Drive-by Saviours

by Chris Benjamin

  Deliveries were a too-rare and too-brief escape from the endless spongy crud left on the plates of the upper class. Bumi measured his life in hours to go: twelve thousand plus commute and a few hours of sporadic sleep and time with his co-workers at the restaurant and his one Canadian friend. Those hours could be broken down into ten- and fourteen-hour chunks that ended in exhaustion an hour after closing time, after every table was cleared and every dish put away for the night. The long shifts were the same except that they began with the lunch crowd.

  IF BUMI WAS SICK I COULDN’T BLAME HIM. HIS ENTIRE WORLD was an insane asylum. Maybe I was the benevolent warden. There was no value to my hack’s diagnosis. An expert opinion was even more useless. He probably didn’t have a health card. I thanked him for the talk and apologized for keeping him awake. He had another long shift in the morning.

  “No problem, Mark,” he said. “I enjoy talking to you.” He sounded more awake than when I had first called.

  “Bumi,” I said. “I know you aren’t Christian or religious, but, you know, have a good Christmas.”

  Even Sarah’s persistent snore couldn’t fill the silence that poured into my ear from Bumi’s end. After a long ten seconds he answered, “Thank you, Mark. You have a good Christmas, too.”

  EIGHTS SYMPTOMS AND EIGHT SIDE EFFECTS FOR SEVEN DOLLARS A DAY IN CHAPTER 19

  Our first just-the-two-of-us Christmas morning started smooth, simple, calm. It was a way of rejoicing neither of us had ever experienced. I assumed when Sarah pulled me close in the early afternoon that it was for a passionate saviour’s day kiss. Instead she asked me a question I had forgotten to dread. “When are you gonna call Michelle?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Not today actually. Not on Christmas Day.”

  “Why not?” she asked. “What a perfect time to reconnect.”

  I had focused a bit too much on the positive and failed to depict the severity of those Christmases past for her, how the Christmas Day fights between Michelle and my stepfather hurt me. How could they do that on Baby Jesus’ birthday? But really there was no explaining it to Sarah. My sibling who washed her hands too much and didn’t get along with her stepfather never quite cut it for tragedy compared to Sarah’s father, who threw himself in front of a rush-hour train.

  I had read that OCD sufferers are masters of deception, able to hide not only their pain and repetitive thoughts but their obscure rituals too. If Michelle had really been a sleight-of-hand illusionist then I was her assistant and greasy accomplice. I would not lift the curtain because her strangeness was impossible to explain; it was too farcical for another human being to understand the pain involved. “Come on,” Sarah said. She squeezed my hand.

  “No, not on Christmas Day,” I said. “Today is for peace.”

  “Since when?” she asked.

  “Since today,” I said. “Today we start a new Christmas tradition of peace. Let’s make it my New Year’s resolution.”

  “Peace?”

  “No, calling my sister.”

  Sarah rolled her eyes and let go of my hand. “Since when do you make New Year’s resolutions?”

  I had always preached that if a change is actually necessary in one’s life it should be made as soon as the need is recognized, not in some annual rite of broken promises. I had seen too many clients drag their dark shadows through my doors full of regrets about things they hadn’t done, decisions made in their brains’ boardrooms but never implemented in the streets. Now staring at my sad inner child’s face, I too became a wilful procrastinator, a wanderer of the well-trodden easy road to regret.

  SARAH KNUCKLED DOWN ON ME TO KEEP MY RESOLUTION BEFORE the New Year’s hangovers had even been conceived. We rung in our hopes for a peaceful and prosperous 2004 with more than a hundred drunken Latinos at a fundraiser for unionizing migrant farm workers, most of whom were back in Mexico for the winter.

  The core of this attempt to organize was Lily, who made her parents proud with her own initiative. She had grasped the link between refugees fleeing oppressive conditions and the exploitation of cheap foreign labour in Canada, and decided the best possible solution was a good old-fashioned union. “Migrant workers are doing the work that we Canadians refuse to do,” she announced just before midnight. “They work under feudal conditions. As a society we take advantage of their vulnerability by literally eating the fruits of their serf-like labour.”

