The Amazing Absorbing Boy (34 page)

The last time I met him was at my mother’s wake. It was late in the night and I was in the little canvas tent before our house. Uncle Boysie and a few others had just left to make preparations for the funeral the next day and there were just a couple old men sleeping on the wooden folding chairs. I, too, was sleeping when I heard a voice to my back. I thought I was dreaming because at this close range, his voice sounded like someone sucking in air and suffocating. I know this will be hard to believe but, sitting right behind me, the Amazing Absorbing Boy told me a story about a woman who had been buried in a field of bullgrass and whenever the wind blew through the tall grass, people would hear the sound of her voice. Singing all her favourite songs. I guessed this was another angle to his Absorbing People stories, or maybe a version of something his mother told him after his father’s death, but for some reason, it removed a small slice of my sadness. Not that I believed him or anything, but I liked the idea suggested by his story; that there were always these little pieces left behind, dancing around and joining and connecting and forming new objects. I thought of this while I walked along the beach in the nights, gazing at the waves and trying to get my mother’s death out of my mind. It crossed my mind, too, when I returned to our house on the day of my chemistry exam.

As I said, I never saw him again, not even when I went to give him the news of my departure to Canada. I shouted and shouted by the ravine but he never showed up. I even said that my father was an inventor and he might be able to build a machine that would turn his scales into shining glass. Or
maybe a new set of skin made from the rubber tree sap. He would use this skin whenever he visited the village, I bawled out to the balisier clump. I even hit on an invisible dye from the
roucou
tree. Still, no answer. Finally on the weekend before my flight, I left an old telescope and a single sheet of paper tucked in a balisier’s arm, where I felt he’d be sure to spot it. On the sheet was a four-panel comic book drawing of a boy touching an Eskimo and a big block of ice and a polar bear and a tree with red zigzag leaves. The boy’s eyes were big and wide with excitement like the people from
Archie
comics and I hoped he understood that it was supposed to be funny.

The minute I put up my hands and I saw everyone in class gazing at me, I knew I could not tell them this true story of my friend, the Amazing Absorbing Boy. Why? Because then I would also have to mention my first silly thought when Uncle Boysie told me he had drowned, that he would soon reconstitute; because I guessed they would not believe, or worse, would be more interested in this disease of his; because when you really got down to it, he was no more a shapeshifter than I was.

And while the class was waiting and growing impatient I discovered something about the Amazing Absorbing Boy’s favourite superheroes: I always felt their most notable traits were their colours, black and blue and silver, and they were all outsiders who were scorned and feared, but at that exact moment, I realized that all of them had been killed off over and over and over.

In the end I told the class about the
lagahoos
who, at nightfall, changed their human forms into that of dogs and
donkeys, and terrorized all the poor villagers. Every village had their own
lagahoo
, and in Mayaro, ours was Amos. Everyone seemed satisfied with my answer and Latanya asked me to spell the word as she wrote it on the board.

A
fter this little drift back to Mayaro, my thoughts returned, more and more, to my old village. And while the bulldozers were tearing up Regent Park and this big machine with a ball and chain (just like that used by the Absorbing Man when he fought Thor) was knocking down walls; while the older people watched on worriedly from their balconies; while more committees were formed and petitions circulated; during all this time, I was in a place far, far away. In the beginning, this place was warm and humid and there were all these insect sounds in the nights, as if they were carrying on this long conversation behind our house, somewhere in the field of cassava bordered by wild heliconias with their pale yellow flowers (which from a distance looked like frozen baby cornbirds). There were little dirty rumshops close to the beach where the fishermen came to spin their stories, and a Chinese shop where
bees and flies buzzed over the bags of sugar and casks of molasses.

But soon something strange happened to this picture I had created of Mayaro. One morning as I was leaving our apartment, when the rumble of the machines had already begun, a shoe museum popped up, right alongside Mrs. Bango parlour. The next day, waterfront trails appeared along the beach, and in less than a week, there were huge glassy buildings along the Mayaro junction and the fish stalls had been replaced with a huge market that sold Greek and Italian and Jewish and Indian food. Soon there were rows of red-leaf trees hidden beneath the coconut palms. Sometimes on the streetcar I imagined some Toronto landmark like Union Station plumb in the middle of the village.

I wondered if my father was also contemplating some version of this combined scenery in preparation for his move to Mayaro and a couple evenings when he returned with hats and caps, the Goodwill tags still attached, I felt he was practising to be a Trinidadian
saga boy
. He wore the hats as he was watching
MacGyver
and each style transformed him from pimp to swindler to drug dealer to Pink Panther spy. Once when he was wearing a bucket hat pulled low over his forehead like Gilligan I noticed him examining what looked like a burn mark on his left hand. It was just above his wrist and I was about to ask how it had happened when I realized it was a tattoo. He was rubbing the tattoo and smirking at MacGyver as if this was some private joke between them. I shifted my position on the table to get a better view. The tattoo seemed
to be of a big eye and when I went to the balcony the eye seemed to be following my move. When I returned I swallowed and told him, “That is a nice tattoo.”

“Eh? Oh this? Is a flying saucer.”

I guessed this was another aspect of his preparation for Mayaro, as most people his age wore tattoos of ships and anchors and rockets, but I pretended it was his final salute to my world.

In the middle of March I visited Javier and once more Carmen accompanied me to the Pickering Go Station. There I told her the story of my friend the Amazing Absorbing Boy and though she had been joking just a few minutes earlier about “the swampy boy” she got quiet and said it was the saddest thing she had heard for a long while. I told her jokingly that she should give me her magic lantern so that I could see him in its dim glow; instead she leaned over and gave me a hug that lasted for five minutes or more. I felt really happy and peaceful then even though I did not squeeze her breast or anything.

