by Alan Cumyn
I think I’m rising to do some of this, but it turns out nothing like that. Part of me rises but my body stays immobile on the bed. I should’ve eaten more. Then I’d have the energy to get up and do all the right things and fall asleep properly. But now I’m split and watching myself, not properly asleep at all. My leg starts twitching. It’s amazing to see. Still one moment, jerking out the next. Articles scatter every time. Soon there’s going to be nothing else left on the bed. Everything will be out of order. (Is it in order now?)
There should be an order, but there isn’t. I shouldn’t be able to watch myself sleeping, but here I am hovering near the ceiling. Sometimes in the hood in the closet with the heat and insects and immobility and starvation eating me slowly slowly I’d hover like this above my body and feel a great sense of lightness because of how close to freedom it all felt. Release. This isn’t the same. (That wasn’t the same either. It was all wrong. Every bit of it.) This is disjointed. If not for the ceiling I’d just float off and never be heard from again. Now I want to be joined. I want to be part of that body and make it sleep properly again. Not articles on atrocities raining all over the bedroom.
I want to, but I can’t. And now the ceiling is opening up into blackness. The ceiling opening up and I try to get back to my body. I try to turn and that works, I can turn, but I can’t get anywhere. There’s nothing to push against. I try but my limbs have no substance. No substance but all the pain of my wretched body. Who rigged the rules in this universe? If you don’t have the substance you shouldn’t have the pain either!
I need to call Joanne. If I could just get to the phone but there’s no way to move and anyway they have the phone they pull the strings I couldn’t even remember the number just hit redial a voice says clear as anything if I could just get to the phone and hit redial she’d know and she’d come but there’s no hope of it they have everything attached and are asking me again in Kuantij I can’t understand a fucking thing I shouldn’t have gone I shouldn’t have taken the damn car it was just badminton an accident a flat fucking tire and if I hadn’t stalled the gears that one time when I was almost away I wouldn’t I wouldn’t I wouldn’t …
Her voice again. Jesus. They’ve got Joanne. I can’t believe it! I writhe now spit scream shit ache turn not Joanne she’s the safe spot the warm voice damn! I can’t move it’s all pressing down don’t touch her! a slope of earth turned mud and sliding now burying me take the house swallow the town your kids your life not her! I hear her voice now from way up on the surface shrieking God I know what they’re doing I can’t stand it I shouldn’t have called I should’ve just let them kill me don’t they know one shock too many and my heart bursts that’s it end fin I’m free I didn’t need to call Joanne I’m sorry so sorry I brought you into the trap goddamn them …
Hands now on my face going for my throat ripping into me burning fire arcing across my limbs and I need to go deeper into blackness down into the hood just further and it goes away it does they never kill me they never do it just will go like this and on until it doesn’t until …
Breathe and breathe and breathe.
It’s what you do after the twister has left. When you’ve been shipwrecked and lie on the beach seven-eighths dead with the cold waves washing you and your skull feels like cracked eggshells your skin tissue paper guts a mudslide trees upon houses and cattle corpses and dead cars and mud, mostly mud.… I open my eyes and for several heartbeats cannot comprehend what reality this is. Slowly the world returns. I’m wrapped stiff in bedsheets. Joanne is holding a warm cloth on my head. My tongue feels swollen, eyes beaten, pores exhausted. It’s morning. Which morning? Sometimes I find myself days later. I was doing so well. Wasn’t I doing well?
Joanne unwraps me, cleans me gently, draws a hot bath. I hobble out of bed, soak in the water, sip hot lemon-and-honey tea with the lights off. “When did you get here?” I ask softly.
“That night,” she says. “I should’ve come when you called.”
“I told you not to.”
“Yes.”
Soft music in the background. My eyes are so sore, but I don’t want to close them. I lose so much when I do.
This is how it is after a twister: you’re thankful to be breathing still. You don’t know how you survived. It’s internal, a savage storm that comes from nowhere, goes to nowhere … A virus injected with all the other drugs. The Kartouf virus. It shifts, lurks in my organs, my brain cells. Attacks now and again just to let me know: you never really escaped. I’m not free. I will be destroyed, any time they choose.
This is what terror is all about.
The water turns cool and I reheat it, turns cool and I reheat. Just want to stay here. One breath at a time. Scrambled eggs and more tea. Served in the bath. Sometimes months go by with nothing. Just the threat, the knowledge. The Kartouf is still inside me.
I get out finally and dry off, pat the towel gently against my aching skin. On with my thick robe. Joanne tells me to sleep, but I refuse. Gently. The only way I can now. Quite a blue sky. She tells me it’s cooler, that the storm brought in a breath of autumn.
“What day is it?”
“Thursday.”
I sort through the lint in my brain. The twister hit on Tuesday night.
The tears start. Everyone says I need to cry them. But two years later – two fucking years later? Do I still need to cry them? How long does this go on for? I cry the tears and then head back to my computer. Thursday! What time is it? 4:02. It couldn’t be morning, it’s too light. All that traffic on the bridges. It’s Thursday fucking afternoon.
