Drive-by Saviours

by Chris Benjamin

  All his life Bumi had struggled to find the ever-elusive truth. The closest he had come was to identify patterns that seemed reasonable, things that felt right, things that worked or at least provided temporary relief from the otherwise perpetual agony of living. In the chaos of his life he knew there was some kind of underlying truth, some hidden order. All he had to do was uncover it, to find and follow the rules. Not the rules of the dictator or the foreign imperialists, not the laws of his ancient backward society and not even the rules of a forgiving or vengeful God, but the rules of the indifferent universe.

  The rules were based on logic. They were simple: black and white; good and bad. In the face of evil, counter with good. No one else Bumi knew seemed to understand this. It was up to him to impose order in the chaos, to find and apply the rules, and he had done so as best he could.

  Thirty-three was significant. Love was essential. Counter hate with love and use thirty-three as your tool. The rules were simple but correcting violations was complex and required complicated, time-consuming, tedious action. Just as staying alive in the open sea with a price on his head required a certain kind of movement to keep progressing through the murky water, slime on his body required thirty-three applied ablutions and harsh scrubbings. Stepping on the wrong spot in the road required thirty-three apologies, even though most people seemed to have no idea where the bad spots were—or that they were even there.

  Bumi’s thirty-three apologies didn’t have to, in fact should not, all be given to one person. But they should be delivered within thirty-three hours of the offence. The apologies had to be hidden because it was his responsibility alone. An apology to Yaty for a harsh tone of voice, an apology to a co-worker for being slow, an apology to Eni for being unable to eat all the food she put on his plate. These were the good things that countered the bad.

  For the life of him Bumi could not think of a solution, a counteraction, to his current dilemma. He hated relying on Robadise’s less omniscient kind of power, his bureaucratic efficiency for deception, his affinity for ‘working the system,’ —cursed politics in which Bumi was an utter failure. Yet all Bumi’s rituals to keep things in order, the ones he thought were so well hidden, had served to turn his neighbours against him. Perhaps this was just after all. Maybe he had unknowingly abused his power, somehow been the real cause of those children’s deaths. Maybe he was somehow responsible for the Bawakaraeng fire. This is what he got for doing a job with toxins. His selfish desire to provide for his family had backfired. He had sold out and played the game after all, knowingly, and this was his punishment.

  Floating on, numb from the pain of saltwater over his wounds, Bumi could make no sense of his reality. He had painstakingly figured out the patterns, the order in the chaos, the rules. He had found the rules and obeyed them—and it hadn’t worked. His reason had been right all along: there was no order, really. But if he stopped following the rules, things might get worse.

  In his mind, Bumi said the name “Yaty” thirty-three times. Then “Bunga” thirty-three times. Then “Baharuddin” thirty-three times. Then “Robadise,” thirty-three times. He banged his head on the starboard side of the seventy-two-foot motorized yacht that flew a Canadian flag. The sight of its garish red and white trim shocked the mesmerized young man out of his circuitous thoughts.

  “The ladder’s over here!” a voice shouted, in English, from near the bow.

  Bumi looked up at the voice, which had emanated from a middle-aged white woman with dark sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat. She was waving and pointing at a rope ladder dangling from the deck of the boat. Bumi swam to the bottom of the ladder and climbed it slowly. His bones creaked and he ached everywhere. Suddenly it was hard to keep his eyes open. As he raised his hands repeatedly to the next rung he saw that his wrists seeped blood. His fingers, tongue, anus and genitals all tingled in pain. He reached the top after what seemed an eternity.

  The woman offered him her hand and helped him over the gunwale and onto the deck. She looked down at her hand and then at Bumi’s reddened hand, and wiped her own hand front and back on her white denim jeans. She returned his gaze. He noticed that they were the same height. “You have your ticket I presume?” she asked.

  Bumi handed her the plastic-covered American dollars from his pants.

  She pocketed the bao. “Welcome aboard,” she said. “I’m Judy. How do you like my new boat?”

