Drive-by Saviours

by Chris Benjamin

  “Yes,” Bumi whispered. True to Yaty, if not the facts.

  Robadise proclaimed augustly, “If my friend is to marry my sister, then I will bless the occasion and all acts of love afterward, and may you bring me many nephews! Just you two wait until it’s official, ya?”

  “Ya!” they agreed.

  Robadise ran hollering to his parents as the two got dressed quickly. Yaty smiled and Bumi frowned. Marrying Yaty might not be so bad, but what circumstances! What a proposal, to have it beaten out of you, or worse, beaten out of your lover by proxy.

  Robadise shared with his parents only the joyous fact of the betrothal. Somehow they had been in the dark as to any interest between the two. Bumi had been a roach-like presence in the house, tolerated and almost unnoticed, an oddity of nature to be begrudgingly admired if considered at all. He took up a lot of space and ate a lot of food without contributing much in return, but he didn’t bite and he was rarely seen in daylight.

  Bumi was not the man Yaty’s family would have envisioned for her, but she’d made her choice and a woman’s choice of husband had to be respected, at least on the surface. That night they feasted on goat and fish fresh from the market, acquired by Yaty herself. She went alone. Bumi still refused to set foot in the market, unlike a real roach. This aversion won him no points with his new in-laws.

  SEVERAL DAYS PASSED BEFORE BUMI GOT TO TALK WITH YATY about her innovative evasion of her brother’s abuse, a manoeuvre that may have created a solution worse than the problem. He was not opposed to marrying her, but he could not get comfortable with how the blessed union had come about. But with all the cousins, uncles and aunts coming by the house to celebrate and meet him, Bumi could only sit with his growing discomfort.

  When the extended family finally cleared out, Bumi beelined it to the Bali with Yaty in tow. It was about a fifteen-minute walk from their home. “Yaty,” he started cautiously, “are you sure you want to marry me? Are you sure I’m the one for you?”

  “Of course, Bumi, how could you even ask?”

  “It seems a reasonable question,” he confided, “considering how we got engaged.”

  “But don’t you love me?”

  This was another subject that he had not breeched with her. He had hardly considered it himself. He’d been too busy working out the root of oppression and how to get her pants off without marrying her. Love had not been the issue, but she sure did make him feel good, and not just physically.

  “I don’t even understand love,” he told her. “I don’t even know what it means.”

  “Typical Indonesian communist,” she chastised. “You supposedly know all about community but you don’t even know what love is.”

  This comment bewildered him. He didn’t understand community either. “Listen,” he said, forcing the tributary argument to the back of his mind for later. “The point is, your brother wanted to kill me. Your family thinks I’m a freak.”

  “My brother loves you. You’re his best friend. It was me he was after.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Bumi said, easing into things he’d peripherally considered, an intuitive fear he’d repressed. “I think he’s jealous of me anyway. I think he wanted an excuse to hit me.”

  “Bumi! You and Robadise go back years. He saved your life when you were in trouble; why would he want to hurt you? Why would he be jealous? He’s a successful policeman and you’re, well, you’re not successful yet. Not that way.”

  “Yeah, that’s it, he’s jealous because I don’t have to be a cop. I get to read the books he wants to read, hang out in a warung, debate with his friends. And they love me, by the way, like they used to love him. He had to sell out, that’s how he feels, so he’s jealous of me for getting what he used to have, and getting a free ride too. Wow, I never realized I was so lucky until just now.”

  “Bumi, that’s silly. He wants you to be happy. He wants you to have those things, believe me. He’s always known you’re a genius, and he loves you. He’s happy we’re getting married, now that the shock of finding us… you know… has worn off.”

  “But Yaty, Yaty, how can we get married like this? I never asked you. That was a lie.”

  “You wanted to, Bumi. I know it, even if you don’t. I know you love me. Besides, who else will take you?”

  “Who says I want to be taken?”

  “Don’t you?”

  It was another question for which Bumi had no answer. As a boy every new tidbit of knowledge was like a refreshing splash of cool water. Now he was drowning in an ocean of unanswerable questions.

