The Amazing Absorbing Boy (27 page)

He left before I could ask him about a typical Canadian.

He came every weekend so when he returned
Vendetta
and borrowed
The Parallax View
I decided to pretend more interest in his federation business. That was a mistake.

He told me, “You’ve been thinking, Samuel. That’s a good sign. I think you’ve just booked a place in the commune.”

“Which commune?”

“The one I am forming, silly.” He pointed to his scooter. “And believe it or not, that is the key.”

“Really?” I think this was my most common word in our conversation.

“Yes, really. Do you want to know how it’s the key?” His little eyes seemed soft and watery behind his glasses. “You have to promise not to tell a soul about this. It’s payback time.”

“But for what?”

“You haven’t been listening to me, Samuel. For the false reports, losing my job and my entire pension, my divorce, garnishing my wages, the accidents, the insurance guys. Should I also mention the cabal?”

“What’s a cabal?” It sounded like a tiny exit at the end of a long tunnel.

“Do you see that asshole with a briefcase outside? Well, he’s part of it. Everyone in that building across the street
too. And the one next to it.” I noticed his finger pointing to building after building. I wanted to ask if everybody in Toronto with a briefcase was in his cabal but he seemed too angry then. I remembered he had said once that dreams couldn’t find a place to grow in the city because there was too much concrete. “I hold all of them responsible for my present condition.” He got on his scooter and gazed up at me. “The federation of fucking fowls.”

He went on for another twenty minutes; and during that week whenever I spotted anybody with a briefcase and a suit, I thought of his cabal. The journalists who descended on Regent Park. The two politicians who collected a list of petitions. Even the little group formed to fight the relocation. I felt that their leader was a huge bald-headed man with pinstriped clothes and shining shoes. Someone like Kingpin from
Daredevil
.

When next I saw Danton he was on foot but his glasses had been replaced by dark shades and he was limping on a walking stick. I was about to open the store for the day and did not recognize him until he pushed his stick through the half-open door. “Trying to ignore me, Samuel?”

“I didn’t make you out with your shades and stick.”

“I didn’t make you out.” He laughed and pulled back his ponytail tight. “That’s good though. It means it’s working.”

“Doing some undercover work?” I asked him lightly.

“You give me too much credit.” He pushed a finger behind one of the black lenses and rubbed. I could hear his eyelids clacking. “It’s my eyes. They are developing holes.”

I felt I should challenge him. “Take off your glasses and let me see.”

His little smile got stale all of a sudden. “You can’t see them, silly. They are not visible to anyone but myself.”

“So you see these holes from the inside then?”

“Exactly. There’s about five in all.”

“It sound painful.”

“Well, Samuel, I am used to that. But it’s more inconvenient than painful. For instance, I might be looking at that row of movies and completely miss the one I’m searching for.”

“That happens to me sometimes.”

“This morning a cyclist almost ran me over. He was in my blind spot.”

Now I don’t want to sound heartless or anything but Danton had told me so many bad-luck stories, this new one just rubbed off me. “You think the cyclist might be from the cabal?”

He stared at me from behind his shades before he said, “That’s good. Very good. You are beginning to understand the matrix. Can I trust you with something? Don’t tell anyone, but I think they are on to me.”

“The fowl federation?”

“You know of them?”

“You told me about a dozen times.”

“Yes, I may have. I think the holes are spreading upwards. I seem to have these memory lapses.” He took a deep breath. “Time is running out, Samuel. I have to move fast. I need all the help I can get.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Keep your eyes open. Someone wants something from me.”

Me too! But it was too late, he had already left.

I think it was then that I noticed this man wearing a brown plaid hat. He was drinking a Tim Horton’s coffee and the minute Danton pulled off, he did the same, slowing down every time Danton stalled, speeding up whenever Danton quickened his pace.

I too had to move fast: it was just two weeks before Christmas and Uncle Boysie’s arrival. Things were picking up in Regent Park also, as notices of community meetings were daily stuck on the lamp poles. And every night as a rule my father asked me if Uncle Boysie was still coming or had changed his mind. The week before the end of the semester I got an airmail from the mailbox downstairs and when I gave it to my father he seemed relieved to read that Uncle Boysie intended to come on New Year’s Day instead of Christmas because “the flights cheaper as nobody does want to fly on that day.”

The flight postponement was a reprieve but Uncle Boysie’s question about typical Canadians lingered in my mind. Auntie Umbrella had asked the same question and when I babbled on about albinos she didn’t seem satisfied. I couldn’t be blamed then as I was sort of green, but now, nine months later, I felt I should be more informed. I couldn’t once again bring up the topic in the class so I looked for clues on the streets and in the newspapers. In the
Sun
, a whole batch of journalists was complaining that “Christmas was under threat”
but all they mentioned was a couple of people refusing to sing carols and say, “Merry Christmas.” I decided these reporters were like the old-timers from Coffee Time, Roy and the others who were always grumbling about how things were changing and making up their own stories to prove this.

Soon after my first visit to downtown Toronto I had watched everyone walking all apart and wondered if they belonged to different clubs that met on weekends, where they would throw off their quietness and mingle to make clubby jokes. I had to laugh at the notion, just a couple months earlier, that I would always be an outcast here until I managed to join one of these groups. I had invented all types of nonsense clubs and pretended that I had managed to scam my way to an invitation.

I now decided to return to the library and suffer myself through one of the downstairs seminars. After two useless seminars on architecture and writing (during which a short man with snarling whiskers declared that “The novel is dead, stabbed through the heart by brittle coquettish munchkins”) I lucked upon a meeting discussing diversity. The speaker, whose name was Mr. Pelicano—he was thin and lanky and the complete opposite of a pelican—began by building a house. He talked about grouts and trowels and tiles and single-colour buckets. When he was finished he said proudly, “There you have it. A perfect mosaic.” He never mentioned who this builder was, gazing at his materializing house.

