The Amazing Absorbing Boy Read Online Free PDF

buildings, I wondered what would happen if the road-builder had made a mistake and all these people found themselves on the wrong path.
    Maybe I was rude to smile at this thought because I landed in exactly that situation and by the time I circled back to my father’s building, I realized that a lot of parks and buildings looked alike. The apartments were all red and boxy. I felt these were the sort of bullet-box buildings with their many closed windows where a crazy man might be chatting with his cat and aiming his telescope or his rifle outside. On my way back, I imagined Green Lantern from the DC comics surrounding all the buildings with a soft emerald fog that made the place look bushy like Mayaro. When I got to the apartment, my father was on the couch twitching his toes. “You had a nice walk?”
    “I went around the block.” I wanted to ask where
he
had been.
    “Around the block, eh? Nice. Very nice. You met any of Boysie’s drunkard friends? Any of your mother’s other family? Huh?” I wondered why he was talking in this Canadian accent all of a sudden. “That is why you left the door unlocked? So they could drop in and have a nice little party? A Mayaro
fête
with plenty rum and
bacchanal
?”
    “I had no keys.” I wanted to add that he had disappeared without a single word and that the cupboards were empty but felt that would further provoke him.
    I went to put the bread I had bought into the fridge when something clattered beneath the kitchen table. It was a singlekey. I felt angry all of a sudden. Did he expect me to pick up the key like a little dog? I went to the table and pulled a chair. I had half a mind to repeat some of my mother’s accusations, like how he was a no-good daydreamer who could never hold down a regular job or how he believed he was smarter than everybody else but had nothing to prove it. Uncle Boysie was even more badmouthing. I remember him telling me that every family had one completely useless person who couldn’t get along with anybody else and that my father was this person. Once he had told me, “You know what is the problem with you father? A dreamer with no dreams is just a madman.”
    I saw the key just beneath the table’s leg and when I looked to the balcony, I noticed my father’s toes curling and uncurling. His hand was beneath his sweater scratching at something and I heard some low mumbling but I didn’t want to look directly at him. He got up still grumbling and walked past me with dragging feet. I heard his bedroom door slam shut.
    This Canadian affair was getting worse by the hour.
    During the remainder of my first week in Canada, I tried my best to keep out of my father’s way. This was not too difficult because he, too, seemed to be avoiding me. He left just before midday and when he returned in the night he spent an hour or so smoking on the balcony. I walked around a lot those few days especially on the cold mornings. I tried to put aside my worries about the money I was wasting on doughnuts and muffins, and the busy people who never returned mysmile but hurried away, and my unfriendly father in the apartment, and most of all, how I was going to fit into a place where every nut had a proper bolt. I know it might seem strange to say this, but the only comforting thing was that every single day I spotted something else about this complicated housing place that made it seem not like the mall I had imagined on my way from the airport but more and more like Port of Spain. I noticed all the different breed of children running around and the drying clothes on the balcony and the torn and spilling garbage bags and the fancy drawings on the walls. Even the dog smell that hit me the minute I stepped in the building. The only difference was the coldness and sometimes I watched old Chinese couples walking with tiny, pattering steps on the sidewalk, looking like little dragons with their frosty breath.
    Whenever my father returned from his job or wherever he had been,