  AT THE WEDDING, ROBADISE OFFERED BUMI A JOB AT A FACTORY. It was one of many assets owned by a friend who owed Robadise a few favours. Robadise’s jealousy was too obvious. He had to force Bumi from his lackadaisical lifestyle and into a brain-killing factory, where he would make belts, of all things, just so Bumi wouldn’t have what Robadise couldn’t. But Bumi had little choice. Soon enough there would be new mouths to feed. Bumi needed the money. Maybe their children would inherit his brains and finish their studies, fill that oceanic hole with answers to his questions.

  THE EARLY MORNING SHIFTS AND ADHERENCE TO THE monochronic timing of Bumi’s new employer, Bumi Sabuk, made his school days seem like an animistic soap-opera dream-world. So afraid was Bumi of being late that his alarm-clock-checking-rituals intensified and he barely got two hours of sleep each night. He’d walk twenty minutes to work, dodging all imperfections in the pavement, catching them through one sleepy eye. He was unsure of the exact consequences of stepping on those imperfections, but he knew that it would shift the universe toward some greater degree of evil, further away from rightness.

  His other eye was on every stranger who passed through his neighbourhood. While Bumi had no inclination to get to know his Makassar neighbours, he worried about people he hadn’t seen before, which in a big city adds up to a lot of people. If someone walked by him in his neighbourhood or around his usual haunts, on the way to work or near the Bali, he just had to know his name and purpose. Bumi carried a notebook to record and remember the information. Otherwise, he’d never know who might come around, or what some stranger might do.

  BUMI WORKED WITH TOXIC TANNING CHEMICALS AND LIVED afraid of the cancerous contaminants he breathed through a flimsy mask. He covered himself from head to toe and took endless ribbing from his co-workers. As usual, he was the most intelligent yet slowest person among his peers, so meticulous were his reviews of the products he handled. He was step seven in a nine-step process, adding a third addition of deep brown, but he could never seem to get the colour quite right. He could never make it perfect. Usually a belt would pass from his hands only when the step-eight guy got on his case. He passed much of his ten-hour day thinking of the children who would be whipped by the belts he was making.

  As bad as Bumi had it, he sympathized with his wife, who in her grown-up world got a job sewing sarongs, batiks and robes for tourists in the back of a gift shop/sweatshop under the constant gaze of an overseer and the occasional peeps of tourists from the store. Her day was fourteen hours long.

  In the early days of their marriage they somehow found the energy and stolen time after a gruelling day to make love. It was early in 1991 when their first child, Bunga, was born, in a real hospital, her face all crinkly, brown and wide-eyed at the implausibility of being born to these two weirdos, one screaming maniacally and the other hyperventilating. When they put Bunga, whose creative and unusual name meant ‘flower,’ in Bumi’s arms and he gazed upon the small and powerful miracle, he knew that he would never experience anything more astonishing, or more wonderful, than this fatherhood.

  TWENTY-NINE OCTOBER CHRISTMASES IN CHAPTER 10

  The city that never wakes up, which has no culture, houses the highest bureaucrat-per-capita rate outside Geneva, has the seventh coldest winter temperatures of any nation’s capital, bans alcohol after midni
ght and litter before, smells like carbon monoxide and feels like ether, celebrates smog and humidity with the bland cultural products of Canadian content law and draws more people for its tulip festival than any other event, is the city that produced the woman I loved. And because I was no freer in my personal life than in my professional life, it was also the city in which I was doomed to spend my twenty-ninth Thanksgiving.

  It was only avoidance of my own DNA that brought me to Ottawa, my old friend Freddy’s words ringing in my memory: “Blood ain’t thicker than water, it’s just harder to swallow.” But if Coupland is right and all families are psychotic, my family is more psychotic than average and Sarah’s is certifiable.

  Her mother Gaby’s suicide threats, which started soon after her husband Vlad offed himself, had subsided somewhat since the start of her blissful relationship with Vlad’s former boss, John Orange. John insisted on being called Johnny to spite his thin grey hair, low-hanging spectacles and ‘Norm Drabble belly,’ all of which collaborated to spite his status as a principal at a prestigious law firm, a favourite of the federal Conservatives. But life’s cycles spun and just like Gaby’s last love and Vlad’s last love this one dulled over dozens of full moons. By the time I entered the fray Johnny Orange, Lawyer Without a Cause, was sleeping with younger, perkier, more sober women.

