Drive-by Saviours

by Chris Benjamin

  Sarah and I stood arm-in-arm and watched him walk down the road. When he was out of sight I turned on her. “Why did you ask him all those personal questions about his family?” I said. “Didn’t you see how uncomfortable he was?”

  She defended herself with an analysis of human interaction that would have made an academic sociologist blush. She said that in a time of severe social isolation the individual constructs a thick veneer to protect himself from the prying eyes of the public sphere.

  “It’s worse in rich countries,” she said, “where we worship almighty individualism. We even have commercials telling us not to follow the pack by drinking the sugar products they’re selling. They tell us to look out for number one, but numbers two through six billion seem to be organized against us.

  “Enter Bumi, the product of a collectivist society with an oppressive government that stuck its nose into his personal business. Yet, as a product of a collectivist society, he’s probably, subconsciously, seeking out allies in the likes of, say, a social worker like you.

  “In other words, Mark, he is dying to open up, but he can’t yet. And you are so blinded by your own desire to be his Canadian pal that you can’t even see how he’s reaching out to you. That’s why I pried.”

  What could I say to this great lover of mine? I was a slave in her presence, albeit a lazy and messy one. Her mind’s ideas were far too big and fast for me to keep up with whatever connections she was making. I just wanted, for once, to help one person in one tangible way, instead of writing euphemisms convincing people with money that the existence of their beloved society depended on trickling some of the Queen Victorias in the direction of my agency. I was good at that kind of bullshit. Maybe Sarah was too and was using it to weave fireworks around my mind and paint a rose-coloured image of her own actions.

  Bumi had taken Lily’s number. It was up to him what he did next. If he called her it was up to her if she was willing to help. If she was willing then it was up to greater forces to determine Bumi and his family’s fate.

  I accepted her argument, even though it was ethereal to me, and possibly just a bunch of random shit coming out of her mouth. I would sleep on it, try to remember the logic of it and see how it sat with me.

  “Anyway,” she said, “hopefully he’ll go see Lily. If anyone can help him, it’s her. She’s amazing, as you well know.”

  I had to acquiesce. She was calling in a favour. This was her reimbursement for letting my Lily crush blow over so peacefully.

  “Hey, what’s with his hands and all those nervous twitches?” she asked, officially changing the subject.

  “I told you. He’s very obsessive. Washes his hands all the time, and how he counts to thirty-three or says things to himself thirty-three times. He told me he used to love to read. Now he gets stuck.”

  “Stuck?”

  “Stuck. Can’t get past a few words. I don’t understand it either. He’s such a brilliant guy and he’s just really stuck. I’m glad you gave him Lily’s phone number, I really am.” I didn’t mention my sister or how Bumi’s habits reminded me of her. I never told Sarah much about Michelle. Just that I had an estranged sister in Portland.

  Sarah shook her head. “Maybe I should have given him the number for my mom’s therapist,” she said.

  We went to bed together for the first time in a week.

  I SAW BUMI THE NEXT WEEKEND. I RENTED A CAR AND TOOK HIM up to the McMichael gallery in Kleinberg. He particularly enjoyed the Haida masks. He told me his Javanese mother used to tell him about the old wayang puppets and he described the pointed masks he saw in tourist shops in Makassar. “We tried to sell those in Makassar,” he told me. “Those tourists there just want snorkel equipment and boat rides.”

  The wayang masks with their condescending toothless grins were not at all like the stark terror inspired by the Haida carvings and the animal clans and netherworld characters they represented, but they reminded Bumi of home and those ancient wayang plays anyway. “So long ago,” he said. I don’t know if he was speaking of cultural or personal origins.

  After covering the Group of Seven and Inuit art sections we stopped for a coffee and a sandwich nearby. I bought as always. Bumi never objected.