The next day Danton came to the video store with his right arm and his left foot heavily bandaged. “I hope you are
keeping watch,” he said, placing on the counter his three films:
Blow Out. Winter Kills. Three Days of the Condor
.

“What happened, man. You look like you returned from a war.”

“Samuel, you crack me up.” Then he got more serious. “You see that gentleman before the coffee shop? The insurance guy?” He glanced at the Tim Horton’s man who was tracking him. “I don’t pay him any attention. Do you know why? Because he is not the enemy. He is not even a foot soldier. The generals are on the top floors of all the buildings you pass every day. That gentleman, Samuel, is just a pawn.”

“A pawn for who?”

“For the generals.”

“Which generals, exactly?”

“The ones on the top floors, silly.”

“The federation of fowls?”

“Did I mention them to you? Anyways, I may have to take a little break. Lay low for a while.”

“Are you going to Owen Sound?”

He placed a finger against his lips. “Not so loud. There are spies everywhere. I think Schmidlap used to be in the SS. Spent some time in Argentina before he came here. Can I tell you a secret?” He did not wait for a reply. “I am working on a movie too. It’s set in the future. Everyone is dying from some mysterious ailment. All the scientists are stumped. Everyone but for this—” he leaned over and whispered “—this counterinsurgent. He discovered it was because technology had allowed everyone to complete their tasks faster. You know the rest.”

“Not really.”

“C’mon, Samuel. Attention spans diminished. Minds grew conditioned to more abbreviated tasks. It was only a short time before the body caught up. You understand? The counter-insurgent was mocked for this view and so, single-handedly, he set about destroying computers. He sabotaged trains and elevators and sports cars and soon he set his sights on the federation of fowls. It was a grand battle.” He chuckled. And I thought of never-ending comic book explosions with thousands of vowels.

I didn’t get the opportunity to ask Danton about a typical Canadian because he never returned to Queen Bee. But on the day my classes ended, a week before Christmas, I was sitting on a bench not too far from the CBC building. On a nearby bench there were two men from Afghanistan. I was listening to their manner of clipping and hardening their words as if placing a little shield around each sentence. One of the men, who was tall and resembled my mother’s Bollywood actors, was listening quietly to his friend while staring at two dead birds not too far from the couple. Perhaps like me he was wondering if some animal, maybe a sewer rat, had dragged them here. Just then there was a little thud and a bird landed on the same spot. The tall Afghan looked up at a glass tower and his friend went to the bird. He scooped it up and held it in his open palm like an offering. He walked away with the bird in his hand, his friend trailing him.

I sat there for another fifteen or twenty minutes, as it was not too cold that day. Flurries were drifting down in
merry little spirals. Everyone was walking quickly, perhaps to put up their Christmas decorations or visit family or whatever Canadians did in preparation for Christmas. I thought of all the people I had met in my ten months here. The coffee-shop old-timers. The chimera. Barbarossa. Danton. The seminar speakers. The Regent Park crowd. My father. All the worriers.

I got up. By the time I got to Regent Park I felt I had an answer for my uncle. A typical Canadian—or at least those I had met—was someone who fussed all the time. About everything. Toronto was getting too modern and ugly. Toronto was stuck in the past. Too many immigrants. Too few. Foreign people were living all by themselves. Foreign people were walking bold-bold in places that shouldn’t concern them. Too many American shows. Too few. Too much hockey violence. Too little. Too hot. Too cold.

When I entered our apartment I saw my father hunched up before the television, worried and frightened like anything. I wondered what was going through his mind. From his posture I felt he might be repeating,
Trapped! Trapped!
Not too long ago, I felt close to hating him—now I just felt sorry for him.

M
aybe I was becoming a regular Canadian, because once school was closed and I
limed
around Regent Park, I too began to worry. It could be because I was in such close and constant quarters with my father; and worse, observing each day different groups fretting about the end of the neighbourhood they had lived in most of their lives. This was surprising, as I had never thought of Regent Park as a community, maybe because living with my father encouraged me to feel it was a place to escape from. Once I heard the Creole woman, who had given me the sheet about refugees, saying, “Just imagine that I have to start over again at my age. With strangers on all sides. That is nastiness. Real nastiness. But God don’t sleep.” She had shouted, “You hear that, Samuel? The man upstairs don’t ever sleep.” She sounded a bit like Auntie Umbrella.

I was also worried about the preparatory course. What if I failed? Maybe I had antagonized the teacher with my silly questions and not concentrating enough on agreeable aspects of the city. I had tried to be positive on the ISU essay I submitted on the last day of class. We had to write three pages on our favourite season and I chose fall because of all the shim-mery comic-book colours: a dazzling red dash here, a splash of yellow there, a sparkle of orange peeping out like Mayaro fireflies. In Mayaro, mostly everything was green. Here the fall colours seemed wizardly and unreal. I included all of this in my essay, and three days before Christmas, when I went to Centennial to collect my grades I was worried like anything.

I got an A minus for the essay, the highest mark I had received in my entire life. I met Javier in the office and he told me he got the same grade (though he had written of spring as a time of renewal). We walked together to the loop and he asked if I had decided on my regular college course. I told him I had not, but it was exciting to have reached the stage where I could be asked such a question. He said he planned to sign up for a diploma in Police Foundations. I thought of his limp but said nothing. Just before his bus arrived, he once again invited me to his grandmother’s place.