Burridge Unbound

by Alan Cumyn

  “The ID card was sitting on top of the body?”

  Luki asks the question again and the woman answers yes.

  “So no one has actually looked at the body?”

  No one.

  “Why haven’t the police been called?”

  The woman hesitates, then tells Luki that they have been. Instead of coming themselves, they told her to call the Truth Commission.

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” I can see a set-up. “Call the police again. Jesus. What am I supposed to do with a body?”

  The woman leaves the room and I wait. For the police, for Sin Vello, for somebody to come and relieve me of this burden. But they’re not going to come. Somehow it dawns on me. This body is meant for me – I’m the one supposed to deal with it. Unwrap the plastic. See what’s been done.

  But I’ll be damned if I will. It may be meant for me but I’m not meant for it. I agreed to hear testimony, to consider evidence in a hearing room. Not to stand in the stench and heat of a Welanto firetrap with this sacrificial victim, this gift-wrapped Captain Velios, supposed author of all state atrocities. The police and IS are waiting for me to peel back the plastic, but I can wait for them, they’ve no idea how long I can wait. Man of bone, still as a rock beneath a lizard. I will not be moved.

  No one else will either. Nothing happens. We’re all stuck here. Time has stopped. The rickety stairs are not meant for this press of people. All looking in, watching me, the walking embodiment of the Truth Commission. Waiting for me to do what I’m supposed to do. Damned if I will. I can wait them out. They don’t know who they’re dealing with. I waited out the Kartouf. Starved, tortured, beaten. I waited them out. This too will pass.

  Eyes peering in. The wizened old man, two young toughs with scraggly beards, an obese woman with thick lips and something growing on her eye. Children now poking their heads between people’s legs. “Get them out!” I say, pointing to the kids, yelling it two more times until they leave. “Luki, where are the police?”

  “They would not answer the phone, Mr. Burridge.”

  “Well, where’s Sin Vello?”

  “Justice Sin is supposed to be here already. I do not know where he is.” Her face is sickly, the stench now getting to her. Her knees wobble and she braces herself against the flimsy wall.

  “All right. All right!” I say. “We can’t wait here. Tell some of these men to pick up the body. We’re going to bring it in the car with us.”

  Not a popular command. The young toughs melt away at the suggestion. No one will come forward.

  “Where are Nito and the driver? Get them up here!”

  I give the command but everything takes forever. Well, I’m not going to open that wrap. Damned if I will.

  Nito and the driver finally arrive. I bark the order at Luki and she hesitates, then tells them. They don’t look at her, or at me, but stare transfixed at the lump.

  “Pick it up! Christ!” I stamp my foot and the floor buckles. Rotting plywood. Sin Vello would fall through.

  Down the stairs, the multitudes parting more quickly than when we arrived. Nito and the driver struggle with the load, switch from shoulder to shoulder to get around corners and squeeze between onlookers. The street now even more jammed with the curious. Not a policeman in sight. No goddamn Sin Vello. What was he talking to Suli about in that video?

  There’s blood on their hands. I know it suddenly in my gut. Whose blood?

  Later, I think. One problem at a time. Right now I don’t know where the fuck I’m going, have to wait for Luki, Nito, the driver, and the corpse. Captain Velios. Who is it really? Some village boy stolen from a bus? The plastic bag with the blurry ID and wallet is in my hand. Eyes of the damned.

  “Where’s the fucking car?”

  I have to follow them now, the body bumping, slipping off their shoulders. Nito is hardly strong enough. Whoever hired him as a bodyguard?

  “Where’s the fucking car?”

  I say it over and over, out loud and in my head, broken record. “Is it this way? Somebody must remember. For God’s sake!”

  We go down one alley, up another. All the buildings and passages look identical – rundown, grubby, deeply shadowed. Crowds everywhere, silent, jostling to get a better view. And the further we go the more the body slumps. Despite myself I look – the garbage bags have started to come undone.

  “Jesus! Luki, could you ask somebody? Everybody here knows exactly where our car is except us!”

