The Picture of Nobody (5 page)

For the next couple of weeks, I didn’t see the loafers. Maybe they had chosen another coffee shop or been kicked out of Ajax. At the same time, Allison was behaving very strangely, always in front of the computer with her head scarf pulled tightly over her head.

Dad felt her new style was an improvement over her Goth look, but I could tell that it worried Mom. During our dinner-time conversations, Mom talked about the terrible things happening all over the world. Wars, kidnappings, and never-ending conflict. She blamed crazy traditions for each of these troubles.

Allison responded only once. She said that it was just as wrong to believe in one solution
to fix every trouble. Mom was shocked, I could tell.

That night, I gazed at the water stain on the ceiling just above my bed. It looked like a boat about to sink. When I blinked and looked again, it changed into a rocket pointing upwards. I played this game for five minutes or so, trying to surprise myself with each new shape. But soon my mind turned to the dinner conversation. I wondered if Allison had taken on her new look because the girls at school had called her names. If the girls were doing to her what the loafers outside Sip and Sup were doing to me. Or if wearing a head scarf was a passing phase, just like the others. Whatever the reason, at least she had a group of friends.

The next morning on our way to school, Allison hurried to catch up with her friends. The dollar store girl waved to me. During recess, I noticed the Afghanistan boy standing outside the back door. He was gazing at the playing field. “Hey,” I said.

“Hey.” He barely glanced at me and kept staring into the distance. I guessed he wanted to be alone. Maybe the playing field reminded him
of something from his country. I walked away. Even though we were the same colour, we were not alike. Our memories were too different. I had lived my entire life in Canada. His accent was Afghani.

In Napanee, there had been a Sikh boy in my class. He was the only other brown person in the school. Once he had shown me a tiny dagger tucked away in his pocket, and he explained why he carried it. When he asked me about my religion, all I could tell him was that my parents were Ismaili Muslims. The only fact I knew about my religion was that Sufis were important. They were poets who composed special religious songs.

He wanted to know more. I quoted a couple of my father’s favourite Sufi verses, but that was the best I could do. Our friendship stalled at that point, maybe because he wished he hadn’t shown me his dagger. Or maybe he felt there was something fake about a boy who knew so little of his parents’ religion.

In the coffee shop, I felt really alone. The old ladies looked like pale ghosts that would soon disappear, the old men like forgotten statues.
Even Mr. Chum reading his newspaper looked to me like a cardboard cut-out set against the counter. At the end of my shift, he said, “Nice trick. Sleeping standing up. Hah!” He closed his eyes and pretended to snore. When he opened his eyes, he asked, “Whatsa matter, alligator?”

“It’s nothing.” I wondered if when I got home my family would also have been replaced with strangers.

Mr. Chum glanced at the outside table normally occupied by the loafers. He rolled up his newspaper slowly. “We control the picture,” he said.

He returned to his newspaper, but I sensed his eyes on me while I put on my coat.

On my way home, I tried to understand what Mr. Chum meant. He often joked. Yet his voice had been serious. As I crossed the street at the corner of Harwood and Bayly, I realized that he had spoken with no trace of an accent. I had never heard this voice before. “We control the picture.”

“We control the picture.” Mr. Chum’s strange statement got my mind off my other worries. What did he mean? And why did he — just that once — speak without any accent? His simple sentence seemed familiar somehow, yet I could not tell why. I puzzled over it in school and in the coffee shop. I started to ask him once, but I changed my mind when I heard him once more speaking with his Chinese accent to some customer.

Then, one day in the library, I recalled the opening of a television series I used to watch with Dad in Napanee:
The Outer Limits
. As it opened, a man with a thin voice would say, “There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt
to adjust the picture. We are controlling...” Each episode showed creatures that could change their shapes, or robots wanting to be humans, or aliens pretending to be ordinary families.

While I mopped and cleaned the coffee shop, I would glance at Mr. Chum, thinking about his remark. A couple of times, he caught me looking at him, and he returned to his newspaper without smiling or anything.

Yet Mr. Chum had become a more interesting person. Just from that simple statement. It reminded me of one of Dad’s mysterious quotes from Shakespeare:
This is the tune of our catch, played by the picture of Nobody
. I imagined a boy walking through a house with a hundred doors inside it. Each time he passed through a door, he was different in some way. He was a nobody because he could be whatever he wanted to be. The picture of nobody was the picture of someone who could change into anyone.

I almost forgot all my worries, but then, a few weeks later, I was brought back to earth. The woman I had seen Sid chatting with started coming to the Sip and Sup regularly. She would arrive with her child by midway through my
shift. The other loafers always left as soon as she appeared, and Sid and the woman would talk seriously.

Sometimes the woman appeared to be pleading. Once when Sid tried to play with her little girl, she pulled the child away. She usually left about ten minutes before the end of my shift. Sid would remain there at the table, his head in his hands. He seemed to be talking to himself, and a few times, he got up and waved his arms, even though no one was with him.

Sid also acted meaner to me. Before, his nasty remarks seemed like jokes to amuse his friends, but now he seemed serious — and dangerous, even. He said things like, “Where the hell do you people keep appearing from?” and “I have my eyes on you. Just remember that. This ain’t Kabul.”

