Burridge Unbound

by Alan Cumyn

  The midday feast is traditional here, and I gather that since this is the opening meeting of the commission we must all eat ourselves into stupidity. Round after round of dishes arrives: spicy meats, burning hot fruit and vegetable plates, odd-textured soups, fish concoctions, deep-fried mysteries. We try engaging our table mates in conversation about the food but the only words of English that emerge are “Harro!” and “Velly happy see-you!”

  “Didn’t you learn any Kuantij while you were here?” Joanne asks me.

  “The Kartouf were not big on language lessons.”

  “And Foreign Affairs?”

  “Ha! I was lucky to get a handout on what to bring.”

  Sizzling chicken strips with a fuzzy, piquant coating. Beans twisted in curlicues and glazed with brown sugar and something hot. A greyish unidentified meat, strings of which get caught in my dentures. Supira, the island firewater, for toasting, a sweet red wine for drinking with the soup, a heavy beer for simply washing things down. I taste and nibble but am careful about having too much. I launch into a long story for Joanne about some spicy tarwon sauce I had once that nearly killed me.

  Several times I look back at the door, expecting Suli Nylioko to arrive. Surely she would have some kind of ceremonial function, opening the Truth Commission, greeting us. But there’s no Suli. Instead a half-dozen men, some in natty blue business suits, others lounging in island casuals, stand up to make speeches. Each in turn is ignored by almost everyone in the room. I notice Franja at one of the other tables and he lifts his glass to me.

  “He seems to be at all these functions,” I say to Joanne.

  “Maybe we could get him to translate?”

  “You’re right. He might be of some use after all.”

  But when I approach him he shakes his head in theatrical regret. “If only I could!” he says. “But my business interests keep me extraordinarily busy.”

  Heavy rain starts sometime in the afternoon and builds to the point where it drowns out the sound of the air conditioning, streaks down the huge windows until it feels like we’re below decks in a glass-hulled boat.

  It turns out that no afternoon session is scheduled. People begin to drift away after the spiced fruit and tea. I try a few of the aides but none can handle my fractured Kuantij. Franja, of course, has evaporated. Joanne hunts through the phrasebook, but it’s hard to turn “What time is it?” into “What time do we meet again?” No one seems particularly concerned. Justice Sin limps majestically out of the room, an ocean liner this time, listing slightly but still powering forward. The aides and other guests disappear into the halls of the justice building or else into taxicabs. The young man with the best English says, “Pleese again tomorrow pleese.”

  A wall of rain, soaking through the awning above the arched doorway, bouncing up off the asphalt and splashing inside the open door. Against it Nito uselessly holds a single portable umbrella. We dash two metres to a waiting cab and jostle with the door just long enough for everything to be soaked through. Then once we’re inside the car immediately steams up. The wipers don’t work and our driver proceeds on trust. It doesn’t matter anyway; as usual traffic is halted everywhere. It takes fifteen minutes to insinuate ourselves onto the boulevard outside the Justico kampi, another twenty to make it a block and a half and turn onto another street. The rain continues unabated, the sewers running rivers, streets awash.

  “At least it’s warm,” says Joanne. Her bra shows plainly through her soaked shirt and her hair drips down her back onto the vinyl of the seat. I have an aching memory of kissing Maryse in a cab like this when we were both wet and hot, the water running down our faces and into each other’s mouths. It’s so sudden it almost feels real, then seems unbearably remote and sad.

  “There was a terrible traffic jam here some years ago,” I say, looking but not looking. “I remember reading about it. A number of awful coincidences all at once. Construction closed the one bridge across the harbour arm, and a building collapsed from poor engineering. It started to slump in the morning and by mid-afternoon was crumpled across three main arteries. This happened during a heatwave – six solid days of over forty degrees Celsius – and there was engine failure in one of the two ferries that serviced the harbour. The other one had been commandeered by someone – Tinto, I think. He spent three days at sea gambling with Taiwanese businessmen. So all traffic had to go straight through the city. Horrendous plugging. Some people were stranded for three or four days. All those engines running to keep the air conditioning going. The smog building up, the heat, I think three dozen people died. There was no inquiry. The city just staggered on.”

