Drive-by Saviours

by Chris Benjamin

  After lunch Lily explained their free services: clients could avoid the trap of the immigration lawyer piranhas and get trustworthy legal advice from volunteer lawyers, have their testimonials—usually stories of torture and persecution from home—translated, get help filling in legal and administration forms in English or Spanish, get assistance finding affordable housing and—unofficially and not to be included in my article—find out where to get under-the-table work for cash until they got status.

  This was the explanation of what I witnessed, which was phones rattling off their perches, volunteers poring over case files, people dropping in every few minutes with questions, staccato Spanish language conversations—a maelstrom of hyperactivity. No one left without being served.

  I conducted my interview with Lily in her bedroom, the only place she could guarantee privacy, most likely uninterrupted. I asked her what got her family interested in working with refugees. “It’s shared experience I guess,” she said. “I mean, we’re not refugees exactly but my father and I come from a war-torn country, and my parents both fought in the revolution there. So our experience isn’t completely unlike the stories we hear everyday from our clients.”

  And so she told me her own story, starting with how her parents married in Nicaragua after the war. They filed an immigration claim for Jose Luis based on family reasons, namely their marriage, their Canadian citizen child and Gwen’s desire to return home with her husband. Realizing the claim could take months to years to process, they took the risk of bringing him to Canada on a one-year visa.

  It wasn’t until years later, after Jose Luis had been deported, that Lily finally learned the truth about her father’s other family. His ex-wife, Concepcion, had kicked him out of their home, Gwen told Lily in Jose Luis’ absence. Soon after the revolution Concepcion found out that Jose and Gwen were having an affair, and she filed for divorce. Concepcion decided that in the new Nicaragua, no man, not even a revolutionary soldier, would be allowed to humiliate her like that. The divorce didn’t come through until after his marriage to Gwen. That made at least one of his two main reasons for coming to Canada, his marriage, null and void.

  “You should have seen the look on my face when my mother told me,” Lily said. “You should have seen the look on Mom’s face when she saw the look on my face! Like this.” She dropped her jaw all the way down to her collarbone. “She couldn’t believe how much anger her little girl could have in her. I was mad. I guess I felt like this all made me null and void too.” Lily had convinced her mother to take her back to meet her stepsisters and brothers, without informing her father, who had returned to Nicaragua.

  They arrived in one of the dingier parts of Granada, a fairly large city in western Nicaragua, and found Jose Luis holed up in a little room owned by a big family. He’d taken a job laying concrete. It was long hours, hard labour, low pay, and left Jose Luis living in a tiny room with bullet holes in the graffiti walls. “It smelled like piss and tobacco,” Lily told me. “He didn’t have any furniture or extra blankets, so we slept together on the floor sharing a tattered little sheet.”

  In the morning Lily’s mother accompanied her on the bus and walked her to the driveway of Concepcion’s house, then hawk-eyed her from about fifty metres down the road as she approached the door.

  When Concepcion found Lily shuffling her feet on her doorstep, she invited her in. “She said she had wondered if I might come there some day,” Lily told me. “She seemed to understand why I was there, but she was cool and she kept a close eye on me the whole time.”

  Lily’s three elder half-siblings were herded into the kitchen to meet her. “They stood in front of the stove and each of them shook my hand. The oldest, Edwin, teetered slightly on his right foot. It had no toes. Other than that they didn’t move at all. They just stared at me, just like Concepcion.

  “So Mom and I returned to Jose Luis and lived with him in his piss-stink room for five months until the divorce was official and we could come back to Canada.”

  I HAD MORE THAN ENOUGH INFORMATION TO WRITE MY FOUR-hundred-word column on the refugee centre and its permanent inhabitants after about twenty minutes in Lily’s room, yet I had no desire to leave. I pulled things out of my briefcase and played show and tell. I grew suspicious that the feeling was mutual when she took great interest in my sketchbook and its collection of abstract public transportation faces. “Where’d you learn to draw like this?” she asked.

  “Partially self-taught, partially art class,” I said.

  “They’re so beautiful,” she told my ego. On the sound of her words my body went into some sort of spin cycle. The sense of comfort I’d felt since my arrival at her house rapidly dissipated and I felt nauseous, dizzy and sore.

  “Thank you,” I muttered. I felt neither gratitude nor sincerity, just a desire to run.

  She gushed on, mistaking my fear for modesty. “No seriously,” she said. “It’s like… I don’t want to sound like a cliché or whatever but, it’s like you really captured their soul, you know?”

  I spit out a laugh to relieve the pressure and, showing no signs of offence, she giggled. “Okay that did sound cliché,” she said. “But really it’s like you just made all these people so beautiful, but without glossing over them to avoid the ugly pieces. They are ugly yet beautiful. This is still cliché, I know, but that’s what I’m seeing here, and I feel like I know your subjects as well as you do just by looking-”

  “You do know them as well as I do,” I shouted, too emphatically. “Because I don’t really know them. I literally did these of strangers on the subway.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “That’s too bad. I’m impressed, but wouldn’t it be better to have their permission? I don’t know.” We stared at each other in silence while my brain screamed excuses to leave that my mouth refused to utter. “It would be interesting to see what it would look like if you sketched someone you knew,” she said. “While they knew you were sketching them too.”

