Drive-by Saviours (17 page)

Robadise bunched the front of Bumi's collar into his fist and slowly pulled him close. “I've staked my career on this, Bumi,” he said. “I've got every cop in the city and then some looking for the murderer. I'm asking you, Brother, for the hundredth time, to put some thought into who might be responsible. Who, Bumi? Not what. For the sake of your children, please use your God-given common sense.” He released him abruptly and left Bumi with Nurkin's collection of murder mystery novels and his own irritating thoughts.

“God gave me no common sense,” Bumi told the door. “And for that I can't forgive Him.” And he prayed for forgiveness.

IT TOOK A FOURTH DEATH, THIS TIME OF A SIX-YEAR-OLD CHINESE
girl, Mei, to break Bumi from his routine. Bunga confirmed that Mei also enjoyed playing at the canal. When asked if there was a specific spot where they met she indicated that behind the amusement park he could find an area shaded by trees where they had placed some discarded cardboard and called it their own Fort Rotterdam. In the late evening Bumi shocked his family by announcing he was going for a solitary ‘constitutional.'

Bunga's spot wasn't hard to find but there was little to see, just a few abandoned old toys and candy wrappers, and the cardboard she'd mentioned. The water looked innocuous enough, no more polluted than the rest of the city, and not likely to cause anything more than the usual diarrhea, which is easily treated among the middle class in a city the size of Makassar. He dared not touch the water directly and decided instead to return with a mason jar and rubber gloves in the night's wee hours, a time he'd normally waste obsessing over the alarm clock and memories of strangers in the neighbourhood. At least it was a way to keep himself busy, which was the only way to stave off his bullying thoughts.

Bumi arrived home just after midnight and kissed his sleeping wife before setting the alarm for their usual six o'clock waking time. He would stay awake until two o'clock and then go back to the canal. But he felt nauseous. He exhausted his energies repeatedly tripping to the toilet. He fell into a deep slumber just before two. He woke up cursing the alarm clock with twice his usual vehemence.

THERE WAS NOTHING TO BE DONE BUT THE USUAL: GO TO WORK,
be a drone, make the sacrifice for the family, hope his daughter wasn't the next to die with no explanation of who or what was at fault, or if it was his own fault. As he walked to work, carefully avoiding the myriad bumps and cracks in the road and touching every streetlight, stopping every passer-by to collect his or her name and purpose and write them down along with a detailed description of the possible perpetrator, he longed for his old
warung
friends so he could discuss the child deaths with them. Not that they would have answers, but at least they would provide a place for him to deposit his thoughts. What a waste, he thought, that with the brilliant minds in his own home no one seemed to have the time or energy anymore for proper debate. Maybe when Bunga and Baharuddin got older he could argue with them. If they got older. If he didn't kill them first, like he had the other children. He prayed for forgiveness again, just in case.

The factory was certainly no place for intelligent conversation. Among the workers the only heated debate was about which horse would race well on the coming weekend, unless you counted the profane arguments his colleagues sometimes had with the machinery. The machines always responded stoically, and remained stubbornly unwilling to operate until a mechanic arrived. In the meantime the craziest person on the shift would be responsible for mercilessly flogging the miscreant robot with a monkey wrench. Sometimes a few whacks would knock loose whatever was jamming the mechanisms and the mechanic could be cancelled. Otherwise betting ensued about what would break first, the wrench, the machine or the guy doing the whacking.

Bumi had tried befriending some of the managers, who had the job of watching the others work, in the hopes of learning something of interest to add to his information warehouse. He was sharply told to mind his place and get back to work. Often as he was applying his layer of tanning material to the current throughput of belts he'd overhear a conversation between two or more managers, and they were as mundane if not more so than the workers' horserace predictions. They didn't dare discuss politics, had no concept of philosophy and only praised Allah in passing when business was good. They talked about productivity levels, which were always below acceptable. They talked of markets, which were always rosy thanks to the good work of General Suharto.