It was a very cold night and on the return trip I saw that all the trees were covered with ice. It seemed as if puffs of smoke had frozen and exploded into millions of tiny sparks that were clinging to all the trees and buildings. They looked like fireflies granted one last night of life before they died and they were partying like mad. Maybe it was the gloomy but magical scenery, but I thought of all the people I had met here who I would never see again. In Trinidad I was sure to bounce them up in the beach or some road but it seemed that in Canada I got to know everyone more from their absence, long
after they had disappeared. In any case, I had plenty practice with this. As the train approached Toronto I saw the pack of bulldozers once more and I remembered Uncle Boysie, in describing the same scene, had remarked that the city looked as if it was being eaten up from the edges. I had thought then of a comic book word,
contagion
, and imagined some slowly spreading alien spore, but now I tried to see the place from his eyes. I wondered what it would look like in ten or twenty years and if like the coffee-shop old-timers I too would complain about everything that had been torn down and lost forever. In Mayaro nothing really changed; people lived and died in the same house and arguments between neighbours lasted for years but here it seemed that every week something new was added. No wonder the chimera fella from the library could never finish his Toronto poem.

I guess all these thoughts were swinging through my head because my professors at Centennial were forever talking about adaptation and improvisation. My courses there finished at the end of May and even though I was relieved to have passed all three I was surprised at the early completion date. In Trinidad classes always ended in July. For two weeks I walked around the city and noticed what I had previously missed—every street had its own style. Before everything had seemed big and shiny and connected but I saw buildings that could have popped straight out of some dingy section of San Fernando and others that seemed so ancient and grand with their turrets and fancy windows and solid walls, it was easy to imagine ghosts roaming around in secret passages.

During one of these strolls I walked into Barbarossa’s shop, but as he was harassing a new employee, a boy who resembled Javier, I left quickly. Twenty minutes later I wandered into Queen Bee and Mr. Schmidlap glanced from behind his Thor statue and crooked his finger at me. When I walked over he asked where I had disappeared during the last two months and I wondered whether he had Alzheimer’s like Carmen’s grandmother. I returned the next evening and took my place behind the counter.

Soon winter went away and everything smelled fresh and grassy. In Mayaro, the old people always said this odour signalled that a snake was nearby but here instead of snakes there were squirrels and birds and hundreds of geese. The geese looked real plump and tasty and I wondered if anyone had ever pushed one of them into a bag and rushed to his apartment for a nice meal.

A couple of the Regent Park residents began moving out to other areas. Those who remained were real worried about their own impending move with all the new travel costs, and splitting up from neighbours and friends, and losing the parks and roads they knew so well. One night I heard a very tall man saying to a woman who reached his shoulder, “Press-shure. Is true press-shure we facing.” Another night I saw a group of people gathered around a big notice stuck on our apartment doorway. The Creole woman was quarrelling with a small Sri Lankan man with a perfectly straight moustache. I think it was a nasty argument because they began to call each other really insultive names. Soon two groups formed
around the two quarrelling people, Creole people on one side and Sri Lankans on the other. I was a little surprised because I was sure I had spotted some of those now on opposite sides chatting in the laundry room. I left in a hurry and returned late in the night to see what they had been arguing about. The notice said that our apartment was scheduled to be demolished in six months.

The next day my father disappeared. That same evening after work I walked to Union and bought a return ticket to its furthest northward destination. The bus stopped at Barrie and when I got back to Union it was close to midnight. A few young women, some with backpacks, dropped out here and there and I thought that in Trinidad they would never travel alone this late. Earlier that week Uncle Boysie had written to ask about my father. At the end of the letter he mentioned some little girl whose body was found in a cornfield because her mother had been unable to pay the ransom. A week later I wrote my reply. I said that my father would probably be in Mayaro by the time this letter arrived—which surprised me, as I had not concluded this before. I thanked him for the money sent and said that my interview with the immigration people would be in four months. The next day, once more on the Go Bus, I was sure that my father was gone for good.

Soon I began to choose new routes, travelling further too. Sometimes, I would pass a rundown little town with old shabby building and tired people roaming around the single convenience store, and I would pretend that my father had moved to one of these places, and that he was sitting at that
very instant, as the train sped by, on the balcony of a grubby townhouse, smoking and trying to fill in the blank spots in his life and wondering where all the years had gone. But on the return trip, I would see him in Mayaro, in the house that was probably overgrown with all my mother’s plants. I wondered what he would think if he heard her murmuring and singing every time the night breeze hit the field of cassava. Most likely he would feel that it was a warbling bullfinch or a
picoplat
.

Maybe it was fitting that my interview for landed immigrant status was conducted by a man who looked a lot like a Canadian animal. The dark circles beneath his eyes made him look exactly like a raccoon but as the interview progressed, they also gave him a cynical and suspicious appearance. In any case I had nothing to hide and I told him of my mother’s death and I repeated my age and spelled Mayaro and my father’s name as he glanced at the documents before him. He mentioned an engineer from India who had married his own sister he then brought over, and others who sponsored complete strangers, claiming they were their children. I was thinking of this when he asked about my education and I said that I had recently started my second semester at Centennial. How long had I been in Canada he asked? The minute I answered and noticed his suspicious glance I felt that I too could hardly believe I had been here for almost two years.