Burridge Unbound

by Alan Cumyn

  Slow, I think – slow. Your heart can’t take this. It’s too much. Everywhere I turn, nightmare. They shot Dorut Kul. Right in my fucking bathroom. Executed him and stole the video. It must be Sin Vello. He sent me out to Welanto then never showed up. Forever and ever these stairs, hot, airless, black as hell. Down and down and down, this one flimsy light with its narrow beam, bouncing.

  Ground floor finally, no time to think, don’t want to think. “Car!” I yell at Nito, like a loud American tourist. “CAR! GO!” And I turn my hands as if on a steering wheel, make honking gestures and noises. I do know the right word but I can’t access it now, everything has to be dead simple or my mind is going to melt. He runs off and I wait, gasping, in suspended animation, a portrait of panic but with nowhere to go, nothing to do but wait for the car. What car? Where’s Nito supposed to get one at this time of night? I’ve no idea, but he must find one. There’s nothing else that can happen. I will it with every nerve in my body.

  “What’s happening?” asks someone in the shadows. Sleepily, in casual English. It’s the older, grey-beard journalist, getting up from a couch in the lobby, his suit wrinkled. “What the fuck?” he says when he sees me.

  “Do you have a car?”

  “What’s happened to you?”

  “Do you have a car?”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Answer my question or I’ll break your fucking neck. Do you have a car?”

  Shakily: “I rented one. Yes.”

  “Then give me the keys.”

  “You have tell me what’s–”

  “Give me the fucking keys!”

  I’m in my cat stance. In two seconds if he doesn’t move I’m going to–

  He hands over the keys.

  “Where’s the car?”

  He stands rooted, dumbfounded, till I bark at him, “Take me there. Go!”

  His feet lurch and I kick him in the back of the leg – a poor kick at that, off-balance, barely glancing him – but he whines like a frightened dog and hurries along uncertainly, my light illuminating just a few feet ahead of him. I don’t know what I’ve become but it’s something low to the ground, pure instinct and adrenaline, crouching in that murky space between killing and being killed. I haven’t room for thinking where we’re going, just for trusting that we’ll get there. My eyes on the light, on every step of his weathered shoes. No room for extra thought, for anything I can’t use.

  The next thing I know, I’m in the car, driving in the predawn, alone. It’s been ages since I’ve driven myself, but my body knows, if I just surrender to it, submerge, it’s fine. But I can’t remember getting in the car. I don’t know what I did with the journalist. The flashlight bounces in the seat beside me.

  Too fast. The sky lighter, a greyish tinge, another sunrise in hell and I don’t know where I’m going. But I do. I’ve been there. I wasn’t paying attention but my body’s been there so it knows. If I just shut down my brain, think with my body. That animal in me that knows what to do. Life on this side and death on the other. Time immemorial. Part of me knows what it’s doing.

  Again, no memory. Each moment passing one to the next but nothing sticks. But here’s the Pink Palace. I knew I could make it. I get out of the car, walk to the soldier at the gate.

  “Commisi vertigas, Bill Boo-reej! Suli Nylioko!” I yell.

  An AK-47 levelled at my chest.

  “Commisi vertigas, Bill Boo-reej! Suli Nylioko!”

  If I move like a flash I could bat away his weapon and break his neck. I know the move exactly. He’s suspicious, but scared too. The blood on my clothes. He knows who I am, but I’m not acting as he expects.

  “Commisi vertigas, Bill Boo-reej! Suli Nylioko!” I jump up and down. He’s either going to shoot me or let me in.

  I want him to kill me. I’ll die with my hands on his throat. Come on!

  “Commisi vertigas, Bill Boo-reej! Suli!”

  Either way it’s the same to me. I’m way over the edge. Fuses blown, kill or be killed. This is blood on my hands. My clothes reek of decaying corpses. They’re piling up. One of them should’ve been me.

  “Commisi vertigas!”

  I am just about to move. One lunge forward then that’s it. The soldier takes a step back. How does he know? As soon as his foot starts to move I’m nearly overcome with the need to crack him. That first sign of retreat. Why don’t I move? His eyes look away. Just for a moment. He’s lost. I know it. If I just stand still, don’t move a muscle, I’ve won.

  It feels like the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I want to crack him. I want him to have to shoot me. Put me out of my misery.