  As I tell the story we move only a few metres further then sit. My leg gets anxious, I try rubbing it and then Joanne pitches in and that doesn’t help at all. Now I can’t avoid the smell of her, the closeness. Her strong hands work up and down my thigh while the driver leers into the mirror. Idiot, I think. I couldn’t get excited if my life depended on it. Just as I think this I shift in my seat, look down involuntarily at my pitiful groin. My pants are even sticking up, that must be what he’s leering at. It’s just the empty fold in the fabric. So I pat myself down as surreptitiously as I can manage … only it won’t go down, and it feels so unusual …

  Oh, for God’s sake.

  I’m hard as a carrot for the first time in forever.

  “Jesus!” I say, slamming out my leg to distract her. “I have to walk! I’m sorry. You stay in the cab if you like.”

  “Are you kidding?” she says, so she pays the driver and we hike off through the deluge, Nito bopping beside us trying to shelter us with the umbrella. We’re just on Cardinal Avenue, the roots of towering glass banks and government buildings interspersed with sorry little crumbling shops, the tops of nearly everything lost to view in the rain. It isn’t far to the Merioka. After a block we convince Nito to desist and we give ourselves completely to the rain. My tent pole has disappeared, but I’m exhilarated. Joanne laughs in the rain and looks near-topless in her soaked white shirt. I take off my sorry jacket and try to sling it around her, but she laughs it away. There are no other pedestrians, just steamed windows in car after car going nowhere, wipers flapping absurdly. The slick-tiled sidewalk is treacherous, the curbs half a metre high to keep the rainwater from flooding. After I lose my balance stepping down from one of them Joanne takes my arm and we proceed together.

  The rain is so heavy that even with Nito we walk right past the Merioka then have to double back a block later. Staff members stare as we squelch through the lobby, and we laugh like children up the elevator. At the door we fumble, trying to pantomime to Nito to come back tomorrow, but he knows already anyway.

  “Look at you!” Joanne says when we’re safely inside.

  “Look at me? Look at you! You’re just as soaked as I am.”

  “No. Your pants,” she says, and I think, my God, it’s happened again. But it isn’t that. I realize, to my horror, that I’ve shit myself.

  “Jesus!”

  “It doesn’t matter. We’ll clean you up. Come on to the bathroom.” She says it in her nurse’s voice, so I follow her, but once there I say I’ll clean myself up.

  “That’s all right,” she says, again in her nurse’s voice, so comforting at other times, but right now I don’t want to hear it. I was so hoping to be past that.

  “I’ll do it,” I say, burning with disappointment and shame.

  “Don’t worry. It can happen to anyone. All this strange food.”

  She leaves and I strip down, shiver in weakness and sudden cold. My shit is runny as ever, parts of it black. Disgusting. I turn my pants inside out and hold them with me in the shower water as long as I can, then ring them out and toss them on the floor. In the hot water the shaking should stop, but instead it increases. I turn up the heat and think ruefully of our Pope joke as I gaze down on my own unemployed, which look a hundred and twenty years old. And those knobby knees, the wet black hair of some starved animal, not a man, not a young man. I soap myself
from top to bottom, the water now as hot as the dial will go, but I’m still cold. I know this cold, that’s what’s so frightening about it. It’s life seeping away.

  I can barely stand, the shaking has gotten worse and worse. I turn off the water and wrap myself in a huge purple and gold Merioka towel. Close my eyes, lean against the counter.

  “Joanne!”

  Trying for breath. Relax, relax. Let the air enter. It can’t reach the lungs if it doesn’t go down the throat.

  “Joanne!”

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  If I shift my weight I can stay against the counter and not slump to the floor. It takes all my energy. What’s happening? It isn’t a twister. It’s something else. Heart attack? As soon as I think of it my chest constricts from a dozen needles pressing at once.

  “Bill! Open the door!”

  No. Not now. This is not the time. Please God, I hear myself praying. I still have things to do. Please. Not now.

  I reach along the counter and unlock the door. Joanne is half-dressed, her hair tied up in a towel. I feel my breath returning. It’s all right. The needles are slowly extracted. One by one. But the shaking remains. I don’t trust myself to say very much.

