Drive-by Saviours

by Chris Benjamin

  Since learning to read he’d pored through all of his father’s encyclopedias cover to cover, learning an academic Indonesian perspective on everything under the alphabet. In Makassar he and Arum would go through discarded copies of newspapers, in which he learned first the Indonesian Government’s version of events and the perpetual progress of the nation, then Arum’s version of events and the stagnation of the nation under dictatorship.

  He had longed for the utopia called school since he’d first learned the word. Now that he could read, he wondered what school could teach him that he couldn’t learn from Arum and the encyclopedias.

  As difficult as morose routines were that week, the worst part was Alfi in the evening. Alfi understood Bumi was leaving and had stopped eating, sleeping and, worst of all, staring in wonder at grains of sand and rolling waves. She clung to Bumi at dusk, climbed into his bed at night and clung to him: still, eyes open, absorbing every last drop of her Big Brother, caretaker, protector, educator, all around hero.

  Alfi was tearing Bumi’s heart to pieces, and they all belonged to her. She became his only concern, despite his father’s tears, his mother’s chronic stomach pain, and his community’s morbid depression.

  The day of departure Yusupu had to pry Alfi’s arms from Bumi’s torso and hold her back from him while she wailed, kicked, flailed and bit at her poor father. Win stayed in bed drinking coconut water.

  As Bumi sped away, surrounded by his friends on the back of his uncle’s boat, Yusupu smothered Alfi as best he could in his wiry arms and afflicting love. Yet still Bumi could hear her cries halfway across the harbour, and for the first time he began to feel angry and resentful toward God. He silently prayed for forgiveness.

  FIVE MILLION CHICKEN LITTLES IN CHAPTER 4

  We shuffled from the building, blinking in the sunlight, a little confused. There were unsent emails in the outbox and we hadn’t completed our end of day routines—checking to-do lists, making new ones for tomorrow, putting files away, and so on. The lack of power was hardest on the electronic information generation. Without power, my calendar, to-do lists, address book, phone book and important documents were all gone, erased from existence until some generator in Ohio or some such damn place got fixed.

  I walked in a dazed dream toward the bus. Already Toronto’s millions of cars were collectively clotting the traffic arteries, but ignorantly I chose my seat up front on the still-empty bus. “Subway’s down,” grunted the driver. There’d be a series of long bus rides for the 1.5 million Torontonians relying on public transit.

  Within a kilometre the bus was standing room only and the driver was encouraging us all to try going south on Bathurst, but hundreds of others had the same idea so I decided to hoof it through the late afternoon heat. I walked and I watched as the sun lowered and the neighbourhoods seemed scarier, as families of four were shut out of corner stores by merchants saying, “No power, no food!” No one wanted to risk serving customers food that might have spoiled in a warm refrigerator.

  My mood moved south a lot quicker than could my feet, and my stunned elation at new-found freedom gave way to fear and frustration. How long could the walk home be? All night, the next too. I’d be stuck in a strange neighbourhood all night. All my mother’s worries came back to me.

  As the buses became too crowded people spilled more and more toward the sidewalk, and some hitchhiked or hailed cabs, which were as hard to catch as buses. The hitchhikers had little trouble benefiting from the kindness of strangers, but my mother’s fear became my own and kept me in my place among the sidewalk herd.

  On through ‘Jewville’ I walked amidst that herd, the strap of my leather briefcase boring into my shoulder as I tried to remember what it was like to be in good shape, pondering the distance between my belly-button and my waist, my location and my home, the sun and the horizon. One lone merchant sold Gatorade and water before closing shop, and on everybody walked with hardly a word between us, besides an occasional dissatisfied bleep.

  “You’re doing a great job, buddy,” one man said to another who was doing a mediocre job directing traffic at a major intersection. I couldn’t tell if the comment was meant to be sarcastic.

  After about half an hour the crowd filtered out, some squeezing onto buses filled with sweaty people, some finding their homes, some hitching rides (though most cars drove by with lonely passenger seats in need of asses), and the sky grew darker as I got lonelier. Still I walked on because I was hesitant to brush against a stranger on one of those overcrowded buses.

