Free The Amazing Absorbing Boy by Rabindranath Maharaj Page B

would soon be her boyfriend but she told me, speaking slowly as if she would change her mind at any minute, “I get in trouble. I live … byself now. I want mother to come here but too far away.” She got up. “But we have to look to future. It is all we have.”
    When she left to serve another customer I realized that she was the exact opposite of the old-timers with their conversations about their younger days and how things were changing so much and getting worse all the time. One week later, I got a job at a gas station on Jarvis Street, just a twentyminute walk from my father’s building. At the end of my first day, tired and greasy as I was, I headed for the coffee shop to thank Dilara for her simple advice, which had encouraged me to not give up, but when I got there she was gone.
    I wanted to tell her how I had walked from street to street asking all the gas station owners if they needed any help; I wanted to boast about how I eventually told one manager, who seemed fat and oily like if he had just rolled out from an oven, that my father owned a gas station in Trinidad and that me and all my brothers worked there on weekends. Maybe I would have left out the part about the manager—whose pants were unzipped—raising two fingers and saying, “Two weeks’ probation. No pay. Any fucking around and you walk. Unnerstan?” I was so happy I didn’t even care if he knew I was lying about my father’s gas station.
    I waited for a while at Coffee Time and wondered whether Dilara had left because she had given me her name or because of the trouble she had hinted at. I hoped, though, she had gotten another, better job. Several days later, I decided to visit on the off chance that Dilara had returned. Another girl was cleaning the table next to the one where Norbert was sitting alone. He seemed older and quieter too. He told me that Jim had returned to Milton but that he often spotted him at the Legion. I was thinking of the Legion of Superheroes when he said Roy had died. We remained quiet for a while and I imagined Roy buried in the Necropolis next to all his old friends. I heard Norbert saying something like, “Jen-kuo-bardso,” and adding, “It’s Polish. It’s all my parents spoke at home.”The foreign language cheered him up a bit and he dropped a couple other strange phrases, so I didn’t say what was on my mind: all his references to German cities and to his German parents. I couldn’t understand why he had changed his own history and I wondered whether he had also made up all the stories about Cabbagetown.
    On my way from work I would pass other rundown coffee shops with groups of old-timers reading the
Sun
and staring at the tight-jeans girls, and I would think of Norbert and Roy gazing back at the good old days, and of Dilara looking forward to getting a good job and bringing her mother to live with her, and I would wonder what, if anything, this knowledge told me about my new country. Maybe the old-timers looked down on newcomers like me because our short airplane trips could not match their long miserable sea voyages during which they had plenty time to remember all their friends who had been killed in some war or the other, while still worrying about how they were going to survive in this new country. I would have liked to throw out this observation to my father but could just imagine how he would react; so instead I settled on the simple idea that all old people were the same, regardless of where they came from. They preferred to sit among their own, polishing their memories and pretending that every change would bring a new set of
bacchanal
.

Chapter Five
TRUDEAU AND THE GOAT PILLS
    A t the end of my two-week probation at Petrocan I got a blue overall and a cap. They were both greasy and I had to wash them twice in the laundry room on the last floor before the smell of oil disappeared. When I wore it for the first time I felt a little proud because it was a uniform; not the same as a fireman’s