The Amazing Absorbing Boy (18 page)

“Canella?” I turned to face her.

“It’s Ginny. And you?”

“Kelvin Raspail.” I saw her pretty broad mouth opening a bit before she turned and walked away, her coat swirling.

“A friend?” The library man had a book clasped against his chest.

“Maybe. I was waiting for your shift to finish.”

“Come.” I followed him to a corner table and when he sat, I did the same.

After a minute or so of silence I asked him, “What’s up?”

He spent another minute passing his tongue over his thick lower lip before he said, “One feels sometimes like a chimera.” It was an interesting comic book word and I tried to picture him with horns and scales. It was surprisingly easy. “It may be difficult to conceive but there was a time when I actually enjoyed my work. This place was my home.”

“Is that why you are leaving?”

He shook his head. “Everything has changed. Now the entire staff is beholden to lists. Horrible memoirs bursting with frivolous grief. I feel sometimes as if I am a custodian of misery. But to answer your question, I am leaving because I have been pushed out.”

“By who?”

“By my advancing years. In two weeks, I will have reached my retirement age. There is just one regret. Just one.” He didn’t seem willing to continue but I just had to ask. When I did, he brought up his hands, made his triangle, and peered through. “I began a poem on August sixteenth, 1984. It was my first day at the library.”

“It must be very long.”

“It’s two lines.” I would have laughed if he wasn’t so serious. “The first line is ‘The snow piffles.’ The second line, written the following year, is ‘Like orphaned kittens.’ For twenty-three years, I have been searching for the third line. It’s inconsequential now.” His triangle collapsed and he looked down at the table. “One had reached an impasse, you see.” He got up suddenly and leaned across the table as if he was about to make a speech. I saw him looking through the window at the people walking along Bloor Street. “One could no longer be inspired. The magic …” He sat once more.

Magic? I wasn’t going to let him stop here. But what he said, pausing to stare at the table, was the last thing from magic. He said that his inspiration had dried up because his poem was supposed to capture the city but each time he had nailed the place, some change or the other made his line irrelevant. “One was always too late, you see. Not unlike a guest who had arrived at a dinner after the festivities, gazing at the drawn curtain and the darkened house.” Then he said something real unusual. “I have been watching you ever since you first entered this place. Chatting with the jewellery girl, taking the elevators to all the floors, sitting uneasily in the seminars, hiding in a corner to read your book, gazing at the street beneath, writing the letter to your uncle.” He went on with some more observations that got me real uncomfortable, as I had no idea I was under this kind of surveillance. But his little speech seemed to have the opposite effect on him as with each new observation his voice got livelier. The way he was
pronouncing his words made me think of plump fishes that had jumped from an aquarium to land on the hard tile. I even told him that. He smiled broadly, which made him look like his chimera creature.

The following Saturday I hurried out of the Bloor and Yonge station and the minute I got to the library I ran up the stairs. I searched from floor to floor until I eventually walked up to a woman at the desk. I didn’t know the chimera’s name so I described him as honestly as I could. The woman frowned a bit as if she didn’t like him. Eventually she told me that he had retired.

I took the stairs to the seminar on the first floor: perhaps he would soon return to clear up his desk or take home some personal effects or something. The speaker before the podium was a young man with a real stylish haircut. He was saying, “If we want to capitalize our assets we need to actionize in a robust manner.” I gazed around at the group of oldish Philippine and Somalian people glancing at each other rather than focusing on the speaker. “We must think outside the box,” he said as he connected his laptop to a machine. Words appeared on a screen behind him. He tapped the heading
Incentivizing Your Resumé
. The words scrolled up and he tapped other words:
ballpark figure, winningest
, and a series of abbreviations. When the man next to me began to snore, I got out the letter I had received the previous day and pretended I was reading it to the chimera.

I imagined the chimera listening to me and saying something about “One should do this” or “One should do that.” Just like his last words to me as he was talking about his poem and this magic business: Presumptuousness and innocence must be poured in equal parts into the same container. It is only then that one can discover magic. The way he went on it had seemed that magic for him was not spells and frogs and Ra’s al Ghul, but a new way of looking at some old thing.

I
continued going to the library on weekends, collecting booklets and trying to understand this whole college system. In Trinidad, high schools were called colleges but it seemed that here they were almost like universities. That almost made me put the whole picture out of my mind, especially when I realized that I also had to do preparatory courses just to qualify for acceptance. One Sunday, a shaved-head black boy showed me how to use the computer to get more information. While he was scrolling through the different sites I asked him if he was from Regent Park and he asked why I would conclude that. I felt he might be displeased by my explanation so I said someone like him was walking up the stairs a couple weeks earlier. He seemed to believe the lie and mentioned he was from the Beaches and that he felt Regent Park was a rathole.

He himself was in a college doing some cooking course.
He had dropped out of high school after his parents split up and his mother moved briefly to a neighbourhood called Malvern. After a year of fooling around he signed up with a programme run by the Scarborough School Board that fast-tracked him to a high school diploma. It was at some alternative centre at the Centennial College campus. He boasted a bit of his cooking classes. I mentioned that in Trinidad, there were only girls in the home economic class, and that got him more offended than my Regent Park mistake. After he left I felt I should have kept my mouth shut, as he was quite helpful. I tried to picture myself in the kitchen of a Canadian restaurant; however, that place was too unfamiliar so I shifted first to a Mayaro bakery where I was punching balls of flour, and then in Rio Claro where I was a
doubles
vendor slapping
channa
into a
barra
. Vendors in Trinidad were usually fat and sweaty and every week someone claimed they had found a rotten tooth or a couple pubic hairs, which we called
jhat
, in some purchased food. I decided to write off that profession.

