Drive-by Saviours

by Chris Benjamin

  “Bumi,” Judy repeated. “We made it. Those guys were hard to get rid of. They went into knights-in-shining-armour mode when they saw this damsel in distress, and the damage to my boat. They wanted to escort me in. Assholes. And when I say I’m fine they give me a hard time about not having a crew. Don’t they know the thrill of solo?”

  She offered her hand but Bumi declined. He wanted to test his legs. He stood to his full height and climbed out of the trunk into a clear space on the floor, where someone had cleared away the surrounding boxes.

  “Come on up on deck,” Judy said.

  He followed her swaying white denim bottom up the spiral stairs onto the deck, and then a path to the horizon marked by Judy’s pointing finger. “There it is. Canada,” she said.

  In the distance he could see an amorphous green, the beauty of which made him weep.

  Judy smiled.

  “How longer?” Bumi asked.

  “Couple hours or so, maybe a bit more.”

  Four more thirty-three-minute periods. He went below and heated some water.

  JUDY LEFT HIM WITH A FINAL MANTRA, SHOUTED FROM HER DECK after Bumi disembarked onto a long dock. “We made it,” she shouted. “Could have been worse.”

  He watched her pull away and a sense of panic struck him. He turned and saw a large open green lawn and a giant house. Two men ran down from the house to meet him. They shouted Indonesian welcomes, “Selemat!”

  The first to arrive on the dock wore a designer suit. He smiled and extended his hand. He was offering not a handshake but a five-page form, in English, and a pen. “Sign this,” he said.

  Bumi took the form and read the first line.

  The other man, who wore polyester slacks and a short-sleeved uniform with a nametag that read ‘Ben,’ flipped to page five, pointed to a line at the bottom and said, “Sign here.”

  Bumi signed and incanted Robadise’s name in his head.

  “Okay, Sir, we have kept our end of the bargain,” the shorter man said. “Don’t forget to keep your end too, heh? Remember we know where your family lives back home, so don’t forget what you owe us, heh?”

  They led him to a five-tonne transport truck and helped him into the back, where he joined a load of one-litre tubs of Indonesian peanut sauce. Without another word, Ben pulled down the sliding door and Bumi was alone with the dirt and the peanut sauce.

  ONE HUNDRED PERCENT CULTURE SHOCK IN CHAPTER 16

  Bumi started regular English classes in his first year of senior school. On paper he excelled, but it wasn’t until he arrived in Canada that the awkward English words became comfortable on his tongue. In Makassar his paper knowledge of English was good enough to quickly quadruple the library of books at his disposal.

  Syam’s personal library of banned books included over one hundred English titles, hidden away like treasure behind a wall of fool’s gold. Bumi ripped through the classics to find answers, sweet answers, but of course always more questions, especially from the great convoluted philosophers. From Homer to Nietzsche the words of dead white men cascaded warmly through Bumi’s young, impressionable brain, sometimes lodging themselves in random synaptic bubbles as something like facts. But he always questioned, always sought new angles.

  Despite his English reading excellence, Bumi’s conversational English was merely slightly better than average in his class, and dipped down to average in higher grades. After high school, in the factory and in his everyday life, Bumi never found much use for spoken English. He read as many English-language books as he found, most of them non-fiction and several of them banned. It was a forbidden delight better than pornography, alcohol or any other piece of dirty child’s play, because it stimulated not the body but the control centre, the mind, where the reality that imprisons the body is created.

  Reading books, especially in that foreign tongue of lands with great wealth and apparent freedom, made Bumi giddy and gave him, oh so temporarily, the most precious of illusions: that of knowing, and that of control. Only when he put a book down did he realize that no knowledge had been gained, only questions, challenges. His doubt remained amplified until the next book.

  Still his spoken English stagnated until his next opportunity to use it, standing sea-legged on a sturdy deck, his tongue wobbly as he forced circular words through squared teeth. They slipped on his saliva and didn’t feel right. Nothing felt right in that moment.

  In the back of a transport truck with five tonnes of peanut sauce and twice the darkness from Vancouver to Toronto, a journey just under three times thirty-three hours, in a vast isolation unlike anything he’d known in Indonesia, Bumi practiced speaking English aloud.

  “Hi, how are you?” Thirty-three times.

  “I’m fine, thank you.” Thirty-three times.

  It beat thinking about home, thinking about all he’d left behind, the intimacy of Rilaka, of his and Yaty’s family, of his neighbours and what they’d done to him—about all that time he’d wasted worrying about the danger of strangers.

  He also practised counting in English. It slowed the process, but it killed the hours and kept the claustrophobia and other fears at bay, and it seemed likely to pay off in the long run. He tried reading some scraps of newspaper lining the floors but, even once his eyes adjusted to the dim light filtering through cracks in the truck’s casing, he couldn’t stay focused on the words in front of him. He got stuck on them and had to look away.

  In Toronto, Bumi was brought directly to one of four brothers who owned an Indonesian restaurant. Like Bumi’s delivery driver this owner was a Chinese man who said very little and, when he did speak, took little time in getting to his point. “Don’t worry,” the owner said. “All the staff are Indonesian illegals, just like you. We’ll give you a place to stay, cheap, and spending money. The rest goes to pay off your debt.”

