wearing an old coat and hat? He might be too old. I changed benches and focused on another group. The seminar woman said they lived like ghosts and I imagined them, just like the Flash, vibrating at a special frequency that made them mostly invisible. Then another thought hit me. Was it possible that among this crowd there might be someone who
could
tell, and who might be gazing at me this very minute? Soon after I arrived in Canada I had been struck by the short glances as if these people had made their assessments in a second or less but now I scanned all the waiting passengers to determine if anyone was carefully studying me. Perhaps the security guard who was leaning on a counter and munching at a muffin, or the Filipino boy wheeling a cart with newspapers. Even the girl punching letters on her phone.

The next day I chose a bench beneath the stairs. I looked around for a while before my eyes settled on a lanky man whose long legs were crossed like a woman’s. He was sitting by himself like a long ghost in his old tweed jacket and a bulging canvas briefcase beside him. It took a while before I recognized him.

I
really believe Sporty had pretended he could not recognize me that day at the Union Station through shame, not his busyness or all his appointments, as he later claimed. But that was Sporty: always pretending, always putting up a big show, always claiming to have some secret in his back pocket. Most Mayaro people got their nicknames from the other villagers but Sporty was the only person who chose his own. I believe it was because everyone called him Homo to suit his last name which was Sapienza. He never answered to the Homo name and after a while he would say, “Hello, you loo-looking for Sporty?” He used to live about ten minutes from my mother’s house in Mayaro, in a half-completed teak shack with no windows or doors, right behind Mrs. Bango parlour. When he disappeared from the village, everyone said that he had moved to San Fernando to fleece the rich city folks or had landed in Carrera, the offshore prison.