The Amazing Absorbing Boy (26 page)

“Wait. You hook it up.”

While I was attaching the cables, he stroked his orange cat and said softly, “Aah, Igor. Today you get a special gift.” He seemed especially happy when the movie appeared on the screen and he sat forward on the couch saying to Igor, “It’s real, buddy. It’s real.” The only time he slumped back was when he heard the upstairs door closing and footsteps creaking on the floor. He glanced at his cat and said something in Filipino to the animal. After ten minutes or so, he told me, “They don’t hear me any more.”

“Who?”

“Entire pamily. But mostly grandson.”

“Because you are busy with your interesting movies?”

He didn’t like this light remark one bit. He got up from the couch and walked over to the table and fiddled with an old lamp that flickered before it settled into a buzzing half-glow. “For fifty-six years I live happy in Manila. One by one, all my children disappear to Canada and Australia and Singapore.
Years pass. Wipe die. Then I get a letter from Angela, my daughter here. Come up, she say. This place is design for retire people. Lakes and parks and libraries and no mugging. So I come.” He pulled a chair and sat next to me. The dim light traced and deepened his wrinkles. He was squinting as if the lamp was bothering his eyes. “Pipteen years ago. Pipteen.”

“It don’t sound so bad.”

He tapped the base of the lamp to hush its buzzing. “Angela and husband Mario were busy all the time but I had two grandson to care. I take them to school and in evenings, we play games and listen to songs and laugh-laugh until parents came in nights. I say to myself, ‘Toktok, in truth the letters don’t lie.’” As he spoke, I noticed Mr. Magboo’s accent was becoming stronger and stronger. He got up.

“What happened?”

“They grow up, buddy.” He raised his hand from his waist to his shoulder then above his head. “No use for this old man again. Nobody want to call me by my Toktok nickname again. They even give me new Canadian name por when I pick up children from school. Costco.”

I was disappointed. “Toktok is not your real name?”

“In Manila ebbybody have nickname. I don’t lie. It’s real.” He laughed, which was the saddest thing about the conversation. “Now I become a low-rate creepy-crawly swampy monster.”

When I left Mr. Magboo I worried I had awakened his deep resentment about his family. He had been happy just viewing his movies. The film we had viewed had a scene of a
mummy strangling an entire family and I had this horrible image of Mr. Magboo climbing up the stairs with his bandages trailing, and strangling his family who had ignored him once his usefulness was over. In most of the B movies it was often an innocent act that led to the awakening of the creature.

After the next class at Centennial, I mentioned this fear to Javier and he just laughed. He told me old people played with a different set of rules and once you understood these rules, everything was usually okay. I felt he was talking of his grandmother. Maybe she was not as pleasant as his essay depicted. Before the bus arrived, he invited me once again to his home.

But Javier was right. That weekend Mr Magboo walked in with a list of movies written in a
crapo
-foot handwriting. “Now I look at all these mobies in DBD.” His tiredness was completely gone. “And this you send to mobie people.” He brought out a clutch of rolled-up papers from his coat pocket.

“What are those?”

“All the stories I make. For mobie people. You post for me.”

“But I don’t know the producers—”

“You get it from case.” He gave me a twenty-dollar bill. “For stamp.”

“Look, I just work in a video store. That is all.” I returned the money.

“You not send?”

“I am just a video clerk,” I pleaded.

He became angry. I saw his eyebrows disappearing behind his glasses. He said the world was filled with stupid,
ungrateful young people. He wished a sabre-tooth or a volcano god could be let loose on all of us. His hands were trembling as he left with his movies and his money. But he returned on Wednesday with the rolled up scripts, the money, and the complaints about young people. Midway through his accusations I decided to take the money and return it when he was in a better mood. I would think of some excuse later. He seemed happy and wondered whether they might get Boris Karloff or Humphrey Bogart to play the lead roles.

“These people are in a coffin somewhere,” I told him.

“Exactly so.”

I decided to not argue.

He brought more scripts during his subsequent visit and I felt guilty for placing the entire bunch in Mr. Schmidlap’s drawer. My guilt increased as he chatted happily about the proposed movies and their long dead actors and enquired why he had not yet received any replies. I decided to use his money to help pay off Mr Schmidlap for the DVD player but each time he visited my guilt increased. One weekend while I was looking at sweaters in the Donation Centre, I saw a red cape hanging on the wall. This was the week after Hallowe’en and I got the cape for just three dollars. When I gave it to Mr. Magboo during his next visit, he tried it on immediately and flashed a smile like the Count on Sesame Street. A woman in the store pulled her son closer. Mr. Magboo left with the cape hanging from his neck. The next week he arrived with the cape flowing after him. I didn’t know what to say. At least it suited him.

When one week then two passed with no visit from Mr. Magboo, I pictured him wandering around some park with his cape blowing behind him and terrified children running away and bawling. Maybe his family had placed him in some home for old, crazy people. I tried to reassure myself that it was only an old man wearing a cape. Who on the bus or the subway will notice? The answer was everybody. Especially the police. I prepared myself for a visit to his home.

I never visited because Mr. Magboo appeared one Saturday with his cape and a new hat. Something else was new and as he got closer, I saw it was the obviously fake Fu Manchu moustache, so lopsided he seemed to be scowling and grinning at the same time. He also had a cane that he used to stylishly adjust his hat. I noted his broad smile and decided he had gone completely mad. “I haven’t seen you for two weeks,” I managed to say.

“Because I become busy. Berry busy, buddy.” I wondered whether his daughter had a new baby. “When you give me cape, I went straight to CBC to complain about movies they steal.”

“With the cape?”

“I think it might have magic powers. Because just outside the building a man say to me, ‘Hurry up. We going shoot soon.’ So I pollow other men with tight pants and bows-arrows.”

