Drive-by Saviours

by Chris Benjamin

  BUMI INVITED ME TO THE PARK WITH HIM SO I COULD MEET HIS new friend. I had reached such stiffness and frustration with my work that I was willing to seize any opportunity to call in sick on a Monday, before I got stuck crunching numbers from some government report. My late report after the Christmas holidays turned out to be the first of several. I was getting lazy. I didn’t keep an eye open for new funding opportunities anymore. I didn’t double check that staff’s long-distance phone calls were legit. I was going through the motions.

  I arrived early to meet Bumi that morning in Art Eggleton Park. I wasn’t accustomed to the early hour and I hadn’t realized that I would beat the crush. Even public transit could travel quickly when unimpeded by millions of bodies demanding simultaneous movement.

  I forgot my sketch pad, so I watched the few other early-bird faces: a bleary-eyed young woman, a big blond guy in a cheap suit, a lazy-eyed old guy shouting occasional profanities to someone named Mary, who, if she was on the bus, ignored him like everyone else. I concluded as I stepped out before Art Eggleton that the initial post-blackout magic had worn off, not for me but for Toronto. The giant shopping complexes were fully lit and the eyes were turned inward, away from the advertising and “Diversity Our Strength” signs. Each of three million souls passed time alone working their way through whatever mazes life threw them into. The energy of my momentous quest for human contact had not dissipated but rather been refocused on one particularly fascinating human. He was the first challenge worth the effort.

  Fuck the health centre. Fuck my sister, and my parents too. And Sarah’s family too.

  Bumi had real problems, and I would help… or fail. The exciting part was that, unlike with applying for a grant, the prospect of failure with Bumi scared me. If life was a game, as Sarah claimed in some of her lighter moments, then Bumi’s was one worth playing, maybe more so than my own struggle with a mundane mortality. The stakes in the game of Bumi’s life were so much higher, so the game seemed worthier of my capabilities.

  Bumi showed up on time and led me down a paved pathway. Lady Juanita was ahead of us with her face and arms stretched to the rising sun. She looked like a well-tanned Jesus, only with more scars and less facial hair. Bumi was right about the smell. I offered my hand when Bumi introduced us but Lady Juanita refused it. “First you must beat me in chess,” she said in a slight Latino accent.

  Lady Juanita already had two chessboards set up: a hand-carved one and a set of cheap plastic pieces on a stone tabletop with squares painted on by the city. She played us both at once and beat me in less than thirty moves and forty-five minutes. All the while she chatted about coups, counter-coups, militias, intelligentsias, spies and corruption. “Marx said that capitalism is a natural precursor to socialism,” she told us. “And the ultimate is communism. So capitalism fucks us first. Then socialism fucks everybody equally through centralized state control.”

  “So which is best?” Bumi asked.

  “They are all equally shit,” she said.

  “But there are other ways,” I said.

  I regretted my feeble contribution. Bumi had better informed himself about political systems in childhood than I had in my whole life, and Lady Juanita had earned her chops as a true experience junkie. There was nothing of substance a newspaper-educated ignoramus like myself could contribute.

  “There may be variations,” Bumi said, “but capitalism and communism are the two common extremes we’re all bound to. Is that not so?” He moved his knight and Lady Juanita took his bishop.

  I recommended a few writers I remembered from undergrad, who wrote about social systems and seemed quite brilliant, like Vandana Shiva. I caught Bumi’s forlorn pupils gaze up at me, though his forehead still pointed toward the chessboard. “Oh, right, sorry,” I said.

  “Maybe if the medicine works,” he said.

  Lady Juanita began a lecture about how the pharmaceutical industry manufactures a need for drugs. Bumi exchanged pawns with Lady Juanita.

  “Bumi,” I said. “When I first met you, on the bus, you had that book with you. The Fugitive. You kept looking at it.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Why? If you can’t read?”

  “You can’t read?” Lady Juanita said. She slapped a hand to her forehead. Bumi explained to her that he used to read, but he got stuck on words. The explanation seemed to alleviate her concern.