  Shouts of “Shame!” emanated from the cavernous nightclub.

  “That’s right!” Lily shouted back, and gentle laughter rippled across the crowd, which was high on spirit-driven revolutionary fervour. “It is right. It is our shame, particularly the shame of the government of Ontario, which won’t allow these men to organize and fight for a minimum wage, for job security, for better working conditions.”

  “Shame!” shouted a deep male voice from behind me.

  “Shame!” echoed my lover beside me with her notorious passion.

  Lily explained that our cover charge paid for more than just midnight finger foods and beer tickets. It also went toward a waged union organizer to work with current leaders among the workers to lobby Ontario for the legal right to unionize. She ended her speech seconds before midnight with the words, “Let’s make 2004 the Year of the Migrant Farm Worker!”

  The assembled freedom-drinkers jumped and cheered, and sang along as the band broke into that old Scottish number.

  Lily reciprocated every one of tens of supportive and congratulatory hugs, including Sarah’s and my own. Her forehead bumped under my chin as she squeezed and lifted me, nearly twice her weight, off the ground. I stumbled when my feet rediscovered the sticky floor.

  We congratulated her on a stirring motivational speech, on her decision to adopt a Chinese baby and on a truly danceable event. Sarah and I had hijacked the dance floor between rum and Cokes and dodged more skilful salsa masters or break-dancers for most of 2003’s remnants. We dripped sweat and oozed booze, and we bought twenty dollars’ worth of raffle tickets for Lily’s Year of the Migrant Farm Worker. It was a year and a woman worth supporting. She hugged us again and, with a promise to send her partner Julia around, continued her rounds while scanning the bar’s dank horizon.

  “We should go,” I said.

  “Why?” Sarah said.

  The sum of Lily and my situations remained the same: a friendship at best, facilitated through the woman to whom I had recently proposed marriage. A strong attraction to Lily at this stage of my relationship with Sarah was embarrassing enough in private, more so with Sarah by my side, and at its potential worst with two couples present in their entirety: three astounding women and one oaf whose gratitude was inadequate given his enormous fortune.

  “I’m starving,” I said. “Let’s go eat.”

  Sarah had no interest in leaving. She was having a splendid time launching the new year with meaning, and wanted to get to know Julia better. “Why don’t you go get a snack and come back?” she said.

  “I told Bumi I’d stop in and see him at the Indonesian restaurant,” I lied.

  “Why would you tell him that when we had plans already?”

  “The restaurant is open late, I figured I’d go late. But I’m tired.” I yawned. I pressed the issue until Sarah shook her head and agreed, perplexed at the sudden disappearance of my clumsy joy for a spacious dance floor.

  “I wonder if we could convince them to deliver at this time,” I said as we walked toward the subway line.

  “I thought you promised to drop in and see him.”

  I explained Bumi’s love of bicycle deliveries, even in the cold and snow.

  Convincing the Changs to let a staff member make a cross-town bicycle delivery on the busiest night of the year required a two-hundred-dollar order. Motivated by the distorted generosity of rum I was pinched by a sharp and sudden need to give Bumi a New Year’s present and conf
ront him about OCD. I ordered enough gado-gado to last a month.

  IT WAS 1:13 AM AS BUMI DONNED THE LAYERS THAT WOULD KEEP him warm in a frigid climate. He strapped the boxes of food to the trailer and hitched it deftly to the bike. Across Eglinton he watched the young drunken professionals run giggling to their taxis. They ignored the pleas of the older men and women on the sidewalks with their paper cups and shivering signs.

  Bumi overtook milling pedestrians and the abundance of cars packed on the tight streets. He dodged heavy doors popping out from parked cars and shifted into high gear. He pumped the pedals hard until he worked up a sweat and the city’s light pollution and partygoers became one long, slow-moving stream of light. Bumi became faster than the light.

