The Amazing Absorbing Boy Read online

  Occasionally, I saw faces that may have been famous, although this was again according to Paul. He told me that the plump smiling man who looked like a baker’s apprentice happily slapping on flour was from a show called City-TV, and the clean-head fella who resembled some of these old royal families from Trinidad almanacs was a top-class CBC man. “The mother corp,” he said as if he was talking about his own mother-in-law. I know it might seem strange but I began to form a picture of Canada from all these people who drove in and out of the gas station. It was Paul who put the idea in my head when he said, “Snapshots, my friend. One hundred little snapshots a day.” He claimed that he had serviced the cars of the prime minister and the mayor and hockey stars with names that reminded me of nibbled-down sandwiches.

  Me, I just concentrated on the people who seemed average, maybe because I could frame-up their apartments and their jobs in the factories and the arguments with their children about new Canadian habits. The people who quarrelled about Canada but were afraid to return to their own countries. The taxi drivers and haulers and families packed inside big old Dodge cars. People who looked as they were always on the run from this or that. People like Dr. Bat.

  I began to pay attention to their clothes and the shape of their cars and the food boxes crumpled in the back seats next to big-eyed children and cardboard containers filled with God knows what. Sometimes they would notice me staring and give me a funny look before they pulled off, and I would see them gazing suspiciously in the rear-view mirrors. One night, almost at the end of my shift, I noticed an old bulky camera in Dr. Bat’s car. He caught me peeking and although he said nothing, when he returned later in the week, I tried to be extra careful with my little spying. While I was filling his tank, he picked up the camera and adjusted some small knobs and polished the lenses with the corner of his coat. He pushed the camera into a black leather bag and dusted the flaps.

  This was the pattern for the next two or three weeks, and to tell the truth, I began to suspect that Dr. Bat was just showing off with his camera. So I was surprised, when one evening, he told me, “It is for quite notable documentary.” I had expected his voice to be small and squeaky but it sounded hollow and flat like if he was rehearsing a speech inside an empty cup.

  “What kind of documentary?”

  “Yes, yes. Quite so. Notable.”

  I decided to leave it at that but during his next visit, when he mentioned once more his documentary business, I repeated my question. This time he reflected a bit before he said, “A complete parade of the jiggery pokeries and hullabaloos.”

  I didn’t know what to say so I remained quiet while he opened his glove compartment and moved around some paper and screwdrivers and little plastic packets. Finally he got out a thick wallet, overflowing with cards and paper peeping out from its flap. He pulled out a card, placed it on the dash, and turned on the interior light. I was able to read his card before he drove off. Dr. Bharanbose Atambee Tulip, exactly as Paul had said. Beneath his name was written “Archivist and Filmmaker,” in small gold-plated, playful letters. I knew for sure he had wanted me to read his card. That same evening I walked over to Paul who was smoking at the back of the wash, and before I could ask him about Dr. Bat, he said, “I see you’ve made a new friend. What he’s up to now?”

  “I think he is making some film or the other.” After a while I added, “He is really a doctor, you know.”

  “Dr. Bat? I doubt it.”

  “But what about the place near India you told me about.”

  Paul threw away his cigarette and pulled out a pair of gloves from his overall pocket. He flapped the gloves before he wriggled his fingers into them. “I think it was a front. He imports spices. Crushed rhino horns and cobra venom and goat pills. Stuff like that.” Maybe Paul had also spotted the plastic packets inside Dr. Bat’s glove compartment. “Not too sure if there are real universities in those places. Not even sure Nepal is real. Too many fancy stories about the place. So he’s making a film, is he?” Paul asked this with a little drag in his voice, like if he was expecting all along that Dr. Bat would make a movie. “What sort of film is it?”

  “Something about jiggery-pokeries.”

  Suddenly this strange word sounded rude and improper and Paul’s eyebrows drooped a bit further which was a sign he was thinking. “Don’t tell anyone, but he is looking for the Buddha.”

  “In Canada?”

