The black driver talked most of the way to the hotel. At first he could hardly make out the man’s accent, and he thought it would be a problem. He had come to write an article about the island, a travel piece, and it would be awkward if he didn’t understand the dialect. He sat back and listened lazily as the taxi curved through the flat countryside. Gradually he was able to make out some of the driver’s words, the odd isolated phrase. Beef. Cane. Something called the Crop Over Festival. From time to time he caught the man’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. By the time they arrived at the hotel they were conversing easily. He was good with languages, and, after all, the man was speaking English. He read the driver’s name on the licence posted by the rear door. Braithwaite, Calvin. Are you, he asked, related to E. R. Braithwaite, the writer? No boss, he’s Guyanese. He asked the man, Braithwaite, if he was free later in the day to take him around, show him the island. He said he was a journalist and had to write a travel piece. From Canada, yes. They settled on a price in Barbados dollars. What time, Braithwaite asked. One? Okay, boss, sure.
They drove along the coast. Braithwaite — call me Calvin, boss — talked freely as he steered the taxi through a series of small villages alive with children in clean short pants and women with narrow waists and long, flouncing skirts. They were on the lee side of the island; when the road swung close to the ocean he could see gentle swells and white sand. He hadn’t liked his hotel. It fronted the beach but most of the patrons sat around the chlorinated swimming pool, their backs to the sun, or in the air-conditioned lounge under potted palms. Calvin told him the price of sugar had gone down and some people were raising beef instead, for the tourist market. The air blowing through the open window was warm and thick. His notebook, which he kept in his shirt pocket, was damp. They stopped at Harrison’s Cave and went down into the island in a tramcar, where it was cooler. Then at five o’clock, back in Bridgetown, Calvin parked the taxi outside a café called Nico’s and led him up the stairs into a small room with a horseshoe-shaped bar taking up most of the floor space. The owner’s name was Sandra. She was a big woman who whooped when she saw Calvin and began telling him about her brother, who had been in an automobile accident. The police had found his wrecked vehicle and had called her; her brother had apparently staggered off to a nearby house to call the police, but had fallen asleep before he could make the call. Sandra was annoyed with him. Maybe he was concussed, Calvin said. Oh he was, Sandra replied. Cussed and concussed, you may be sure of it.
He had Calvin drive him to the house of Mrs. Champion, a Canadian woman he’d arranged to meet for his article. She owned a car dealership in Toronto, Porsches and Saabs, and lived in Bridgetown while her two sons ran the business. Her house was called Queen’s Fort, and the backyard, which ran down to the white-sand beach, was enclosed in a chain-link fence. She was going to tell him about renting villas. Someone from a villa-management company also met them there, a younger woman named Mary Archer. While Calvin waited in the taxi, he drank iced tea with the two women, and afterwards was taken down to the beach behind Mrs. Champion’s house. Mrs. Champion told him that the house next to hers was owned by Lee Remick’s mother. Farther down was an even larger bungalow that was once owned, they said, by John Denver. You can rent them when the owners aren’t in residence, Mary Archer said, with or without servants. On their way back to the taxi, a guard dog in one of the yards barked at them through the fence. He jumped back. If you were coloured, Mrs. Champion said, that dog would be at your throat. Dogs here really go crazy whenever a black person goes by.
As he was getting out of the cab at the hotel he asked Calvin for a phone number or an email address, so that when he was back in Canada writing the article he could contact him, ask a few questions, verify some facts. Calvin gave him his business card with a phone number. The website should be up and running in a few days, boss, he said, laughing. The journalist gave Calvin his own email address and told him to send a message when everything was operational. Calvin took the slip of paper and put it in the glove compartment, which was already crammed with similar slips of paper, and they both thought that was the end of it.
Now Calvin Braithwaite spends a good part of his day watching his computer screen. Not at his place of work, he doesn’t have a place of work, but in the small apartment above St. Clair Avenue West, in Toronto, that he shares with his wife, Martine, Martine’s older brother Barnard Henry, and Calvin and Martine’s three children, Molly, Lucie, and little Patrick, who mercifully are in school, where they are doing well, leaving him plenty of peace of mind for the composing and sending out of his resumés. Since coming to Toronto he has composed some fifty or sixty resumés and sent them to more than seven hundred potential employers, businesses, agencies, trusts, individuals, anyone who has a website or an email address and is in a position to hire the kind of person Calvin describes himself as in his resumés. To Whom It May Concern: my name is Calvin Braithwaite and I am new to your country. In my native Barbados I was employed as a full-time gardener, or a veterinary’s assistant, or a health care worker, a nurse’s aide, a computer programmer, a newspaper reporter (sports), take your pick, references below, but since coming to Toronto I have had no luck putting any of my considerable skills to good use. I am dependable, clean, responsible, well educated, a father of three, my wife is a beautician, I have a driver’s licence and my own car. In fact, it is his brother-in-law Barnard’s car, a taxicab, but he drives it as well, in the afternoons. He doesn’t put all that in the resumés, of course. He drove a taxicab in Barbados; he doesn’t mention that, either.
Six months ago he programmed his computer to bark like a dog whenever an email arrived, but so far the dog has not stirred, not once, has not so much as lifted its head off the floor to sniff at the air or growl at a passing tramcar, has not scratched at a flea nor coughed nor drooled nor licked its testicles nor exhibited any of the normal signs of animate life, not once in six months. Every hour or so Calvin takes a break from writing resumés and checks his email himself, in case the dog has died and urgent messages have been flooding in unannounced. He had of course sent one of his early resumés to the journalist, and he is in daily expectation of receiving a reply. But there is never anything. And so Calvin returns to the composition of yet another creative version of himself, sometimes staring inertly at the screen so long that the computer gives up and goes to sleep. Whenever this happens, the screen saver appears, as though the computer were dreaming and the screen saver were its dream, and Calvin stares inertly at that.
He downloaded the screen saver shortly after downloading the dog. It is a continuing sequence of images, like a silent cartoon feature, in which a man on a desert island performs a series of Robinson Crusoe-like tasks. Some — such as waving at a passing ocean liner — are designed to get him off the island; others are just things he needs to do to survive, trying to catch a fish, for example, or to climb the palm tree growing in the middle of the island to get at a coconut. In none of these endeavours is he successful. Calvin is amazed that the man has lasted so long, almost half a year, given his lack of success at acquiring even the basic necessities of life. The program must take up a huge amount of memory. At the moment, the man is throwing stones at a monkey that has appeared at the top of the coconut tree. The monkey catches the stones and throws them back at the man. Calvin watches this bloodless exchange for a while, then decides to go out for a walk.
In some of his resumés his wife Martine is a beautician, in others she is a registered nurse employed at a home for seniors, or a daycare worker, or a flight attendant formerly with bwia, now with WestJet flying out of Hamilton, or with Air Canada flying out of Pearson, depending on the status of the position he is applying for. It wouldn’t do for a man seeking employment as a systems analyst, for example, to have a wife who works in a beauty parlour. The partner of such a man should be in human resources, or at the very least commercial real estate. In real life, she works in a convenience store on St. Clair, called The Store Famous, owned by a gentleman from Trinidad named Mr. Chakra Biswas. The store specializes in West Indian items, and is always full of people from the islands coming in to buy things they cannot find anywhere else. Calvin goes down two or three times a day to keep Martine company.
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