  “I need to lie down.” Then, at the bed, “Please hold me.”

  The warmth of her spreads along my back, her arms around me. Maryse and I would lie like this before going to sleep. Just a few minutes. She could never stand it long – her arm would fall asleep, she’d always withdraw. “I need a small place for myself,” she said one time.

  Not me. I want no small place, but to be swallowed whole, remade, given another chance. To just stop this shaking, this cold, rest a time. To breathe and love. To be loved and made warm.

  Strange to be so cold in the tropics. Is the air conditioner on? Maybe we could turn it off. Just this once. I think the thought but it’s hard to make the words come out. Nice with a pair of arms around me again, to feel and hear someone else’s breathing. To close my eyes.

  I had strange travels before. There were places I fled to in rest, in my head, in dreams. Cold places sometimes because I was so hot, sweat seeping out of me, bag of bones that I was. I remember shaking like this. I remember.

  New snow. Like fine, clean dust, but under that is hard, old snow that goes crunch crunch when we walk. Dad doesn’t wear a hat but I don’t know how – my ears get cold even with my ski hat. We walk with our sticks and skates hanging over our shoulders.

  When we round the corner the rink isn’t white and snowy in the distance as I thought it would be, but a gleaming silver, the new ice pulling in every bit of light from the dull dawn and magnifying it. Even before we’re there I can tell it’s a perfect sheet of ice, so slippery and hard that my little wrist shot is going to skid all the way across to the far boards and then bounce back like a bolt from Bobby Hull.

  Dawn, and the change room is locked. “Somebody cleared the rink, then watered, then went home to bed,” Dad says, stopping to look out at the immaculate surface.

  We sit on a snowbank to put on our skates. The air is so cold our fingers freeze a minute after we take off our mitts. Dad does Graham’s skates, squats in front of him and fusses with the laces. Graham looks cold and somehow almost still asleep, sitting so small in his ski jacket. I get my left skate on then have to jam my hands back in my mitts to warm them up again. When I take off my mitts my hands get cold again and I shake them but it doesn’t help. My foot won’t go in my skate. I push and push and then the skate shoots out and spins across the ice. Graham laughs suddenly and Dad turns around to watch the skate.

  “Better go get it!” he says.

  So I clump on one skate and one boot, take two steps then end up on my bum. I knew it was slippery ice! When I get back my hands are cold still, even in my mitts.

  “Dad, can you get this skate on me?”

  “You can do it yourself.” He’s finished now with Graham and sits down on the snowbank beside me to pull on his own skates.

  “But the laces are frozen–”

  “Stop talking and just do it.”

  I don’t say anything, but pull till I don’t know what I’m pulling, if it’s tightening or loosening the stupid laces. Finally Dad comes over and impatiently squats in front of me. In a minute it’s done. The skate that he tied feels snug and firm and the one that I tied is loose and flimsy. But before I can ask him to do the other one he skates away. I have trouble picking up my hockey stick with my mitts on, have to get down on my knees and take off my mitts to pick it up and then put on my mitts again as I get up.

  Glide squish, glide squish, glide squish. That’s what it feels like with the one good skate tightened by Dad and the one loose one tightened by me. Besides that, I’m a frozen ice chunk skating around, I’m so cold.

  Dad passes me the puck. I feel it on the end of my stick, move it back and forth, concentrate. It’s so cold! I try my wrist shot just to see how it goes on this ice: the puck spins and skids then bounces on a few bumps and stops before it reaches the boards. So much for Bobby Hull.

  Here’s how I warm up: we’re skating down the full length of the ice, practising our long passing, and Graham passes it to me but it’s so far ahead I have to skate really hard to get there. When I start I’m cold and just before I reach my stick out to get the puck I’m hot, my hands almost burning and my hair wet from sweating and the inside of my jacket feels like there’s an electric heater. Just like that. I pass the puck to Dad and skate off to the other end of the ice and then I take off my hat and loosen my jacket because everything is boiling.