In any case there were so many other interesting courses. Design and fashion and film and computer stuff and everything under the sun. It was exciting just to read about them. Once I saw a course on dentistry and remembered something so vague I couldn’t be sure if it was just a memory. It must have been a year or so before my father left Mayaro for good and in my recollection he was bent over a tray with some white powder. Next to the tray was a
flambeau
shining on a skull. There may have been knives and icepicks on the table too. He was making a set of teeth and not once did he quarrel with me.

The next day I wished he was still as peaceful because I discovered that for me to be admitted to the college I needed him to sign my admission form, as I was still a minor. This was a funny word. I had never considered myself a minor in any way. A few weeks earlier, a group of Sri Lankan men in the laundry room of our building were talking about minorities. One of the men, a real dark fella with jacket and tie was saying that everybody pushed them to the side and yet complained because they didn’t mingle. After that they broke into their own language talking real fast and rolling their tongues. I guess they were chatting about a zoo as another fella mentioned something about a tiger.

Anyways back to my own problem. For close to two weeks I tried to think of some way to approach my father. Should I suggest that we move to a two-bedroom apartment using a portion of Uncle Boysie’s money? However, I didn’t know how he would react to the news that money had been sent to me. Perhaps I could redecorate the apartment or buy him some present like teeth-making equipment. Other ideas came but I had to throw them out them one after the other.

At work I told Paul that a friend was worried as his visitor’s visa was up. He said that half the taxi drivers were in the same position and they regularly used each other’s identity papers and driving permits. Same with the Chinese people in Markham. He made it sound like an exciting game, and after that conversation I pretended I was part of a shadowy group, like Professor Xavier’s mutants, that only came out at nights. This fantasy disappeared by the time I got home.

Once Uncle Boysie had told me that the fella upstairs knew exactly how much weight we could carry on our shoulders and he always increased and lightened the burden to suit. I think maybe he forgot about the rules in my case because the same time I was worrying about my status I learned that I would be laid off from the gas station at the end of the month. For a while I suspected that Paul had reported my question about visitor’s visas to the boss but Paul seemed genuinely sad to see me leave. On my last day he took off a beaded necklace and held it before me. He said it had been left by the Vikings at Pistolet Bay (which I guessed was somewhere in Newfoundland) and that it would bring me good luck.

That night I decided to test its powers on my father.

This is how it went. First he said that every day he was discovering that sending for me was a big mistake, then he shifted to some trap he felt I was laying for him and finally he shouted, “You start back with this status nonsense again? You think anybody was rushing to help me when I come to this place? Laying out the red carpet? If is kissmeass school you wanted to go to, then why the hell you didn’t stay in Trinidad? You know anything about the rules and regulations here? I don’t know why I ever listen to that fat, lazy uncle of yours,” he shouted. “I wring my ears. I wring it a thousand times!”

While he was wringing his ears I was stroking my necklace, which got him in a worse mood. “Dressing up like a damn rasta
locho
.”

I had to say something. I told him, “Is no damn rasta jewellery. Is a damn charm!” I don’t know if it was because
I had raised my voice to him for the first time or because he was afraid of magic, but he backed away and I felt for just a second or so his eyes went blank as if he didn’t know what to say.

By the end of the week I felt it was fear. It was a rainy evening and I was returning from the library when I saw him talking to a woman outside our building. He was wearing a yellow raincoat and was shifting from one leg to the other as if he was impatient to get out from the rain but the woman, who had no coat and was completely drenched, didn’t look as if she was in a hurry. She had frizzled red hair like a troll and high heel shoes that made her legs look even stumpier. The next day when I returned from the library I saw her in our apartment.

She and my father were sitting on opposite ends of the kitchen table and between them was some sort of Chinese checkers board but instead of marbles there were pointed little crystals in the holes. The woman was stroking the crystals and saying “Woo woo” like a mother petting a baby. She kept her eyes closed as I walked to the balcony but I caught a glimpse of my father frowning as if I had broken the spell or trance or whatever they were doing. I remained on the balcony for maybe fifteen minutes peeking at them. When they both left, I walked into the kitchen and caught a whiff of a strong smell like ground-up garlic and clove.

The next day it was the same but instead of a Chinese checkers board, on the table was a row of little vials, each a different colour. From the balcony I saw the woman picking up some of the vials and puffing out her cheeks as she blew
over the fridge and stove and cupboard. My first thought was that she was getting rid of the cockroaches and rats my father often complained about but then she began her wailing sound again. From the balcony I heard her murmuring as she sprinkled: “We must fumigate the soul. We must bleach the spirits. We must scrub the mind.” I felt maybe she had been a cleaning lady before she picked up this hocus-pocus business. After they had left together, I noticed a vial on the table. I shook it a bit and almost dropped it—I don’t think I had ever smelled anything nastier. It reeked of cat shit and oil and ginger. I put it back on the table just as my father returned. He glanced at me suspiciously for a couple seconds before he said, “You trying to cancel out the blasted thing or what?”