Burridge Unbound

by Alan Cumyn

  ACCLAIM FOR

  Burridge Unbound

  “In electrifying prose, by turns violent, manic, and deeply sad, Alan Cumyn charts Burridge’s lurching, rubble-strewn, chaotic, and strangely heroic course.”

  –Jury Citation for The Giller Prize by Margaret Atwood, Alistair MacLeod, and Jane Urquhart

  “Burridge Unbound is a thrilling piece of literary fiction. Cumyn has taken an explosive subject and made a fine novel out of it.”

  –Edmonton Journal

  “Cumyn’s writing is breathtakingly good.… He develops Burridge as a darkly humorous Everyman.… The novel is a beautiful and painful slice of reality.…”

  –Ottawa Life

  “… his convincing portrait of Burridge alone, in all his psychological complexity, is highly original and no small feat.”

  –Toronto Star

  “The book takes on the dimensions of a thriller, taut, mesmerizing, horrific.”

  –Quill & Quire

  “The pain, suffering and chaos of a world turned topsy turvy is superbly mediated through the sardonic voice of Burridge, and the result is a novel which both moves and educates.”

  –Amnesty International

  “Powerful.… Hard to put down.”

  –Windsor Star

  BOOKS BY ALAN CUMYN

  FICTION

  Waiting for Li Ming (1993)

  Between Families and the Sky (1995)

  Man of Bone (1998)

  Burridge Unbound (2000)

  Losing It (2001)

  NON-FICTION

  What in the World Is Going On? (1998)

  Copyright © 2000 by Alan Cumyn

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Cumyn, Alan, 1960-

  Burridge unbound

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-465-9

  I. Title.

  PS8555.U489B87 2002 C813′.54 C2001-903821-6

  PR9199.3.C775B84 2002

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Except for historical references, the names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.

  The author would like to gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Region of Ottawa-Carleton Arts Grants Program in the preparation of this manuscript.

  Thanks too to the many friends, family members, and colleagues whose comments, suggestions, and support have been invaluable. Finally, thanks to Ellen Seligman for her inspirational editing. The deficiencies that remain are entirely mine. Thank you! A.C.

  SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN

  EMBLEM EDITIONS

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street,

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com/emblem

  v3.1

  For my mother and father

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  About the Author

  1

  This is the moment people remember: the sudden intake of breath, the shift of attention. It’s Geneva or New York – for now I’m not sure which. If I thought it through I’d know. I haven’t entirely lost my mind. Things just fade in and out sometimes. I’m learning to live with it, as with so many other parts of my condition.

  We’re a small group, just me, Derrick Langford, and Joanne Stoddart, the complete staff of Freedom International. Derrick has all the files, Joanne her nurse’s bag. I walk empty-handed. I’m the point-man, the face and mouthpiece; my job now is to not fall over. I try to stand straight, to do my breathing, to turn my elbows out a bit (for energy – everything is for energy). Derrick walks ahead because he knows where we’re going. Joanne stays a half-pace behind, her right hand free in case I stumble. If I stick to my breathing (abdominal; slow sips of air) and watch the horizon I’m usually all right. The table is grand, not the circle I expect but a huge rectangle, and the chairs have high sweeping backs and swivel soundlessly. The windows are high so nothing outside can distract us.

  They’re all watching me. Men mostly, senior, overweight, distinguished, from two dozen different countries. They don’t rise, just stare. The special rapporteur – his name escapes me though I’ve met him before – half-rises and holds out a hand, which I grasp momentarily as I pass. He’s a Chilean with tiny, intense eyes and too firm a grip; every pore reeks of nicotine and worry. There are few smiles. One woman, the only female I notice besides Joanne, pales when she sees me but doesn’t look away. I’m the man who walked through the valley of the shadow of death. I didn’t succumb and yet I didn’t entirely survive either. I became the shadow of death. Despite the suit, the vitamins, the best efforts of modern medicine, damnation is written in every jutting bone of my face.

  We reach our seats finally and I clutch the armrests like life preservers. So often people are struck by how still I appear, and yet my heart labours as if stuck in the wrong gear. Joanne reaches to touch my arm. “Breathe,” she says softly and I do, and it makes things better for a bit.

  Derrick pours me a glass of water. I drink, close my eyes, try to focus. It’s New York. The United Nations. I threw up in the cab on the way here. My leg is already feeling uneasy. Shit for that. I’ve been fooling myself. Too much pressure. I shouldn’t have come.

  More water. The special rapporteur speaks in solid, professorial paragraphs – long, structured thoughts laid like paving stones, the designs careful, crafted without wobbles or loose dirt or unexpected outcomes. He holds up my book, speaks of its “integrity of voice,” “passionate detail,” the “honest and personal account of horrors beyond our imagination.” The book has sent my voice around the world, I suppose, but mostly it sent my face, the dark ragged stare, the eloquence of the unexpressed.

