Drive-by Saviours

by Chris Benjamin

  There was even a case in the file of a young Catholic named Rita who confessed the tiniest and most obscure supposed sins to her priest on an hourly basis. “Reverend, I had a pee and it gave a pleasing feeling where it shouldn’t have.” She knew her sins were the product of being an organic being and yet she could not shake the guilt or the fear of eternal damnation.

  The file was not all bacterial apocalypse and murders so devious the perpetrator could not prove the crime. A remarkable feature common to many of these sceptics was a tendency toward success in professional life. Many were rich or prominent or had further hallowed the halls of some ivy-covered institution. It seemed that they could turn the obsessions off when absolutely necessary, like when performing surgery or explaining relativity through the use of quadratic equations, or in Bumi’s case, washing dishes, and in Michelle’s case, teaching English.

  As I closed the file my stomach growled and the clock’s little hand approached six. I had wasted the whole afternoon reading things that had no relevance to the report Sherry expected on her desk when she returned from vacation. I called Sarah to explain that our dinner plans were off.

  Her charm, once applied so liberally to my ego, was by this point reserved for others. “Come on,” she said. “I’ve barely seen you all week.”

  I explained to her about the OCD file and she failed to see the relevance of a bunch of anonymous self-absorbed freaks to our sushi plans.

  “It’s all about Bumi,” I told her, knowing that he had made as strong an impression on her as he had on me.

  “How can they have a file about Bumi?” she asked.

  “This may be what he has.” I was convinced of it. “That’s why he washes so much. And apparently the tics and shrugs he does are common with this.”

  “So his mind is full of these same kinds of obsessions,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. It would explain the behaviour.

  “So he’s like Howard Hughes.”

  “Who?”

  “The Aviator. You remember that movie?”

  I hadn’t seen or heard of it.

  “He’s the guy who invented the Hercules warplane,” Sarah said. “He also made all these gory movies in the forties. Big tycoon. He was obsessed with germs and he’d always repeat phrases over and over.”

  “There was a movie about it?” Having felt like I’d stumbled onto some high-level state secret, the existence of a Hollywood movie about the obsessions and compulsions that had taken my family from me, and Bumi’s from him, was a betrayal. There was a damn movie and no one had told me.

  “There was also As Good as it Gets,” Sarah told me. “Jack Nicholson’s character had it. And the guy in that new TV show too.”

  “What show?”

  There seemed to have sprung an entire pop-culture genre of this disease while I remained completely ignorant of its existence.

  “I forget what it’s called,” Sarah told me. “Some detective show where the guy is all obsessive. My mom loves it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this?”

  Why hadn’t anyone told me this as I threw my sister’s bike in the lake and cursed all death and demons upon her? No one ever told me that my curses had worked so well, that she was fighting them in her head all along.

  “Why would I tell you? I guess I never made the connection to Bumi. I only met him once.”

  I heaved my shoulders, breathed heavily into the phone, watched the little hand eclipse the six and pursed my lips in self-inflicted anger. I couldn’t worry about the damn government report now.

  “I’m sorry,” Sarah said. “But you figured it out on your own.”

  “Sherry did,” I said.

  “Well, whatever,” she said, trailing off. She left a silent distance between us until I mustered my confession.

  “I just wish I’d known before,” I said.

  “Why?” She could never leave spaces between sentences for me.

  “Because my sister was like this. And I never knew. I’ve been a social worker for four years now, working in a full-service health centre under the supervision of a psychologist, and I’ve never bothered talking to Sherry or figuring out what it was with her.”

  “That’s not your fault.” She interrupted my thinking again. “I won’t let you take responsibility for that. You told me what an asshole she was.”

  “Of course she was an asshole. Wouldn’t you be if all you could see was danger and you couldn’t explain it to anyone because you knew they’d think you’re crazy? Who is the real asshole? The crazy one or the one who turns his back on the crazy one, who makes fun of the crazy one with his friends behind the crazy one’s back?”