  He took a looping right south onto Mount Pleasant and ignored the horn-blasting limo that swerved around him as it ran the yellow. Downhill Bumi pumped his pedals in hard unison with his icy breath. The road widened and quickened as the cars overtook him, but he was still faster than the light. In a few short big city minutes he took an illegal left at the Bloor lights and headed to the viaduct without breaking stride. His steaming trailer bounced right behind him. A few minutes later he reached the open door of his destination. “You ordered so many foods I thought it was a big party,” he said.

  BUMI ACCEPTED MY OFFER OF TEA ON THE CONDITION IT COME quickly. He had to return soon or face the wrath of the youngest and most volatile Chang. He shed his layers right down to shorts and grease-stained once-white t-shirt. “It gets hot in the kitchen,” he said.

  As I heated the kettle he excused himself to the washroom. Sarah set the table for three and I served up the nasi goreng, ayam, gado-gado and coconut goat meat. I added three cups of hot tea and we sat to wait for Bumi.

  “I have to pee,” Sarah said after three minutes. We could hear the taps run from the bathroom. Steam emerged from under the bathroom door.

  I looked at my watch and estimated, based on experiences with Bumi in coffee shops, that he would be another ten minutes. He emerged like a shot eight minutes later. “I must take my tea to go!” he yelled as he ran down the hall past the kitchen to his scattered pieces of clothing, which he reassembled pell-mell over his body.

  I joined Bumi as Sarah replaced him in the washroom.

  “Sorry,” he said. His brown face reddened. “I shouldn’t taken so long.”

  “You shouldn’t have taken so long,” I said.

  “I shouldn’t have taken so long,” he said. He wrapped a four-foot wool scarf around his neck, shoulders and chin.

  “I guess you don’t often get the chance to wash up during your shift,” I said.

  Bumi touched his chin to each shoulder and affirmed that it was a rare opportunity with a nod. He pulled his over-sized puffy jacket over his head.

  “Wait here one sec,” I told him. The OCD file was by my computer, still open to the first document. I grabbed the whole file and brought it to Bumi, who was fully dressed, holding our bill in one mitten. I handed him the file and said, “This is on loan from work. I think you should read it.”

  He looked at me blankly and touched his chin to each shoulder again.

  “Just trust me,” I said. “It will really be of interest to you.”

  He nodded and my rum-soaked cerebrum reminded me that Bumi got stuck when he read. I took the file gently from his mitten-covered hands, opened it and read from the first document: “When worries, doubts, and superstitious beliefs become so excessive, such as hours of hand washing or driving around and around the block to check an accident that didn’t occur, then a diagnosis of obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD, is made. People with OCD often say the symptoms feel like a case of mental hiccups that won’t go away. OCD is a medical brain disorder that causes problems in information processing. It is not your fault or the result of a weak or unstable personality.”

  I looked up at Bumi, whose face remained blank as he touched his chin to each shoulder.

  “I think this may be why you have your habits, Bumi.”

  He gave an airy laugh through his teeth that left his smile behind, but said nothing. “Maybe we should get together next week and talk about it,” I said.

  He nodded and walked out the door without a word.

  Sarah squeezed around me from behind, paper cup of tea and purse in hand, and shouted, “Wait. The money!”

  I watched our heavy wooden front door slam shut behind her until she re-emerged shivering in her nightgown.

  “Well,” she said. “Good first try. Maybe you can be a bit more delicate with your sister.”

  MY GREATEST FEAR WITH MICHELLE WAS THAT MY MEMORY WAS A convenient construction, more specifically that in reality she abandoned me, not the other way around. For years I carried this fear. Wouldn’t I look like a fool calling her up asking for forgiveness only to hear her refuse to apologize and tell me to fuck off.

  Sarah nagged and prodded me for weeks before I screwed together the courage to pick up the phone. Complications are never particularly motivational and I first had to call my mother to get Mikki’s number. My vague hope that Mother would be happy about my interest in re-connecting with my sister melted as soon as I said, “Mother, it’s Mark,” and a heavy silence set in. I launched my full-metal defence before she said a word. I lied in great detail that my heavenward intentions to call on Christmas had been foiled by a soap opera of complicated crises among Sarah’s family.