  “How about you?” I said.

  She nodded her consent.

  Our respective work demands prevented any sketching on the spot. We agreed that I would return on Saturday afternoon. She suggested that I could include it in the newsletter and I agreed, even though I doubted they would print it and didn’t much care if anyone saw my drawings anyway.

  I SPENT THE NEXT THREE DAYS THINKING OF LILY POSING FOR ME. I had drawn nude models in art class, but that was nothing like this. That was a paid stranger on a sanitized table with instruction and trained eyes on students. This would be intimate: me, Lily, her bedroom and my sketch pad. No money would change hands.

  The art models always seemed hard up for cash. Not necessarily desperate, but certainly in need. They were mostly young, probably students who didn’t want to deal with the public in a customer service job. Lily was something else: strong, accomplished, ruthless yet so utterly moral. My thoughts drifted into fantasies of a large studio with Lily spread naked like an antique tablecloth sewed by master craftswomen and embroidered by world-class artisans, and me with absolute permission to gaze at her and shift her position as necessary to forge the greatest re-creation of her mixed-heritage beauty.

  These were the dangerous thoughts of a man who, I must admit it, was becoming increasingly miserable. The happy memories of the past four years were becoming tainted with disillusion. My high hopes of making a real difference in people’s lives had never reached fruition. It should have been simpler, more direct, but instead I expertly shuffled paper and that was somehow supposed to save people. I was incompetent at real social work.

  Sarah’s astute gift of observation, which had smitten me just four years back, rubbed my most raw wounds like a conscience. “What happened to the man I fell in love with?” she asked me one night after I told her I’d rather read than make love. “He had such passion.”

  “I’m just not in the mood.”

 
“Not only do you no longer have passion for me, Mark, you don’t seem to have passion for life at all. What happened to the man who told me he could save the world?”

  I told her she shouldn’t have believed such naiveté.

  “The way you said it,” she said, “didn’t sound naïve. You had me convinced and it didn’t sound like salesmanship either. It was incredibly sexy and I never doubted you. I don’t know where that guy went.”

  She left the bed to sleep on the couch while I moped.

  Now I wondered what Lily would think about saving the world. She didn’t strike me as naïve. I thought about how she’d gone to meet her half-brothers and half-sister when she was only eleven with such high hopes for new relations, new blood ties, allies, cohorts. All that hope dashed so efficiently and she could just turn off her memory switch, forget about those people—if they weren’t interested neither was she. I don’t know if I could do that. I don’t know if I could be that strong, or cold.

  Yet from a young age she committed herself wholly to helping some of the world’s most vulnerable needy people, who have more excuses than most as to why they might be broken-down. Lily told me her story when prompted, but seemed more comfortable expressing continued amazement at the indomitable nature of other people.

  She told me about a woman who, after hearing her husband rape her daughter in the next room at night, stayed awake for the majority of a six-year span to make sure he stayed in their own bed before fleeing with her daughter. She told me of a man in a wheelchair who, after watching his own father executed gangster style, spent nine years in a Chilean jail and had karate practiced on his back by the guards each night. She told me of another woman who had been brutally raped by soldiers representing both her government and the guerrillas fighting against her government in a one-week span and carried two souvenirs of those experiences: HIV and a baby boy who could only get the medicine and HIV tests he needed in Canada—for him she fled. Lily also told me of a man who followed his instincts, which took him deep into forest hiding, and returned the next day to find the friends and family who’d laughed at his paranoia massacred, and then walked from Guatemala to California on foot, illegally, and was smuggled to Canada by a trucker who told him his chances of being received as a refugee were better there.

  Half these people were accepted as refugees and the other half were sent to Buffalo to find their own way home. These kinds of stories inspire me to shake my disgusted head. They inspire Sarah to complain angrily and loudly. They inspire Lily to offer all her skills and knowledge to maximize the odds that people find refuge from persecution and a stable new home. Her anger had somehow not turned into cynicism, and for this I put her naked form through my brain in endless cycles while my frustrated girlfriend slept on the couch.

  The more Sarah complained, the more I distanced myself from her, the less I let her be my inspiration, the less willing I became to inspire her and the less I reciprocated the attention she lavished on me. The meals she made became more elaborate and were hand delivered to me in greater quantities. I ate more and better but made fewer appreciative grunts and lip-smacks. The nightly seduction routine started to feel like reality TV auditions as she dreamed up new schemes to accompany sexy outfits and theme music with driving beats, while my exhaustion became chronic and severe. The calls at work and love-poem emails became more frequent and I became busier, terser and more dissatisfied with the results at the end of the day. And to thank Sarah for her hyper-anxious efforts to save what had long been a relationship that made us both better, happier and sexier people, I fantasized about the new friend she’d introduced to me.

