Drive-by Saviours

by Chris Benjamin

  I answered him with both of my standard lines. The first was designed to mirror his frustration back to him and demonstrate my solidarity, to allow for the legitimacy of his words. The purpose of the second was to instil confidence and compare his frustration with the positive perception of another. “English is a very difficult language to learn,” I told him. “Your English is actually very good.” From there I improvised as appropriate to the specific file in hand. “The mistake you made is very common, even among native English speakers.”

  He cocked his eyebrow at me. “Please finish,” he said. He pointed to the picture. “This picture,” he added. “I can show it to my wife one day. So she can see what I look like in Canada.”

  Relieved, I agreed. “It will take some time,” I said. “If you give me your mailing address I can send it to you.”

  He shook his head. “Give me your address,” he said. “I will pick it up next week.”

  I wrote it down for him with my name.

  “Mark,” he said.

  I nodded my head and offered my hand.

  He glanced to his left and back at me, then did another twitch, touching his chin to his right shoulder. Finally he grabbed my hand with a firm shake. “Bumi,” he said.

  THIRTY-THREE SHOPPING DAYS LEFT IN CHAPTER 18

  “You draw nice,” Bumi said when I handed him the picture. He stood on my front porch and looked down at the finished product.

  “Nice-ly,” I corrected without thinking, like some annoying, condescending father.

  “Nicely,” he repeated.

  “It could use something in the background,” I said, “to fill out the white space.”

  He tilted his head, did that twitch of his, touched his chin to each of his shoulders. “Don’t know,” he said. He looked up at me for the first time since I answered the doorbell. “Excuse me, may I use your toilet?”

  I let him in and pointed down the hall. “I just put in new floors,” I announced.

  He handed the picture back to me to hold. I had wanted to draw a few policemen behind him, off in the distance, maybe peering intently his way but trying to hide their interest. It was beyond my skill level. I did add in the closed book he’d been staring at. I even remembered the title, and I found the author on Google. It was called The Fugitive and it was written by a man named Pramoedya Ananta Toer, from Indonesia. He wrote much of his work in a prison colony during the Suharto regime, which is maybe what made me think of police officers watching Bumi from a distance.

  Bumi spent a good twenty minutes in the washroom. Steam leaked out through the doorframe. “Everything alright?” I asked. I wished Sarah were home. She had a way with awkward situations. That is to say, she had a blind-spot to awkwardness. Why would she worry about a strange man emitting steam from our bathroom?

  “Just one moment,” Bumi said from somewhere beyond the steam. He emerged a few minutes later rubbing his hands. I handed him back the picture.

  “Who are you?” he asked me. “Why you so interest in me?”

  I resisted the urge to correct his grammar. “Like I told you, I’m Mark, Mark McCloud. I’m a social worker.”

  He raised his eyebrow at me. “Why you care about this?” he asked. He pointed to the drawing of his book.

  “It’s just a detail I remembered from the bus,” I said. “You were looking at this book, like you were reading it, but it was closed.”

  “You think I need social worker?” he asked.

  “A social worker,” I said, still correcting his grammatical errors on automatic.

  “A social worker,” he said. “You think I need a social worker?”

  I shook my head. “That’s not my decision,” I said. “I mean, if you think you need a social worker you can get one. Or if you commit a crime or something you’d have to see one.”

  Bumi’s head snapped back like I’d punched him. “No, Mark, I have not committed a crime. Never.”

  “Oh I know,” I said. “I’m just saying.”

  I thought I should explain that “just saying” is an expression but he nodded his head as if it was all understood. His paranoia left me on edge. Maybe he did need a social worker. A good one. “So you okay with the picture?” I said. “I mean, we’re good?”

  “Yes,” he said. His gaze fell back to the picture. “Thank you.”

  “I hope your wife likes it.”

  Bumi snapped his head back up and he met my eyes. “My wife?”

  “You said you’d send it to her.”

  He nodded. “I will.”