  Breathe and breathe and breathe. I love you too. Don’t really know what I think about that.

  Don’t really know.

  He phones, comes back out of his little hut, his weapon still pointed, left hand patting the air as if trying to get a pit bull to calm down. Talking to me now in Kuantij, soothing words I guess. Wait, wait, he says. I don’t want to wait. I want to crack him so that he has to shoot me.

  But I don’t move, just stand in my cat stance, left foot forward a bit, weightless, hands relaxed but ready by my waist. I could probably step and grab the gun right out of his hands. Then what?

  Then what?

  Several more soldiers arrive. They walk slowly, calmly, like men approaching a bomb. Their hands pat down on the air as well, silently soothing the beast. I hear myself snarl, feel the hair stand on the back of my neck. I can’t see them all clearly, but sense their movement, some behind me, outside my peripheral vision.

  The first touch I’m going to explode.

  But they don’t touch. It’s gentle phrases in Kuantij, with Suli’s name sprinkled throughout. She’s the one I need to talk to.

  Their gentle sounds and my snarls. I want to lash out. I want to go down breaking someone. It’s the one thing I never did with the Kartouf, it would’ve changed everything. They would’ve killed me early. I would never have had to go through all this shit.

  I love you too.

  I wouldn’t have–

  Someone moves and I lunge and the blow to the side of my head doesn’t kill me. I have this distinct thought as I fall – I’m not dead. They hit me but I’m not dead.

  24

  From far down the road I see Patrick running, chasing a red Chinese dragon kite so elaborate I wonder for a moment who possibly could’ve made it. It dips and swirls with the wind, swoops down, its magnificent head so well engineered that the jaws swing open as they get closer to the boy. He runs, laughing at the jaws, which do look funny in a way, gaping open and lurching, the tongue dangling out, hiding the teeth. From where I’m sitting I can see him perfectly, far better than I want to: the way his legs scissor forward, the ragged mop of hair, the undone shoelace, his hands grasping the string that isn’t restraining the kite at all. No, the dragon is well ahead of the string, swooping down on my boy, who isn’t watching properly, he never does – crossing the road, riding his bike, he doesn’t pay proper attention.

  He doesn’t even see me. I look his way, but I’m in a strange position. I can’t yell out, he’d never hear me, and I can’t raise my hand, I don’t know why. I just can’t. And it gets hard to hold him in view. One moment he’s racing just ahead of his dragon kite and then when I look again …

  When I look again he isn’t there. I wait, because Patrick and the dragon should come into view. I’m moving and they’re moving, it’s a matter of angles. Soon enough they should come into view again. But they don’t, and I have that sickening feeling. As I round the corner they should come back in view.

  But nothing.

  Nothing.

  Slowly I fade back into this version of reality. I’m in the back of an army truck, the cover up because of the rain. Not tied, not bound, but it’s as if I’ve been encased, in a sense – my body doesn’t feel as if it can move without permission. Two soldiers are sitting with me. One keeps his eyes fixed on my sorry frame; the other’s head bobs as he lurches in and
out of his own sleep. I don’t know how long we’ve been climbing, but it seems like yet another version of eternity. The road behind is mud-slick from the rain. I can just see a receding bright circle of it out the back opening of the truck.

  Still in my bloody clothes. I’ve had a chance to wash a bit but don’t have my meds, they’re back at the hotel, in that other world I can’t return to. Doors have closed, it’s better to run for now. I should be fine for a couple of days. And then, who knows? It all feels oddly remote, except for the heartburn. I shouldn’t have had the papaya and pineapple they offered at breakfast. Maybe better simply not to eat.

  We’re climbing, climbing, I can only look backwards through this receding hole. I have a vague notion that they’re taking me to see Suli. I don’t know why we have to go this way, so far into the mountains. The gears labouring, one soldier staring at me in his own trance. I could reach across, seize his weapon, and kill the both of them, I think dully. Only I couldn’t possibly move fast enough. My arms would float as if in water. Heavy as sausages. I’d never make it.

  This is my last trip into the mountains, I think. Whatever happens. Either I’m going to make it out or not, but I’m not coming back.

