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  ORIGINAL PRIN

  Original Prin

  A NOVEL

  RANDY BOYAGODA

  A JOHN METCALF BOOK

  BIBLIOASIS

  WINDSOR, ONTARIO

  Copyright © Randy Boyagoda, 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Boyagoda, Randy, 1976-, author

  Original prin / Randy Boyagoda.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77196-245-2 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77196-246-9 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS8603.O9768O75 2018 C813’.6 C2018-901728-7

  C2018-901729-5

  Edited by John Metcalf

  Copy Edited by Emily Donaldson

  Cover Design by Michel Vrana

  Typeset by Chris Andrechek

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the financial support of the Government of Canada. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,709 individual artists and 1,078 organizations in 204 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

  Author acknowledgments: Thank you to John Metcalf, Dan Wells, Kim Witherspoon, Charles Foran, and T.H. Adamowski. I also gratefully acknowledge the support I received for writing this book from Ryerson University, the University of St. Michael’s College, the University of Toronto, and from the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Chapter 17 originally appeared in Commonweal magazine.

  For Anna,

  and for Mira, Olive, Ever, and Imogen:

  My originals in life and love

  “Perhaps in you is the sense that citizens of Canada

  are not involved in the real root of the threat.”

  —David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

  Part One

  1

  Eight months before he became a suicide bomber, Prin went to the zoo with his family. Puffy and brightly balaclava’d, the six of them fanned across an empty parking lot. Ahead of them was a billboard advertising the zoo’s newest additions. Two furry gifts from China snuggled in the smiling Prime Minister’s lap, chewing bamboo shoots that pointed in perilous directions. Prin experienced a sympathetic twinge in his own groin. This was the day to tell them.

  “The baby panda bears are turning into polar bears!” said his six-year-old, Maisie.

  “That’s just snow sticking to the picture,” said his ten-year-old, Philomena.

  “That’s called climate change,” said his eight-year-old, Chiara.

  “I won’t eat them!” said his four-year-old, Pippa.

  “Who wants a snack?” asked his wife, Molly.

  He strode out in front, the family food bag slung across his back.

  It was lunchtime, and they hadn’t eaten since more or less an hour before the Mass they’d attended at a plaster-­walled church on the rusty eastern edge of the city. The church was fronted by chipped saints’ shrines and wedges of stumpy evergreen shrubs. Everything was fretted in winter road salt. The church was surrounded by an endless run of ethnic food stores and hair salons and paycheque-advance shops, by mid-rise apartments and crime-scene hotels and diners for old white people.

  Inside, almost everyone was poor and South Asian. Prin’s own parents had come from Sri Lanka in the 1960s. His father had worked downtown, eighty hours a week, and raised him far from the city, in a suburban paradise of flavoured coffee and televisions in every bedroom and streets named for fruit and kings and there were no other brown people.

  Whereas at a church like St. Teresa’s, in deep Scarborough, the people went to communion in sincere moustaches and dark, dismal suits, in wedding gold and bright crimson saris that flowed into snow boots. The little girls wore braids past their waists. The boys wore quickly hemmed dress pants over Lebron James-endorsed basketball shoes. Everyone had sideburns. Everyone was singing folk hymns to Mother Mary and her baby, songs that cut to the heart.

  He took his family to this church once a year, on January 1, in an aging Volvo with a trunk full of emergency supplies—road flares, iPad chargers, unread New Yorkers—and also the gingham grocery store bag he was now carrying into the zoo as his family debated pandas and polar bears behind him, his wife asking him to slow down so everyone could have a snack.

  The bag was packed with bananas and avocados and also a St. Sebastian’s cranberry-spelt loaf Molly had baked that morning. At the bottom of the bag was a champagne-foiled sparkling-juice bottle, which, in keeping with family tradition, they’d brought to toast the lemurs on New Year’s Day.

  Which was, this year, also the day to tell them.

  This was why they had come, in spite of the weather and Prin’s father calling in the morning to remind him that the Chinese now owned Volvo. Would you trust the lives of your children to car tires made by Falun Gong prisoners? To car tires probably made of Falun Gong prisoners?

  His father was divorced, had sold his convenience store in the inner city to a condo developer, subscribed to a premium alternative-news package, and had a lot of time to think and forward emails.

  Prin and Molly had decided to stop calling it just a potty problem. He was going in for surgery later that January. The plan was to take the girls to one of the more obscure exhibits and explain it there and leave it there, in a place they would never visit again.

  Girls, something awful is growing inside your daddy. It’s called cancer, and it looks like this:

  Mole rats: blind, pink, splotchy, writhing, they lived in a stacked complex of glass tubes. Their lives were spent crawling and squeezing over each other, their dull, plump shapes pulsing and proliferating in low light. Who wouldn’t want a very careful doctor with a super-powerful robot assistant to cut all of these gross and pointless bodies out of their beloved zoo, their beloved daddy?