“What happened?” I call to Joanne. “Did anything happen while I was out?”
I like that word, out. It sounds so inoffensive.
“You need to rest, Bill.”
“I know. I have been. Did anything happen?” This computer takes so long to boot up.
“Clinton bombed terrorist sites in Afghanistan and Sudan,” she says. “It’s classic wag the dog.”
“Oh, for God’s sakes!” I have a friend in Sudan. “Was it Khartoum?” This computer!
“I think so.” She tells me the announcement came just as Monica Lewinsky was going in to testify again. And what she says next freezes my blood.
“There was one other thing. I think you should just go to bed, but I know you won’t, so I’ll tell you. Minitzh was assassinated last night. The whole of Santa Irene has been turned upside down. The phone’s been ringing off the hook for you. I finally just turned it off. Bill?”
Breathe and breathe and breathe. Sometimes it’s all you can do.
3
A reporter from the BBC calls, asking for a reaction. I tell him I’m like everybody else, stunned. CNN broadcasts a five-minute segment of amateur video of riots in the capital: blurry colour shots of a crowd overturning a bus and then setting it ablaze, of distant troops in ragged green firing at unknown targets, of a dog writhing and yelping in a muddy backstreet. That’s it – on to Yeltsin overturning his cabinet and Angola sending soldiers into the Congo. The South Asia desk at Foreign Affairs doesn’t know what’s happening – who murdered Minitzh, what the army is doing, whether the Kartouf is behind it or how they’re reacting, who will take over. The mission in Santa Irene was closed two years ago after they got me home safely.
Another reporter calls from CBC Radio. “Mr. Burridge, how do you feel when you hear that the country where you suffered so much is now in the throes of such confusion?”
“I’m concerned for people, obviously,” I say.
“Do you fear that the rebel Kartouf, the group that kidnapped and tortured you, could now be on the verge of taking power in Santa Irene?”
“It’s unlikely, I think, that the Kartouf would be in a position to take power. They really are a raggedy force. Their support is in the villages, which have been decimated. In the capital there’s no love for the Kartouf, and the military is the real power. There could well be a struggle going on now within the army and some new strongman will emerge. We
’ll have to see.”
“Reports are reaching us today from AP and other sources that the ‘strongman’ could actually be a woman, Suli Nylioko. What can you tell us about her?”
The question takes me by surprise, and my pause turns into a ponderous radio silence.
“Mr. Burridge?”
“Suli Nylioko,” I say, “is the widow of the former leader of the Democratic Coalition, which was banned in the early 1980s. Her husband, Jono, was shot at the airport after being given a promise of safe passage from General Minitzh. Suli and her children were allowed to leave. The family was very wealthy, although I don’t know how much money they were able to take out of the country. She studied at Oxford for a time. I had no idea she was back in the country.”
“So she is like an Aung San Suu Kyi?” the interviewer asks.
“Or a Corazon Aquino,” I say. “Or perhaps a Benazir Bhutto or Winnie Mandela.”
“That’s quite a range of possibilities.”
“We’ll have to see,” I say.
There are more questions to which I give careful, not very informed answers. The urgency of it is somehow satisfying, though; it takes me away from thrashing about in my own personal swamp. Then just as I have this thought she asks the inevitable.
“Since returning from your captivity two years ago, Mr. Burridge, you’ve managed to build a human-rights organization that has won a strong international reputation. You’ve won the Olof Palme Award and the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, among others. But in your book you indicate what a tremendous personal price you’ve paid. How are you faring these days? Have the ghosts of your ordeal been put to rest, or does the new uncertainty in Santa Irene bring them back to life?”
My sigh at the question is audible, I’m sure, across thousands of kilometres. Another ponderous radio silence.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Burridge, if that’s too personal a question. You don’t have to–”
I try not to sound too impatient. “What I tend to say is this: On a good day, I work too hard to think about it. On a bad day, I haven’t worked hard enough.”
We say our goodbyes and I sit for a moment in silence. Then Joanne brings me toast and mushroom soup, and I find The Islander on the Internet. The coverage is remarkably detailed – a good sign that no one at the top is in enough control to muzzle the press.
RIOTS IN WELANTO
20 August 1998
Hulinga Kaliotu
Thousands of rioters and looters took to the streets of Welanto last night, burning large sections of the shantytown to the ground and looting shops and stalls. Reports also say many daughters were raped by roaming packs of police who were supposed to be protecting residents.
No one knows what set off the riots. One man who was taking cover in a ditch said that a mob had been turned away from Seaside Heights by private armies and so had vented their anger against their own neighbourhood.
A long line of limousines could be seen through most of the night heading for the airport, which remains closed today. According to foreign news reports, some of Santa Irene’s wealthiest citizens spent the night on benches in the airport lounge, waiting for clearance to leave the country.
There were no confirmed reports of casualties from the latest Welanto riots. Riots yesterday killed 23 people and injured some 350 more, according to local hospitals.
Another article focuses on Suli Nylioko.
