The Amazing Absorbing Boy (9 page)

A
t the end of my two-week probation at Petrocan I got a blue overall and a cap. They were both greasy and I had to wash them twice in the laundry room on the last floor before the smell of oil disappeared. When I wore it for the first time I felt a little proud because it was a uniform; not the same as a fireman’s or a cop’s but a uniform nevertheless. I wished my father was at home so he could see me. In the elevator I saluted a group of little boys with a fast flick of my finger like in the movies. They broke out laughing and one said, “What the fuck?” As I was getting off, another stood upright, saluted me, and almost in the same motion slapped the palms of the other boys.

I don’t think they knew I was joking in the Trinidadian manner by posing a bit, and later at work when I repeated the incident to Paul, the tall, greasy-looking wash operator who had been working at the Petrocan for close to ten years, he got
serious as if I had stained the name of the Petrocan uniform and should be court-martialled. Paul seemed to know all sorts of secrets about the regular taxi drivers who came twice a week to refuel their tanks and sometimes to get an underbody wash.

When I told him that I was from Trinidad he told me he was from Newfoundland and that he knew much of the island I was from, but everything he mentioned—like the word “poo-nanny”—came from Jamaica. Which was why I wasn’t sure how I should react to what he called his “inside info.” He said that the strapped Sikh had been a wrestler and had developed a special cobra hold, and that the fidgety man with the neat moustache was once an engineer who had to rush out from Iran after some dam he was building washed away a royal palace straight into another kingdom. To listen to Paul, these taxi drivers were all doctors and lawyers and inventors and refugees and terrorists and Nazis and escaped criminals from other countries. Once he told me that a stocky man, whose head seemed to sink into his fleshy body like a
moroccoy
while I was filling his tank, was once the best cook in Poland. “Papa Perogies,” Paul called him, and I can’t say whether this was the name he was called in Poland or one Paul had given to him.

Now I should say straight off that Paul must have picked up his information from unseen sources because I rarely saw him talking to any of these drivers. It could have been his slack style of walking or all his beads and bracelets or the way his eyes would droop after one of his smokes in the garage, but no one really trusted him. Me, I enjoyed his stories even though they resembled some of the old movies I had seen at
the Liberty cinema in Trinidad. Paul reminded me a little of my old school friend Pantamoolie who was always inventing stories about our teachers.

One of Paul’s most interesting was of Dr. Bat. According to Paul, his real name was Bharanbose Atambee Tulip and before he came to Canada to drive his taxi he had moved from India to work as a doctor in Nepal. I never asked Paul how he knew that Mr. Tulip was once a doctor and when exactly his name had been shortened to its initials because I knew he would come up with some fancy explanation. Still, I was glad to see these ordinary-looking taxi drivers another way, and on evenings when my hands were freezing and my ears felt like frozen biscuits, for just a little while I would forget the cold.

Sometimes when I was cleaning the windscreen of a fancy van with a pretty woman and her son sitting inside, I would wonder about the kind of house they would return to and try really hard to imagine the fancy furniture surrounding them as they ate from expensive dinner plates while some sort of music played in the living room. I would picture the offices of the men who pulled in for gas with their ties and suits and the boyfriends of the women who fixed their lipstick in the rear-view mirror while I cleaned their windscreens. So close to them while they were doing this personal thing! I even pretended a few times that I was sitting next to these young women, but those pictures couldn’t hold, because my mind would be empty about what would happen after they had pulled off. What we would talk about and where we would drive to. Occasionally I imagined that I was driving a red sports car
and Dilara, in the passenger seat, was gazing at some other boy filling the tank. But this picture couldn’t hold either. Sometimes I felt a trace of sadness, especially when I saw youngish people who I guessed had happy families and nice houses and cottages and who felt at home in this country they were born in. Which could be why I bothered to listen to Paul’s stories of those who were not so lucky. People like myself.

Occasionally, I saw faces that may have been famous, although this was again according to Paul. He told me that the plump smiling man who looked like a baker’s apprentice happily slapping on flour was from a show called City-TV, and the clean-head fella who resembled some of these old royal families from Trinidad almanacs was a top-class CBC man. “The mother corp,” he said as if he was talking about his own mother-in-law. I know it might seem strange but I began to form a picture of Canada from all these people who drove in and out of the gas station. It was Paul who put the idea in my head when he said, “Snapshots, my friend. One hundred little snapshots a day.” He claimed that he had serviced the cars of the prime minister and the mayor and hockey stars with names that reminded me of nibbled-down sandwiches.

