Burridge Unbound

by Alan Cumyn

  Three days since the twister. It only lasted the one afternoon and night really; I was up and functioning by the next evening. But the residue is particularly bitter, like lime and ashes have been poured into my blood. This is how it’s going to be. The Kartouf are telling me. I refused to go back, and, far from being appeased, they’ve been spurred on. I’m offering no resistance so the knee will be in my groin more than ever.

  Focus. The low light, the cliff edge, the bleeding colours. The approach of inevitable winter. Here I am shivering with not enough clothes. I have a sweater but not a jacket, and the ground is cold, the air chilly even in the sun. Stupid. A body like mine holds heat like a copper sheet.

  I’m early, of course; couldn’t face the entire morning in my apartment. What if the cigarettes came back? The sun passes behind a cloud and instantly the air is much chillier; even the wind seems to pick up. I huddle on the blanket, thrust my hands beneath my sweater. Bad news. Frail men like me catch pneumonia from biting little winds like this. I get up and shake my limbs, pace a bit, fall naturally into practising my animals. They’re good for raising heat, calming the nerves. Dragon, lun, pang, mandarin, snake, ape, and bear …

  “Daddy!” Patrick calls and breaks grasp with his mother, runs from the parking lot down the hill. Too impossibly tall; he seems years older than he was at the gallery. “What are you doing?” he asks when he gets to me.

  “Trying to warm up,” I say. “Here, punch me with your right hand.”

  “What?”

  “Punch me. Nice and slow. Aim at my chin.”

  As his fist comes near I deflect the punch, bend the arm gently against itself, then pull him and catch his throat.

  “Punch at me low,” I say, and for a few minutes we pantomime the animals. I’ve been rehearsing what to say to him but this is finer.

  “Careful of your father,” Maryse says.

  “He’s beating me up!” Patrick calls back.

  She has brought her own picnic basket, not a shiny new tourist version like mine, but an old family one that has done for generations.

  “Wow! You’ve gone all out,” she says, and I think immediately that I meant to get smoked oysters for her but forgot.

  Patrick looks at the food but doesn’t like anything except the peanut butter sandwich his mother has brought for him. He even hates all the juices – what kind of child doesn’t like juice? – and the apples, though spectacularly ripe, are too firm.

  “I have three loose teeth,” he says, then points them all out to me and wiggles them.

  “He really doesn’t eat much,” Maryse says. “Patrick, I think you’re trying to be skinny like your dad.”

  It’s choppy details like that. We both keep our attention on the boy. He can’t seem to sit still for long but has to roar up and investigate the totem pole, run around and throw a rock in the water, come back for another bite of sandwich. Maryse is sensibly dressed in thick pants, a sweater and jacket. Her eyes look tired. She tells me the name of Patrick’s teacher and I forget it. He likes numbers a lot but is slow with his reading. There’ve been some health problems – so many days he complains about a sore stomach, he doesn’t want to go to school. She’s taken him twice to the doctor but he can’t seem to locate the problem. Stress, maybe.

  I ask about his friends and she says he doesn’t seem to have any. No one he wants to bring home. I ask about her art and she says the show was a critical success, which means, I gather, no sales. She’s applied for a grant and there’s a job coming open at the community college. Not looking at me. Hands busy with buttering the bread, pouring wine, wiping Patrick’s face, plucking out an olive and pickle.

  “It’s pretty,” she says, looking at the colours.

  Patrick has brought a balsa-wood flyer, so we launch then chase it. It lodges in a tree and Patrick climbs it. Later the plane falls in the water and I snatch it out like a hero father would. Maryse sits on the blanket not watching us, her eyes trained on the river. After a time she pulls out her sunglasses and she looks like one of those glamorous starlets twenty years later, bundled and hidden and strangely human. Patrick has to go pee and I take him into the bushes. It starts to rain and we scramble to pack up the food and blanket, carry it all awkwardly to the car. Not a light refreshing rain but a steady daunting downpour, and we sit as if in a car wash, the windows fogging and obscured by water, this sense of being at the bottom of a lake. There’s lots of food to nibble on and nowhere to go and a great looming subject or two I don’t want to talk about. From the outside we look like any normal family.