  It was only when Bumi heard the word ‘illegals’ that he realized he was one. He had broken the law ever since he left Rilaka, but he had never thought of himself as an illegal. In Indonesia he read illegal books. But in Canada his very existence was a crime. So much for being himself. Robadise was a dubious fiend.

  The place to stay turned out to be a decent mid-town rooming house shared by never less than eight Indonesian men at a time, all employees at the same restaurant. The old Chinese landlady lived alone in the basement, and took good care of her male residents. She cooked them Chinese food on their rare off-days. On workdays they were fed combo meals from the restaurant, the cost of which came from their pay.

  Bumi’s roommates took him under their wings and gave him whatever knowledge he needed to perform his duties on the job. They didn’t mind giving him sharp reminders of his duties when he became distracted. At work he washed dishes, chopped vegetables, and cleared tables.

  Bang, a man about Bumi’s age, informed him that he was a friend of Robadise and Yaty’s family. “I put in a good word for you at the restaurant,” Bang said. “Don’t make me look bad, Mas.” Bang repeated these words every time Bumi was slow with the dishes, when he rewashed them after the industrial-strength, pressurized, high-temperature dishwasher missed a spot.

  Bang showed Bumi how to use the bus and subway system and where to buy food and clothing that was a bit more familiar to him, how to send letters home (always with a fake name, altered handwriting, no return address and written in vagaries that only his family would understand). Bumi couldn’t bring himself to write home in those early weeks, but he promised himself that when the time came he would follow Bang’s advice for the sake of their safety.

  Bumi developed a love-hate relationship with the Toronto Transit Commission (the TTC). It seemed impossibly efficient, clean and spacious compared to the little blue bus system of home, where sixteen or more boisterous bodies could be crammed into a tiny minibus. There, conversation was expected and essential for survival. Yet on any given bus in Toronto he coul
d watch twenty people sit far apart and not talk to one another or make eye contact. The only spontaneous conversations that ever erupted were always between immigrants from more collectivist countries, where public conversation was part of life.

  The first time Bumi rode a bus alone he walked up and down the aisle and introduced himself to everyone, asked their names and purposes for being on the bus, notebook at the ready like some ace reporter. He received dirty looks, insults, threats and outright shoves, and he knew his mission was impossible. He could never know such people. Refusal to share, a rarity back home, was the norm in Toronto.

  Bumi sat down rejected, forlorn and afraid of everyone on the bus. They all sat and stared like glue addicts into the vacant space a nose length in front of them. Some read, which seemed to him a reasonable compromise. If he couldn’t learn about these people directly, he could read about them in the convenient and free newspapers left lying on the seats. This pricing point was essential because he hadn’t yet received any paycheques. He didn’t even know if he would get any pay after room and board. He had been given a bus pass and some work and casual clothes, the cost of which would also come from his paycheque. He had no money to buy the books and magazines that populated the shelves of so many stores throughout the city. In Toronto, Bumi was like a teenaged boy looking through the glass at a peepshow. The first discarded newspaper he found seemed godsent.

  Bumi got through the first few lines of a front-page article about a trade dispute between Canada and the United States when he got stuck on a quotation from the Minister of Trade, who had said, “I concur.”

  He never learned with what the minister concurred. ‘I concur’ became his new mantra. It replaced the names of loved ones, jingoistic slogans of hope for the future and simple English-language small talk. Thirty-three sets of thirty-three ‘I concurs,’ with three-count rests in between, every time he picked up anything written in English.

  Bumi considered learning Spanish or Chinese so that he could read some of the other print media in Toronto, but he knew he would just get stuck on other phrases. His suspicions were confirmed when he tried to write home and found himself unable to write a single word in Indonesian or any other language, other than ‘I concur,’ over and over again.

  He worked eighty-five hours a week anyway. There was no time to read or write in a known language, let alone learn a new one. There was no time for friends or to learn the names of strangers.

  His great love of reading and knowledge had survived the oppression of a brutal dictatorship, but the Toronto Transit Commission killed it. Bumi, the sceptical outsider since birth who had always held dear to a few close friends, found none in Toronto. He found no enemies either, and that was a welcome change. His old fears of the rattan cane and the cynical eyes of his bosses and neighbours didn’t seem real anymore. They were replaced by an unsettling fear of people in general. His compulsion for accosting strangers disappeared in a blink, while every other one of his rituals intensified with time.

  TWO MEN IN THE WORLD OF CHAPTER 17

  The harder Sarah tried, the more I withdrew, from her, from everything. I left work earlier each day. Each day I bought a paper in front of Pape Station and read half a story. Then my fingers got itchy and I covertly sketched the people on the TTC—the Torontonians I wanted to know but was too shy to meet. I filled a sketchbook a week, but every sketch remained unfinished. I couldn’t commit to any one person’s face. I had to know them all, or at least know their silhouettes.