Me, I just concentrated on the people who seemed average, maybe because I could frame-up their apartments and their jobs in the factories and the arguments with their children about new Canadian habits. The people who quarrelled about Canada but were afraid to return to their own countries. The taxi drivers and haulers and families packed inside
big old Dodge cars. People who looked as they were always on the run from this or that. People like Dr. Bat.

I began to pay attention to their clothes and the shape of their cars and the food boxes crumpled in the back seats next to big-eyed children and cardboard containers filled with God knows what. Sometimes they would notice me staring and give me a funny look before they pulled off, and I would see them gazing suspiciously in the rear-view mirrors. One night, almost at the end of my shift, I noticed an old bulky camera in Dr. Bat’s car. He caught me peeking and although he said nothing, when he returned later in the week, I tried to be extra careful with my little spying. While I was filling his tank, he picked up the camera and adjusted some small knobs and polished the lenses with the corner of his coat. He pushed the camera into a black leather bag and dusted the flaps.

This was the pattern for the next two or three weeks, and to tell the truth, I began to suspect that Dr. Bat was just showing off with his camera. So I was surprised, when one evening, he told me, “It is for quite notable documentary.” I had expected his voice to be small and squeaky but it sounded hollow and flat like if he was rehearsing a speech inside an empty cup.

“What kind of documentary?”

“Yes, yes. Quite so. Notable.”

I decided to leave it at that but during his next visit, when he mentioned once more his documentary business, I repeated my question. This time he reflected a bit before
he said, “A complete parade of the jiggery pokeries and hullabaloos.”

I didn’t know what to say so I remained quiet while he opened his glove compartment and moved around some paper and screwdrivers and little plastic packets. Finally he got out a thick wallet, overflowing with cards and paper peeping out from its flap. He pulled out a card, placed it on the dash, and turned on the interior light. I was able to read his card before he drove off. Dr. Bharanbose Atambee Tulip, exactly as Paul had said. Beneath his name was written “Archivist and Filmmaker,” in small gold-plated, playful letters. I knew for sure he had wanted me to read his card. That same evening I walked over to Paul who was smoking at the back of the wash, and before I could ask him about Dr. Bat, he said, “I see you’ve made a new friend. What he’s up to now?”

“I think he is making some film or the other.” After a while I added, “He is really a doctor, you know.”

“Dr. Bat? I doubt it.”

“But what about the place near India you told me about.”

Paul threw away his cigarette and pulled out a pair of gloves from his overall pocket. He flapped the gloves before he wriggled his fingers into them. “I think it was a front. He imports spices. Crushed rhino horns and cobra venom and goat pills. Stuff like that.” Maybe Paul had also spotted the plastic packets inside Dr. Bat’s glove compartment. “Not too sure if there are real universities in those places. Not even sure Nepal is real. Too many fancy stories about the place. So he’s making a film, is he?” Paul asked this with a little
drag in his voice, like if he was expecting all along that Dr. Bat would make a movie. “What sort of film is it?”

“Something about jiggery-pokeries.”

Suddenly this strange word sounded rude and improper and Paul’s eyebrows drooped a bit further which was a sign he was thinking. “Don’t tell anyone, but he is looking for the Buddha.”

“In Canada?”

“According to legend he will be found on a rock covered in ice.” He said this in a low voice and I was sure it sprang from a movie. A few minutes later, he came up with a rumour that the fat red taxi driver, who looked like he would one hot day melt right into the seat of his Cutlass, was once a KGB agent whose specialty was toads’ poison. I felt that Paul had made up this thing about
crapos
just because of the driver’s appearance. This habit of Paul’s must have remained in my mind, because during his next stop at the station, Dr. Bat caught me staring boldfaced at his little ears and his thick black glasses and his pushed-out lower lip. To cover up, I asked him quickly, “So how is the film coming along?”

He switched off his engine and pulled his bag onto his lap. “I am engaged in a desperate search for Chinooks and such.” I wondered whether this was some strange Nepalese word for China but he added, “It is a notable expedition across Canada, so to say. Serious mapping of landmarks and highlights.”