  “Do you want a cup of tea?” I said.

  “No, thank you,” he said. He took a quick look at his watch. “Well, okay. Thank you.”

  HE DIDN’T STAY LONG. I POURED HIM A CUP, TO WHICH HE ADDED about ten spoonfuls of sugar, and he downed it in two gulps. He looked at his watch again. “I have to get to work,” he said.

  I shook his hand at the door. His grip was gentler than I remembered. He smiled and stooped a little. I thanked him for coming and my gratitude was sincere.

  “You are kind,” he said.

  I wanted to know him better. I wanted to ask him where he worked at least, or why he was separated from his wife. But he was so paranoid. In his quirky mannerisms, his twitches and his herky-jerky changes of heart, he reminded me of Michelle. But Michelle was long gone, and he was right in front of me. “Look,” I said, “do you like basketball? Because I have some free tickets from work, for the Raptors.”

  TO KNOW BUMI I’D FIRST HAVE TO REVEAL A BIT OF MYSELF. I hated talking about myself, especially my past. My present was no fun either. And I didn’t have a lot of hope for the future.

  There were those first years with Sarah that were pleasant to remember and talk about, so I started there. We somehow ignored the pyrotechnics, multinational advertisements and general blare of the basketball game and I told Bumi how Sarah and I had met, and how she told me such great stories.

  He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe how amazing she was.

  “How is she?” he said.

  “Meaning?”

  “How is she like?

  “What is she like.”

  “What is she like?”

  “Some people can be described as an accident waiting to happen,” I said. “Sarah is an accident in perpetual motion.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “I didn’t explain it very well,” I said. “Sarah is fiery. She has a passion that cuts deep, like she has this knowledge of the right way of doing things, and God help you if you violate her rules.” All those useless words were just remnants of our latest first-thing-Monday-morning fight.

  “She is a great woman,” Bumi concluded. “I like to meet her.”

  “You would like to meet her,” I corrected

  “Exactly,” Bumi said.

  We laughed but I was afraid. I didn’t want to introduce Sarah to Bumi. I was content to have him, to have anything, for myself.

  Bumi changed the subject. “It is nice for you to help me improve my English,” he said.

  “Nice of me. I notice you make some small mistakes but not many, and I can always tell what you mean. If you want we can meet again and work on some basics.”

  I GOT HOOKED ON BUMI OVER A SERIES OF COFFEES AT CHEAP cafes, which led to art galleries and tourist attractions like the CN Tower and the Royal Ontario Museum. I didn’t mind paying his admission. Somehow I just found the money and the time that was never available for my clients. Things like recreational basketball, household renovations, Sarah and work paled in importance next to my need to be with Bumi, to converse with him, to go over any grammatical mistakes he made. We tried reading too, but he couldn’t do it.

  “I get stuck now,” he said.

  It was no easy task to open him up. Lon
g before he told me anything about his life I told him all about my miserable job and how the blackout had awoken me to something greater, yet made my nine-to-fiver that much more miserable. I explained to him again my fascination with faces, my increasing desire to draw them and to feel what I see in them. I explained that every day I sat and listened to people’s problems and felt nothing, but I took one look at a faraway face and grabbed my charcoal pencil and forgot everything else except that face’s life story. And the further away the roots of that face, the more excited I became.

  Bumi nodded sagely at these confessions, but he didn’t say much. He would have been a great social worker or therapist. “Maybe you should bring your pencils when you meet clients,” he joked one time.

  Though he shared little, I assumed our interest was mutual because Bumi cut his weekly working hours down to seventy during those weeks leading up to Christmas. “Why do you work so damn much?” I asked him over chicken souvlaki sandwiches late one night. He had just come off a fourteen-hour shift. It was the first thing I had the guts to ask him. I had a feeling he was a refugee who had probably been through some nasty Suharto shit, and worked to get his mind off the past, or just to make enough to survive the present. I was in the right ballpark, but my guesses were vague and useless compared to what he told me.