  “And how is Sarah?” she asked in a merry singsong, as if the world could be all cherries and ice cream for her if only Sarah was all right.

  “She’s fine,” I said. “And I’m fine too.”

  My mother expressed relief that Sarah was fine and reminded me of my stepfather’s many theories. “He thinks you need to treat her well or you will lose her. He is worried that working with the kind of people you do and living in the big city is bad for her. He’s worried she’ll leave you for someone with a professional job.”

  “I have a professional job,” I said.

  She pointed out that my stepfather worried about my health, what with the smog and the traffic, the SARS and the guns.

  “I need Mikki’s number,” I said.

  “What for?” She seemed a bit taken aback by the interruption. I usually let my mother explain her husband’s theories and worries for hours or however long it took to alleviate the guilt of my absence from the sadness of their lives. At that particular moment my guilt had already ebbed because I was after all on a mission of mercy, one that I was not ready to explain to anyone who didn’t have obsessions stronger than a hazy fear of homeless people and other races.

  “I need to get a hold of her,” I said.

  “What for?” she said. My mother with all her neighbourhood accolades and nominations for sainthood is an innately cautious woman. I should have anticipated her need for complete information instead of fantasizing about her maternal joy at the potential reunion of her offspring.

  “I just thought I should call her,” I said. “See what she’s up to.”

  “She teaches at that English school in Portland,” she said. “It’s long distance.”

  “So is this, Mother.”

  “Your dad doesn’t understand why his kids choose to live so far away in such big cities with so much crime.” She had bent to my stepfather’s insistence that he be called our dad.

  “You lived in Toronto too,” I said.

  “Scarborough, Dear,” she said.

  “Can I have the number?”

  She ceded the number, told me to give Sarah a hug, explained that my ‘father’ thought Sarah was a really great woman. “He says you should seriously consider marrying before she comes to her senses.” She promised to send me some video she’d recorded from the news about avoiding the SARS.

  The die had been cast and the sound waves set in motion. I tried Michelle right
away and it was busy. Most likely Mother had called her immediately to let her know I’d be calling. I hung up the phone and, feeling a surge of anger, pounded my palm on the kitchen table.

  “What?” Sarah asked lazily from the living room couch. She looked up from her most cherished project, her dream incarnate: the business plan.

  “Busy,” I said.

  “Well goddamn,” she said, her voice alight with playful sarcasm. “Burn down the phone company.”

  “Sorry,” I said with an evil grin on my face. I made my approach.

  She waggled a finger warning of dire consequences to any interference with her work. With my mind firmly on my momentous need to release all pent up energy I ignored the ominous finger and threw the business plan to the floor. For that rebellious act I was forced to struggle through one of Sarah’s legendary headlocks. I rolled on the floor in neck-bound agony and heaved her off the ground in my arms with her arm still wrapped round my neck. A series of pile drivers, body-slams, suplexes and corkscrews followed. We fell amidst our scattered belongings, panting and laughing. And on we fought.

  “Oh shit,” I said. I saw the VCR clock from under a half-nelson submission hold. “I gotta go meet Bumi.” I squirmed loose and kissed her. She caught the back of my head and pulled me back for a long, close-eyed sucking of lips that left me breathless. “See you,” I said. I left her lying decimated in the ruins.

  CONVINCING BUMI THAT HE WAS SICK TURNED OUT TO BE A smaller obstacle than my mother or any frightened bureaucrat.

  “So I am crazy,” he said when I finished reading the contents of the file aloud.

  “Not crazy,” I said. “Sick. Maybe.”

  “Sick in the head,” he said.

  I read out to him the cases that most resembled his own symptoms. First, one of the classic hand-washers. Second, a checker who spent hours a day ensuring that the elements were off and the alarms were on. Third, a man who had to count to a hundred between each word he read.