  I have an odd thought of Nito’s face after I’d left him in the dark with the body of Dorut Kul. The shock, like in a bad movie, but soundless and forever human. Nothing we could ever get used to. Alone in sudden darkness with the cold and heat of death. On our way down the jaws of the beast.

  The village appears gradually, down below us for some reason, peeking between trees and clouds, the road having taken us along mountain edges higher than we needed to go. With each switchback of the mountain road I see clouds and the tops of trees far below the cliff edge, sometimes the skeletons of old trucks abandoned at the bottom. I think of something I read about ages ago – the Indian army driving from Kashmir to occupy Ladakh, a long line of trucks proceeding so cautiously in the fog, following the rear lights of the troop truck ahead … twenty of them shooting off into the abyss with military precision and passivity into soundless doom.

  Soundless Burridge, as if my vocal cords have been cauterized by the shock of the past few days. Wrapped and still and soundless, no anger left, no fear.

  No fear.

  It doesn’t feel like what I thought it would. It feels less alive than before, when I was a mass of fears. It feels dead but not quite gone, hovering, impassive. Like Joanne’s lost boys in Sudan. Maybe. Numb from shock. Bodies shutting down. Low gear, slowly, slowly down the slope.

  Stopped finally. A shock to move my legs and arms, to rise and crouch in the back of the truck, then have to step down into mud. My legs trembling still from climbing all those stairs in the Merioka.

  The Merioka.

  Dorut Kul lying in his own blood and brains.

  And now Suli here to greet me, her face sombre, her bare feet and the hem of her saftori spattered with mud. “I am so sorry,” she says, embracing me like a mother.

  “I have some questions,” I say, trying to remember my lines.

  “Not now. I must clean you.” Not a request, not an order, but a statement of reality for which I’m grateful. I need statements of reality. She folds her arm into mine and we walk along the mud of a pathway, soldiers ahead of us, some villagers as well, looking at Suli and the bent foreigner. The rain has stopped and the clouds for a time look like they might clear; the air feels fresh after the long, confined ride and the city smog. It isn’t much of a village, it seems, just a collection of huts on stilts surrounded by trees, perched on the side of this mountain. Hardly anyone around, either – no children that I can see, a few elderly women tending chickens.

  “Can you climb?” she asks, and rather than speak I step onto the broad ladder and slowly draw myself up into the hut. It’s surprisingly spacious and airy, with a thatched roof, woven bamboo sides, a sturdy plank floor worn smooth, I imagine, by generations of bare feet.

  “What is this place?”

  “Lie down. Rest. I will return.”

  The mat is thin but comfortable, with a pillow made of sturdy cloth stuffed, it feels like, with soft feathers. I drift near sleep, feel my body relax so completely it seems as if I’m rising off the mat, hovering, looking down. This odd sense of safety I sometimes got with the Kartouf. It was the drugs, the needle. Maybe they’ve shot me up again. Maybe that’s it.

  No panic. It feels all right. Just to hover, be still.

  I don’t hear Suli re-enter, don’t feel her peel off my bloody clothes. What I do feel is the water – coolish at first, then fine. Such an elemental thing, washing me clean. Forgive me, Suli, for I have sinned. I can’t remember what I did, but I must have sinned or why would I be so bloody? She rubs my shoulders now with scented oil, my back and legs. I’m naked before her but it doesn’t feel like the usual world. Nakedness doesn’t matter. Blood, pain, sweat, filth – doesn’t matter. Not in this world. She turns me over and I see her face glistening with tears. They suit her – I can’t imagine anything more beautiful. The grieving widow. I see her for a moment kneeling in the airport, panic around her, her grief so perfect and profound.

  It isn’t the usual world.

  I say, “Dorut Kul has been murdered. He showed me a video of you and Sin Vello talking. The video has been stolen.”

  She says, “Shhhhhh. Not now.”

  Calmly. Everything is peaceful. Her hands are small but strong and warm. Wherever she touches on my body feels better instantly. My buttocks and legs and feet, oh my feet.

  Like being with Joanne. Joanne. From that other reality I must cling to.

  “He was shot in my suite at the Merioka. The back of his head blown off. His blood and brains were on the floor. And somebody took the video and transcript.”

  “Just be still,” she says. “Everything will become clear.”

  Her soothing hands on my belly, my wretched stomach, fragile chest. Everywhere she touches.