  “According to legend he will be found on a rock covered in ice.” He said this in a low voice and I was sure it sprang from a movie. A few minutes later, he came up with a rumour that the fat red taxi driver, who looked like he would one hot day melt right into the seat of his Cutlass, was once a KGB agent whose specialty was toads’ poison. I felt that Paul had made up this thing about crapos just because of the driver’s appearance. This habit of Paul’s must have remained in my mind, because during his next stop at the station, Dr. Bat caught me staring boldfaced at his little ears and his thick black glasses and his pushed-out lower lip. To cover up, I asked him quickly, “So how is the film coming along?”

  He switched off his engine and pulled his bag onto his lap. “I am engaged in a desperate search for Chinooks and such.” I wondered whether this was some strange Nepalese word for China but he added, “It is a notable expedition across Canada, so to say. Serious mapping of landmarks and highlights.”

  Just to make conversation, I asked, “Like National Geographic?”

  “Utter bunkum and pooh-bah with willy-nilly pictures galore!”

  “Eh?” I almost repeated the swearword the little boy had used in the elevator.

  “I am observer and collector of rash views coerced on my people for eons.” I thought of the Watcher from Fantastic Four but Dr. Bat didn’t look the part. “The cloaked-up underbelly of hatched landscape. You follow?” He seemed so stern I nodded. “My observation has told me that we are …”

  He clicked his fingers, trying to come up with the word. After a while I tried to help him, “Special?”

  He shook his head and pointed to the sky. “Other beings.”

  “Like angels?”

  “No such creature in my horoscope. I am a Hindu atheist.” His clicking seemed angrier and louder. Finally he gave up and slid forward on his seat, closer to the window. “Pay attention, please. Many years ago I take train, second-class, from Hyderabad straight to Delhi.”

  “To look for the—?”

  He held up a hand for me to be quiet. “On said junket, I jot copious notes of everything. The stations and rails and government buildings. And I say to myself, ‘Dr. Tulip, it is quite correct to credit British thugs for rails and civil service and bulky laws but the thugs donated even more important bequest.’” He pushed out his lower lip and I noticed his tongue playing with his teeth. “They teach us to do red-letter taxonomies of copious animal, plants, and minerals. You follow? Now we are better than said thugs in classification. Best bookkeepers, best librarians, best scientists, best mathematicians, best accountants, best stamp collectors, best—”

  I felt I had to stop him. “You must be proud of all this.”

  “But what is to be proud about, gas station boy, tell me please? Who knows what Dr. Tulip knows? Rather we are classified for corner stores and taxis and wife-beating and riotous sidesplitting accents. Now, the ranking is more disagreeable than before because sinister avenge plots is affixed to recipe.” He waggled his head as he was complaining and I couldn’t say whether this was a sign of his vexation or gloominess. When the driver waiting behind Dr. Bat popped his horn, he said, “That is why hasty chap behind engage in unrefined insults and verbal body blows.” He drove off waggling and grumbling.

  He continued to come twice a week to refuel his tank and during each visit he would mention some additional information about his expedition. But I soon noticed something strange: he began to sound angrier and angrier as if something was hindering his film. Once he told me, waggling his head one hundred miles a minute, “Everybody require Dr. Tulip to be pic
ture-perfect Indian. ‘Oh, sorry, master, it is my fault one hundred percent. It is my heirloom to be so bunglesome. God wills it. Please punish me, sir. I insist.’” He also switched back and forth from Canada to India, which made it even more difficult to follow him. Once he asked me, “Where did you spring up?”

  “Trinidad. In a little village name Mayaro.”

  He looked relieved. “These whiskery chaps make it dire for us with their blowing-ups and such. We get hoisted on bloody petards most diabolical. So now Dr. Tulip and his ilk are fair game for questionable looks and third-degrees.”

