The Amazing Absorbing Boy (32 page)

“So you going back?”

“Going back, Samuel? Go back to what? My life here.”

In the following days I thought of what she had said. She was right about the coldness though. January went away slowly and in February the cold seemed newborn and frisky, as if had not been hanging around for the last three months. In Trinidad, I believed winter lasted only one month and that it went away with the Christmas carols, but every week the days got shorter, the nights falling at the same time that the fishermen in Mayaro were preparing for their last haul and the
dasheen
planters were still toiling in their fields. It was so still on some evenings, with no breeze ruffling the trees or shovelling up dust from the road, I felt that an invisible ray had frozen everything in place.

It seemed as if I had spent far more than a year in Canada, maybe because so much had happened ever since I landed in my father’s apartment. Things were tough in the beginning, really tough, but I really had to count myself as lucky. Uncle Boysie’s money had been granted at the correct time, as was his agreement with my father that led to me being sponsored. According to the Creole lady, “
crapo
would have smoked my pipe” if I wasn’t being sponsored, as it would have been impossible to pay the tuition fees.

Same with the choice of a programme. For months I had bothered my head with courses in baking and electronics and even dentistry but the correct course was right before my eyes. At least when I was in Queen Bee. And so I signed up for a diploma in Communication and Culture, where half of the courses had something or the other to do with films. I knew I had made the correct choice when on the first day of class, a short Chinese man with the neatest moustache in the biggest head I had ever seen wrote his name on the board. Dr. Michael Yee Fang.

Dr. Fang’s course was on internet films and during the first week he showed us more than two dozen five-minute films, some of which he claimed had been shot on cellphones. He said that soon films and books and television shows would have to be shorter because nobody wanted to be tied down to the same thing for too long. Maybe my father was from the future. In any case, this was much better than watching movies from the pit in Liberty cinema in Rio Claro as people there were always shouting at the actors and flicking cigarettes at the screen whenever
a villain appeared. Every month there was a small fire in the cinema. Once when Dr. Fang was carrying on about all these new internet films and streaming videos and compression techniques I remembered Danton’s proposed movie about everyone dying at a young age because their minds had grown accustomed to only handling short tasks. Dr. Fang said this was the age of improvisation and that anyone who could not adapt would be annihilated. It was an interesting comic-book word and for a minute or so I imagined Dr. Doom or Lex Luthor saying it. Dr. Fang, though, spoke in a quiet normal way (except for the word “usually” which he could never pronounce).

Another course was on propaganda. This was taught by a old bald-pated man who was always fanning himself with his lecture notes. His skin was thin and oily and it reminded me of the pale paper with which Mayaro grocery owners wrapped butter and cheese. He wore the same pants and grey coat to every class and his stop-and-start voice alone was enough to send me into a deep sleep. Worse, he gave us extra long reading lists that he expected to be covered for the subsequent class. In Trinidad whenever anyone used the term propaganda it was to express disbelief. People would say, “Nah, man. That is just propaganda,” if they were told that so-and-so wife was fooling around. I tried to make this class interesting by digging up other Trinidadian examples, and sometimes I had to force myself to not smile when I recalled the lies told by Pantamoolie and my other friends at Mayaro Composite.

The most interesting course by far was that on folklore, and not only because it was taught by a pretty lady who wore
only shades of green, and who scattered her fingers across her cheek as she leaned forward on her desk and gazed at us; I liked this course because it was the only one where I had a special knowledge of nonsense superstitions like shape shifting
lagahoos
and ball-of-fire
souyoucants
. The teacher’s name was Miss Latanya Lemptiski and she commanded us to only use her first name. She looked too pretty to be a real professor.

On the third week of her class she wrote
avatar
on the board. I thought she was going to lecture about Hindu gods but instead she licked her finger, flipped through her loose notes and began talking about video games. I felt sort of bad, as this was the first time I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. As some of the other students began to boast about their Playstation games and their own avatars I realized how green I was in this field. I never owned a Playstation or Xbox or the other toys the students spoke about. I began to focus instead on Latanya’s light green blouse with no top button and on her habit of licking her finger whenever she intended to turn a page. Then she mentioned doppelgangers.

The Xbox crowd seemed mystified but she got my attention instantly. I had come across these doppelganger impostors in comic book series like
Crisis on Infinite Earths
and in the Frank Miller
Batman
books and Chris Claremont
X Men
annuals. Nearly every superhero had his or her own doppelganger. Superman had Bizarro, Wolverine had Sabretooth, Spider-Man had Venom and the Justice League had an entire alternate universe. I was disappointed when that class came to an end.

While I was walking to the subway I pretended that all these people with their necks pulled into their coats had duplicates running around in a warm beach, and when I got home and spotted my father staring as usual from the balcony I imagined he was creating his own doppelganger that smiled and grew excited as it paused from its inventions to look out of a window at swaying cornbirds’ nests and spindly heliconias. That night I wanted to talk to him of my class so I remained by the kitchen table and when he slid shut the balcony door, rubbed his hands and sat before the television I told him we had studied avatars in class. He seemed puzzled so I repeated the teacher’s statement about shape shifters that could replace a real person so perfectly that no one, not even family, was able to detect it was an imposter. He seemed to be thinking about this but then he leaned forward and turned on the television. MacGyver was making some kind of walkie-talkie with a cordless phone. “That wouldn’t work,” my father said. “You going about it the wrong way. If was me I would have used a nine volt adaptor from the radio. The entire thing will blow up when you plug it in to phone the police.”