  Little bits of hair start to poke out. I look away; it’s hard to focus on anything else. We change directions. Some men in the crowd say that way, then some others say no, the other way, we turn around and around …

  “Luki – get the driver to use his remote to honk the horn!” She doesn’t understand at first, but then she talks to him. He takes the body off his shoulder and the corpse falls roughly to the ground, slumps against a set of stairs; a little more plastic gives way. He checks his pockets. It’s a nightmare. Everyone looking in, the darkness pressing in on us like a thousand feet of ocean.

  The driver says something to Luki, looks at me in fear and guilt, starts going through his pockets again. Oh my God, I think. This isn’t happening.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Burridge,” Luki says.

  “Oh come on, I don’t believe this.”

  “He has lost his keys.”

  Luki and the driver talk now, a hundred miles an hour, and Nito joins in. Now everyone’s talking, the crowd included, taking all the air. My head is pounding. I don’t need to be here, I think.

  “I’m sorry, so sorry!” Luki says, near tears. “The car has been stolen.”

  The body has started to slip out of the plastic bags. It’s black as hell and hundreds of people are crowded around staring as the head pokes out. No, I think, this isn’t happening. How could we have lost the car? Where are the police? I am not going to look at this poor boy–

  This poor boy with no eyes. The eyes have been burned out. Blackened like charcoal, and the rest of the face is purple in this infernal light, and Luki is right there looking. I turn her away. Too late. Too goddamn late for anything.

  23

  “Where’s the nearest police station?”

  It’s the only thing I can think of. We’re stuck in the middle of Welanto with a corpse and no car, no Sin Vello, and no police.

  “I don’t know,” Luki says.

  “Then ask, goddamn it!” She dissolves immediately into tears and I apologize, try to get hold of myself. I’m shaking.

  Luki recovers, asks the people crowding around. The driver kneels on the ground and vomits. The head of the corpse lolls to one side, and for a moment I expect it to roll right out of the bag, but it seems to be attached.

  “There is a police station this way,” Luki says, pointing.

  The driver won’t get up to carry the body. For a moment it infuriates me. “Get up!” I scream, “Get up! Get up!”

  He covers his head, waiting to get hit, like he’s being terrorized.

  “Mr. Burridge!”

  “Get up!”

  “It’s all right, Mr. Burridge – I’ll take him. I’ll do it.” Luki’s face strained with fear. She bends down uncertainly, tries to hoist half the corpse to her shoulder.

  “Luki, put it down.”

  “It’s all right, Mr. Burridge.” Struggling, losing her grip.

  “It’s not all right, Luki. It’s so far past all right I don’t even know what it is. But you put that down. I’ll take it. I’m meant to take it.”

  My shoulder so much higher than Nito’s. I’m at the back with the weight, the lolling head. The body slopes down to Nito at the front, holding the legs and feet. I can’t believe how heavy it is. And the reek of it, so much worse like this than even a few feet away. I stagger a step and another, nearly pull us all over, but catch my balance. Is my heart going to take this? I don’t know, yet somehow it seems clear that I am meant to do this. This body has been put here for me.

  The crowds watching. Who knows whe
re we’re going? I’ve no idea. Nito is in front. He’s following Luki’s directions. We’re going somewhere, I’ve lost track of where. My brain knows. Step after step into the darkness, one alley becoming another, maybe the same one we passed ten minutes ago. I will not fold. The brush of this boy’s ghoulish hair against my face and shoulder. It’s my body, I realize at some point, hours and days later perhaps, step after step into the darkness. I’m bearing my own body. I’m Captain Velios. I’m the one who had to be killed.

  “Here is the police station,” Luki says in the dream. It is a dream, yes? This darkness, the heaviness of my limbs, the pressure in my chest, the strange disconnected faces all around me.

  I look up. Of course it’s a dream. This is no real police station, it’s a dreamified one: dark, sorry little claptrap building completely closed up. No police here. Never were. Couldn’t be.

  Luki pounds on the door. This small pregnant dream person. Yelling in Kuantij, but I understand perfectly, so it is a dream. She says, “Wake up! Wake up! We have a body!”

