The Origin of Waves Read Online Free PDF

fooping!” His sudden outburst, like thunder, frightens and embarrasses me. “If you see what I’m saying …”
    He hollers so much, and so loudly when he says this, and with such wicked warmth, that all those years are peeled back, revealing us and a time when we were in love with the same girl, Chermadene.
    “And neither of us really got to first base with her,” he says, “because she was a virgin, and because we never played baseball in the island, and because her mother threatened us.”
    And in his words, I am facing the hurtful memory of those glorious, happy days.
    I am standing now in front of a window with men’s suits the size of giants, with matching shoes, and the trunks of men with pink skin made of shining plastic, with false silk hair; and I can see rows of shoes of shiny leather and stiff lasts of large feet attached to long trousers, to bodies that end at the waist, as if a mass-murderer has hacked the bodies into halves, and left them in these show windows which look like glass coffins that cannot hold them from head to foot. And my glance touches matching shirts for men made famous in movies about men who like to chop down trees tall as skyscrapers, and have a preference for heights; and I can see the sidewalk now, for to my right are long windows that reach to the ground, all glass with shirts in them, made in foreign countries like the ones John says he lived in, and made by foreign hands, Polo, Yves Saint Laurent, Ralph Lauren, and other designers; and briefcases and travel bags made from the sides of animals which the television says are killed illegally. I can see now where I am standing, and where I am going. I am standing across the street from the south end of the Eaton Centre. It has taken me all this time, in physical movement and in the span of years, to travel this shortdistance from the edge of the Lake, which before this moment was completely blotted out by the thick falling snow. Now I can see where I am standing and where I am going. It is as if John’s breath, and the violence he has put into his laughing speech, his exuberance and warmth, show me how unsmiling an old man’s walk, this afternoon in December, has been.
    The snow has disappeared. All around us, it seems, the street and the sidewalk have come alive. And I am sure also that we two black men, old geezers as they call us in this city, and as we appear, two old-age pensioners, we two old West Indian men are the only two living, happy persons in the world, on this cold honest Toronto afternoon. It is like sitting on that warm sand, possessing the entire beach and owning our lives, conquerors of the entire beach, and with no one in sight, no one threatening, no one pretending to our throne of ownership.
    “Where’s the nearest bar? This calls for a drink. Goddamn!” John says.
    “Not a drink, man.
Drinks!”
I say.
    “Do you have time? You’re on your lunchtime?” he says.
    “I don’t work,” I tell him.
    “Unemploy, huh? Goddamn!”
    “I don’t work.”
    “Goddamn! You’re retired, then?”
    “I am not retired.”
    “Goddamn! Things tough with everybody these days? But you still hustling the chicks, though!”
    “I am free. Of chicks and work. The only work I do is walking. I walk all day. Work is for immigrants. I was never an immigrant. Ten years ago I stopped working. Nowadays I just walk. As the song says,
I walk the lonely streets
. Ten years almost to the day … the twenty-six of this month is …”
    “You won’t be pimping, would ya?”
    “Just walking. And looking at people, and …”
    “If a man don’t work, he’s gotta be pimping. And I don’t mean
you
personally, nor that you be pimping off chicks, if you see what I mean.”
    “…  but the twenty-six of this month ten years ago is when I made up my mind not to lift another finger even if it was to save my life. Not since eighty-six, or eighty-seven. December the twenty-six, nineteen hundred and eighty-seven, to be exact. I