“You were in a movie?”

“Many, buddy. They call me … what is the word?” He thought for a while. “Something like leffobers.”

“Extras? Is that it?” I might have sounded a bit excited.

He leaned closer to me and whispered, “It’s real, buddy. You better believe it.” I think this was his extra voice. He was about to leave the shop when he hesitated and said, “Parewell, priend.” Outside, he swirled his cape and vanished into the crowd. I never saw him again.

Or rather, I never saw him in real again, for I was sure that in a couple television shows I spotted him running away from explosions and bears, and once, sleeping inside a purple pod.

During the first week of December, with barely a month left for the completion of my preparatory course, I received a letter from Uncle Boysie. He said he intended to spend Christmas in Canada and itemized some intended sights that would not have been out of place in Mr. Magboo’s movies. He wanted to see cats frozen on trees and against windows, and playful Eskimos, and André the Giant battling midgets. Most worrisome, he instructed me to describe for him immediately after his arrival, “a regular Canadian” so he would be able to fit in.

W
hen I showed my father Uncle Boysie’s letter he began to curse straightaway. “Why the bitch coming here for? Anybody invite him?” He glanced at me suspiciously before he continued. “He lie if he feel this is
mash-up
Mayaro with
commess
and
bacchanal
on all sides. Regular Canadian, my ass.” It was only when I ventured that he might be coming to straighten out the house business that my father cooled down a little. “Eh? You think so? But he could have done that right in Mayaro,” he said in a weak and indecisive voice. I could see that he was conflicted (to use Mrs. Dragan’s word for second-generation immigrants.)

I turned to her for an answer to Uncle Boysie’s question. We were discussing multiculturalism—a favourite topic of hers—when I asked, “Miss, how would you describe a typical Canadian?” I saw her struggling and immediately regretted the question. She was sly though as she tried to turn the table.
“You are originally from Trinidad, not so? How would you describe a typical Trinidadian?”

I recalled Uncle Boysie’s gripes. “Someone who likes
bacchanal
and carnival.”

“I see. Is there a typical Latin American?” She walked to the back of the class.

Javier answered. Stories and a history of struggle.

She turned to other places and students, most likely from these spots, provided answers. Poetry and Guinness. Caste divisions and “sparkling poverty.” Tea, crumpets and a dry sense of humour. Inventiveness and patriotism. I believe some of these normally quiet students felt it was a game as they went on and on. The teacher didn’t play though and when she abruptly moved on to another topic I decided that there was no such creature as a regular Canadian. I would have to tell Uncle Boysie that.

Nevertheless, I thought of my uncle’s question in Mr. Schmidlap’s video store. I had to discount the owner first of all because he was too gloomy and he seemed on the verge of expiry. One by one I also dismissed the regular customers. Too porny. Too tame. Too crazy. Too foreign.

Which left one tiny sliver of hope. Danton. His full name was Danton Madrigal and he regularly mentioned Canadian places like Owen Sound—which he called “the elephant’s bottom” because of how it appeared on the map—and Longlac and Haliburton and Bolton. I felt that all these spots were far away so I was surprised when he revealed that he frequently visited his old friends there.

His first appearance in Queen Bee coincided with the flurry of meetings in Regent Park, organized by people worried about where they would be moved, so—just in case—I always listened carefully to his descriptions of places that seemed both strange and interesting. His farmhouses and abandoned copper mines and Indian reservations and bundles of rivers. It was only later that I began to also notice his appearance, the tiny eyes peeping from behind round wire glasses and the few grains of hair on his head pulled into a tight ponytail. His round face reminded me of parakeets from Trinidad but I would never mention this to him, because first of all, he never gave me a chance to put in a word and secondly, I could never tell what was going through his mind. In the beginning, it was difficult to catch up with him because he was always jumping from topic to topic. Sometimes he would be talking about a movie explosion and then switch to some accident in Owen Sound. He had many accidents with motorbikes and boats and these little snow-cars. These accidents never went well for him because he talked about the insurance companies and police as if they were movie crooks.

The weekend after I asked Mrs. Dragan about typical Canadians he came into the shop riding one of these scooter chairs used by old people. I thought he had another accident but the minute he entered, he parked his chair next to the row of science fiction movies and jumped right off. “What do you think?” he asked me. “Like my new car?”

“What happened?”

“What happened, my friend, is that I got tired of walking.” He laughed in his scratchy way and I spotted Mr. Schmidlap awakening from his nap in his corner table.

“I thought you had another accident.”

“Samuel, you crack me up.” He usually said that whenever I asked a question he found, for whatever reason, funny. He leaned across the counter toward me. “Don’t tell anyone but it’s payback time.”

I tried to recall his long list of enemies. Doctors, lawyers, insurance people, police, and more mysteriously, a shadowy group he believed was controlling everything from electricity to water. He hinted the group was based inside one of the big buildings on Bay Street. He called them “the federation of fowls” and he once mentioned he had rigged up his computer to tap into their network. When I mentioned that conversation to Javier, he said that Danton belonged to a special kind of mad men who were dangerous because they didn’t know they were crazy.

“Want to go for a spin? C’mon, it’s faster than most bikes.” This was another thing about Danton: I never knew when he was joking or not. He walked across to the science fiction aisle and returned a couple minutes later with a movie named
Vendetta
. “Seen it about five times,” he told me.

“It that good?”

“It that good?” He imitated my accent and laughed. “Yes, Samuel. It could be my life story.” As usual he shifted to the fowl federation before he got going on another of his favourite topics: how nice things were in the sixties with everybody
singing and dancing as if the
fête
wouldn’t end. He went on about these people like Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendrix, as if he knew them personally before he said suddenly, “I think the scooter has made me too mellow. This is very dangerous.”