  Nito puts his end of the body down, but it seems too soon. I’m perfectly willing to carry it farther. How else can I get rid of it if I don’t carry it the whole way?

  Finally a tired old man in a nightshirt opens the door holding a lamp. Now that’s in a dream. This isn’t a policeman. He jumps back comically at the sight of the body, of me still holding the head to my chest. The poor boy’s head. Luki explains it all to him, but I can follow exactly what she’s saying, so it is a dream. He doesn’t want to take it. Of course not. I have to carry it farther. All the way. How else can I get rid of it? But Luki pushes herself into the station house. It changes completely inside – there’s a desk with papers and record books, doors leading to rooms in the back where prisoners, and corpses, I suppose, could be kept. The outside station house doesn’t correspond to the inside one.

  The body goes down to the floor – dirt, cold – but I keep hold. The poor boy. Marks on his neck, black welts in the purple skin.

  “We need to see the whole body,” I say. Luki looks at me. I’m not crazy. This is a dream, but I’m not crazy. “We need to see the whole body and to make notes, and this man must sign in the register that he received the body.”

  He doesn’t want to do it. You see, I knew he was going to be difficult, not a real police officer at all, but a skinny old man standing in his nightshirt with his spindly legs sticking out.

  “Does he have a knife or some scissors?” I stretch the body on the floor, the boy’s sorry head lolling again but staying on. It is a dream. In real life the head would come off and we’d have to put it in a refrigerator.

  Luki hands me some scissors. “I have to do it,” I say. “You get a notebook and mark things down. But I have to cut it open.”

  Quiet, relaxed. Still as a rock beneath a lizard. The plastic slices so easily, the tape more difficult – duct tape. A thousand and one things you can do with it.

  “Start with the eyes,” I say. “Burned out. Mark that down. A deep scar on the neck, like a knife wound. I don’t know how old it is. There are burn marks down the arms and some of the fingers are missing. On the right hand – half the index, and the whole middle finger, half the pinkie. On the left all of the ring finger and the other one – what’s it called? – the fourth one.” Like Dr. Parker’s voice but with informal terminology. “Burn marks on the nipples and abdomen, and a gash across the belly, it looks like it’s been roughly stitched up. Testicles–” and here my voice fails, I have to fight, stay in the dream. “There are no testicles. And the legs have been lacerated and there is no left foot.”

  We turn it over, make note of the welts on the back and buttocks. No bullet wounds. No puncture marks. A strange lack of blood, as if the body’s been bled already. I have the policeman check among the garbage bags for the missing foot. He does it because it’s a dream. None of this makes sense otherwise.

  “Have him make a photocopy of your notes and sign this body into the register.”

  Luki tells him, but there’s no photocopier. Of course not. So Luki copies out her notes by hand, signs both copies, leaves one with the officer. I watch him write something down in the register, his hands shaking.

  It should be the end of the dream. I should wake up now in the luxury suite at the Merioka, or back at home – where? Wherever I’m supposed to be. I wait, but the dream doesn’t end. We stand staring at the body on the floor, the cut garbage bags, the blood on my hands and clothes – now where did that come from? It wasn’t there before.

  “Have him call for a police car to bring us home again,” I say. She asks and he explains, frightened, as if we’re going to have him beaten, that there is no police car at this station. They just use bicycles.

  “Have him call one from another station,” I say. And he replies – again, almost in a panic – that the radio is broken and the telephone lines have not worked since Tuesday.

  “I’m not staying the night here! For God’s sake! Get him to find us a taxi!”

  Luki yells at him now too and he withers, the old guy, the fake policeman in his nightshirt with his spindly legs and Adam’s apple gulping every breath. When Luki yells, he leaves and we wait, alone in the police station with the body. What happens if he doesn’t come back? It’s that kind of dream. Nothing is going to work out. I’m going to have to wrap up the boy again and hoist him on my back and carry him to another–

  The taxi pulls up in minutes and we leave the body at the station.

  Silence on the ride back. Everything so dark – no streetlights on now, none. No shop lights, a blackout. It makes perfect sense. This is a black night. The city deserves to be in darkness.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to Luki. “No job is worth what you’ve seen tonight.”