  They would ask: When they cut it out, would he bleed like when he was shaving and yelling that they were late for church? What does prostate cancer look like? Does it bite?

  The forums he’d visited recommended finding something like mole rats when it was time to tell the kids. An Evangelical from Naperville, Illinois posted that he drove his kids to the parking lot of a mosque in South Side Chicago to tell them. An hour later, he posted that Islam is a religion of peace. While the others debated, Prin image-searched zoo animals until he found the blind mole rats of Toronto.

  But they never made it. Shortly after entering the zoo, wet snow began to wallop them. The children decided to take a break from all the walking just as they reached the first concession stand.

  “Oh please Daddy, can we have some chocolates?” asked Chiara.

  “You just had some,” said Prin.

  “That was all the way back in the car ride! Also, these are … traditional Santa Claus boots full of Belgian-chocolate reindeer droppings,” said Maisie.

  Despite the snow smacking them around, everyone stopped to
congratulate Maisie on her reading. Maisie now looked meaningfully at her older sisters, who immediately proposed chocolates so that the entire family could celebrate her dramatic advances in literacy.

  “I want to eat reindeer droppings! You never let me eat reindeer droppings!” said Pippa.

  “Mom, they’re on sale,” said Philomena.

  “Not just on sale. They’re on deep discount. Maisie, what’s 75 percent off $12.99?” asked Chiara.

  “Chiara, why don’t you tell us the answer,” said Molly.

  “That’s like, like, like, wait, I know, please, Mom, WAIT—”

  “Let’s go, girls, and we’ll work on your math at home, Chiara,” said Molly.

  Defeated, the children were easier to push ahead. The family paid a fast visit to the African rhinoceros standing all by herself in a snow-covered concrete savannah in far-eastern Toronto; she was wondering what the hell her parents were thinking when they decided to move to Canada.

  They made for the nearest indoor space. The butterfly hall was so humid that the snow-doused children began melting and sweating and crying for help to tear off their soaking balaclavas even before they passed through the thick plastic strips that kept the butterflies in their optimal subtropical climate. Prin headed back outside and looked up through the pelting swirls. The midday sky was now pewter and thunder shook out from behind the bare trees.

  Could this be a sign?

  Was God using a winter weather event to tell him this was the perfect day to tell the girls, or was He telling him to go home and keep them safe from bad roads and bad news? The sky also went dark and thunder sounded while Christ hung on the cross. But other than his mother, who would take him seriously for making that connection? He was no Christ. He was a forty-year-old associate professor of English with early-stage prostate cancer.

  “Maybe we should just go home,” Prin said.

  “Whatever you think is best, dear,” Molly said.

  But she always said that. Did she always mean it? After twelve years of marriage and now with this diagnosis and this snowed-out plan to tell the children, it felt to Prin too late, or too early, to find out.

  “LEMURS! DADDY! WE CAN’T GO HOME YET! WE NEED TO TOAST THE LEMURS!”

  2

  Prin was surprised to find other people in the lemur house. He wouldn’t have told them in here anyway, but he’d been hoping, given the weather, that they would have at least had the place to themselves. Instead, two university-age Asian girls with metallic brown hair in matching bowl cuts sat on a bench across from the animals’ glassed-in enclosure, studying their phones.

  There was also a family from out of town. The parents wore unendorsed running shoes and shapeless blue jeans. The dad had a neck beard and a bright blue, straight-billed Blue Jays cap that he wore in reverse. He was drinking from a giant bottle of bright purple Gatorade. The mom had spiky short hair and was chewing gum, dramatically. They were bickering over what looked like a flip phone. They had three children—little twin boys with rat-tails running around with robot figurines, and an older girl with purplish hair who was standing off to the side with a novel Prin recognized from that year’s community-reading exercise at his university. The book was a national bestseller about corruption-fighting vampires who were also Indigenous youth leaders.

  “Okay, girls, finish your snacks. Don’t take off your coats. We’re not staying long. Let’s find the New Year lemur and have our toast,” Prin said.

  He pulled the sparkling juice from his bag.

  “We got Iron Mans for Christmas!” the little boys said, leaning into him, trying to see what else was in the food bag.

  “JAYDEN! BRAYDEN! Get over here. Hey, who wants iPad?” said the other father.

  By the time Prin had very carefully, even ritually un-foiled the bottle and set up the little glasses, his own children were crowded around the other family’s twins, all of them jockeying for more screen. Molly was chatting with the other mom and nodding commiseratively.

  “Looks like it’s just you and me for the bottle, eh buddy?” said the other father.

  “Sorry? Oh yeah, right,” said Prin.

  His heart was now beating hard with the sudden effort of remembering, in addition to the remarks he planned to deliver to his children about his cancer diagnosis, that day’s college football games and the names of the different kinds of saws he owned and how many cylinders were in his car’s engine.