  Thanksgiving 2003 was to be the first official family function for these already stale newlyweds. It was also the day we would celebrate their first ever Ukrainian Christmas. Sarah and I had no intention of wasting our real Christmas watching Gaby and Johnny decorate their fast-fading love affair with worn Christmas lights, substituting imposed traditions for the true comfort of enduring love. Instead we’d spend Christmas at our new home in Toronto, knowing Gaby refused to travel. Gaby’s compensation was Ukrainian Christmas in early October.

  From the time they had defected, Vlad banned all things Ukrainian from their household. Since her first husband’s death Gaby had taken considerable pains to revive what she and her children never had. Her traditions had been taken by the Soviets and her children’s by their father. She insisted on implementing a reasonable reproduction of January seventh-like festivities, regardless of the time of year.

  On ‘Christmas Eve’ Saturday, Sarah, her sister Jennifer and I sat around the kitchen table painting eggs and cutting out and colouring images of Baby Jesus, Mother Mary, Vladimir Putin and gift-bearers, while Gaby fluttered about all around us handing out scissors and crayons and paints and sweets, in between trips to the kitchen preparing our holy, twelve-course feast of sweet meats and pastries. With the exception of Sarah, who was on the forty-year fast of the catalogue model, we ate enough to hold us until December 25th, egged on by Gaby’s chants of “Eat! You’re too skinny. Sarah, eat! Not you, Jenny, you’ve had enough.”

  We set up and decorated the tree, adorning it with a miniature Santa Claus at the top. Afterward we surrounded the tree and serenaded it with Christmas songs. Gaby explained that if Vlad hadn’t totally cut the family off from the local Ukrainian community, the girls would have grown up visiting Ukrainian neighbours at Christmas, bringing lanterns and spreading grain on their doorsteps as they sang for small gifts or donations for the church. Had that happened, and had this actually been Christmas, other people’s children would now visit and sing for us—but this was not to be and we had to make our own music.

  Sarah, who refused to disown or confront her family, resisted such cultural reclamation by running frequent errands outside the house. She insisted on maintaining family ties for special occasions and revelled in sharing the dirt on her tight-lipped family in her own social circles on her own time. And so, in between all those Canadianized Ukrainian traditions I found myself accompanying Sarah to convenience stores, gas stations, and coffee shops in search of last-minute high-need items like sugar sprinkles, miso, bouillon cubes and other suddenly essential ingredients for the feast or decor.

  Intermittently I would drink Scotch with Papa Johnny Orange, who belted Irish folk tunes between shots and somehow still feigned control over the Christmas show like it was his law firm.

  Jenny was mostly invisible. Her cell phone-laptop-palm pilot and pager filled in where the walls of her bedroom left off seven years before. She had become the president of one of the surviving Silicon Valley dotcoms and I could only assume that her motivation for being in Ottawa was the same as Sarah’s: to maintain that most precious illusion of family and avoid wasting ‘actual’ Christmas there.

  While Johnny and I downed Scotch, Gaby excreted a faint combination odour of expensive perfume and cheap vodka. One never saw the woman drink but Sarah and Jenny spent sixty minutes throughout each day pulling half-finished bottles of fermented potato snot from ceiling beams, floor panels and toilet tanks. The progression of Gaby’s morning-teeters toward evening-staggers was proof of a losing battle.

  The pervading chill of booze, technology and an escalating meal plan made a step outside into Ottawa’s autumn air feel like a blast of tropical heat. Still, for me, ‘Christmas’ in their three-bedroom-refrigerator was an Icelandic paradise because nobody ever yelled except Johnny, who was never angry but enjoyed barking orders that had already been fulfilled or were otherwise completely irrelevant. “Somebody baste that damn turkey before Butterball sues!” A lifetime of litigation had left Johnny incapable of non-litigious analogy.

  “No turkey, Buddy,” Gaby would answer with a rueful smile. “And the roast is ready.”

  “Good girl!”