  I’d decided by then to tell him about my sister, how Michelle, Mikki, reminded me so much of him, right down to the nervous tics and the always red hands. I knew it wouldn’t be easy to talk about because I’d never told anyone about Mikki since I left home. After a few years defending my own position in my community and family by secretly berating the monster with whom I lived, I’d had enough of the mythology of it. I shoved the beast in my closet and locked the rusted door.

  But here was Bumi, who according to Sarah was reaching out for help in his own subtle way. And I had no clue how to help him. If he had been a client maybe I could have asked the hard questions, but Bumi was becoming a friend. All I could think was to share my own stories with him, and hope that since he and Michelle were similar, he’d identify and reciprocate.

  By the time we sat down with our coffee and food I had myself sufficiently psyched up to tell him about Michelle. But just as I opened my mouth, Bumi beat me to the story.

  “I saw Lily,” he said.

  Lily hadn’t heard much from us since the refugee centre’s tenth anniversary. I always meant to call her just as soon as things calmed down. But I felt awkward. My unrequited attraction left Lily completely asexual in my idiot mind, and to lust for something asexual was a bit repulsive. Easier to let Sarah be our joint correspondent with Lily. But Sarah had little desire to represent a fool like me to Lily, whom she so admired.

  “How is Lily?” I asked.

  “Great,” Bumi told me. “Like Sarah said. She says to say ‘hi’ for you and Sarah.”

  I corrected his grammar and he thanked me. “Lily says I can file for official refugee status,” he said. “Because of political persecution for my beliefs and for my behaviours. If I did that Canada would deport me. My request would be denied because of reformasi—our dictator has fell, and because I did not file immediately when I arrived in Canada. Or, I could stay here illegally and Yaty and the children could apply to immigrate here. But they would likely be denied because Yaty have no formal education or white-collar skills.”

  “Sounds like Lily wasn’t that much help after all.”

  “She cured my short obsession about being a refugee,” he said.

  His words seemed a good segue to my original intention to talk about my sister, but I’d lost my nerve. Bumi’s situation depressed me and I felt more impotent at that coffee shop than I did at work. The rules had been written and approved by those with the votes, who had unintentionally colluded with international criminals and a now-retired dictator, and together they delivered the news, via Lily, that the thousands of miles and billions of litres of ocean separating Bumi from his family were nothing compared to the quantity of red tape that stood in his way.

  “Bumi, do you think it would be safe for you to return now?”

  “That is very difficult,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I have the debt,” he said. Bumi had three more years of eighty-hour work weeks to go: 12,480 hours of hard labour before he could hope to see his children. If he reneged on his debt he would have no family to return to. Robadise’s Chinese friends were more powerful than a corrupt Indonesian police force, especially now that the highest levels of corruption had been shuffled.

  “Why did you run?” I asked. Sarah had planted a bold seed in me.

  In barely a whisper Bumi told me a story, one that I’ll never forget, about grotesque dead children and misplaced blame, about mental and physical torture and about a narrow escape across the ocean. I had to imagine the journey as a dotted line being drawn over a map. But rather than excite me like a journey should, Bumi’s words made me feel powerless and constrained. Th
ere were too many crazy things happening that I couldn’t stop. Bumi smiled at me and I noticed his big, off-white teeth with gaps, the only flaw in his facial beauty. It was the first genuine smile he had ever given me.

  “All that is over now,” he said. “The next coffee on me.”

  “Save your money for your debt,” I said.

  He laughed. “Haven’t you wondered how I get home with having no papers? I have wondered that. Lily give me the answer. I claim refugee status. I just wait until three more years, claim refugee status, and the government send me home. Lily has saved me ten years more debt! I thought I had to get smuggled home. Now I know better because you and Sarah helped me. Please, let me thank you in a small way.”

  He smiled again and I could do nothing but laugh and slap him on the shoulder. I had never touched Bumi and even to touch his shoulder was electric, warm and radiant, like he was emanating heat stored from his equatorial days. I wondered how much his debt was. Maybe it was low enough that some good folks with moderate salaries, maybe a paper-pusher and a medium circulation catalogue model, could cover a portion of it and save him a few months.