SULI DENIES CHARGES, CALLS FOR CALM
20 August 1998
Dorut Kul
Freedom Party leader Suli Nylioko, who remained in hiding last night, issued a statement through Island Radio that she had no part in the assassination of President General Linga Minitzh. She also called for calm and demanded the military rein in its own soldiers who are causing so much destruction in the capital.
“I don’t know who is responsible for this murder. My sympathies are for the family of the General and my hope is that the assassins will be brought to justice. But there have been so many other unsolved murders that justice has become a stranger on this island. Do we want to invite her back? Or let fires of hatred consume us? It is time now for calm, for proper elections, and for responsible, peace-loving people to get at the truth and set us to healing.”
Suli returned to Santa Irene last year to manage her family’s estates. She was arrested briefly in February for filing registration papers for the Freedom Party, but was let out on bail pending trial. Till now she has refrained from comment on national affairs, saying that she wished to live peacefully and rebuild her family. However, some sources say she has been using her time to build party support among influential academics, human-rights activists, and union leaders.
A photo shows a tank with ragged children playing all over it while a soldier discusses something with an old man. The soldier’s machine-gun is slung lazily over his shoulder and the chinstrap of his helmet is undone; the old man has barely enough clothes to cover his stick-like limbs. The caption reads, Out of gas!
SECURITY FAILURE BLAMED
20 August 1998
Islander staff
Military sources have blamed a security lapse among the president’s elite personal guard for the assassination of President General Linga Minitzh, according to unconfirmed reports.
The sources say that lax security allowed the bakery truck to pull alongside the presidential compound and self-detonate as the president was leaving for a meeting. No body has yet been found among the bakery truck rubble and a transmitter device discovered near the scene indicates a remote-controlled attack.
Officials have so far issued no statements.
Sources close to the military indicate that there is a strong possibility that terrorists infiltrated the president’s personal guard. Otherwise they would not have known precisely when to attack or have been able to deliver the truck safely into the presidential compound. The president frequently changed schedules and boasted as late as last week that terrorists had been routed on the island.
The Kartouf has been widely suspected in the attack but so far has claimed no responsibility.
Further down the screen is an unsigned editorial that would have brought troops into the newspaper office if it had been published while Minitzh was alive.
WHILE THE RATS FLEE
There is something at once appalling and fascinating about watching the lumito’s desperate scramble to escape their native land now that their friend and protector has been killed. To see them in their Pierre Cardin suits and Versace dresses herding fat, spoiled, scared children down the long, jammed corridors of Minitzh Freedom and Prosperity International Airport, tugging at overstuffed luggage, fighting with others over trolleys and bench space, waving now near-worthless 100,000 loros notes at anyone who might be of help.
No law, decree, or regulation has been passed, yet somehow the soldiers guarding the checkpoints along the Airport Driveway know to turn away anyone not in a private limousine, anyone not abandoning a Seaside Heights property or significant business holdings – in short, anyone who was not a personal friend or relative of the dear departed leader.
Officially all flights have been suspended, no tickets are being issued, and yet now and again, according to no known or published schedule, a plane does lift off for Hong Kong, Manila, or Bangkok. Who is authorizing these flights? Who decides who gets on? What price has been paid?
And where is Vice-President Barios? Why hasn’t he stepped into the breach to assume his duties? The leadership vacuum has spawned so many rumours – that Barios has left on his private yacht, is drinking himself to death in the bowels of the Pink Palace, has already fled to Geneva to oversee the millions siphoned into secret accounts.
Another rumour was confirmed by a close relative of Minitzh: that the important “meeting” the president was headed for before his fateful encounter was actually a tryst with his favourite prostitute Gloriala, who can now be seen wailing in the VIP lounge of Freedom and Prosperity International. She looks a mess, and so do we all.
I read through every story, download, catalogue, check for new articles. Late in the afternoon Joanne drags me from the computer and we walk slowly along the shore of the Ottawa River, past the Rideau Canal locks to the bottom of Parliament Hill. It’s a strange place of near-solitude beneath the seat of power – from a certain perspective the river looks as wild and fresh as it must have appeared to Champlain when he first poked his canoe past this point.
Joanne holds my arm and I feel like an eighty-year-old invalid. How many regular programs have I started? Weights, treadmill, rowing machine, bike, martial arts, swimming. A long walk every morning. I understand now why old people give up. To be this feeble, to know you can’t push very hard. If I hadn’t been in such good shape before my abduction, I never would have survived. I would’ve checked out early and saved myself a lot of grief and pain.
Slowly walking, these quiet non-conversations.
“I think you should go see Wu,” she says. Pleasantly. A policeman rides by on a bicycle and strains his head back to look at her, so radiant in plain jeans and an oversized T-shirt. She has too much life. That’s it. I have too little, so just being with her I’m soaking some of it in. But not enough. I know in my head that Joanne is extraordinary; my body feels nothing. Me and my limp dead rat. What could be sadder? My batteries were drained close to zero and even now the lights are on but the engine won’t turn over.
Wu is another with too much life. If I could, I’d hire him to treat just me. But he won’t give up his practice. Good for him. I’ve turned into such a greedy bastard. I meant to go see him more often. But somehow the work took over.