  Wait. Was it pistons?

  “So, what are we drinking?” the other father asked.

  “Sparkling juice. Nothing alcoholic, sorry. It’s kind of a thing we do every New Year’s Day. We come to the zoo and raise a toast to the lemurs,” said Prin.

  “Yeah, my kids loved that Disney movie too. Which one was it again?” asked the other father.

  “Sorry, I’m not sure,” he said.

  Prin was lying. But that was better than what he wanted to do, which was tell this man in a baseball cap that his own children loved the Royal Zoological Society of London vintage print hanging in their bedroom, their nursery. He wanted to remark that lemurs were famously curious and creative animals. Prin liked to think his family was curious and creative, too. Mindful that it might not be as readily apparent to his wife and children, he had provided Molly and the girls with various explanations of the connection he saw between lemurs and their family.

  They humoured him, mostly by letting him believe he was humouring them.

  “I can’t believe I can’t remember the name of that movie either! We even had it going on both screens in the van when we drove here!” the other father said.

  “So you’re from out of town?”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah. The library gives out free passes. Ours expired yesterday but we took a shot and it worked out. And we had a pretty late night, if you know what I mean, so I figured just bring the kids here and let them run around while I drink fifty gallons of Gatorade, right? It’s all about the kids, anyway, right? Even if I’m missing—”

  “Oklahoma-Notre Dame!” Prin said.

  “Wait, crap, you think we’re going to be stuck here until 8 o’clock? Maybe, eh? This weather’s right fierce. They were calling it Snowpocalypse on the news. Buddy, the best decision CNN ever made was giving Trump his own 24-hour weather show after all that stuff happened and he got fired or fired himself or whatever. I still don’t understand that situation. Do you?” the other dad asked.

  “Well, if you were to ask Theodor Adorno—”

  “Who’s he play for, Notre Dame?” the other dad asked.

  “He was, well, a thinker about the culture,” said Prin.

  “Which culture?” the other dad asked.

  “Actually that’s a good question—”

  “Hundred percent. And it’s all about everyone needing to have the right phone, right? Anyways, you got four kids, eh? All girls? Still trying for the boy, right? I hear that. After we had the twins, I got the snip. I’m Shane, by the way. What’s your name? What are you, some kind of doctor? I know this guy from Bangla—, wait, I think he’s from Bangla-something. Hey Alanna, where’s Jag-ditch from again? It starts Bangla—”

  Suddenly there was a loud snapping noise and the lights went out. Through one of the big windows you could see sparks jumping up and around. They were coming out of a black cable flailing around on the snow-covered ground.

  “Cool, Daddy, look!” one of Prin’s daughters said.

  Everyone went to the window. Shane and Alanna fussed over a small digital camera while their boys’ kept slamming their Iron Mans against the glass. They were desperate to get outside and ride the wire, fight the wire, aim the wire, fire the wire. Standing behind Molly and the girls, Prin watched the cable sparking pointlessly. Molly reached for his hand and squeezed it and smiled. She was fine with their living as brother and sister for the rest of their lives. What mattered was having rest of their
lives.

  Prin agreed. He had to agree. How could he not agree? But still. Prin smiled and squeezed back and continued to ache, pointlessly.

  What would Adorno do?

  Now they were all standing in the dark, staring out at a grey storm that had turned into thick, pinning rain. In the sudden quiet that even the children observed, you could really hear it hammering on the roof of the lemur house.

  Prin wondered what they were doing in there, the lemurs. Were they still swinging around on knotty, low-slung ropes, or were they lolling on their thick rubber furniture, peeling oranges and napping and snuggling themselves with their own tails and making his daughters wish they could live like lemurs too? Were those glossy black eyes tracking everything the whole time? Were they pondering why no one was toasting them, or trying to figure out who was dropping all those marbles and nails on their sudden nighttime sky?

  When was he supposed to tell the children?

  There had been a plan, a good plan, a prayed-about and well-researched plan. He felt cheated. He had long since accepted the fear and the pain that had come with his diagnosis. He knew this was real. He also knew that what was real for him was small compared to what was real fear and pain for so many others. But he knew it was real too, his portion. And all he wanted from God and the world was five minutes with his kids in front of some blind mole rats. They had defied the Trumpian weather and the Chinese tires and come to the zoo and the plan had fallen apart. What did God expect him to do, instead? Tell them tomorrow?

  That wasn’t the plan!

  If he did what he really wanted to do, had wanted to do for so very long, which was scream and scream and scream, what would happen next?

  “E-cigarettes don’t give much light. Anyone bring candles?” Shane asked.

  When he was a boy, Prin would demand that God prove He was truly there in church by making the candles on the altar flicker. Then, going back and forth between hope and terror and feeling vindicated both ways, he would close his eyes for long stretches. He never told anyone about his chancing with God like this. If he did, some grown-up would have ruined the whole thrilling, secret dare of it.