  I longed for Sarah. She’d seemed like an old friend from a full life together the moment we met. A lone old woman was able to penetrate and engage my thoughts.

  “There’s no buses coming,” she said. “They’re all full.”

  “I know. I’ve seen them.”

  “You better walk faster. It’s getting darker.”

  I thought of watching the stars with Sarah, without urban light pollution, and I obliged and thanked the woman. After a ninety-minute walk I caught a bus at Eglinton, still thirteen city blocks from home. The bus driver created his own route. In response to the crisis he headed south then east the way the subway would under normal circumstances.

  I stood shoulder to shoulder in the sweltering mosaic, which melted into one twisted hunk of flesh in the heat. The faces came to me geometrically in animated colour. They formed slowly before my eyes in a Benetton ad. I reached for my sketchbook and elbowed the man next to me in the process.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  He made an effort to smile but the edges of his mouth ran into dimples and stopped. I shifted around, bumped people on every side as I tried to twist a hand into my shoulder bag—with no luck. I managed only to wring my hands together, but the itch to draw remained. I settled for taking flash photos by blinking my eyes, like I’d learned in art class.

  First was the brown businessman: head of clay formed from the top point and rolling out fatter at the bottom; jet-black, forward-flowing strands of thick, trim hair, grey on the sides. Then a charcoal sketch of his slippery clear glasses sliding down his nose. And a flurry of motion lines creased around his jaw, up and down on an unseen piece of gum while his eyes twinkled at a newspaper. He was one of the lucky few with a seat.

  Then there was a burly Eastern European man wearing a vertical-striped shirt and blue track pants with bright yellow stripes down the sides that pointed at his sneakers. His whole face a ski slope. He sat hypnotized by the long still rows of cars that crept around the corners. He too had a seat, but kindly surrendered it to a big older woman whose fatty knees were about to buckle. When he stood I realized he was slim and shorter than I. Only his face was burly.

  The big old woman’s fat ass spilled over the edges of the seat as she sat. For me she was a full colour drawing of creased face, saggy breasts, wide hips and rolling thighs, like a Gauguin nude come alive and clothed. Where before I’d have seen a charcoal sketch at best, now I saw the vast roundness of her face, the depths of time, the story of where youth used to live and then I even saw her eyes, which were the same age as mine. And as I stared at that ancient/young entity, miracle of miracles, she smiled at me toothlessly, joyful at a young man’s attention.

  I smiled back slowly and shyly, turning my head, face beating red, outright flirting now, and she schoolgirl-giggled.

  Next to her was a thin, brown man with a broad, serious face. He looked like resilient dignity scrunched against the window. He dressed plainly in grease-stained polyester slacks, scuffed dress shoes and a green army surplus coat open over a white t-shirt, also grease-stained. He wore no jewellery and had no tattoos. I imagined a long lit cigarette dangling from his plush lips because the photo I flashed of him on my brain needed something burning to match the intensity of his eyes. I couldn’t tell where he was from—South Asia maybe—but like most Torontonians he wasn’t from Toronto, or even Canada. His worn good loo
ks were periodically scrunched up by his little twitches, during which he would rub his chin on his right and then his left shoulder spastically. It made him look like a chicken pecking for food, but as I snapped my eyes shut, I caught only his rugged beauty, poised in the nanosecond of my internal sketch. In it his head was tilted down toward his left shoulder, with his eyebrows raised and his eyes gazing steady, up and to his left.

  One of the Caribbean men next to me in the aisle of humanity shouted incoherently, until I cocked my ear and cleared my head of accumulated smoke and fog. There was heavy saliva in his speech, slapping teeth at the back like a big, tsk but deeper and wetter: chslslslsl, and there were a lot of sing-song eh-ehs and some owa! Creole.