  Boiling and different. It’s late now, so late, Maryse has been out with some of her girlfriends. I’ve been waiting here for her, waiting, the light on downstairs. Lying on her side of the bed. She knows I can’t sleep without her. I hear the sound of the car downstairs, her feet in the hallway, the fridge door opening while she considers what to have. This is her time, the dark side of midnight. She’s in no hurry now, it isn’t the rush of the day, she doesn’t want to go to sleep either. I’m stretched like a cable listening, waiting. The soft turn of pages. Please, not a New Yorker article. Something short. She has a glass of warm milk to slow herself down. Don’t go to your studio, I think. It’s too late. You’ll be up all night. Feet on the stairs, please. Quiet feet. Yes.

  She pauses by Patrick’s door. The soft kiss. Gentle fingers tuck and soothe, turn out the hall light.

  Barefoot on the carpet. Buttons. The skirt slides off. Small pile on the bedroom floor. I stay as still as I can. Stretched like a cable. She doesn’t turn on the light. Opens the drawer for a T-shirt, but there’s no need, it’s so hot, leave it for tonight. I move my leg a bit and she sits on the edge of the bed.

  Still.

  The lightest touch. Just on the outside of my foot. Around the ankle. I move my leg slightly and she continues up the calf. So slowly. To the thigh and then down again, to the other foot. Playing her after-midnight game.

  On the back and shoulders, down my arms, her body so close but not pressing. I move to get closer but she pulls away, then touches me again.

  “Are you awake?”

  “Hmmm.”

  Shoulders, neck, lips, cheeks. With her fingers and then her lips, and now she does press against me, it’s been so long, it feels like forever I’ve been stretched like this, aching and waiting. I turn and pull her against me and she laughs, pulls back, says, “Slowly,” so soft and low I nearly lose it.

  “You’ve been waiting for me,” she whispers.

  “Yes.”

  “When you should’ve been sleeping.”

  “Could’ve.”

  “Yes?”

  Straddling me, pressing, opening, her fingers guiding me inside.

  “Maybe.”

  Half-asleep. Rocking at sea, crying salt tears, it feels like it’s been forever, like nectar, like you could take away everything else but this, or the memory of this. To keep it somehow, it’s all I’d need. It’s been so long. I’d forgotten, bl
ocked it out. Now to be back, to find every nerve has memorized this feeling, has soaked in it so that it would be there all the time, I just had to ask.

  Everything’s here. The smell of her, the night’s sweat and her lipstick and the vague traces of cigarette from her artist friends and the wine she’s had. Her impossible softness. Muscled but soft, how is that accomplished? The turbulence of hair and suddenness of want, of her wanting me …

  The suddenness of losing her.

  Everything, all at once – smell, touch, sight, oh the sight of her, gone, taken, about to be taken. It can’t last. Even stored inside me it can’t last. It isn’t now. She couldn’t want me. That was a hundred years ago. Before I fell down the rabbit hole. A hundred million years gone by.

  “Bill?”

  I’m sorry. I try to say the words but they won’t come out. It’s that kind of a dream. I know the words to say but my mouth won’t co-operate.

  “Bill?”

  I try to get her back. Just the light touch was enough. In the darkness, the sound of her clothes sliding to the floor, the soft approach. Just to get that back. The anticipation. I used to be part of a life with anticipation. And love. I used to yearn for it, live for it. But when you’re a hundred and eighty years old no one will …

  No one.

  “Bill?”

  Eyes open. Strange light. What place is this? Not before, not … back there.…

  Yes. All right. I know.

  “You slept,” Joanne says, like it’s a minor miracle, which it is, I have to admit. Just the word – slept. It has such an exotic feel.

  She’s about to tell me it’s morning. She’s going to say what’s planned for the day. All my directions will line up in just a moment.

  “Good dream?” she asks in her wicked-innocent way and I know, immediately, that she knows. She couldn’t have been looking in my head, but she knows anyway what was there.

  16

  Day two is quickly soured with a bad feeling, an anxiousness and growing anger that’s hard to place at first, but there’s plenty of time to think in the hearing room at Justico kampi. We go through a carbon copy of the day before – Justice Sin begins his remarks; I fiddle with my headphones and complain about lack of translation; aides appear concerned, check the equipment in apparent amazement that it could still be malfunctioning, then leave to do, it seems, nothing.