  “How are you doing for money?” I ask, and Maryse says it’s fine, I’ve been sending enough. I don’t tell her about Derrick’s concerns. Why should I worry her? I’ll feed them before I feed myself.

  “I have to get Patrick back for piano,” she says finally. “Can I give you a lift to your building?”

  The rain is really lashing now so I accept. I didn’t even bring an umbrella. She fires up the engine and even with the wipers and defogger on high the world outside stays blurry so the ride is slow and cautious. Not many cars are on the roads anyway. We pass several that have pulled over to wait out the downpour.

  At my building the pleasant words come out. I have my hand on the latch but don’t leave. I can’t think of what to say, of what I want. I open the door a crack and look at the rain and then close the door again.

  “Could I come to the piano lesson?” I ask.

  “What?”

  “I’ve nothing to do this afternoon and would love it if I could just listen to the piano lesson.”

  Patrick roars with excitement and Maryse swallows her misgivings. But she drives much more aggressively across town and I can’t tell if it’s because we’re late or she’s angry at me. Small steps, I said, and now the picnic has turned into a piano lesson.

  The lesson is in a private home in Ottawa South. “I usually don’t stay,” Maryse says, and deposits us both at the door. Mrs. Friendly answers, ushers us in, and Maryse dashes back to the car. Mrs. Friendly is in her late sixties, sagging in a comfortable way, with pasty skin and jiggling jowls. She has chocolate chip cookies on the table beside the piano. Patrick goes for them without asking. Geraniums and African violets line the windows and the furniture is old, quaint, impeccably clean. I sit on the sofa by the window and listen to the fumbling chords and the gentle voice, to the chock-chock-chock of the metronome. The piano is an upright Heintzmann; pictures of children and grandchildren crowd the top, in graduation gowns, prom dresses, clown suits, cowboy hats. The bookshelf is lined with Kipling, Tennyson, H.G. Wells, Churchill on the war, novels by Dickens, Thackeray, and Hardy.

  “Sweetness, then tempo!” Mrs. Friendly says in her grandmotherly voice. “Stretch, don’t look!”

  I drink in the details as if this were my last supper.

  I don’t know the music. Something very light. When the lesson is over Mrs. Friendly effuses over Patrick’s playing and I chime in. Then I praise Mrs. Friendly and she praises me for having such a wonderful son, so quiet and well behaved and diligent. It’s a safe place, this piano room; it reminds me of my own grandmother’s living room, and I’m in no hurry to leave.

  We sit and talk about the deceased Mr. Friendly. He was an air-force navigator who missed World War Two and Korea – too young – but served for long stretches in the Arctic. In 1974 the army doctors told him he had a rare brain disease. “Such a long name!” she says. “None of us could pronounce it.” But the CAT scan showed there wasn’t much brain left; perhaps he had two months to live. So he went on sick leave and bought this house for his wife and kids – the back wing could be rented out to provide an income. After three months he asked his doctor if he could go back to work, since he wasn’t feeling too bad. The doctor checked him over and agreed to part-time. He went back full-time instead, and never looked back. Died of lung cancer just three years ago.

  “When he realized he had extra time, after those two months left to live, he started volunteering for
everything,” she says. “He headed up the Kiwanis for several years, was always out calling bingo, shovelling snow, cleaning highways, collecting blankets for charity. He was filled with the need to help others. Just to give thanks.”

  While she talks I’m filled with the need to believe in this story, in redemption, grace, second chances.

  The rain clears and Maryse returns for us. “I waited for you guys to call,” she snaps. Then more gently, “Patrick usually calls when he’s through.” Mrs. Friendly presses more cookies on me at the door and tells Patrick to practise a half-hour a day if he can.