  “It’s not your fault,” she said. “You were just a kid.”

  Sarah re-invited me to dinner. I accepted. All Sherry would find on her desk on return from vacation was a hand-scrawled excuse. It was the first time in my life I missed a deadline.

  DINNER WITH SARAH WAS THE GOOD OLD DAYS, A COMPETITION of laughter that both sides won. Our good fortune and mutual admiration shielded us, for the moment, against the increasing madness of the world around us. If we could only avoid integrating with the likes of Bumi, illegals and immigrants with their stories of genius repression and abstract bombs going off in their faces, then we could eat our sushi and rotis in peace for God’s sake. But they were the majority now, in this city that had adopted “Diversity Our Strength” as its official slogan. They lay in waiting like a homeless army, ready to ambush us with their heartache and hardships. And in some cases diseases they didn’t know they had.

  We avoided all that on an enchanted Friday evening sheltered by the giggles of a Japanese hostess who apologized more than a celebrity tabloid. We played the childish games of long-term lovers, imitating animals and objects using only our faces and chopsticks, racing to see who could pick up a piece of pickled ginger faster and belching discretely (or not) between bites.

  And we told stories. Not just the everyday updates about pre-Madonna fashion photographers and over-the-top social workers, but the made-up fantasies of the lives of the strangers surrounding us, projections of affairs among our friends and guesses at what our own future may hold.

  For a long time we had kept the subject of marriage away from any property we owned, rented, borrowed, worked on or ate in. It was a subject far too intricate and meticulous to take lightly, and light had been the mood of our early relationship. When things got more serious I became too frightened to accelerate or legitimize our commitment. Lately, things had been too unhappy to talk about anything longer term. But on this night things like rings, white dresses and smiling relatives were all over my mind.

  Gazing across the pine table at this candlelit laughing beauty, it was impossible not to imagine a Norman Rockwell aging process in which things just got better until the Good Lord Above called us both home. Maybe it was the saké or maybe it was my display of vulnerability and her response of great tenderness, because on this night these faraway dreams enticed and enchanted me.

  Such thoughts swirled as Sarah told me she had heard from Lily, who decided to adopt a Chinese baby with her partner. As she spoke I tore my chopstick wrapper into six pieces and laid them on the table. As Sarah posited about the impending possibility of legalized gay marriage and how it might help Lily’s chances, I picked up the middle piece of the wrapper, now a paper ring, and placed it on the baby finger of Sarah’s left hand. “Do you think maybe you would like to marry me?” I asked. I didn’t know what answer to hope for.

  Sarah stopped mid-word and cocked her head to the side with her mouth still open. “Are you serious?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “It’s just a question.”

  Sarah nodded with all traces of humour gone. “Ask me again when you’re sure,” she said. She took the paper ring, with its pastel
green ink diamond, slowly from her finger, and placed it gently into my breast pocket. She excused herself with the politest of grace and headed downstairs to the washroom.

  I prepared an eloquent apology for her return, one that would restore the easy joy of our evening. It included a detailed explanation of my thinking at the time, how I got caught up in and high on our games and I thought for the first time that I might be quite happy living with her until one of us died. But statements like that always work better in my head. They come out of my mouth jumbled and rambling, confusing and useless.

  “Sorry,” was all I said when Sarah returned.

  She smiled and said, “S’okay.”

  The evening continued and was not a travesty. It did, however, become more serious, slower and heavier. Sarah advised me to call my sister over Christmas and I agreed because I didn’t want to reveal my cowardice. It was neither the first nor the last time I suffered the delusion that I could hide my character flaws from Sarah.

  I shared with her a fond memory, or an amalgamation of memories, of my childhood Christmases. My parents had never been morning people by nature and refused to tolerate youthful exuberance before nine o’clock on a holiday. Ergo, we were banned from coming upstairs before that time. Our stepfather went so far as to leave a large pee bucket for us in the basement on Christmas Eve just in case our little bladders got the better of us before the adults were ready.