  I don’t want to imply that my girlfriend was flawless. She could be as stubborn and pig-headed, as temper tantrum prone, as nagging and manipulative as any man. And the vanity of her industry had its influence on her tendency to judge other women as flawed. Judgement was salve for her insecurity that I had become bored with her body. She claimed her body was the only thing about her that really interested me. She said that interest was as susceptible to time’s brutality as a glossy monthly magazine. But her commitment and kindness to me were flawless, her brilliance still illuminated my world and her passion for life should have remained contagious. Its failure to do so was entirely my fault.

  I took only misery and guilt from sketching Lily, the Goddess of my Mind. She sat with royal posture on a high-backed chair in a bright yellow summer dress as I salivated and reluctantly moved my pencil over the page. I couldn’t capture her soul because she was too perfect in my eyes, suffering as they were from their schoolboy crush. She was the best of the United States of America, the best of Canada, the best of Nicaragua, the noble savage civilized, educated and christened. She was perfect, and I was so defective.

  I tried to focus on her form but the more I focused on curves the more guilt tugged at me from the inside. I panicked, pretended that my phone was buzzing, actually faked a conversation with Sarah in which I was needed for some unnamed emergency, and fled with a photograph of her as a young girl in Granada tucked into my breast pocket for future reference. She had offered me two recent pictures of her but I knew that I could only draw her as a child, asexual and unknown, a stranger just like the ones on public transportation or World Vision commercials.

  SARAH AND I WERE PROUD TO BE GUESTS AT A PARTY CELEBRATing the refugee house’s tenth anniversary, and I was especially proud to present Lily with a copy of the newsletter with a brief article about the refugee centre and a sketch of a young Nicaraguan girl in a cute summer dress with scabs on her knees.

  Lily was equally proud to introduce us to her girlfriend, Julia.

  “You know,” Sarah confessed to me back at home, “I totally assumed she was straight. I was even thinking of introducing her to one of the agency guys—a male model with a conscience. I have to admit that she doesn’t fit my stereotype of a lesbian.”

  “Too much hair?”

  “Too pretty, no tattoos—I totally have a stereotype.”

  “Don’t feel too bad, I guess it’s a learning experience for both of us.”

  “You assumed too?” she asked, a little too casually.

  “Yeah, I guess so. I wasn’t planning to set her up with anyone.”

  Sarah pulled my chin to hers and accentuated a frown with narrowed eyes.

  “Maybe I had a little crush on her,” I admitted.

  “Had?”

  “Have,” I corrected myself.

  To avoid further inquiry I kissed her gently and continued until we were making love and reconciliation as best we could.

  TWO HUNDRED VOLTS IN CHAPTER 13

  When Bumi regained consciousness he smelled coffee, urine and something he didn’t recognize. There was the sound of muffled male voices, and intense pain in his wrists. He tried to collect his thoughts with his eyes still closed.

  His worst and least rational fear had caught up to him: he’d been arrested. Perhaps his few banned books had been found. Perhaps he had been betrayed. If only he had studied Pak Syam’s methods of bribery more carefully.

  Perhaps the trouble began when he overhead his managers’ conversation.

  These false theories all made sense but he knew the real reason for his predicament. He had done it after all. He had no memory of being such an evil beast but all his life’s rage and frustrated powerlessness must have spilled out in acts of violence against society’s weakest and most vulnerable. He was worse than America, worse than Holland, worse than Suharto. He had exerted his meagre strength over the only ones weaker than himself: little children. He disgusted himself.

  He’d never had an urge to hurt children. He’d fantasized about killing his bosses, his family elders, members of the military and the World Bank and his old teachers, but he had never once wanted to kill children. He loved children. What had he done?

  He squeezed his eyes shut tighter. He feared the visual ev
idence they would bring him. He became aware of pain in his shoulders, like he had been climbing a rope. He squirmed and found himself restrained. The pain of curiosity overcame all else. He opened his eyes.

  He was in a tiny jail cell, a closet with a steel door. Slivers of light through cracks in the door gave the only illumination. He was standing despite his exhausted legs. There was not even room to squat. The walls were too close. Looking down he saw beady eyes peering back at him. He snapped his head back up and pressed his face against his shoulder, stifling a shout.

  His hands were above his head, and looking up he saw the source of his physical pains. He was tied by the wrists to a bar running across the cell, just under the ceiling. His head was throbbing too, possibly the result of the blow from the policeman’s stick. He swallowed his anger and fear and sorrow and looked back down at the rat, which squeaked back at him. He also saw what appeared to be the source of the urine smell, a dark spot in his underwear. He wore no other clothes. His feet were about six inches from the ground, and there was no conceivable relief for his arms.

  He pulled his knees up to his chest. He extended his legs straight so that they were perpendicular to his torso. He repeated the exercise several times but it gave him neither relief nor satisfaction, and served only to kill thirty seconds. He waited motionless for another thirty seconds, and realized it would be hard to maintain his sanity for long in that predicament.

  He struggled to free his hands, which caused the rawhide rope to burn his wrists badly, and he cried out in pain. He immediately heard chairs scraping. The door opened and a rush of white light flooded his eyes. He cried out again and closed his eyes, turned his head.