  It’s turning into one of the most famously unread documents of the decade. Briefly I did some talk shows, put up with interviews from young media people who didn’t seem to know what to ask or how. There have been prizes from humanitarian organizations, too many to remember – not that my memory has been much to rely on. I dwell on too much of what I need to forget, and have a tenuous grasp of everything else. Derrick has managed to spin the prizes into grants. I stole him from Amnesty International. I don�
�t know why he came, really; I couldn’t offer much money, and I’m not all that pleasant to deal with. Maybe this puts him more in the limelight. I’m the face and the name but everyone knows Derrick does everything. Don’t they know that?

  Drifting again. I have to keep my mind focused. Especially in public. Everyone is clapping and I don’t know why. What did I miss? I look to Derrick but he’s clapping too. A large black man from Nigeria thumps the table with the palm of his hand. The special rapporteur stands and so does everyone else. I start to stand too but Joanne puts a hand on my shoulder. Of course. I’m three-quarters stupid half the time. It’s my condition. That’s what I tell myself anyway.

  When the ovation is over Joanne passes me a note. The paper has the blue U.N. symbol in the top corner with HUMAN RIGHTS COMMITTEE in large black letters. Joanne’s writing is spidery, with thin pointy letters designed to be packed onto an airmail sheet. “Why does the Pope keep his eyes up when he’s in the shower?”

  I start to laugh as soon as I read it. Our oldest joke. Near the end of the interview in my sparse apartment, when she’d reviewed the long, daunting list of my ailments and had talked about her nursing stints in Rwanda, Sudan, Mozambique, I’d suddenly asked her to tell me a joke. Without a second’s thought she asked about the Pope, and delivered the punch-line with genuine glee. “Because he doesn’t want to look down on the unemployed!” Her great bush of red hair shorter then, skin deeply freckled from so many stints in the tropics. Just the slightest shadow in her gaze, a tenseness in her shoulders and jaw, otherwise she looked untouched from her years of dealing with refugees. I told her most of all I needed someone who could say something funny on command. It doesn’t have to be new or in good taste or even particularly humorous. Just an attempt to lighten the mood.

  The Spanish delegate is speaking. Again, I haven’t been following. Derrick has been taking notes. He has brown curly hair, intense eyebrows, an enormous head on quite a young body. His doodles range from the margins to the middle of the page, at times blocking out sections of his notes. Sometimes I’ve turned his pages upside down to look at what I’d swear were sexual organs, male and female mixed, pendulous testicles and breasts, a storm of pubic hair and vagina lips angling into a thigh that narrows phallic-like. Or maybe it’s just my mind.

  On and on he goes, this Spanish fellow. If I plugged in the earphones, if I found the right setting for translation into English, I suppose I could follow what he’s saying. But I know already, have heard too many of these sorts of speeches. The words are careful, diplomatic, righteous in safe ways. They weigh in against torture, extrajudicial executions, disappearances, defend the individual from tyranny without naming the individual or the tyranny. Words we all can support without risking anything at all. I don’t need to hear them but I nod my head, giving the impression, perhaps, that I’m following in Spanish.

  People will believe almost anything about a torture survivor – that I have a greater consciousness, a more developed sense of conscience, a supernatural refinement of the higher emotions. That I don’t have a back passage. But I do, and the Spaniard has been talking too long. I clench, but everything about my bowels is delicate. I forgot my breathing. I deserve diarrhea. I forgot my fucking breathing! I try now to get it back against the panic. I’m going to shit my pants in the United Nations. The Spaniard goes on and on and the shit is coming sure as a train on greased rails. I knew I wasn’t ready. I could’ve just sent Derrick. He wrote the brief and he can read it better than I can anyway.

  Joanne has a whole drugstore in her bag. Sometimes one little pill can make all the difference. I ought to know. Amitatriphyline for stress, insomnia, and depression. Cisapride for heartburn and my various digestive disorders. Furosemide and metoprolol for high blood pressure. Aspirin for my weak heart. Those are the ones I remember. Joanne keeps track of when and where and how much. I can’t keep it all in my shrinking brain. The metoprolol and aspirin work against the cisapride and mess up my digestion. Almost everything ruins my sex drive, and my heart is too weak for any new anti-impotence drug. Then there’s all the chemically induced laundry lint in my brain. Daily reality for a human-rights defender.

  Still the Spaniard speaks on. I’ve been so preoccupied keeping back the mudslide that I haven’t paid attention to the crawling, itching, pulling in my leg. Now I squirm. Sweat seeps down my face, onto my shirt collar and jacket. Why did I agree to wear a tie? Respect for the goddamn United Nations. Stupid, lame, impotent organization. Begging for money. They don’t even have air conditioning. What a travesty. I was clear with Derrick and he was clear with them. No fucking speeches. I don’t need to hear this Spanish crap. It wasn’t on the schedule and I don’t have to put up with it. My leg burning now, I can’t keep it back. I should’ve videotaped my testimony and stayed home.