  Bumi blinked, touched his chin to his right then his left shoulder and answered slowly, “It’s a beautiful boat.” He hadn’t spoken English much since school and the words made his tongue feel swollen.

  “Thanks. I just picked it up from your wonderful shipbuilders in Bira. It sails beautifully, and has a nice engine too when speed is of the essence or wind is scarce. But for now we’re safe. I’m not expecting a particularly eventful trip, quite frankly. You seem to have some good connections—well organized. We tried to get you a passport but there just wasn’t time, so if anything does come up, like coastguard or anything like that, and we need to hide you, well, let me show you.”

  Bumi followed Judy down through a trapdoor and wooden ladder into the belly of the yacht, a spacious mahogany luxury boat with gleaming hand-carved furniture bolted to the floors and original oil paintings by Indonesian artists on the walls. She led him to a five-foot-high, white painted door that swung outward. Inside were several trunks.

  “Luggage,” she said. “Except this one in the middle—it’s empty. If you climb over the others you can get to it. It’s not locked. When I say, ‘Get in the box,’ that’s the one. Come down here to this room, close it behind you and lock it. Then get in that trunk and close it. It will lock automatically. Only I have the keys. I don’t expect we’ll be boarded by anyone, but just in case. Understand?”

  Bumi nodded.

  “Good. Other than that, enjoy your trip.”

  She showed him the kitchen and welcomed him to help himself whenever he was hungry. “You must be starving after your swim, no?”

  He nodded. He was hungry but there was a greater need. “What about water?” he asked.

  She opened another white painted door to a deep closet filled with twenty-litre jugs of spring-water. “This should be enough to see us through,” she told him. “As long as we don’t eat or drink too much. The last thing we want to do is have to detour and dock somewhere. We’re not exactly prepared for that unless you feel like hiding out in the box.”

  He did not. “Can I please wash my hands for some time?” he asked awkwardly. He could read English well but it had never taken to his tongue the way Indonesian had.

  “Of course,” she said as she gazed again at his red hands. “You can even heat some up in the kettle if you want and mix it with colder water. Just remember we have to conserve, both the water and the gas. It’s a long journey to Canada.”

  There was that word again, Canada, with its internal symmetry. “How long to Canada?” he said.

  “Depends on wind conditions, complications, et cetera,” she explained. “Could be a month, could be more.”

  JUDY OFFERED VERY LITTLE INFORMATION DURING THEIR VOYAGE and Bumi asked no more questions. Her company, her quiet busy competence, comforted him as they rocked over the waves of the misnamed Pacific. He was seasick the first few days, vomiting up his canned food frequently, but with time and nautical miles the sea became glassy still, their boat its only disturbance. Unlike the straight from one land mass to another that he’d known as a child, this open ocean seemed endless, the embodiment of infinity, that unfathomable mathematical quantity. Gazing out at endless still water he could almost make his peace with God.

  Judy kept busy adjusting the sail, checking the maps and GIS system, and steering their course through rough waters and calm. Bumi, as instructed, did his best to enjoy the ride, one of the more tranquil periods of this part of his life, under her parental wing.

  At night
he slept on a pull-down cot in a small room with a tiny porthole. It was not spacious but it was comfortable enough, more comfortable than standing in a cold hard cell between torture sessions, and he had no belongings to store anyway. Judy lent him a few of her clothes, which fit well enough, and a couple of romance novels to kill the time.

  “Sorry I don’t have anything more intellectually challenging,” she said. “I don’t go for heavy thinking when I’m out at sea.”

  Despite the relative calm of the trip, Bumi remained far from relaxed. He was haunted by mental images of his brief period of torture. They weren’t quite flashbacks but there was a vivid mental picture that sparked phantom pains in his fingers, feet, genitals and especially his anus, which would cause him to jump, shake and twitch periodically. The images returned and returned again like a closed loop film that he couldn’t turn off, acting as a constant reminder of the danger still lurking on his cruise.

  When he could put all that out of his mind he was tortured by self-accusations or mental debates about what had really happened, what was really happening, who to trust. There was no scenery to distract him, just endless rolling water, sky and sun.

