Drive-by Saviours

by Chris Benjamin

  “So, Child-killer, it hurts, heh?” a gravel voice said. Bumi forced his eyes open and saw a short, stocky young man. Three other figures stood behind the short man.

  Bumi shook his head in disbelief.

  “Don’t bother trying to deny it,” another of the policemen said more kindly. He was thin and middle-aged. “You’ll only make things worse for yourself. The sooner you confess, the easier this will be for all of us. Especially you.”

  Bumi couldn’t believe what he was hearing. All his fears that he was the murderer were based on nothing but his own mind, which had betrayed and tricked him at every turn. He couldn’t actually be guilty. “What am I accused of?” he asked. He dreaded the answer but he needed certainty.

  The policemen laughed. “You are accused of the most heinous crime of all,” the middle-aged one said, “killing innocents. Will you confess now? Or later?”

  Rage consumed Bumi again. Robadise should have protected him from this. Unless it was Robadise who betrayed him. He screamed at the thought, “It’s not true!” He wondered why he hadn’t seen it coming. The situation was too ridiculous, too inconceivable, too painful, to be real. The pain was greater than when Pram died, greater than when he was taken from Rilaka, greater than anything he could remember or imagine.

  He closed his eyes and thought of his wife, of their bed, and hoped it was all a dream. “It’s not true!” he screamed again.

  He heard the laughter of his accusers, and the question repeated, “Hey loudmouth, ready to confess?”

  Bumi gave a quick silent prayer for forgiveness. “I want to see my family,” he told them with all the bravado he could summon.

  “Oh, these ones?” the short cop in front said, pulling Bumi’s most prized possession from his shirt pocket. It was a picture of Yaty with Bunga and Baharuddin. The cop placed it on the floor under Bumi’s feet as the beady-eyed rat watched from the corner. The cop pulled down his zipper and pissed on Bumi’s family as Bumi and the rat looked on. Bumi tried to look away from his family’s now pitiful urine-soaked faces, but he couldn’t, not until the cop was finished.

  When he looked up Bumi saw four pudgy faces staring his way in anticipation. He opened his mouth several times, trying to find some appropriate words, but there were none. He wanted to scream again but fear clutched his howls and held them in his throat. It was a useless fear, he realized, because no matter what he said or did, he was in for pain like he’d never known.

  “He’s not talking, boys. Looks like he needs some encouragement,” another of the policemen, a tall muscular man with a nasal voice, said.

  “Where’s Robadise?” Bumi blurted to much raucous laughter.

  “Your in-laws can’t help you now,” the middle-aged one said. “There is no protection for what you did, pantat! Did you think you could get away with it? Officer Kartiman’s daughter was one of your victims you know. Perhaps you’d like to get to know him better.”

  The one officer who hadn’t yet spoken, Kartiman, looked at Bumi with a taut-faced snarl. Bumi wondered how such an enormous man would possibly fit into the closet of a cell with him. Kartiman pulled a small hunting knife from his boot, reached up and cut the rope just above Bumi’s wrists without even standing tippy-toed. Bumi slumped against the back wall and stepped on the rat, which squeaked, jumped and ran over Bumi’s feet and out of the cell.

  One of the other cops handed something to Kartiman, who held it behind his back. “Show me your right palm,” Kartiman said.

  Bumi felt his body tremble against the cement wall like a cold rainy night. His bowels gave out and he felt a warm stream down his leg. He couldn’t move.

  “Now!” Kartiman barked, giving Bumi another chill. Kartiman’s tone was not one of anger after all. This was not personal. It was business. Kartiman pulled a three-foot cable from behind his back and forced it into Bumi’s trembling hand. “I’ll be back,” Kartiman said. “Think about what you have done, and how you did it. I want details when I return.” He slammed the cell door shut and Bumi was left alone in the dark. His hands went numb and he dropped Kartiman’s cable. It landed on Bumi’s family portrait with a clang, and he heard the sound of scattering roaches.