  Behind my back a tall stick-figured Asian man, Mainland Chinese in fact, with a jaw joyously jutting into a face-consuming smile, was cracking random dad-jokes through the crowd and laughing like an evil villain from an anime video game. He talked to a little old lady white as snow and paled by a lifetime of hard work who peered through the window into the unlit dusk and tried to see street names. They chattered idly, as Torontonians rarely do, telling tales of the trip home, strategizing and prophesying on what was to follow. They were exceedingly nice to each other, establishing comfort and familiarity quickly, safe in the knowledge that this night would be remembered so it best be made interesting, excited by the enormity of our entire city in darkness, in every neighbourhood, at the very same time—all streets trying to get home. Never before had so many Torontonians shared the same thing, and in that polite, calm rage against panic they were more alive, more real, more present than they’d ever been.

  Or maybe it was just me. For once I was quietly watching, not out of fear so much as an intense curiosity to know them all. To speak would be to focus my observation on only one or a few individuals. By staying silent I could know them all even if they didn’t know me.

  It was the little old lady who forced my tongue when she said in her little old lady voice, “Does anyone know where the heck we are? I can’t see a single street sign.”

  I pressed my face down against the glass at her eye level as if that vantage would help me see what she missed. “Dupont,” I told her. Still far from home. “Where you getting off?”

  “Kennedy Station.”

  “Me too!” the joyous Chinese mouth shouted. It was all but floating on its own grin, separate from the rest of the man’s face. “But it’s so far! We won’t get there until ten o’clock!”

  “Hey,” the little old lady said, “you can help us find our street with your keen eye. You can let people know where the bus is.”

  And so it was decreed that not only would I know everyone on the bus, they would know me too, eastbound as far as my home in Greektown, halfway to Kennedy. And so it was that I became a useful citizen during the Great Toronto Blackout of 2003.

  My brief fame was nothing compared to that of the man in the hard hat with the window seat about halfway down the bus who started out talking to anyone who would listen and finished off hollering at the whole bus. “What’s a black man got to do to get his black ass home in this city?” He wanted us to wonder with him.

  “I’ve been coming all the way from Mississauga,” Hardhat continued, “been on two hours already! Huh! Yonge and Bloor is coming up, then it’s finally over for me, I can finally get my ass home after three hours. Fu-uuck! Don’t stop the bus till you get to Yonge and Bloor, driver goddamn!”

  And the driver didn’t stop either. He drove by crowd after crowd of tired, angry people crammed between fire-sale beer and red-wine parties. Toronto saw an opportunity and took action because in the five o’clock world most people wait, wait, and wait for a chance to dance on a weekday—for any break from the norm.

  But others, like me and the crowd at Yonge and Bloor, just wanted to get home. I stood patiently calling out street names, the misery on my brain being slowly evicted to make room for observation and communication. I was lucky I wasn’t still walking, or worse, stuck on a subway car with no power.

  The Yonge and Bloor crowd wasn’t so lucky, and as the driver slowed the bus to let another pass in front, they shared their misfortune with us. They beat on the doors, windows and side of the bus.

  “Get your black ass away from the bus. You can’t get on the bus here!” the man with the hard hat hollered out his window at the furious crowd, apparently presuming every ass in Toronto to be black.

  When the driver concurred with hard hat guy and pulled away, the man grew even angrier. “Hey, stop this goddamn bus and let me off. It’s Yonge and Bloor! I came all the way from Mississauga. This is my stop motherfucker!” His words raged steady and forceful.

  “I think you should watch your language, Sir. There’s a child on the bus with us,” a gargantuan man said. His gargantuan bass voice boomed from behind the other’s hard hat.

  When the hard hat guy turned I got a clear view of the opening sequence of a comic-book world, dark and menacing behind a bright ominous moon. Behind Hardhat, a broad African face lurked in the shadows, appearing dark and therefore evil, because that’s the stereotype comics toy with. Only when our own prejudices have condemned him do we learn the depths of the beautiful heart of the dark character. But in this story the reveal was done differently. We knew first of the gargantuan man’s defender-of-justice nature because we heard his powerful voice defend an innocent child from profanity. Then was revealed his broad black perspiring face, angry at the assault of the innocent by our villainous Hardhat.