  This is my last thought before my leg jerks out and slams the underside of the table. Everyone’s water jumps and Derrick’s pen flies out of his hand. At least the Spaniard stops talking, but the damage is done – my pants are now full of runny, toxic, smelly shit. Joanne knows exactly what’s happened and knows too she can’t do a thing about it. Derrick gets out of his seat to retrieve his pen. The Spaniard finishes up. My leg slams the table again and another jet of shit surges to freedom. In my incarceration, in the closet in the hood with my limbs shackled, I learned to be still as a rock under a lizard. But no more. I have control over nothing.

  Everybody’s staring. Now it’s my turn to speak. But if I stand up the shit will run down my trousers. If I stay seated my leg will just keep jerking up every thirty seconds – Restless Leg Syndrome.

  Joanne leans in. Everyone is watching. “Do you want to leave?” she asks in a voice as soothing as flannel sheets on a winter’s night. I think that’s why I hired her. For her jokes, her voice, and her eyes, a thousand shades of green and brown. I can imagine those refugees staggering into the holding camps, rubbing the dust from their vision. We soak in energy from people and sometimes it’s cleansing and sometimes it frazzles and defeats.

  “We can come back and do this another time,” she says. “It’s just talk.”

  It is. Just talk. Talk can happen now or later. Talk changes nothing. Words are written on paper. Sounds vibrate eardrums and the words go onto different paper, are printed up and mailed to libraries and offices around the world where they sit largely unread. Nothing actually changes. Helicopters still arrive in mountain villages and huts are still set ablaze and children are gunned down as they flee. I’m not the only one who has seen it and talked about it. But I suffered and I’m an ex-diplomat. I come from the moneyed part of the world, so prizes have been bestowed upon me for that and for my useless bloody words.

  I get to my feet before my leg jerks out again. Maybe they can’t see. Maybe they’re all diplomats, so they purposely don’t notice. It’s only three or four steps. My hands can’t keep still to hold Derrick’s speech, so I just set the papers down and grip the sides of the lectern. Breathe and breathe and breathe. Look to the horizon. I jiggle my leg to stop the jerking and more shit slides down, now onto my socks and shoes. The scent of my own rot. So familiar. Let them smell it. The reek of a life coming apart.

  “In the mountains of Santa Irene,” I read in my quavering voice, using the Spanish pronunciation, Ee-ray-nay, “government troops are carrying out a systematic slaughter of villagers suspected of harbouring guerrillas of the rebel resistance group Kartouf. They arrive sometimes in broad daylight, but usually at night, two or three helicopters in a pack. They rake the village first with machine-gun fire and then they set fire to the huts and the surrounding jungle. The villages are small but often thirty to sixty people die at a time, sometimes as many as two hundred.”

  I lose my place briefly. Derrick has triple-spaced and used a large font, but when I’m tired my vision can’t be trusted. Sometimes the world goes blurry. No doubt the pause makes the delegates wonder if I’m overcome with emotion. I’m just trying to see the words. I blink and look, blink and look
. Breathe and breathe and breathe.

  “As many of you know,” I say finally, abandoning the text, “the Kartouf are a terrorist organization. As a junior diplomat only three weeks in the country I was kidnapped and suffered their hospitality, longed for death every moment under their care. I harbour no protective feelings for the Kartouf. But the government of Santa Irene is committing cold-blooded murder of largely innocent people. They have used my incarceration to step up their campaign, which infuriates me no end. I’m personally involved in this struggle. My organization, of course, advocates peace, justice, and human rights around the world. Blood is flowing in so many parts of the planet. But I’ve come to add my voice to this one small struggle for the human soul. I’m asking you to add your voices as well. Create an international outcry. Use my name as much as you wish. Our report is in front of you. You don’t really need to hear the words from me. You already know the right thing to do. Do it.”

  I’ve said enough, but for a time I look back at Derrick’s notes to try to see what I’ve left out. The sources of documentation. The names of the villages. The letters from survivors. What was it one of them said? They eat us like locusts and our blood becomes the soil. I know these words are there but my eyes are blurry still.

  I don’t sit down, don’t wait for the clapping, for questions. My leg has to move anyway. I think it’s this way. In a moment Derrick and Joanne are back with me. I feel smaller, bent like an old man, though not yet forty. I feel like I’m walking up an endless hill. “I’m sorry,” I mutter over and over.

  Joanne finds the washroom. Derrick goes back to deal with the committee. He knows the details anyway. I feel so humiliated. The washroom is finely appointed, as they say, everything mirrored and gleaming. I lean against the counter – marble? certainly cold, hard, and smooth – and I fail to look away from the mirror soon enough. That haggard face, the doomed eyes, the sparse greying hair. It’s me. I look like a street person. Two years after freedom and I’m still so far beyond the bandwidth of normal human experience.