  THE ORDEAL LASTED ABOUT THREE DAYS. BUMI COULD NOT TELL day from night but the faint call to prayer reminded him of God’s power over all of this five times daily. That whole time there were intermittent periods of darkness and bright white light, utter silence and blasts of Weird Al Yankovic at top decibel, but no extreme ever lasted more than a few hours.

  He was beaten on the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands, pissed on, sprayed with a hose and given electric shocks to the fingers, tongue, anus and genitals. His body convulsed so violently against the walls that he fractured a collarbone and lost a molar. He was left alone with the pain and the smell of smoke from his own burning flesh. Sometimes they hung him by his wrists from the ceiling. Sometimes they left him standing. He couldn’t lie down at all. His constant companions in the vertical coffin were the rats and the cockroaches.

  He reached a point in pain where the things that once haunted him became his only comfort. He counted repeatedly to thirty-three in an effort to right the toppling universe, but always there was the knowledge that more would come, and he would break. He would admit to anything just to be left alone with the rats and roaches and the piss and shit. Yet he had other fears, the usual fears inflated by circumstance. The skin on his wrists was being slowly torn off by the rawhide rope and in these unsanitary conditions he worried about bacterial warfare. The piss of these dogs was the greatest horror, and only God knew what was in the cold water they blasted him with every time he passed out.

  Still he worried about Bunga, Baharuddin and Yaty. Maybe Yaty was involved in this betrayal. Perhaps during the late-night rap sessions of their early years he had complained too much about Robadise’s drift from the Warung Bali paradise, from the paradise of youth, how he’d sold out like in the Catcher in the Rye. Maybe the loyalties of blood trumped those of marriage. He worried about Bunga playing by that contaminated canal. He wondered about her loyalties. No young girl could resist the pressure applied by her peers to join them in fun without her father around to prevent it.

  The pain and the worry and the fear of more pain, the confusion of days and nights rolled tightly into hours of coming and going uniforms and shifting shadows like wayang villains, almost made him confess. He decided that he must be guilty somehow of something. This was just the logical conclusion of the sinking of a boy genius that had started some place so far away, in some World Bank boardroom so many years before.

  But if a child died while he hung that would prove his innocence and they would have to free him. He held onto that dim and guilty hope as long as he could visualize it, as long as he could picture returning to his family redeemed and to his brother-in-law martyred and reborn, which was only a short time. Like those before him and those after, his body outlasted his mind and soon all thoughts were fleeting and all ideas were dental floss in a windstorm. He couldn’t grip them anymore to follow their thread, and there was only pain. Just as a certain pain became normal another kind of pain would replace it.

  It was then that Bumi realized his threshold for pain was low, which is probably what prevented a confession. Several times under the grip of pain emanating from his organs and flowing through veins and arteries into every crevice of his physical being, Bumi realized what they were after long enough to think the phrase they wanted to hear from him: ‘I did it.’ Several times he opened his mouth to transfer the false information from mind to matter and instead screamed and passed out.

  HE AWOKE IN HIS BROTHER’S ARMS. “COME ON, BUMI, LET’S GET you home,” Robadise whispered in his ear as he half carried, half dragged Bumi’s slumped body out of the cell, down the hall and into the backseat of a police car.

  HE AWOKE AGAIN, THIS TIME NAKED AND SCREAMING AS THE li
ght hit him in the face. Yaty was rubbing alcohol onto his wrists. He hugged her mightily and they clung to each other symbiotically, both shipwrecked and both life preservers. They cried softly until Bumi noticed how gentle this light really was, cascading through the west window and illuminating a star system of dust particles. “What… day is it?” The words rolled lethargically from his belly.

  “Friday,” Yaty told him.

  He should have been at work. He said nothing because he knew that his world had changed, that the essential rhythmic torture of his old life no longer applied, but also that nothing had improved. Things had only worsened.

  “I should get Robadise,” Yaty said.

  “Why? Don’t go Yaty, please.” He knew he sounded like a child.

  “I’ll be right back.” She twisted herself free and hurried from the room, closing the door behind her. Bumi’s eyes gazed vacantly at the closed door. He tried to maintain her image, as he’d done in his torture cell. Everything hurt now, wrists, shoulders, teeth and bones.