  The hostilities were precise and subtle, unlike the Civil War re-creations of my Christmases past, in which all the offences of history—real, imagined and insinuated—were dragged through our sparsely decorated living room and around our under-stalked tree. This was how I thought of Christmas, but in fact neither my sister nor I had been home to help praise baby Jesus in several years. Sarah’s family psychosis had become my own and as far as I was concerned it was a big improvement.

  Ottawa, with its paucity of direct insults and abundance of big-ticket attempts at buying love or forgiveness, was the opposite of my humbler, louder origins. Every year Sarah spent about three hundred times more on Christmas presents than on long distance phone calls, only to be outbid by her mother and sibling. This year Step-Papa Johnny upped the stakes in an effort to win over his former employee’s daughters.

  The biggest benefactor to the whole shopping spree was the person least interested in participating: me. For my reticence I received cash, clothes, cologne, booze, books, CDs, gift certificates, and even travellers cheques, for a return on investment that would make Arthur Anderson blush. It made little impression on the wrapping-paper vultures around me, who were engaged in a simultaneous shredding orgy that allowed no one to witness their scrupulously selected bribe being opened. When the wrappers settled over gleaming packaging we were all smiles and thanks. There was nary a shout or yelp and we all had a nice buzz going by noon.

  Periodically Sarah would lead me up to her childhood room and, amidst the old Raggedy Anns, Barbies and Cabbage Patch Kids, spit family-oriented venom through gritted teeth. “You see the way that philandering fatty treats my mother? How drunk is Mom gonna get? Where the hell was Jenny when she fell down the stairs? Yet I catch shit for telling her to ease off the booze.”

  Even these rants thrilled me, though I would never admit it. With Sarah’s frustration splintered in three directions I became her best ally again, like in the days before we bought our fixer-upper house and settled into that struggle with a mundane mortality, where material things are a temporary comfort.

  ZERO TO SIXTY IN CHAPTER 11

  In his six years as a factory worker Bumi became an almost complete insomniac, read hundreds of books a year, lost complete touch with his coffee shop friends, and was in constant conflict with Yaty’s family. He was forced to counter his unpleasant and unwanted fantasies of killing them by praying for their well-being to a God he deeply mistru
sted. It was only his devotion to Yaty and his children that kept him living.

  When Baharuddin was born Bumi was surprised to find himself as amazed by his second child as he was by the first. Bumi’s dazed amazement inspired Yaty to choose the boy’s name, a description of newness. Newness never fails to astound.

  A week after Baharuddin’s birth, taking inspiration from the novel Roots, Bumi took his seven-pound newborn into the small courtyard and cradled his whole backside in his dirty, calloused hands, and lifted the boy to the stars and the black heavens. He said, “Look my son.” Baharuddin cried as his white cotton blankets unfurled and fell around Bumi’s hand.

  “Look son,” Bumi repeated in a loud deep voice. “I want to tell you something very important. You are immensely special and important. Never let anyone tell you otherwise. In this world you will be expected to conform and you will receive nothing if not pressure to be numb, to obey, to feed the collective ambiguity. Don’t let them do that to you. You are the most important thing, other than what you see high above and around you. Always remember that.”

  Bumi gathered the crying infant back into his arms, covered him again and whispered gently into his ear, “You are more important than anything except the universe itself. God will never help you through this life and I am not a strong man. I will always give you my love and let you be what you want to be. The rest is up to you.” His best wisdom shared, Bumi returned the infant to Yaty and washed himself thoroughly for several hours.

  Bunga, now five, was the consummate talker and regaled Baharuddin with tales of the schoolyard playground. Her monologues left Bumi longing for his long-abandoned sister, and covered his few sleeping hours with a rambling dream of Rilaka, in which Grandpa’s ghost, Yusupu, Win, Syam and Pram stood all together around a bubbling pond. Overwrought with perverse curiosity, Bumi found himself emerging from the ocean water. He stumbled onto the shore and shook off the salty film, lunging arduously toward them, calling their names soundlessly and feeling very heavy. When he reached their circle they took no notice and went on chatting amicably amongst themselves as he nudged at their elbows. He was small again, smaller than he ever remembered being, though heavier, and the equal weight of his words were stuck in his throat. Noticing the absence of Alfi he began to panic. He kicked sand at the backs of their knees, trying unsuccessfully to shout.