Burridge Unbound

by Alan Cumyn

  “Bill–”

  “Don’t really know what I think about that. You wrote it.”

  “She did?” my mother says.

  “You run away,” I say. “It’s what you do, remember? Well, don’t do it this time!” I’m out of control, saying anything. Stop it, I think.

  “We don’t have to decide right now out in the street,” Joanne says.

  “Yes, we do! We have to put the universe in order right now!” I scream it to grey Ottawa, where such things are never done in public. The universe is never put in order in the street in the cold wind during working hours.

  “For God’s sake, let’s go to the golf course,” Graham says, shaking his head. “Everybody’s waiting.”

  And like that my tirade drains away, victim of the most sensible thing. We all have to go to the golf course. Because everybody’s waiting. Joanne takes my arm and Graham walks with Mom and the universe is not going to fall in place just for me, just because I need it to at this very moment. It never does, and the bitterness rises in me, a hard, burnt electrical taste. But not worse than that, and it doesn’t last long.

  “When are you supposed to leave?” I ask Joanne in the car. Quietly, hoping for privacy. Then – “Don’t answer that.” Holding her arm. “It’s not right away. It’s not today.”

  “No,” she says. The old sound of her voice – warm flannel. “Not today.”

  “And you are coming back.”

  “People are dying. I have certain skills.”

  “And you are coming back?”

  “Yes,” she says, and looks at me finally the way she’s supposed to when she says yes. There’s everything to tell her. I watch as much as I can as my heart goes hammer hammer, it can’t slow down. Buildings, streets, hills, sky, it all appears so permanent, and yet I know there’s no glue, nothing stays fixed, it could fall apart from one moment to the next.

  I fall for a moment into a memory. It’s late, late, one of our first nights in Santa Irene. Maryse and I are lying in the darkness in bed, wide awake, jet-lagged, naked and quiet, sweating on the sheets, it’s so hot. Exhausted and yet still roiled from the trip. This feeling: We’ve done it, we’ve travelled across the world and now here we are. Then suddenly, from behind the high ceiling, come the sounds of a terrific battle – two animals having at it fiercely above our heads. We don’t say a word – it’s frightening but distant. The way they’re thudding and screeching I think they might come crashing through the tiles right on top of us. And yet it seems safe, somehow; we’re in our new home, we don’t bother to move. I’m more concerned for Patrick, who’s in the other room.

  Then it gets very quiet, and I hold Maryse’s hand, and we hear it. Tokay, tokay, tokay. We don’t know what it is, but it sounds soothing.

  It will never be like that again, I think now. We were different people and we’ve been reassembled and it won’t be the same. And yet, this has something of that same feeling. I’ve just crossed the world and here I am. This is what is happening.

  I close my eyes and listen.

  Alan Cumyn’s most recent books are Man of Bone (1998), winner of the Ottawa-Carleton Book Award (as it was then known) and a finalist for the prestigious Trillium Book Award in 1999; Burridge Unbound (2000), which won the Ottawa Book Award and was a finalist for The Giller Prize; and Losing It (2001).

  Cumyn worked for eight years for the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board, writing on international human-rights issues. He has taught in the People’s Republic of China and in Indonesia, ran a group home in Toronto for Katimavik, and is the author of a bestselling guide to working and studying abroad.

  Alan Cumyn lives in Ottawa.