One evening, the argument between Sid and the woman seemed to be worse than usual. She didn’t sit for the entire half hour, and she held her girl tightly.

When she left in a huff, Sid clasped his hands at the back of his neck and bent low over the table. He seemed smaller, somehow, through the
glass wall of the coffee shop. When I left, he was still in that same position. He said in a low voice, as if he was talking to himself, “Fucking Arab.” He made the word sound like “crab.”

I stopped in my tracks. “I’m not an Arab. I was born in Canada.” After a while, I added, “Just like you.”

“You’re nothing like me, buddy.”

“Yes, I know.”

He glared at me as if he couldn’t tell whether I had agreed with his statement or insulted him.

When I got home, Mom and Dad were in the dining room wearing their going-out clothes. “We are taking Allison to the Driftwood Theatre,” Mom said. “To see
King Lear
. Sure you don’t want to come along?”

I shook my head. “Too tired.”

“
The weight of this sad time we must obey
,” Dad said. “
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say
.”

Allison came out of her room as Dad was reciting the lines from the play. She rolled her eyes and, just for a moment, she looked like her old self.

“We will be back in two hours,” Mom told me. “Keep the door locked.”

As I dropped my backpack on the living room couch, I noticed the computer monitor glowing in the corner. I stared at Allison’s Barbie screen saver. At another time, I may have felt touched that this screen saver had remained her favourite through all of her different phases. Valley Girl. Skater Girl. Goth. Head-scarf Girl. But I was in a different mood. When I sat at the computer desk, I noticed that she had left her Facebook and e-mail accounts open.

What I did next was something I never would have done if I had thought it through. It was one of those acts a person commits because the chance will vanish swiftly. It reminded me of the thin, feathery thrill I felt during our hidden treasure hunts in primary school.

And I felt this thrill as I created a new e-mail account; as I pasted all of Allison’s contacts — there must have been more than fifty — into a viral e-mail; as I wrote that unbelievably nasty thing about “Sid who hangs out at Sip and Sup.” But just as quickly, the excitement began to fade. I pressed Send before I could change my mind, and then I deleted the new e-mail account.

The next morning I tried to convince myself that those who received the e-mail would ignore it as childish and silly. In any case, nothing could be traced back to me because I had deleted the account.

Such was my mental state that I pretended I would never, ever write such a horrible e-mail. Surely, sending this message was just my fantasy of revenge. I tried to chase away the thought that what I had written might even be true.

Yet that evening I got a clue that I had really done something big. Even though the loafers came to their usual spot, Sid did not turn up. Midway through my shift, the woman with the little girl came, and she talked to the group for a
while. Although she remained there for close to fifteen minutes, none of the loafers ever looked up at her. I think they were glad when she left. They moved closer to each other and seemed to be whispering.

I didn’t see the loafers again until Friday. That day, a police car pulled up, and a pretty female officer walked over to them. The officer did most of the talking. Even though she got into her car after just three or four minutes, the conversation had seemed never-ending to me.

All sorts of questions ran through my mind. What was she asking them? What did they tell her? But the question that stuck throughout that night was: could the e-mail be traced back to me? Deep down, I knew the officer’s visit was connected to what I had written about Sid.

I tossed and turned almost all that night. Each time the single sentence tried to wriggle into my head, I made myself think of something else. I tried to think of how happy I had been in Fredericton. The students at my school there thought my brown face meant that I was Native. I wished I could still pretend to be someone else. Anyone who could not be connected with bombs
and secret plots. But, I thought, it’s too late now. I had dug a deep hole and jumped straight into it.

I suffered day and night, but soon this worry was replaced by another. Although the loafers did not show up the next week, the woman with the girl did. She stayed by the usual table even after my shift was over, holding her child and staring into the distance.

One evening there was a snowstorm. The snow brightened up the street so much that I could clearly see everyone hurrying to their homes. I could see the cars driving by slowly. And I could see the woman sitting with her child as if she was stuck there and needed someone to pull her away. The little girl tried to do that once. She couldn’t make her mother move, so she sat at the end of the bench with her small arms folded against her chest. The large, twirling snowflakes looked to me like bleached cockroaches crowding the child. This scene felt like my punishment, yet I couldn’t look away. I got annoyed with myself because I was so warm and comfortable in the coffee shop.

I walked over to Mr. Chum and told him, “The little girl outside seems to be freezing.”

He looked up from his newspaper. “You ask her to come inside.”

I couldn’t tell from his flat voice whether he was asking a question or not. Still, I leaned the mop against the counter and walked down the steps. “Do you want to come inside? It’s really cold out here.”

The woman did not answer, but the girl looked up at me. Her cheeks were completely red. “Mama?” She tugged at her mother’s coat.

I stood there for a minute or so, waiting for the mother to say something, and when she did not, I returned to the coffee shop. I began to wipe the tables, but I kept my head down so I wouldn’t see the mother and her child freezing outside.

Shortly before the end of my shift, I heard Mr. Chum say, “Rittle baby fleezing. Hey, Tommy. Chocoritt for baby.” He held up a cup.