  Judy’s romance novels were no relief. They were as tortuous as anything else and only served to remind him of the only woman he ever loved. Besides that his seasickness returned several weeks into the voyage for no apparent reason. The sea remained glassy calm. Like most of Bumi’s physical discomfort, this illness caused a worse mental discomfort, in this case the guilt of having lost his fisher’s sea-stomach, the latest piece of damning evidence of just how many lightyears he had flown from his home and his original family, to whom he’d never be able to return. In Makassar he had often comforted himself with the fantasy of visiting Rilaka again when his courage was great enough, or when his father and Pak Suharto were deep enough in the ground.

  Unable to indulge in his physical purification rituals more than once a day, he absolved all pains as best he could by repeating things thirty-three times in his head, most often Yaty’s name, but sometimes mantras like ‘Life will be better in Canada’ or ‘One day I will be reunited with my family and somehow this will all make sense’ or ‘There is truth in the world and one day I will find it.’ He tried and failed to imagine a more current positive mantra. There were only past pleasantries and hope for the future. ‘The future is better than the present. The future is better than the past.’

  Time and sea passed slowly in these mental conditions. Judy seemed to sense his gloom and occasionally offered pearls of positive thought like, “Hey I’ve seen people way worse off than you in this game,” or “Could be worse, you could be jammed in the underbelly of a freight boat with 167 of your countrymen,” or “You’re lucky your family had the money for this,” or “You survived didn’t you? You beat the odds,” and these too would become mantras of thirty-three.

  Bumi ate very little. Very little of what he found in the kitchen resembled food to him. He slept away as many hours as he could. In sleep at least he dreamed of washing and for one brief moment when he woke, he felt clean. Then he thought of Yaty, missed her, masturbated and was no longer clean.

  Just over a thousand hours into the voyage he stumbled from bed and onto the upper deck with the sun directly overhead. A chill took him despite the sun and Judy’s windbreaker. “Mercury’s so low it’s practically underwater,” Judy said. “It’s trouble.”

  Bumi stretched his mind back to remember all those fishermen’s signs of trouble: different colours, cloud formations and temperature swings at unusual times. Sudden changes. He couldn’t remember ever feeling this cold on the sea. “It is still calm,” he said.

  “Not for long,” Judy answered. “There’s rain gear down below. You better put some on.”

  By the time Bumi found a pair of over-sized rubber boots and a yellow rain suit the wind had started. It didn’t feel like much but as he emerged back onto the deck he noticed the white-capped waves kicking up again. Soon the boat was rocking, whimpering its sad and scared creaks and groans. Black clouds had surrounded it. Trouble.

  “Grab everything that’s loose up here and put it down in storage,” Judy said.

  Bumi obliged, vanquishing his worry to focus on the task he’d been given. He grabbed an armload of life preservers and ran down the steep metal stairs below, almost falling off the last step. He threw them into the room full of boxes and ran back up the steps.

  On deck Judy fought the sail. She tried to bring it down as the largest raindrops Bumi had ever seen came from some black hole and launched a heavy assault on the vessel. A gust of wind howled from starboard and whipped at them. It knocked Bumi over onto the already rain-flooded deck.

  Judy clung to the main mast. The wind came harder and harder, then eased off as quickly as it had started.

  Bumi struggled to find his feet. The boat lurched forward as the wind came back from behind them. The boat plunged head on into an emergent wave that flooded the deck and washed them both backward like landed fish. The wave slammed them into the base around the main mast. Still the wind whipped the sail and the main mast creaked to protest the force.

  Again Judy stood to fight the sail and again the boat lurched forward. The sea flooded the deck, soaking them both. The main mast creaked again and Bumi heard the sickening sound of splintering wood.

  “Get below!” Judy shouted. She shoved him down the stairs.

  He slipped and slid downward. He clutched at the metal just in time to prevent a bad fall.

  Judy clambered behind him and shut them in. Bumi heard wood crack and splinter more.