  To me Bumi said, “When I was young Pak Syam lent me that book. The same morning I finished it the news say that two boys were caught with the same author’s writings. They put them in jail. I give it back to Pak Syam and he burned it. He say it was bad luck to keep.

  “When I come to Canada my landlord have a copy of that same book. She give it to me. I carry it because I can. I cannot read it anymore, but I can hold it open on the bus and no one can stop me. No one want to stop me.” He paused before adding, “I guess I am the fugitive now.”

  I CALLED MY SISTER AGAIN TWO WEEKS AFTER OUR FIRST conversation — to the minute. Same groggy response.

  “So what are you up to these days?” I asked.

  “Teaching. Hanging out with my girlfriend.”

  “Girlfriend?” The gender, for some reason, didn’t surprise me in the least. What was harder to comprehend was Michelle in a relationship at all. She was too high maintenance, too weird, too psychotic.

  “Yeah, a girlfriend,” she said. “Toni. She’s an amazing woman. She’s a teacher too.” Toni taught ESL and made short anti-racist videos in her spare time. She sold the videos to school boards and scout groups. She hoped to make a feature-length documentary about institutional exclusion of people of colour in western North America. I wondered how my sister could end up with a woman like that. She told me that she too had a side gig: one-on-one language tutoring with the children of rich immigrants.

  I boasted about Sarah and my job and Michelle said she’d heard it all from our mother already. I wondered aloud why the maternal grapevine was growing only one way. I had heard nary a sound byte on Michelle in five years except that she taught English.

  “Mother and I have grown quite close over the years,” Michelle explained.

  Another unfathomable development. I asked her to explain the phenomenon of becoming closer to someone after moving further away.

  Michelle said nothing. There was a dead silence for an excruciating ninety seconds. I watched the big hand slide toward 11:30 and knew I should stop billing my non-profit employer for long distance silence, but I needed to win this listening contest.

  I lost, changed the subject, told her about my art classes and how much better my sketches were.

  “Nice, Brother,” she said.

  Having gained my elder’s approval I excused myself, said I had a client and hung up.

  AS MY ADMINISTRATIVE DUTIES GREW, MY LIST OF ACTUAL clients shrank, and with my productivity waning I handed the remaining few to colleagues. Perhaps they would have better luck with a woman who couldn’t find work after surviving cancer, a mother of six fighting infanticide fantasies and a sixteen-year-old kid with a collection of illegal handguns. I knew that one of the few things my clients had in common was a need for consistency, but I also knew that consistently rescheduling their appointments and letting my mind wander while they told me their troubles was not helping them. My colleagues were more qualified and better counsellors.

  To keep my head above an ever-growing stack of paperwork I needed to accept myself as an administrator. Maybe I could start something on the side, a money-maker. So far my $413, tens of cups of coffee and uncounted admission ticket investment in Bumi had yielded no tangible return.

  I held on to one official client, Abdul the neuroscience researcher. He was the only one making any progress. Lily had hooked him up with a volunteer job in a University of Toronto (U of T) lab, something to do with cadavers. Lily had connections everywhere.


  When I told Abdul about the volunteer job he actually smiled. He took my hand and held it for a long time and just smiled. “I am very pleased,” he said.

  I warned him it was full-time with no financial compensation and he said he didn’t mind because he wasn’t allowed to work until his refugee hearing. The U of T lab tech and I wrote him glowing letters of recommendation for the hearing.

  I arrived late for my Tuesday afternoon appointment with Abdul because I had been in the washroom for over an hour trying to figure out what was preventing me from confronting my sister about OCD.

  Abdul was back to being distraught. “I’m fired,” he said. He held his head in his hands and talked into the boardroom table. In his letter of recommendation I had made special note of his dedication to his profession and his hours of toil for no pay. I talked of his persistence against all odds. He didn’t want to tell me too much about what had happened in Sri Lanka, only that he had taken an unpopular stance at work and refused to budge for ethical reasons. Sri Lanka may disapprove, but I urged the refugee committee to consider such a commitment to one’s beliefs a great asset to Canada.