  During those years when Michelle and I both believed in Santa Clause she, the eldest, would be the first awake. Two hours before the upstairs ban expired she would burst into my room ready to play. I would wipe the dust from my eyes and yawn. She would tell me a joke and we’d laugh into our pillows. She entertained me with G.I. JOES, stuffed animals and Lego on parade before my eyes. Two hours flew by and we tore up the stairs to see what capitalism’s favourite saint had bought for us.

  Our tradition was killed by the anvil of Michelle’s puberty. Christmas became the year’s biggest disappointment tempered with my annual unanswered prayer: please Jesus don’t let them fight on your birthday. They always did, my sister and stepfather, and the explosion was supernova for a special day because they had held back all week.

  Sarah told me about a similar memory. She had to hide her younger sister from her drunken mother as she rampaged around the kitchen throwing knives. But that had been just six years ago. My sob stories always lost out to Sarah’s.

  We laughed a little and shook our heads at the psychoses of the typical Canadian family. I almost advised her that if we decided to get married that children should have nothing to do with it. I decided not to tempt her temper again. We went home and made gentle love like old people sometimes do in movies.

  While Sarah snored I fretted with too many things troubling me.

  I picked up the phone. It was 1:15 AM. Bumi never slept anyway. He answered in a groggy voice.

  “Did I wake you?” I asked.

  He said I hadn’t and it didn’t seem like him to lie for the sake of social graces.

  “Why do you sound so tired?” I asked.

  “Just got off work,” he said. “Fourteen-hours shift.”

  “Jesus Bumi, it’s only three days to Christmas and you’re working this late?”

  “Yes,” he said. He yawned through the phone.

  “Well, how was work?” I asked.

  “Long,” he said.

  I couldn’t say the words he needed to hear. I couldn’t tell Bumi that I had discovered the brand of his crazy.

  There was a long silence during which I watched Sarah’s chest heave and listened to Bumi’s breathing and occasional yawning.

  “How was work for you?” he finally asked.

  “Interesting,” I said, unable to make use of the perfect segue he created.

  “You are lucky you can say that,” he said. “That you have an interesting work for today.”

  “What is your workday like?” I asked.

  BUMI WORKED TWO KINDS OF SHIFTS: FOURTEEN HOURS FROM 11:00 AM to 1:00 AM, and ten hours from 3:00 PM to 1:00 AM. His workplace was a cultural and class-based hierarchy with illegals at the bottom who did the work of the untouchables. They served meals; washed food, gum and cigarette butts from dishes; made occasional deliveries by bicycle; bought lottery tickets for the higher classes; and took verbal abuse when things went wrong.

  Next up were the legal Indonesians who had been brought over for their specific and rare skill set: the ability to prepare authentic Indonesian food for the Canadian palate.

  Toward the upper end of the system raged the Chinese owners, the four brothers who had built an empire of sushi joints, one Indonesian restaurant and the long-term debt of the help, for whom they had financed numerous water-borne journeys to relative freedom. The brothers Chang were known among their employees as ruthless, fearless, short-tempered and psychotic. Bumi had learned of their severity soon after his arrival in Toronto, through his usual series of hapless errors. He brought them the wrong brand of cigarettes, mixed up the names of the brothers, purchased them losing lottery tickets, crashed the company bicycle into a parked car on a delivery, melted plastic dishes on a hot-plate and was slow in general. Each mishap was taken as a personal insult and whichever brother was on hand would fly into a red-faced rage, cursing Bumi out in an incomprehensible stream of Indonesian, English and Mandarin profanity.