  “Fuck!” Judy yelled. She punched the metal stairs with a crack of her knuckles. “Ow! Fuck! If that mast comes down we’re so fucked,” Judy said. She sucked her bloody knuckles and paced.

  As Judy`s panic rose, Bumi became calmer than he’d been when the sea was just a philosophical piece of glass. “Maybe it is best to die at sea,” he said.

  Judy glared at him, parted her lips, closed them again and said, “I always thought so, you know? But I’m not ready yet.” She ran to the storage room and ran back with two axes, handed one to Bumi. “Back up,” she said, jerking her thumb toward the hatch above them.

  “What?” he asked.

  “We have to chop up that mast, now! If we leave it on deck it’ll get whipped around and it’ll destroy what’s left of my boat.”

  “It is very dangerous up there,” he said.

  “It’ll be worse if we leave it,” Judy said. She mounted the stairs.

  Bumi hesitated. But to die at sea was better than to die in Canada. He followed Judy into the wind and rain.

  The mast looked unlikely to go anywhere, but just as Bumi opened his mouth to say so the boat lurched to starboard and the mast swung to port. They ducked as it swung around and back, and more water poured in.

  Waist deep in water, Judy took four hacks at the splintered base before she accepted the futility of her actions. “We’ll never get it out of all these wires,” she said, throwing her axe down.

  “You should have more help,” Bumi observed. “Some employee.”

  “I work alone,” she barked back as another, gentler wave passed under them. The rain, so furious and quick to anger, was letting up, calming itself. “Believe it or not it’s safer not to have a crew in my line of work,” Judy said.

  Bumi nodded, wondering what would happen next.

  “Back down,” she said. “Gotta wait it out. Looks like the worst is over but you can never be sure.”

  Bumi couldn’t agree more.

  THEY PLAYED CARDS TO PASS THE CHOPPY, NOISY AFTERNOON. They slept as best they could through a rocky night. The morning sea was pensive, almost remorseful. Together they chopped the mast and cut its ties, heaved it into the sea, their penance paid for dirty deeds. Judy said they’d have to motor it the rest of the way, but luckily they weren�
��t far now. “Otherwise I would have had to call my bosses for help,” she said. “That would have cost extra.”

  He didn’t ask if he was to somehow pay for the damage to the boat that he had caused, or God had caused in His latest vendetta against Bumi. He killed those last few days with a new mantra. “God doesn’t like me,” he repeated in sets of thirty-three, until the morning Judy gave him a new mantra to chill his spine.

  “Get in the box!” she shouted, waving him back below deck.

  Bumi ran down the spiral steps as fast as his feet could move, pulled the white door open, climbed over several boxes and jumped into the designated crate; scrunched his body virtually into a ball and pulled the lid shut. He breathed in slowly with a silent count of one, and exhaled two, trying to slow his rapidly beating heart and keep the blood from rushing right through his ears. He braced himself as the fear rose in him. “There will be a beating soon,” he thought. “Bright lights, loud music, then electric shocks.” Three, he inhaled and a long four, he exhaled.

  Although it was dark already he closed his eyes and fought off his fearful thoughts of more torture, chemical death injected under his skin by coast guard cronies. Five, he inhaled long and slow. He hoped to suffocate before they found him.

  By the slow count of twenty-six he heard footsteps and muffled male voices, both of which became gradually louder. He began counting again. He forced his breath to come slow.

  “What’s your cargo?” a now comprehensible deep voice said in English.

  “Just personal effects,” Judy answered. “Let me get you a list. It was all checked when I left Indonesia.”

  Bumi heard the sounds of several sets of footsteps as they shuffled around then faded away, like a giant typist running out of caffeine. He strained to hear more. Nothing greeted his ears but the sound of his own heart and the blood rushing too fast again.

  “BUMI?”

  Judy’s voice hit him with a gust of fresh air that easily found his lungs as he sucked it in and opened his eyes. The dusty light struck his pupils hard and he squinted and rubbed his eyes.