Fatboy Fall Down by Rabindranath Maharaj

Author:Rabindranath Maharaj
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2019-04-08T16:00:00+00:00

One morning when he was driving to work, he imagined himself far away, maybe in Wally’s city, where everything was surely bright and predictable. He wondered how his life might have turned out if he had been born in another village, in another country, maybe another time. During his courting days, his wife had dragged him to see a movie set in Spain where a group of children looked at the trains and imagined they were carrying a monster. He had been bored of the movie, but his wife had remarked on the village and the forest and the mountains, shot always with a long-range lens so that everything looked remote but complete. She had wondered aloud what it would be like to live in such a place, and Orbits had been puzzled by the extent of her ambition.

He was imagining these scenarios later in the morning, wondering what Wally and his family were doing and the places they were visiting, when there was a knock on his office. A man entered. He was slim and seemed a bit overdressed for a farmer. Orbits pointed to a chair and waited for the man to begin. The man seemed hesitant, even embarrassed, and Orbits asked him if he had come to file a claim or was interested in a subsidy, the two most frequent requests of his office. The man looked down at the chair’s leg and pulled it closer to the table. His sad, handsome face appeared familiar somehow, and Orbits tried to place him. The man began to talk, but in a wistful, hard-to-follow manner, about religion and culture and love and fate. He seemed to be pleading for some sympathy, but Orbits still didn’t understand what he wanted. “Sometimes I wonder if god really wanted us to love each other or just fall into a union. Or maybe not even that. Like an animal just to breed. I really don’t know.” He glanced at Orbits only briefly before his gaze returned to the ground. “You ever find yourself in a position where it have no one you could talk with? Nobody who will understand what you going through and all that on your mind? So you have no choice but to talk to yourself, but the minute the words leave your mouth, you begin to feel like is nothing and that life is nothing and everything is nothing.” As he continued talking, Orbits felt that the man was reflecting his own despair, and it was through this connection that Orbits finally recognized him from the photograph taken on the beach with his wife and two children standing at his side.

The man had closed the door behind him, perhaps because of politeness, but Orbits knew of quiet men unexpectedly shrugging off their reserve and slipping into a tightly wound, dangerous temper. Perhaps he had a knife hidden in his pants. He heard the man saying, “I always believe that if you wait long enough everything balance itself out in the end, but I have to tell you that sometimes the waiting is hard.

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