  True to her word, Yaty returned in less than a minute towing her brother by his arm. He ran directly to Bumi and hugged him gently. Bumi felt small and fragile in the arms of this giant of a man.

  “I’m sorry, Bumi. Please believe me, I’m sorry,” Robadise said. “I never thought they would come for you. No one told me until it was too late, and you wouldn’t believe the bureaucracy to get you out. Those fuckers! Sorry, forget it. I’m sorry is all—that this happened to you. But don’t worry, I have a plan.”

  Yaty heaved a sharp sigh.

  Bumi directed his response to her. “Plan?”

  She ran from the room.

  “Bumi,” Robadise said, drawing Bumi’s gaze back on him. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but you’re screwed. Our neighbours have fucked you.”

  “Fucked me?” Having remained outwardly calm through his entire ordeal, Bumi became engulfed in panic at home in his bed facing his brother-in-law. “Our neighbours fucked me?” he screamed.

  He could feel razors dancing at the edges of his heart, cutting their latest chunk, the piece that esteemed, admired and above all trusted Robadise. He was getting fucked alright and he knew who the real fucker was. Drawing strength from some untapped reserve Bumi shoved Robadise aside and bolted from his bed. He immediately slipped and hit the floor.

  Robadise was on his back, predator on prey. “Bumi,” he said, “listen to me, please. You know all that weird shit you do? Ya, we all know about it. Scalding yourself raw, covering yourself with plastic to pick things up, rearranging your room in ways to protect yourself from spirits, staying up all night checking everything is in the right order, accosting every stranger you see and keeping tabs on them, even checking your penis for disease every night even though you’ve only had Yaty. You with all your rationality are one of the most superstitious people I know. Just in case, maybe? We all know about your rituals. It’s a small neighbourhood with many eyes.”

  Bumi’s breathing became slow, deep and heavy. Rage gathered from his red raw fingers and his curled toes, angry energy to fight this beast.

  “We tolerate it Bumi, because we love you. Yaty especially. You have been a faithful husband to her, and a good father to your kids. I know you’d never hurt a fly Bumi, though it’s obvious you want to hurt me right now. But you couldn’t, not because I’m stronger but because you just don’t have it in you to hurt. Unfortunately, this is a rare trait.”

  Bumi lurched upward to try to throw Robadise from his back. Failure. The beast was too strong. He breathed deeply to restart the process of gathering the energy of his rage.

  “Bumi,” Robadise said, unperturbed, “our neighbours are not so kind as you. They are not even as kind as I am. They too are superstitious. The worst part is, between you and me, I know I’m partly responsible. If I hadn’t been such a good cop, if I hadn’t been so insistent on finding the criminal… but what could I do, Bumi? They were children, little children like Bunga. She could have been next.”

  The rage was sufficient. Bumi threw Robadise from his back and put him in a headlock. But the beast talked on.

  “Bumi, I am sorry, but I guess I stirred up some things, some resentment toward you, when I got people thinking about who could be sick enough to do these deeds. And they said it must be you, with all your weird rituals. They think you practice guna-guna, Bumi, black magic! They think it could only have been black magic, otherwise why no evidence?”

  Bumi squeezed tighter, trying to get his forearm around the beast’s throat, but his wrists were too sore to grip and Robadise continued his hurried whisper. It drove Bumi madder and madder.

  “And they think your rituals were black magic to do the little kids in, Bumi. And what makes it worse is that after they arrested you, without my knowledge or my father’s knowledge of course, the killings stopped. The real murderer is smart, and he obviously doesn’t want to be caught.”

  Bumi let go. He panted hard.

  Robadise rolled onto his back and looked Bumi in the eye.

  “Goblok!” Bumi shouted into his face, using the Javanese term for emphasis. “There is no real murderer! Unless you count the fuckers at Bumi Sabuk.”

  “Bumi Sabuk? Your employer? You think someone at Bumi Sabuk is the murderer?” Robadise asked, intrigued.