  Had Bumi not owed the brothers so much money he would have been fired, along with those who had vouched for him. All the damage was taken from Bumi’s pay, even when the mistakes weren’t his fault, like when a customer slammed into him and sent a stack of plates smashing across the floor. Bumi feared his employers, not just for what they could do to his family, but for what they did to him on a daily basis. He learned certain strategies to avoid their wrath. He never disagreed with them, even if they said absurd things like, “You aren’t really tired yet. You are fine” or “It is not hot in this kitchen. The temperature is perfect.” Even when these statements clearly contradicted the facts, Bumi held his tongue.

  Atop this restaurateur society sat the chosen whites with money to spend on exotic food and invest in unique opportunities. They included bankers, entrepreneurs, doctors, vegetarian hippies and even social workers. In the most multicultural city almost all of the clientele were white. Most members of Toronto’s relatively small Indonesian community were unaware of, uninterested in or worked at the restaurant.

  It was rumoured that the Brothers reported to one other overseas level of authority, the true mastermind of the whole operation. Mrs. Chang, their mother, had raised them and three others back in Shanghai with no help from a deadbeat husband beaten to death on their tenth wedding anniversary. Bumi had found no proof of existence for this matriarchal legend, and he sometimes fantasized that she was in fact his landlady, the kindly matron who cared for him and the other illegals. He knew, though, that he himself was officially dead, a fugitive of Indonesia disintegrated at sea for refusing capture. There was no proof of his existence in this paper-based world.

  Bumi’s shorter shift began as the supper crowd gathered momentum. As the philosophy and cultural studies students merged with senior early-bird technocrats over a few bottles of imported Bintang pilsner, Bumi dove elbow-deep into the lunch crowd’s leftovers. He cleared and cleaned, composted and put away while the chefs joked and flirted with the waitresses. It all seemed jovial enough to Bumi until he learned about the pragmatism of the flirtation. The waitresses shared Bumi’s lack of legal status. Many shacked up with a chef for the chance to secure some sort of identity, or at least tap into the benefits of a bona fide landed immigrant or even Indo-Canadian citizen. Any cultural similarities were a bonus and personal compatibility was an unlikely miracle for which any and all praise was due Allah, who in His Infinite Wisdom could bring two lost souls together in the hellish kitchen in Canada.

  The illegal men had each
other and their slop to hold on to. Where Bumi had once lost sleep over the chemical additives of leather, here he was exposed to the more than three hundred unique chemical compounds of other people’s cigarette butts, not to mention whatever lived in their mouths and saliva. Where once he had stressed over the perfect alignment of belt holes, here he could never be satisfied with the work of industrial strength dishwashing machines built for bulk. There was always a disgusting film left all over the dishes that he could not abide unless someone screamed at him, “Bumi, put them away goddamnit!”

  It took only a few shifts for Bumi’s co-workers to catch on that he would get them all fired if some Chang needed to constantly break his bottleneck. They timed their own shouts to Bumi so they didn’t even have to watch him. The machine went ding and up went the hatch. If Bumi was emptying they waited thirty seconds and shouted, “Bumi goddamnit.”

  He’d snap from his entranced inspection and unload. If Bumi had been a surgeon, teacher or football star, he’d have that ability to turn the obsessions off in times of great professional import. As an untouchable the very tasks he performed triggered the mania of his mind, the great traitor. After a shift he’d go home and scour his bare hands with Mr. Clean.

  Bumi enjoyed making deliveries. Even in the dead of winter, on New Year’s Day or at Eidl Fitri, when he most longed for his family, in the demonic cold with some trickster called Jack Frost blowing icy breath hard on his face; Bumi loved the movement around this grid of a city. He loved the logic of its direction and the chaos of its people, especially the homeless ones frozen to a sidewalk spot with hands outstretched, carrying quirky signs like “Please invest in life-saving crack” and “Will drain system for food.”

  What empathy they must have felt from Bumi as he pedaled by muttering, “I concur, I concur.” They reminded him of his old friends in the Makassar market. If only he hadn’t lost that childish näiveté that had once allowed him to make such friends. His employers were even less forgiving than his father and they needed their lotto tickets before the six o’clock draw, so there was no time to dally with street friends.