  Once we’re back in the car Maryse pulls out as if she’s in a big hurry. The wipers snap back and forth and she’s completely absorbed in navigating through the annoyingly slow traffic. She can’t wait to get rid of me. It’s obvious.

  “Listen,” I say. I want this to be more private, but Patrick should hear me say these words as well. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for the way everything has turned out. You know that I love you – the both of you – as much as my rattling heart can any more.” It’s a pathetic attempt at humour, gets no visible reaction. “Anyway, what I want to say–”

  “Bill,” she cuts in, “I think we need to take the next step.” Stopped at a red light, the cold rain washing us. I’m not sure what she means. The next step? I’m not ready to move back in. But her tone–

  “We shouldn’t talk about it here,” she says, her voice lowered, as if Patrick hasn’t just heard.

  “No. Of course,” I say. “The next step?”

  Green light, but the traffic is still backed up from the next intersection. Maryse leans on the horn, but they aren’t going anywhere and neither are we. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she says, and looks behind suddenly to try to get into the other lane. No good.

  She doesn’t mean moving back in. No, the next step is formal divorce. That’s what she means. It’s obvious, yet it hits me by surprise, like knocking your head on a corner you’ve avoided till now. The anger rises suddenly.

  “Anyway,” I say, “what I need to tell you is that I’ve been invited by the president of Santa Irene, Suli Nylioko, to serve on a truth commission to investigate past abuses. So for a lot of reasons–”

  “What?” Maryse says. The light falls red but she swerves the van forward. I don’t know how we miss a blue sedan on our right, but we do, somehow, make it, just barely, to the other side of the intersection.

  “I’ve thought about it deeply,” I say, my voice too loud, my temper getting the best of me.

  “What’s Daddy doing?” Patrick asks.

  “Would you have to go back there?”

  “I’m afraid there’s no other way. But the president called personally. She’s someone I really trust. I can’t explain it but I think there might be a strong possibility of really making a difference.”

  “Bill, be reasonable!”

  “What’s Daddy doing?”

  “A truth commission! Why do they need you? How could they even have the temerity to ask? Bill, you’re not up to that kind of work. Be realistic. You can’t go back there. It’s just nuts. Call them back. Say you can’t do it. God! Tell them your wife forbids you!”

  It’s an odd thing to say, and I look at her too long. What could she care? My wife. Who has just asked for a divorce. Who has not been my wife for years, it seems, and now is lost for good. The magnetic pull of our bodies and souls has been replaced by jagged spinning rock against rock with sparks flying, abrasion, heat without warmth. My wife.

  Who doesn’t have the Kartouf knee in her groin.

  “You have to trust me,” I say, trying to stay calm. “I’ve made myself sick thinking about this. I don’t believe I have another choice. If there were any other way – of living, I mean. Not doing what I’m doing now, which is not living, it’s twisting on a hook in a cold wind. I want to be free.”

  “Is Daddy going back where the kidnappers got him?”

  “It’s okay,” I tell Patrick, reach back to hold his hand. He’s shaking, brim-full with tears. “The kidnappers won’t get me again. That’s all over.”

  “But they got you last time. They almost killed you – you told me!”

  “There aren’t any more kidnappers,” I tell him. “It’s not the same place. They’re trying to get better, and I have to help them, and maybe I can get better myself.” I turn to Maryse. “Please listen,” I say, quietly so she will. “I have to do whatever it takes to free myself.”

  “There are other ways you can be helped,” she says, so angry.

  “No, that’s it,” I say, “I can’t be helped, we saw that, you did your best–” I fail to keep the bitterness from my voice, see it register in her eyes. “I have to help myself,” I say. “It was all done to me, I was powerless. But this is different. This is my choice. A chance to do something. It’s different and it’s what I need.”

  I realize it now. This is the only thing to do.

  “I’ll write to you,” I say to Patrick. “Every day, on the e-mail, you watch.”

  “Do you promise?”

  Maryse looks at me, full of doubt and reproach.