Just to make conversation, I asked, “Like
National Geographic?
”

“Utter bunkum and pooh-bah with willy-nilly pictures galore!”

“Eh?” I almost repeated the swearword the little boy had used in the elevator.

“I am observer and collector of rash views coerced on my people for eons.” I thought of the Watcher from
Fantastic Four
but Dr. Bat didn’t look the part. “The cloaked-up underbelly of hatched landscape. You follow?” He seemed so stern I nodded. “My observation has told me that we are …”

He clicked his fingers, trying to come up with the word. After a while I tried to help him, “Special?”

He shook his head and pointed to the sky. “Other beings.”

“Like angels?”

“No such creature in my horoscope. I am a Hindu atheist.” His clicking seemed angrier and louder. Finally he gave up and slid forward on his seat, closer to the window. “Pay attention, please. Many years ago I take train, second-class, from Hyderabad straight to Delhi.”

“To look for the—?”

He held up a hand for me to be quiet. “On said junket, I jot copious notes of everything. The stations and rails and government buildings. And I say to myself, ‘Dr. Tulip, it is quite correct to credit British thugs for rails and civil service and bulky laws but the thugs donated even more important bequest.’” He pushed out his lower lip and I noticed his tongue playing with his teeth. “They teach us to do red-letter taxonomies of copious animal, plants, and minerals. You follow?
Now we are better than said thugs in classification. Best bookkeepers, best librarians, best scientists, best mathematicians, best accountants, best stamp collectors, best—”

I felt I had to stop him. “You must be proud of all this.”

“But what is to be proud about, gas station boy, tell me please? Who knows what Dr. Tulip knows? Rather we are classified for corner stores and taxis and wife-beating and riotous sidesplitting accents. Now, the ranking is more disagreeable than before because sinister avenge plots is affixed to recipe.” He waggled his head as he was complaining and I couldn’t say whether this was a sign of his vexation or gloominess. When the driver waiting behind Dr. Bat popped his horn, he said, “That is why hasty chap behind engage in unrefined insults and verbal body blows.” He drove off waggling and grumbling.

He continued to come twice a week to refuel his tank and during each visit he would mention some additional information about his expedition. But I soon noticed something strange: he began to sound angrier and angrier as if something was hindering his film. Once he told me, waggling his head one hundred miles a minute, “Everybody require Dr. Tulip to be picture-perfect Indian. ‘Oh, sorry, master, it is my fault one hundred percent. It is my heirloom to be so bunglesome. God wills it. Please punish me, sir. I
insist
.’” He also switched back and forth from Canada to India, which made it even more difficult to follow him. Once he asked me, “Where did you spring up?”

“Trinidad. In a little village name Mayaro.”

He looked relieved. “These whiskery chaps make it dire for us with their blowing-ups and such. We get hoisted on bloody petards most diabolical. So now Dr. Tulip and his ilk are fair game for questionable looks and third-degrees.”

Whenever Dr. Bat stopped to chat, I would notice Paul looking on from the service centre and afterwards he would always ask what we were discussing. I don’t know why I bothered to pass on Dr. Bat’s speeches about the chaps who were giving his ilk a bad name, and how he had to be extra careful as he would be pressured for the smallest mistake, because Paul always acted as if he already knew all of this. Maybe it was because he always added tiny bits to the stories. All of a sudden, Dr. Bat’s search for the Buddha changed into a quest for a baby Dalai Lama who was living, in all places, in Newfoundland. “These quests eat up our souls,” Paul said, dragging on his rolled-up cigarette like a movie actor.

Later that week while Dr. Bat was discussing his documentary, he said, “It is unfortunate reality that India is notably eminent for superstitious mumbo jumbo and mystical sleight of hand and every such exotica. Such pigeonholes got soldered on our backs and follow us like leeches even if we profess medical or scientific training, par excellence. No point in Dr. Tulip making grievances public, because before he is finished, the nasty stares are there, the excuses are there, and before you know it, hey presto, the busy signs come up.” At the end of my shift, I repeated this to Paul in a bored way because Dr. Bat was now making the same complaints over and over. Maybe what he told me was true but it was depressing to hear, and
besides I had my own problems. Paul’s talk of soul-eating quests had reminded me of my father, and of Dilara from the coffee shop. I felt I should write off Dr. Bat or maybe just fill his tank and pretend to be too busy to chat.