  Whenever Dr. Bat stopped to chat, I would notice Paul looking on from the service centre and afterwards he would always ask what we were discussing. I don’t know why I bothered to pass on Dr. Bat’s speeches about the chaps who were giving his ilk a bad name, and how he had to be extra careful as he would be pressured for the smallest mistake, because Paul always acted as if he already knew all of this. Maybe it was because he always added tiny bits to the stories. All of a sudden, Dr. Bat’s search for the Buddha changed into a quest for a baby Dalai Lama who was living, in all places, in Newfoundland. “These quests eat up our souls,” Paul said, dragging on his rolled-up cigarette like a movie actor.

  Later that week while Dr. Bat was discussing his documentary, he said, “It is unfortunate reality that India is notably eminent for superstitious mumbo jumbo and mystical sleight of hand and every such exotica. Such pigeonholes got soldered on our backs and follow us like leeches even if we profess medical or scientific training, par excellence. No point in Dr. Tulip making grievances public, because before he is finished, the nasty stares are there, the excuses are there, and before you know it, hey presto, the busy signs come up.” At the end of my shift, I repeated this to Paul in a bored way because Dr. Bat was now making the same complaints over and over. Maybe what he told me was true but it was depressing to hear, and besides I had my own problems. Paul’s talk of soul-eating quests had reminded me of my father, and of Dilara from the coffee shop. I felt I should write off Dr. Bat or maybe just fill his tank and pretend to be too busy to chat.

  On a Monday morning, after my weekend off, Paul told me that Dr. Bat had brought in his taxi for an undercoating and wax job, and then real casually, he asked, “Do you know he journeyed to somewhere close to Tibet?”

  “Yes, you told me. Nepal.”

  “No, no. Not Nepal. A glacier or something called Lhotse.” He pronounced the word as if he was holding back a sneeze. “One of the highest places on the planet. Home to the fabled mountain kangaroo. And that’s not all.” For the next fifteen minutes, Paul told me about shy mountain cobras that escaped by drilling holes in the ice with their stiff tails, and snow porcupines with icicles instead of spikes, and ice monkeys that had guided two mountain-men named Hillary and Tenzing up the Himalayas. “Would you believe that he saw these giant rabbits with soft bubbly flesh like cake baking in an oven?”

  And yet, no Buddha? I wanted to ask. I didn’t believe it for one minute, but all of a sudden Dr. Bat was interesting once more. I began to press him about his time in Nepal and his taxi driving and his documentary and the plotting chaps and even about his ilk. Although he seemed glad I was so interested, he just continued talking about all his hardships. And I was forced to listen. He told me that he had saved up all his money to come to Canada but some doctors’ group refused to recognize his degree so he had no choice but to drive this taxi, which he didn’t even own and which made just enough money to pay for his apartment in Brampton, where he lived with his wife and two children. But with Paul he was different. Following the weekends when Dr. Bat brought in his taxi for servicing, Paul would fill me up with all the new stories he had heard.

  During Dr. Bat’s time in this Lhotse place, he had met Madonna and Michael Jackson and Elton John and Deepak Chopra and Marlon Brando. One Monday, I asked Paul what all these famous people were doing up in the mountain and he said they were searching for “the facts of life.” He took off his gloves and blew on his fingers and looked so thoughtful, I felt that these facts were some kind of top secret. The same evening during my little conversation with Dr. Bat, I mentioned the facts just to hear what he would say. “Fact, number one, is Dr. Tulip steadfast karma as permanent taxi driver. Fact number two, is abusement by snooty passengers. Fact number three, is ever present whiskery troublemakers who drag Dr. Tulip in their messy ongoing grievance. Fact number four, is that said Dr. Tulip is trapped between two homesteads with no claim to either one.” He added many more facts concerning the superintendent at his apartment and his disappointment with his children who no longer respected or obeyed him. Nothing about shy ice cobras and the mysterious facts of life or the Buddha. Every now and again I would drop little titbits from Paul’s stories but he would never take the bait.