  “I have debt,” he said.

  I nodded and left a silent space. I hoped he’d fill it with more details, but it was a long wait, probably a full minute, before my patience was rewarded.

  “I hear Suharto may even go to jail,” he said. “If I pay these men back I may go home and see Yaty. And my children.”

  That’s as much as he said about his family then, but he talked at length about his friend Bang, and the rest of the Indonesian men he worked with, how their desires to return home had compounded tenfold since Indonesia’s 1998 reformasi—the downfall of Suharto and his cronies that happened two years after Bumi got to Canada. This too was a new clue—he had never told me how long he’d been in the country. Seven years is a long time away from everyone you love.

  He told me the restaurant workers had all celebrated the first free Indonesian elections in thirty-three years with an all-night dance in the street, during which they composed a wayang puppet show about the gas riots that started the greatest Indonesian political change of their lives. But they were stuck in Toronto, indentured to Chinese restaurateurs.

  Any time Bumi spent with me amounted to wages lost, and therefore to time away from his family. He must have liked me on some level, or at least gotten something out of our cross-cultural exchange.

  I GREW TIRED OF HIDING MY FRIENDSHIP WITH BUMI FROM Sarah. I grew tired of lying about my whereabouts whenever I met him for coffee or some cultural event. It took me a month, but I did tell her all about Bumi. Over a late dinner I laid out every scrap of information he had shared. I spoke fast and it took just minutes. She was convinced this Bumi was my latest crush, that I was either bisexual or Bumi was actually a woman.

  “Christ,” I said. I stood and headed for bed without another word.

  I told Bumi about Sarah’s ridiculous assumptions a couple of days later. I snorted and hoped he’d find it funny, but the more I complained about Sarah the more he wanted to meet her.

  I invited him for tofurkey dinner a few weeks before Christmas. “I know you don’t celebrate Christmas, but…”

  “Jesus seems a lot nicer than his father,” Bumi said.

  A HOUSE PREPARED BY SARAH FOR A NEW GUEST IS IMMACULATE and comfortable. She shows her guests the charm of her grandmother Ingrid and great-grandmother Valeriya, yet none of their pressure to conform or abstain. She peppered Bumi with her usual specialties: deep fried goat cheese, homemade bread and salsa, stuffed mushrooms wrapped in mock bacon and cognac. He ate and drank voraciously, outpacing our own boar-like consumption. It could have left an awkward pause as we waited for the main course, but Sarah filled the gaps with her stories. She repeated to him the little facts from his own life that I had shared with her, and asked for elaboration.

  Bumi reciprocated her charms and became a storyteller. In moments she opened him up like I never could. He told us about the fishing island where he was born, about how he had invented new fishing techniques and become invaluable to his father at the market where they sold the fish. He told us that government officials had taken him away from all that. He told us about his friend Robadise, who helped him survive some tough times in school, and became Bumi’s brother-in-law and helped him find work to support the family. Bumi spoke as if recanting an old folk tale, as if it hadn’t really happened to him and first person was just a useful device. We were so engrossed that the tofurkey was drier than the wine by the time we pulled ourselves up to the kitchen table.

  Bumi reversed the gentle inquiry and asked Sarah a few standard questions. He was better at small talk than I would have guessed.

  Sarah switched to her own storytelling mode. The fashion industry, as told by Sarah, was one fraught with idiots, talented artists, sycophants, hangers-on, creeps, perverts, brilliant designers, astute planners and organizers and more ego than the isle of Manhattan. It was a miracle she’d suffered only mild bulimia, which was by then under control, in such an oppressive industry.

  The political analysis she offered the industry was unique, in that she was its only member who seemed to have one at all. She was worried that the capitalist fashionistas would mock her dream to create her own fashion line, one free of sweatshop labour. Instead they proved to be quite supportive of the idea but questioned whether a model could reach such entrepreneurial platitudes without first becoming famous from Paris to New York. “A catalogue model could never succeed in business,” they told her. They said she should leave Toronto, her beloved home and the home of her beloved. They told her the best she could hope for here was an occasional role in a throwaway Canadian art film. She earned decent money as a model and squirreled most of it away. She had a business plan on the go.