  “Some boy they called Captain Velios was killed in Welanto,” I say. These things I have to hold on to. I’m a Truth Commissioner. I haven’t come all this way to forget. “He was wrapped in garbage bags. He’d been mutilated.”

  “Don’t think about it now,” she says. The fragrance of the oil. Sandalwood? I’m never going to leave this moment. Eternal comfort and relief. It must be some sort of death.

  “I carried the body all the way to the police station. With Nito. Luki said she’d do it but I said no at that. Some things I said no to.”

  “Yes.”

  Her fingers on my scalp, rubbing the oil through and through, working down my forehead, across my eyes, down the line of my jaw. Like Wu. For a moment I could be back with him. None of this happened. Of course I didn’t go back to Santa Irene. Ridiculous. I’ve had enough punishment for one life. Wu’s fingers on the back of my neck, down my shoulders again. Pulling out the bad energy.

  “What were you and Sin Vello talking about that was so bad?” Of course I have to ask it. I’m a Truth Commissioner. It’s why I’m here.

  “Not now. Stay still.”

  “Was it Minitzh? Did you plot to assassinate the president?” It’s the worst thing I can think of. What makes the most sense.

  “Shhhhhh.”

  “Why else would you kill Dorut Kul?”

  “Everything will become clear,” she says. “Now we have to get ready.”

  She rises and my body turns cold, just like that, grace has been withdrawn. I can’t move, lie here still as a corpse. Of course. If she had Dorut Kul killed then she’d have me killed too. It’s probably already happened. I’ve been killed and like so many other things it isn’t what you expect. I’m lying here unable to move, cold as death, but still sensing, still thinking.

  “We carried the body all the way to the police station, and I would’ve carried it up the stairs too at the Merioka, but somebody else had already done that.”

  When she puts her hand on my shoulder again I can move. As simple as that. Reanimation, warmth flooding in. I s
it up, then stand, and she wraps me in a long, patterned brown cloth – ginkos running up and down the trunks of trees. It hangs loosely around my shoulders, snug around the waist, falls nearly to the floor.

  “For the man it’s called a golung. Yours is from the Upong, my old tribe. This one belonged to my husband.”

  “Somebody else had already carried the body up,” I say. “The refrigerator was full of heads.”

  Sunshine, the first really brilliant dose of it since coming back to the island. Dully, some thought from the past about my meds, how I shouldn’t spend time in full sun. But I’m off my meds anyway. Still, a hat would be useful, and sunscreen. Page one, Your Visit to the Tropics. When walking along a mountain ridge in the full sun carrying a chicken for hours, wear a hat and sunscreen.

  The chicken has gotten used to my carrying it. At first it squawked and flapped wildly, but now I have her cradled from below with my hand at her throat. Comfort and death. I’m sweating like a water sack. Suli is leading a goat and some of the soldiers have turkeys in bamboo cages. Why didn’t I get a cage for my chicken?

  It doesn’t matter. We’re just walking. The golung is light and cool, doesn’t seem to be falling off. I’m hungry though, and the pressure is building in my head. I didn’t think there would be headaches in death. Somehow that seems too earthly. But then again this is a journey back. An impossibly colourful bird sings at the top of a tree and then for a while the path swings to the edge of a rice paddy and I see the other paddies tiling down the slope, then up the next, filling the whole valley, liquid silver layers. We have to stop to look – you’d have to be dead not to pause in awe, and so I know I’m not dead yet. There’s more I have to go through.

  Small steps, blood working through my body, the chicken hot against me but still calm. The path turns into the wooded area then back to the open, affording another clear view of this valley of tiled water. It isn’t the fabled Watabi Valley but like it, I imagine. The path is slick in most places and my cheap rubber thongs swim in the muck, flap against my heels when I step forward. Down and down, over a rickety log bridge, past a small village like the one where Suli met me, huts on stilts, a few cooking fires smouldering. Then finally to a larger village, all of us collecting like small streams coming into a river. Old men with gnarled ceremonial walking sticks, some in red golungs, some in brown. Women in blue or green, draped in lavish garlands of flowers, and children too in bright colours, many of them leading goats, dogs, carrying chickens. Trickling down, the colours blending and mixing, voices like water. Shadows deep and cool when we reach them, sun so bright, overpowering in the open.