  She stares ahead in silence, her hands folded on her lap, resting against her growing belly.

  “I have something else I need to show you,” I say. “I’m sorry. My instinct is to order you now to clear out, go find something else to do. But there’s no one else I can ask.”

  “I’m all right,” she says dully. Eyes transfixed by the darkness.

  When we get to the Merioka no lights are on. It makes total sense, since no lights are on anywhere else, but my brain is preternaturally slow processing the information. There’s been a total blackout – no electricity in the quarter. The young man on the steps explains it to Luki but stares at me, the Truth Commissioner washed in blood.

  “How long has the power been out?”

  Most of the night. The elevators aren’t working. My room is on the twenty-third floor. I tell Luki to go home to her husband. What I have for her – the video – can wait. Luki asks the young man if there’s a room on the main floor I could sleep in tonight. But I want my own place. A change of clothes, water to wash with. It’s only right. I’m meant to walk up all those stairs. Nito comes with me, silent, holding the flashlight, and I have a sense that we’re making our way up from total blackness into something else. Not daylight, but something else.

  I couldn’t have done this three months ago. Somehow I’m getting stronger. Or else I’m fooling myself, and it’s going to kill me. My abused heart. I try to relax everything, just use the muscles that have to be used – in the thighs, calves, ankles, feet. We climb a flight and rest, climb a flight and rest, the air getting hotter the higher we climb. We smell so bad, Nito and I, rank with the stench of Velios, as if we are still carrying him.

  Finally we reach the twenty-third floor and I find the lock with my key. Eerie darkness, just the impotent poking beam of Nito’s flashlight. I open the door and Nito shines his light into the blackness. It doesn’t feel like my suite at all. Seeing it this way, the narrow beam showing files here and there, my stuff so messy, the bed even.… The bed wasn’t like that when I left, and neither were those chairs. I reach for the light switch instinctively, but of course it doesn’t go on. I grab the flashlight from Nito, shine it crazily around the room, but everything is in the wrong place, as if
my brain can’t order the information any more, the pictures come in randomly with no sense. My briefcase overturned, papers dumped, the mattress sideways, my clothes littered on the floor, the lamp bent and leaning against the bureau, that body face down as if crawling out of the bathroom …

  I scream and Nito yells something a split second later, an animal shriek. How did Velios get up here? For a moment I’m stuck with the thought. It should’ve been me. I drop the flashlight and kick it in my confusion and it goes out, I have to feel on my hands and knees, crash into things, I can’t control anything now. Breathe, breathe. But I can’t, I have to get the flashlight first. Nito searches beside me, curses in Kuantij. Then I’ve got it again, turn it on, and hold it still with every muscle in my body. This beam carving in the darkness, as if we’re in a cave a thousand feet underground, everything not in the beam lost in irrevocable night. Nito walks towards the bathroom reluctantly, his limbs stiff with fear. There’s the body. No garbage bags. Why did they put Velios back into clothes? All this blood pooling in the bathroom.

  Then Nito kneels, turns the body face up. It isn’t Velios. It’s Dorut Kul. The back half of his head has been blown off and something – brains? – are clumped in the blood on the floor.

  I fight my nausea, step to the closet with the flashlight, leaving Nito for a moment in the dark with the body of Dorut Kul. There’s my suit jacket still hanging, untouched. Thank God! I reach in the sleeve – nothing. In the other sleeve …

  “Come on! Let’s get out of here. Come on!” I yell, shining back on Nito, his face struck with horror. “Now! Come on!” I yell.

  Out the door, down the stairs, two at a time, three and four, the light bouncing crazily off the walls, this endless, oven-hot stairwell. They killed Dorut Kul. They took the video and the transcript. Savages. Bloody savages. I bash my knee against a post and then I trip, roll for a moment then right myself, keep going. Nito runs behind me. They shot Dorut Kul right in my bathroom. Because of what was on the video. They would’ve shot me. Yes? If I’d been there. No – they sent me out to Welanto to deal with the body of the boy they’re calling Velios. They did it to get me out of my room. So they could shoot Dorut Kul.