  I heard this same story of idealistic vision and dogged determination on our first date, and about 587 times since. I was becoming as tired of it as Sarah seemed to be of my inability to dream anymore. I gnawed at my dry tofurkey from her first anecdotes about Parisian modelling gigs to her visits to Mexican sweatshops, hoping my boredom didn’t show, and that Bumi wouldn’t share it.

  If he was bored he hid it well, with well-timed questions and exclamations, and an occasional brief anecdote of his own. “My wife works in a sweatshop,” he told us. “Not so bad like some of the ones you talk about.”

  “Not as bad as some of the ones she talks about,” I corrected him. Sarah squinted at me, kicked me under the table and refilled my wine.

  “Yes,” he concurred. “Not as bad. But still hard. She is paid very bad. She works very hard. Long hours. Lucky for us her brother and father makes good money.”

  “Couldn’t your father or brother use their connections to find her something better?” Sarah asked.

  “Well, her job is good for a woman without university. Many womans in Indonesia work for the informal sector. They sell junk, beg, prostitute, make very small money,” he explained. “Her job is not so bad.”

  Sarah nodded and repeated what he had said back to him in short-form and said, “Still, it must be difficult for her. And it must be so hard for you to be away from her and your children.” Sarah was a natural-born social worker. “So, do you think your wife will join you some day?” The flip side of the gift of Sarah’s openness is her complete lack of tact. Not everyone can be so revealing with the facts of their lives, especially those residing under dubious circumstances.

  Bumi took a sip from his tea and fished his fork around the crumbs remaining on his plate. “Not yet,” he said.

  “That must be difficult,” she told him. She touched the raw, red skin of his right wrist. “I imagine you hope to be with her again someday.”

&nbs
p; “Of course,” he said. “One day. Anything is possible.”

  “Is that why you work so hard? Are you saving money so they can immigrate?”

  Bumi cleared his throat a little and shifted in his seat. I kicked my beloved under the table, hard.

  She kicked back and glared at me, either oblivious or defiant. A brick wall had wounded our swift conversation.

  Bumi looked down at the table and mumbled, “It is difficult to say.” He cast me a lifeline-seeking glance. In all my conversations with Bumi he’d never talked much about his family.

  Sarah blazed forward. “Yes, it must be so difficult to be so far away from them. Do you hear from them often?”

  “Not so often, not yet,” Bumi said. “I miss them, yes.”

  Sarah nodded.

  “There is dessert!” I announced. I smiled at Bumi, who smiled thinly back.

  We ate dessert without much further conversation. Bumi excused himself only an hour into primetime. “I must work early,” he said.

  “You work so hard, Bumi,” Sarah told him at the front door. “There must be an easier way to reunite you with your family. You should meet my friend Lily, shouldn’t he Mark?”

  I nodded, swept away in the tornado of Sarah’s enthusiasm. She did this to me sometimes and I hated it. How could I protest? Love is oppressive sometimes.

  “Hang on a sec, Bumi,” Sarah said.

  She jogged down the hall to our bedroom, leaving Bumi on the porch in a dirty, worn winter coat with fur collar pulled up over his head. The coat looked older than Bumi.

  “Sarah is very enthusiastic,” I said.

  “She a wonderful woman,” he said.

  “She is a wonderful woman,” I said.

  Sarah jogged back to us. She laughed at her own shortness of breath. “Here,” she said. She handed Bumi a piece of paper with Lily’s name and number on it. “She is an amazing woman who deals with all kinds of international workers, immigrants, asylum-seekers, you name it. Please give her a call. You never know.”

  “Anything is possible,” Bumi said as he backed down the steps to the sidewalk. He waved and grinned from under his fur lining. “Thank you so much for a wonderful night.”