  Hardhat, the caricature criminal, retorted witlessly, “I see the kid.”

  Dark Avenger said, “Good, watch your language.”

  “I see the kid.”

  “I think you should watch your language.”

  “I see the kid.”

  “Good.”

  “I see the kid.”

  A nod.

  “I see the kid.”

  George Lucas writes better dialogue.

  “Good,” Hardhat said. He surmised that it was agreed he saw the eight-year-old blond kid who stood right across from him. “Now I got to get offa this bus before that man beats me up. I’m just a little guy.”

  It was true, and it became the second time that afternoon that a man became smaller as he stood. Hardhat’s body was dwarfed by his voice.

  He rang the bell and yanked and yanked and yanked the cord but the bus driver drove on and those rare random Toronto conversations were drowned by Hardhat’s stream-of-consciousness profanity.

  “Driver, please let him off. He’s become obscene,” a tall mother said. Her ruddy children had long since left her home to become investment bankers. She was drawn eloquently with silver stitching on an ancient batik. She’d lost her slender figure in childbirth but never her grace or style, nor her commitment to quality and righteousness. She had no patience for rudeness or impropriety, not from the young and certainly not from the middle-aged, blue collar or otherwise.

  Finally the driver stopped to let Hardhat off in a particularly dark spot with no bus-stop sign and no anxious subway exiles. Hardhat gave us the finger, and one to a guy directing traffic too.

  “Fuck Toronto!” He shouted loud enough for us to hear through the open windows. “Osama’s gonna get you now! The bombs are coming tonight you uptight motherfuckers, so you may as well go home and die!”

  As we pulled away I squinted out the window. “Sherbourne!”

  My new friends and fans cheered, “Whoohooo!” because they didn’t know my name.

  BUT WHAT IF HARDHAT WAS RIGHT, WHAT IF THIS WAS PHASE ONE for the takeover of the world?

  Sarah was thinking the same Chicken Little thoughts as I spotted Broadview Street. She was worried about looting, rioting, people in powerless hospitals due to car crashes at lightless intersections, and me. This is what can happen when people in love have too much time on their hands and no me
dia or electric lights to read or write by. After establishing that the hospitals were doing fine without her, my diet-prone catalogue-model girlfriend and juggernaut homemaker set to barbequing some veggie burgers and corn for me.

  Walking up my street at 9:30 in the darkest night since ’65, watching cops direct traffic from afar, I realized it was the perfect night for crime. I contemplated which store to break into first, and was still working on the problem when I entered the scene of beer, burgers, candlelight and Sarah in her underwear. With full bellies we finished the night of stargazing from our little backyard grass plot. Looting and violence, accidental or planned, were as implausible as working the next day. All Toronto seemed to be at peace and rest.

  FOUR YEARS TO LIFE IN CHAPTER 5

  Among the thousands of forced migrants to Makassar in 1982 were eight boys and seven girls from the island of Rilaka, and among these was Bumi. The thought of escape played constantly on the young boy’s mind. Local government peace and order officers, teachers, and school administrators had been warned that members of the new ‘special’ class had high risks of flight, but no one was overly concerned because they knew where to find the refugees. Bumi knew that to run back to Rilaka would mean capture and punishment for him and his family. He pondered routes out of the city, but with no money an eight-year-old couldn’t get far.

  The first task for Ibu Nova, who was given the honour of teaching this special new class because of her reputation as an excellent disciplinarian, was to teach them proper Indonesian. All of Rilaka’s children had some knowledge of the official national language, but on an isolated island where Buginese had always been the language, only Bumi was fluent.

  He had displayed leadership throughout his short life, but school was the first place Bumi demonstrated such obvious superiority over his peers in something they were all expected to know. So tired was Ibu Nova of his answering each and every question correctly before the others could even think on the matter at hand, she eventually let him sit and read the paper or a novel while the others studied.