The next day at work I phoned Javier but got his grandmother who said something in Spanish. I was about to hang up when I heard another voice on the extension. I said I had called for Javier and during a pause I mentioned our classes together at the Centennial campus.

“Sam? I thought you had abandoned us and gone back to your swampy boy.”

I felt a little tickle in my stomach from hearing Carmen’s musical voice. “Abandon you, my dear? How could I?”

“What?”

“Oh God, sorry. I was looking at a movie poster on the wall.” I felt if I continued I would begin to stammer like Sporty.

“Really? Are you in a cinema?”

“I work in a video store.”

“Cool. Can you get me a movie with Javier—” She began to giggle. “Javier Bardem, the actor, silly.” We chatted for close to half an hour. She told me that her brother was now in Durham College doing his law enforcement course and she was volunteering at Heathcliff Retirement Home where many of the old people had Alzheimer’s just like her grandmother. “It’s so sad. They can’t recognize anyone.” She now believed that the only thing separating adults from children was memories. This was impressive and soon she cheered up and said I should not be “a stranger.” I said I was busy with my college courses but I would definitely call again. I would have liked to chat longer but she had to go to her retirement home.

“Abandon you, my dear.” It was Mr. Schmidlap. I had no idea he had been listening and I couldn’t tell from his face whether he was joking or chastising.

“A friend,” I told him. “Her grandmother has Alzheimer’s.”

He blinked slowly twice and returned to his corner table. Just before we were closing I went over to him and said I would have to leave the job, as I needed to devote more time
to my assignments. He put his hands into his jacket pocket as if we were going to have a long conversation. I mentioned the difficult propaganda course and threw out some names recently mentioned by the professor. Zedong. Rumsfeld. Goebbels. He blinked slowly, one-two-pause, one-two-stop, as if we were communicating in code. To tell the truth I felt sorry for him then and I wondered if old people had a hard time dealing with any upset to their schedule. On Saturday, my last day at work, I brought him a Thor action figure. I got it for only five dollars at Barbarossa’s shop. When I had entered the shop my old boss was telling a young girl with glasses that seemed to be clenching her face that some speed dating centre was four blocks west. I almost walked out of the place as the girl look quite frightened by Barbarossa’s loud voice and big head but he spotted me and said, “Mr. Roti Ramirez, if you come back expecting your old job, the position is taken.” When I told him I was just browsing he turned his attention once more to the nervous girl.

I bought the Thor figure only because there was nothing else in the shop that suited Mr. Schmidlap and when I gave it to him I had no idea if he would be offended by the rust on the cast iron knees and the peeling paint on the face and the missing hammer but he held it and stroked it and turned it this way and that before he placed it on his corner table.

Latanya finally got to the gods in her next folklore class. She said that these old-time religions were packed with shapeshifters. She mentioned Circe and Pan and Anansi from Africa. The interesting thing about these shapeshifters,
according to her, was that they were always up to some sort of mischief, never caring about the consequences. They were quite smart, too, as they had to rely mostly on trickery while battling gods who threw thunderbolts and erupted volcanoes. During her following class she focused on fairy tales I had read in primary school. Who would have imagined that these imps and sprites and wraiths and genies were so important, “altering the balance of power” according to Latanya? She made them seem like the good guys and as she read from her notes I imagined she had a few hidden in her cupboard and a couple pushed under her bed. I was startled when at that exact moment she said that we all had our own shapeshifters.

She gazed at the puzzled students and clarified that every single person had at some time or the other met a shapeshifter. She threw out some names: Shelley and Donne and Goethe, who had bounced up shapeshifters pointing to this or that path. This didn’t help and quite a few hands went up, most likely for clarification. And as she explained I felt that her eyes flickered on me as if she had read my mind and knew my biggest secret by far.

T
he first time I heard of him was from the rumours at Mayaro Composite. A couple of my friends mentioned this boy who had moved with his mother to a house about twenty minutes from ours. The only way to get there was by an access road long abandoned by regular vehicles, and used mostly by hunters returning from the forest and fishermen who sought out the scaly
cascadura
, which liked to live in those swampy areas. It seemed an odd place to live, as all the nasty yellow waste from the coconut-husking factory drained into that corner of the swamp. One of the boys reported that he was the same age as us, about thirteen or so, and we expected him to soon show up at school, and when he did not, the rumours began.

We heard that his mother was a
souyoucant
, who could shed her skin and change into a ball of fire; that his father was an escaped murderer who was hidden away in the house too;
that they had skipped away from Chacachacare, the offshore leper colony; that they were pygmies. When all these interesting stories were exhausted, the class began to speculate on the family’s background. Day by day, the family changed from Portuguese to high-caste Indians to Chinese to mixed race
cocopanyols
and finally to albinos. Once Goose, who was an even bigger liar than Pantamoolie, said the father was an old scaly alligator that visited the mother each night. Then one morning, the class prefect, whose father was a game warden, said that the family name was Loykie. This didn’t help one bit because it was the sort of name that could apply to nearly all the races in Trinidad. Low Kee, Loakie, Lokhi, Loukoue. I preferred Loykie because its pronunciation reminded me of a character from
Tales of Asgard
, found at the end of
Thor
comics. The only student who claimed to have actually seen him was Pantamoolie. He told us that the boy was swinging from vine to vine like Tarzan and each time he hit a tree by mistake he made a screeching sound like a baby dinosaur.