  What I did not mention was that Abdul could be pushy, cantankerous and stubborn. I had tried to coach him for his unpaid job. I explained to him the need to adjust to a new workplace culture and new approach to work. He nodded and said, “I’m a very hard worker,” which was an obvious understatement because Abdul’s only commitments were to neuroscience and God, in that order. He had no family in Toronto other than a cousin, who let him stay on his couch.

  “How can you be fired?” I asked. “It’s volunteer.”

  Abdul was at a complete loss. “They just tell me to get out,” he said.

  I grabbed the boardroom phone and called the lab tech who had supervised him and left her a voicemail. Whatever the reason, his dismissal did not bode well for Abdul because his refugee hearing was on the coming Monday, less than a week away.

  MY SENSE OF TIME SHIFTED COMPLETELY AFTER THE HANDOFF of frontline client responsibility. The delicate balance of things that seemed correct and authentically me tipped over. It was liberating and disconcerting. With no clients to see aside from Abdul I could jam my forty hours in wherever I felt like, free from the constraints of office hours or the expectations of co-workers.

  I made Monday morning in the park with Bumi and Lady Juanita a routine. The new commitment left me with a heaping to-do list so I dropped out of recreational sports, quit the volunteer board and art class and resigned from my volunteer post with the social workers’ magazine.

  Just as my Friday evening routine with Sarah was on the upswing I quashed it to save Bumi from OCD, save Abdul from deportation and save the health centre from bankruptcy. My sister was on her own. Fuck her.

  What had always seemed like a great balancing act had transformed me into a pathetic busker who panned for laughs by throwing everything in sight into the air only to watch them crash back to earth again. If you have too many priorities they are no longer priorities. That was why I ditched the dead weight of family in the first place.

  Maybe I had seen too many mega-corporations get away with this same kind of logic to realize that when you lack the power of multinational purse-string holders there is backlash. There is in fact accountability if the people whom you lay off are smart enough to check the books and strong enough to point out what you owe them.

  The people in my life were far smarter than I, and at least as strong. The first to hold me to account was Sherry, who stormed into my cubicle as I left a second, more urgent, message for the U of T lab tech who had fired Abdul. Sherry stood with arms crossed, tapping her foot three times per second at my cubicle entranceway. This was beyond her usual report vulturing.

  “What’s this I hear about you dumping your caseload?” she said, dunking the phone back into its receiver.

  “Sherry, there’s just too much coming due right now. I couldn’t keep up anymore.”

  “Why didn’t you come see me?” she barked with her arms outstretched and her mouth agape. With her short, hundred-dollar hair and oversized glasses she looked like a parody of Conan O’Brien. Even in anger her words were perfectly enunciated.

  “Can we talk in your office?” I asked.

  With brisk steps, Sherry led the way around the cubicle maze and into her office.

  I had an extra eight inches on my legs so I was able to follow her swift movement and still look casual and unperturbed, but my heart was beating so hard my eardrums hurt. I closed her door behind me and flopped into her proffered chair.

  She grabbed her desk chair and swivelled to probe me with massive blue eyes through massive pink glasses.

  I couldn’t hold that gaze so I scanned the collage of family photos that muralled her wall.

  “So,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “My workload,” I said. I launched into an exposé of every minister I had to meet, briefing I had to send, media call I had to take, report I had to compose, piece of research I had to compile and proposal I had to write. “Connie, Maria and you all rely on me to do the fundraising, report writing, media work, public relations and accounting around here. When do I have time for clients anymore?”

  Sherry reminded me that clients were the reason for our business and all else was secondary.

  “Then why do you expect me to do all that other stuff?” I said. I confessed to her that I had been dumping clients for years to make room for the paperwork parade that crossed my desk. This latest dump was nothing more than a final purge.