  Meanwhile, Paul continued to claim he had wriggled out all kinds of interesting information from Dr. Bat, who, while he was in Lhotse, had discovered a secret group searching for a good hiding place for the treasures they had stolen over the years. I challenged Paul on this because it sounded like an Indiana Jones movie but he answered me right off the stumps, as if the words were on the tip of his tongue. He told me the group had stolen Beethoven’s ear trumpets, which was some kind of hearing aid, and Dr. Freud’s couch from a museum in London, and the stuffed remains of Able, a monkey sent into space, and Colonel Sanders’ pacemaker, the first in the world (“looked like a small musical box”), and a hubcap from Elvis Presley’s Eldorado Biarritz, and Mao’s favourite chopsticks, and several unknown books written by famous writers. “The Dodger’s Instrument,” he told me, thinking deeply. “An erotic novel by Charles Dickens. Used a pseudonym. Julius Babcock. Very few people know of it.”

  “Just you and Dr. Bat?”

  “Believe what you want, buddy. I’m just repeating the facts as I hear them.” He pushed his hand into his dirty pants and brought up a crumpled tissue. From this tissue he took out a brown capsule and popped it into his mouth. “Goat pills,” he told me, swishing around the capsule. “Got it from Dr. Bat.”

  “What does it do?”

  “Anything you wish it to do?” After a while his eyes looked a little glazed and he began to smile for no reason.

  I know it sounds stupid that I would continue to press Dr. Bat about Paul’s made-up stories. Maybe I wanted to believe that this sad, quarrelling taxi driver really had all these secrets packed away in the back of his mind, safe from all the bad treatment he claimed everyone was heaping on him. And when Paul said that Marlon Brando was not part of the group of thieves but was there to film a movie in which he played the Buddha, and that when Dr. Bat first saw him in his costume he immediately bowed at his feet, I casually mentioned the Buddha to Dr. Bat. That was a mistake because it opened the pipe to all his anger. “Life is big playground illusion,” he told me, wiggling his fingers above his ears to show he was quoting some book or the other. “So all of Dr. Tulip bad luck and harassment is picture perfect hallucination. Just like poofy powder puff ghosts.” He wiggled his fingers again. “Be patient, humble seeker of reasonable job and nice apartment, because soon, nirvana will land willy-nilly on your taxi.” All this waggling and wiggling made him look like one of these classical Indian dancers I had seen in Trinidad. “Maybe Dr. Tulip conspicuous pigment cover is penance for previous life felonies. When he starve to expiration date, he will reincarnate into stout pink baby with upholstered pram. Then no more hullabaloos and, oh, the inhumanity.”

  This went on for a couple weeks. I had always listened to Paul’s stories; now I decided to tell him in detail those I had picked up. So soon after Paul had reported his last instalment, which upgraded the list of treasure from the Lhotse seekers to include a dog called Owney stolen from the National Postal Museum in America, I gave him my own complete list of all Dr. Bat’s worries. He smiled a bit and said he was not surprised because philosophers like Dr. Bat were usually tortured and unhappy because of their belief that there must be some reward for all their suf
fering. He made the suffering seem like a choice. Before I could say this, he launched into a story about Brando who had brought with him a big bag stuffed with butter tarts and marble cakes and frosted raisin bread and marshmallows (which turned brittle in the cold). According to Paul, Brando was mistaken for an abominable snowman by some Sherpas who pelted him with big blocks of ice. Dr. Bat had rushed to his defence. “Must have been quite a sight to see Dr. Bat and Brando too rolling down the mountain with all his cakes behind him.” He thought for a while. “Trudeau was there too. Did I mention him?”

  “No. What was he doing there?”

  “A walk in the snow. There’s no better place than Lhotse for snowy strolls.”

  I decided to put a stop to this nonsense once and for all. During his next stop at the station, I asked Dr. Bat point-blank if he had ever been to Lhotse. He looked at me like if I was mad but my mind was made up. Maybe I had mispronounced the word. I threw out some other names: Owney, Colonel Sanders, Julius Babcock, Marlon Brando. Trudeau. I can’t say how I expected Dr. Bat to react but the last thing I expected to hear was, “Yes, quite so. My favourite lizard.”