  Bumi explained what he’d heard, speculated that maybe whatever was in the canal had subsided. Robadise listened intently and issued a quick dismissal. “Bumi, you must see that you have no real evidence. This doesn’t help you.”

  “And where is the evidence against me?” Bumi demanded, his own foolish accusations still ringing in his head.

  “Most of the police and the public think you did it, so no evidence is needed,” Robadise explained as if he were speaking to Bunga. “Besides, they searched our house right before they seized you. My father and I weren’t here, obviously. They found your communist propaganda.”

  Bumi issued a deep belly laugh and rolled onto his back, clutching his knees. He continued laughing and rolling side to side until Yaty returned with sweet tea. She gazed at her husband with eyes half shut and placed the tray on the floor before looking toward Robadise, who shook his head. She left without a word.

  “I’m serious, Bumi, Toer is—”

  “Hardly communist propaganda!” Bumi shouted from his back.

  “His true ideology is irrelevant. It’s banned material. That means you’re fucked. That’s all the evidence they need to call you a commie-kid-killer voodoo-practicing traitor. I managed to get you out for now because of my connections and with a little palm grease but in their mind it’s just our family’s chance to say our goodbyes before you are hanged.”

  The honest finality of these words rang through the big room as Bumi’s laughter subsided into hollow silence. Robadise lay down on his back beside Bumi and turned his head so they were face to face and asked his old friend, “Want to hear my plan now?”

  A MILLION LITTLE THINGS IN CHAPTER 14

  After a relationship failure people always ask why. It’s the most frustrating of the post break-up questions. In my experience failure boils down to the intricate series of what we tend to call ‘the little things.’ Matching worldview, philosophy, religion, even mid-level politics, is easy. What is hard is deciding who will wash the dishes on Tuesday, how much dirt on the floor is acceptable, whether to watch TV after a hard day’s work or give each other foot rubs, who pays for coffee. These are the thrusts and parries, dodges and ducks that can turn a good partnership into a competition that erodes trust, intimacy and closeness.

  Sarah had no trouble forgiving my little crush on her friend Lily because nothing had come of it, and nothing ever could. But Sarah could never forgive my laziness about dishes or my tendency toward blindness when it came to my things strewn across the floor, coupled with hot-headed hostility if she dared rearrange my ‘organi
zed mess.’

  I could forgive Sarah’s vanity and stubborn self-righteousness, but her “need for total control over her environment,” as I put it during one fight, her strong preference for a clean and tidy household, irked me beyond patience or forgiveness. Her eventual assault on my newspapers was almost unbearable.

  We shared a cynical addiction to news stories and their accompanying shallow analysis. We had a subscription to the Globe and Mail and we loved poring over it in the morning, making fun of Margaret Wente and the other right-wing hacks, loving the vindictiveness of Jan Wong, Stackhouse’s exotic overseas thrillers of corruption and poverty. This was the way to start a day, to kick-start our righteous anger before we faced our little corner of Toronto’s problems. Maybe the anger was futile given that Sarah went to have her picture taken and I went to administrate the problems of others, but at least it fired us up a little, gave us a nice jolt to start the day. Maybe that jolt was all just entertainment, our version of the perverted little boys who would eventually masturbate over Sarah’s panty ads, but it had never caused us any serious problems.

  Regardless of the usefulness of our newspaper habit in the greater schemes of the universe, it was something we shared, with one major difference: I was obsessive: I couldn’t start a newspaper without finishing it, cover to cover. What a waste to read just a few articles and then chuck the rest. Maybe I had an insecure need to be up on current events, or maybe it was a neurotic tendency. Regardless, the need was real and strong.

  But we read less than we shared what we read with one another, made fun of the writers and the characters they described and gagged out our own two-bit analyses. We never got far through the papers during the morning routine. So I’d take the paper with me to help fight off the public transit crush to work. But my itch to draw often got the better of me during the commute, so the paper went into my briefcase and came home with me again. It would join a pileup on the bedroom floor. By November the pile had become a double-helix cancer weaving its way around our double bed.