  My indomitable boss and of late irreplaceable ally put her head in her hands, just as poor Abdul had in the early afternoon. For the first time she said something to me that was not clear as air. I couldn’t make out her words.

  “Pardon,” I said.

  Head still in hands, she muttered, “Does that mean you have no clients left?”

  “I have one,” I told her.

  “One,” she echoed. “Which one? Who?”

  “Abdul Ali,” I said. “His refugee hearing is on Monday. I thought his chances were excellent but then he got fired from his volunteer job in the neuroscience lab and he says he doesn’t know why.”

  “Did you probe him on that?”

  “No time for that. I’ve got two calls in to Tanya Reid at the lab to see what went wrong.”

  Sherry finally lifted her head from her hands, fixed her hair and adjusted her glasses to the left and back to the right. “Jesus, Mark,” she said. “Maybe your clients are better off with the other social workers if you didn’t even bother to probe Abdul on what he might have done to get himself fired. Now he feels vindicated even if he was in the wrong, and he doesn’t learn to take responsibility.”

  I half-smiled at her and knew it could only get worse from there.

  TECHNICALLY SHE WAS CORRECT. BY NOT FORCING THE ISSUE with Abdul, by just accepting that he had no idea what he did wrong, I let him take the easy way, a route that any sentient being with any survival instinct whatsoever will take any time it can sense it. This easy way didn’t give Abdul the opportunity to challenge himself, to adapt to a new environment and culture, to learn and to grow as an individual and to avoid repeating whatever mistakes had cost him his volunteer job.

  However, forcing the issue would place the burden of proof on Abdul and ignore the vast and powerful external forces influencing his perceptions and feelings. “Imagine taking a stand for a personal belief,” I could have said to Sherry. “Like, say, against amalgamation. And imagine then being told that this particular opinion is illegal and treasonous. Imagine having to flee your home with the long, sharp teeth of an unjust law at your back until you land in Togo or Kazakhstan or Bolivia, unable to speak the language, access the institutions or even legally prove your existence. How would you feel if your social worker asked you to elucidate your own personal responsib
ility for your crappy situation?”

  I could have pulled down the Ontario Social Worker’s Code of Ethics from the shelf above Sherry’s desk and asked her to show me where I was in violation, and she could not have done so, at least not on the specific level of not holding Abdul accountable for this volunteer failure. But I didn’t argue. The truth was that the real reason I didn’t bother getting Abdul’s full side of the story was expedience.

  My rushed approach had nothing to do with Abdul’s impending refugee hearing. There was plenty of time to get his side of the story before then. My hurry had little to do with Abdul other than perhaps a mild dislike for his abrasive personality, and much to do with Bumi, Michelle, Sarah, Lily and her Year of the Migrant Farm Worker and a self-replicating pile of suit-wearing ninnies who demanded coordinated marches of numbers arranged in colourful patterns showing the myth of human progress. This never-ending game of paint-by-numbers allowed civil servants to help elected officials justify their careers to penny-pinching taxpayers in search of bigger bank accounts.

  I was the idiot who had somehow become the paint-by-number artist and without my specialized skill the health centre’s entire emotional health team would be deemed ineffective and wasteful, and would thus be wasted in lieu of enacting the recommendations of the latest report by the latest bi-lateral, non-partisan task force. Surely my time was better spent saving the jobs and asses of my colleagues than helping Abdul assess his shortcomings before some anonymous tribunal of assholes sent him home or underground. I skipped the counselling shtick because I knew it would be more efficient to negotiate something with the lab tech.

  “SHERRY,” I SAID AFTER A LONG PAUSE, DURING WHICH SHE WAS content to let her wisdom sink in. “The fact is you’re right. The truth is I’m a better administrator than counsellor. That’s why I transferred my cases. It’s always been that way and that’s why I always do the fundraising and reporting. Why don’t we just make it official and re-structure a bit, with me as the assistant manager?”