  I preferred dark faces. Maybe I fetishized the noble brown man, his pain and strength. But also, they were easier to draw. White faces came out so lifeless, outlines of black around where flesh should be. But even dark faces were hard to concentrate on for long. My excitement always faded before I brought them to life. Maybe I just didn’t have it in me to make them breathe, like Michelle could with her model cities. Better an incomplete possibility than a completed failure.

  The face that most excited me became the most troublesome. He was a handsome brown man in grease-stained brown polyester slacks, scuffed black 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. He stared at a closed book.

  He looked familiar but I hadn’t met him. I had seen him somewhere before. Maybe he had been a client, but probably not. Everybody needs help sometime, but not this guy. This guy was dignity, even though his worn good looks were periodically scrunched up by little facial twitches, during which he rubbed his chin on his right and then his left shoulder. Even those twitches looked familiar. He was the dignity I’d always wished I could personify.

  My charcoal pencil blew over the page like a gentle breeze, of its own volition. I could have put it in my weak hand and had the same results. But I was interrupted. He caught me in the act.

  He stared at my pencil, as if he knew it was beyond my control. He put his book into his knapsack but he never took his eyes off the pencil. I put it and the sketchbook back into my briefcase and took a last good look at his features. Maybe I could recapture the magic and finish the sketch later.

  He stood and approached me.

  “Sorry to bother you, Sir,” he said. “Why are you drawing me?” He spoke in an accent, but not a strong one, and not one I recognized.

  His question was straightforward enough, but the answer was complicated. I had been drawing since I was a child. The more life pissed me off the more I drew. To draw was to release. My sketch pad was like those little stress balls the other social workers liked to squeeze after tough appointments. I never put much thought into how my own release worked, or why drawing made me happy even though I wasn’t all that good at it. It just did.

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  He cocked an eyebrow at me.

  “You have a beautiful face,” I said.

  It was a stupid thing to say to a stranger, but it was true; his face was beautiful. And it was true that my desire to draw had something to do with the beauty of Torontonians’ faces. I’d always longed to know that beauty somehow, especially since the blackout, when the light pollution fled the city and returned to that generator in Idaho or whatever damn place. In the dim emergency generators of the public transit system, in the warmth of humans bonding in the face of the same mysterious event, their colour and verve were revealed to me, as if replacing the other energy we’d lost, the one that turns everything grey. Why had I never seen it before? It was unfair that people hid their beauty like that.

  The man looked at me with his same blank expression that conveyed, falsely or truthfully, a deep, cold anger. “I have rights,” he said. “This is a free country. I have my rights.”

  I didn’t see what he meant by that. Canada had never seemed all that free to me, and rights and freedom had little to do with drawing him. “What do you mean?” I said.

  “I mean…” he trailed off. “Why are you drawing me? Why really?”

  I took a deep breath. “Remember the blackout?” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Ever since the blackout I just really want to know people,” I said.

  “You have no right to draw me,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him, but I didn’t feel sorry. I felt robbed.

  “Why do you draw me?” he said. He came closer to my face and his own reddened. Dark veins appeared across his eyes. His beauty was putrefying.

  I tried again to explain about how his face had inspired me.

  “You gay?” he asked.

  “I have a girlfriend. For now. That’s maybe part of my problem.” I felt a little guilty then. Maybe it wasn’t right to just draw people without their permission. Maybe I’d have better judgment and less desperation for human contact if Sarah, the woman I had lived with for the past five years for God’s sake, understood me at all.

  “Sexual crisis?” he said.


  “Sort of,” I said. “No, not really. I think you mean sexual identity crisis, so no. I’m just having a tough time so I need an outlet. So I draw people. Badly.”

  “You can’t draw and yet you draw me? Let me see this drawing by a man who can’t draw, please.”

  I told him it was bad, unrealistic, and that I was a bit embarrassed to show it.

  “Good,” he said. “We can destroy it. Give it to me, please.”

  I looked down at my briefcase. “It’s locked,” I said. I didn’t want to give it to him. I had high hopes for that drawing.

  “Unlock it, please,” he said.

  I unlocked the briefcase and pulled my sketchbook out. I flipped through to the last drawing and ripped it out.

  He took it from me and glanced down at it, stopped and said, “It’s not done.” He handed it back to me.

  I took it from him, expecting him to laugh or smile or crack up like a sociopath. His head stayed down and all I saw was his tussled, dandruff-infested hair. “Not finished,” was all I could think to say.

  “Sorry,” he said. “My English is not good.”

  The social worker part of my brain, which slept soundly during off-hours, snapped awake when I heard those words. I shifted mental gears. Instead of a guilty party caught red-handed, I became an ally for an oppressed minority.

  My English is not good. It was the most common gripe I heard from the immigrants I worked with. It was usually a mere echo of what they had been told by people who tried to maintain their positions of privilege by putting down the new kids—playground rules. It might be false modesty or some sort of reverse psychology suck-up, or perhaps just the lack of confidence that kicks in naturally when working outside of one’s comfort zone, but on an almost weekly basis I’d hear some articulate expression of how bad someone’s English was, complete with profuse apologies.