  But I couldn’t ask him how much. He was proud enough to offer to buy me coffee. It was no time to offer a handout. “Bumi, I have one question,” I said. “Are you sure you want to go back? Are you sure it’s the only option, or the best one? Is there no other way to get your family here, where people won’t accuse you of evil just because you wash your hands a lot?”

  The last traces of Bumi’s smile vacated his face and he assumed the serious look of the coffee shop revolutionary he used to be. “Having sampled two oceans now as well as continents,” he said, “I feel that I know what the globe itself must feel: there’s nowhere to go. Elsewhere is nothing more than a far-flung strew of stars, burning away.”

  “Who said that?” I asked.

  “Joseph Brodsky,” he said. “Exiled Russian poet who lived in America. People are the same here, Mark: afraid and cruel. Only it is not home.”

  THE LAST FEW WEEKS BEFORE CHRISTMAS ARE THE MOST difficult at cubicle farms across North America, and mine was no exception. The wilful preparatory slowdown is incongruous to the needs of clients, which tend to increase around that time of year. End of year reports and start of year budget proposals are due in January and, with half our staff on holidays and the remainder in a corporately cheerful mood, mounds of papers and megabytes of emails surrounded my thoughts and dreams. My own mood had an inverse relation to the prevalent Christmas spirit and I felt a sort of solidarity with Muslims, Jews and people of other faiths being ignored or mocked by looming neon spruce trees and shopping sprees.

  Christmas of 2003 was a particularly difficult one for me. During the forced slowdown when I needed to speed up at work, my relationship with Sarah was marching a forced up-tempo and I needed a slowdown. Since she had twisted my mind, spinning her latest web of connected world systems that were meaningless or nonexistent to me, our relations had improved considerably, mainly because I had lost my fight. She had mastered me with theories and facts that had my brain factory working overtime. I had no time left to worry about how I felt. At home I became a futuristic robot from 1980s television. I rolled around and dusted things and served drinks, offered idle chit-chat as needed.

  My mind was also clouded with Bumi and his problems and—for the first time since I was a child—my older sister and hers. Why did I link those two so strongly? Just because of a few similar bizarre habits, a similar unrealized potential and a similar kind of genius.

  In the final working weeks of 2003 my co-workers slowed their pace of work as they got excited for a break and a party and a new year. I slowed my pace too, but only because I was too distracted by thoughts of Bumi and Michelle to get much done. When I was invited to the lunchroom for Christmas cupcakes or shortbread or some such sugar binge, I was glad for some forced socialization with people who did not look to me for help in anything beyond the administrative.

  Not one to charm an entire party, I find it best at these cookie-cutter functions to hone in on the least offensive person in the room and fire away with whatever questions come to mind. Having an aversion to the condescending caterwaul of immaculate social workers out to save the world by correcting the bad behaviour of immature or immoral mothers, I chose my boss, Sherry. Her most admirable and annoying characteristic was her ability to be astounded by and marvel at every individual thing in life with aggregate amazement. Perhaps I was driven further in Sherry’s direction by my own anxieties about Bumi and my sister. Sherry used to be a psychologist before she got her promotion to full-fledged senior bureaucrat.

  “I wanted to ask you one thing,” I told her, skipping the small talk and stepping between her and the door on the other side of the cafeteria.

  She smiled and threw back the shoulders of her power-suit. “Hit me,” she proclaimed boldly.

  “I have this friend.” I started with Bumi’s hand-washing, moved on to his ritualistic counting and patterned chanting and ended with his inability to read.

  “Come,” she said. She stepped around me and waved her hand. “Follow me.”

  I nodded and smiled to Mabel as we passed. She was flirting with the doctors again. She smiled back and nodded vigorously. “Merry Christmas, Mark!”