  “Absolutely,” I say.

  We talk for another hour, in the rain in the traffic and later parked on the street by my apartment. Back and forth, with tears and hugs and painful silences. But it’s clear now for the first time in ages. It feels both sad and light, a relief and an ache for what’s to come.

  I have to return to Santa Irene. If it kills me, well … there would still be a freedom in that.

  We talk it through in ever-tightening circles, until finally we are wrung dry and it really is time to go. Then I stand on the street in the diminishing rain and watch the spot where my family used to be.

  13

  The movie on the plane is a Chinese martial-arts extravaganza with English subtitles. I leave off my earphones but sit fascinated by the image on the tiny screen – the hero prince scales the wooden tower, fighting off ten, twelve, fifteen attackers at a time, then reaches the princess at the top only to find that she’s a martial-arts master too, who boots him off when he isn’t looking. Back up he fights, one hand holding flowers, and when he reaches the top this time they’re joined by … his wife, also a martial-arts master. Now he must fend off attacks from both women, somehow explain to his wife why he’s bringing flowers to the princess, and still woo the princess at the same time. “You don’t love me!” the wife proclaims and leaps from the tower. Our hero goes after her, breaking the laws of gravity to catch up, grab her, and snag a ledge halfway down. Then the princess throws herself off the tower and so our hero must go after her as well …

  The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of phone calls and negotiations, of doctors’ visits and international briefings, meetings at Foreign Affairs and at the Santa Irenian embassy, of visa applications and last-minute packing, of scrawled messages, mass e-mails, hurried goodbyes. When I phoned, Suli agreed to forty-five thousand dollars plus expenses for three months – enough to pay me and Joanne decently and still make Derrick happy. I’ve left him back in the office with something to work with.

  Oddly enough, after Maryse my worst argument was with Joanne – she still thinks I shouldn’t have accepted, was even reluctant to agree to accompany me. But she’s here. I finally convinced her I wouldn’t have even thought of going if I wasn’t sure she’d be with me. She’s worried about her mother’s health, too, but the latest prognosis was guardedly optimistic, in the short run at least.

  Everything done under pressure, the rush of the decision and the hundred subsequent things to do. Now these hours on the plane seem unreal, a weird nowhere between the past and the future. The slow squeeze of time. Through the many trips up and down the aisle to spell my leg, through the rubber duck à l’orange and gazing at the floor of clouds, the little plastic packets of salted peanuts and chemical-cheese crackers and endless rounds of juice and tea and coffee and water.

  Joanne has been uncharacteristically quiet. I ask her how she’s doin
g and she says, “Fine,” abruptly.

  “Fine?” I say back to her.

  She says it again, “Fine,” without looking at me. She has a book turned face down on her lap and her eyes are half closed.

  “Last time I made this flight,” I say, “Maryse got a terrible headache. I think it lasted her whole time in Santa Irene. They recycle the air on these flights so it feels like the oxygen disappears.”

  Joanne doesn’t respond.

  “People were smoking on that flight, though,” I continue. “All those Asian businessmen. What’s your book about?”

  “Damn!” she says, rising abruptly and hurrying down the aisle to the washrooms. She darts in front of a woman with a small child and into the next available stall. I crane to see through the gap in the headrests of the seats in front of me. The door stays closed a long time. The woman ushers her child into the cubicle beside Joanne’s, and they finish and leave but Joanne’s door stays closed.

  I walk up and down the aisle, my leg feeling angry – it’s the best way I can describe it, as if it needs to lash out at something. The warrior on screen is battling the many forces of evil while, for some reason, trying to keep his mother-in-law balanced on a pole in the courtyard.

  I return to my seat, sit quietly and breathe. Tuck my chin in, fold my hands in my lap. Little sips of air, but controlled from the abdomen. Tongue on the roof of the mouth. What was it Wu said to me? That in ancient days in the night darkness men and women were like animals and stayed quiet so as not to draw attention to themselves. So they had plenty of time to learn how to breathe.