  Sherry led me to our resource room’s psychology section, pulled down a large folder from the shelf and handed it to me. “It sounds like your friend has obsessive compulsive disorder,” she said. She emphasized every syllable of the name of this obvious menace. “The sceptic’s disease.”

  “Sceptics?”

  “Where your brain tells you bad things and turns you into a sceptic, sceptical of all the evidence disproving the bad things.”

  I myself was sceptical. This disease sounded like the contrivance of some hokey backwoods optimist club. “But surely there are bad things,” I said.

  She nodded affirmative. “Of course. But with OCD the bad things are very specific thoughts that have no evidence and little basis in reality. Read up on it.” She patted the file and flashed her perfect smile. “Let me know if you have any questions. But like I told you once before, you have to be careful about diagnosing friends. Your friend should see a trained psychoanalyst. I can recommend some for you.”

  Amazing. Several lifetimes of agonizing doubt, spread across oceans and continents and bang, with the straightened white smile of a bureaucratic optimist who had never missed a dentist appointment or grammatical error, the truth would be revealed in a mauve file folder held in my trembling hands.

  NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES LITTLE JIMMY CHECKED THE alarm, he remained sceptical that it was on. When its electronic screech finally pierced the air at 7:00 AM, he was already awake and convinced that it would fail him. He went to school and slept through math class.

  No matter how many times Dr. Cabrera returned to the crash site and found no bodies or signs of damage to his Nissan, he remained sceptical that there had in fact been no accident, that he hadn’t killed anyone. He couldn’t stop checking. Each highway-side visit’s sense of relief proved temporary and made him that much later for work, made his queue of waiting patients that much longer.

  No matter how many crimes Julia confessed to with no convictions and no evidence other than her own confession, she could not shake the guilt that haunted her every hour, waking or dreaming. She remained sceptical of her innocence.

  And, most commonly, no matter how many times Mr. A, B or C washed his hands and arms, no matter if the skin covering these appendages was all but melted off from scalding hot water, he remained sceptical that they were clean, safe from insidious infection.

  In a world of propaganda, euphemisms, outright lies, statistical manipulation, media bias and snake-oil salesmen’s bullshit, I sat with a file full of true stories of intelligent sceptics whose minds betrayed them. That six ounces of pink circuitry more complex than i
ts own inventions had made up or exaggerated the worst possible scenario and ignored the ample evidence disproving the tall tale of things that could go wrong.

  This disorder was a dictator’s wet dream. It had, after all, immobilized two of the greatest minds I had ever encountered, one of which had every reason to organize itself and other people. Rather than buy the products produced by Suharto’s propaganda machine, Bumi’s brain had, true to its nature, one-upped that most powerful general of a seventeen-island army, and created its own obsessions: germs and numbers.

  Suharto’s New Order (NO) government says, “Fear the insidious evil of false ideals like communism.”

  Bumi’s brain wades into all ideals and takes the parts it likes best, leaving the rest, and dreams up something completely different to fear.

  NO says, “Report anyone you suspect of communist thought, exploration, activity, sympathy, or propagandizing because it is better to cage or kill twenty innocents than have one guilty go free.”

  Bumi associates freely with twenty guilty men and reads the words of hundreds of others, and says, “Take action against any and all possible bacteria because there are billions of them and one survivor can end your existence long before you find the truth of its essence. While you’re at it avoid all those cracks, dips and bumps in the pavement because they are caverns of evil that could befall the few people you love and depend on for love in this dirty world of ours. If you should make any mistakes be sure to take corrective action in the form of thirty-three apologies or incantations of the names of your most precious associates, because three is a magic number and thirty-three is enough to be certain.

  This sceptic’s disease file was the stuff of a psychological thriller. The brain-quacks could have easily called it the disease of faith. Its victims are the truest believers and most rigorous practitioners in their own personal religion or form of mysticism. They have an attuned awareness to how ridiculous they look, and how absurd the absolute moralism attached to their underlying obsessions really is.