But on this particular day, a new thing happened. Bumi overheard a fascinating and potentially useful tidbit of information from two managers, which took the form of an argument on tactical responses to a potentially dangerous situation. This situation was more dangerous, or at least more immediate, than the usual outdated machinery, lack of safety equipment, poor air circulation and abundance of toxic chemicals. Most importantly, it had the potential to be very public. The danger related directly to Bumi's most pressing personal concern.

“Bad news about that fire at the Bawakaraeng plant, ya?” the first manager said.

There was a long pause during which Bumi had to force himself to keep working rather than ask the manager what fire he was talking about.

Finally the second manager answered his colleague. “Ya, but it could have been worse. The fire was quickly extinguished with little damage and hardly any leakage. It was well managed. Didn't even make the news. There is nothing to be concerned about.”

“You're right,” the other said. “It sounds like the Americans may be interested in picking up our new fashion line, heh? Perhaps we're in for a raise.”

The conversation was the usual rooster talk from that point on but all Bumi could hear was the phrase “hardly any leakage.” The words rang in his ears like a gunshot. He felt ill. Four children had died mysteriously, all choking like they'd been poisoned, all who liked to play at the same canal that ran through Bawakaraeng where this fire occurred. Yet no one cared enough to look into it.

Bumi felt a strong urge to violently attack the two managers, for the sake of his children, for the sake of Bunga who at an age when her first memories were forming had lost her playmates and friends and these bastards were unwilling to do more than banter while Robadise stormed the warpath. He convinced himself to stay put as his rage shifted inward. He considered throwing himself into the leather cutting machine. He was no better than these fools. He had suspected the canal and done nothing.

Worse, his worst suspicions about himself were, in a way, confirmed. He was partially responsible for putting the same toxins that perhaps killed those children into the belt that would hold some rich American's designer jeans up. He was guilty as suspected.

He fumed and he raged silently through his shift, his mind in turmoil. When his shift ended Bumi ran home, for once forgetting his rituals, to tell Robadise what he'd heard. He ran straight by the four police vehicles parked outside the house. He ran straight into the broad end of a large policeman's stick, which he then found pushed against his esophagus, choking him. He was flipped facedown to the kitchen floor. He tasted his own blood as cold metal clamped down on his wrists.

“What's going on?” he choked out as best he could.

He was answered with another stick, this time across the back of his head. The room went black as he was hauled to his feet and he smelled and felt burlap against his face. His legs were rubbery underneath him and he heard voices crying, feminine voices, women and children both. They cried his name.

FROM TWELVE TO FORTY-THREE IN CHAPTER 12

S
oon after Thanksgiving-Christmas in Ottawa I came
down with a bad case of the Drug Resistant Super Bug, or ‘flu' as everyone else insisted on calling it. Sarah missed the whole thing, the hallucinations and midnight sweats. She was in Halifax visiting a university friend. She called me every night and told me to stop exaggerating. Her suspicions of my psychosomatics were confirmed when she returned home the day after I went back to work, having fully recovered.

Her hands flailed as she told me of a new friend she made in Halifax: Lily. Lily lived in Toronto but was at a conference on Canada's refugee hearing process. They met at a fair trade coffee shop on Barrington Street. Sarah told Lily stories about the workers who grew and picked the coffee they were ordering, not knowing that the father of this fair-skinned girl was one of the real-life workers in question. Fortunately Sarah's version was not so far from his experiences. That was in Nicaragua, before the revolution in which Lily's father and mother, a Canadian gringa, both fought. Sarah decided that Lily should meet me, what with my experience counselling refugees.

The night we had Lily over Sarah spent several hours making her famous spinach and ricotta lasagne while I tried to move the new bathroom floor from its six-month sublet in our basement into its permanent home under our feet and around our toilet. The fancy carved radish adornments topped the lasagne as I swept gyprock sawdust under the floor-mat and the doorbell rang.

“That's her,” Sarah squealed. She was like a schoolgirl hosting one of the popular kids.

Sarah had easily befriended most of my friends and ditched the more vacuous of the modelling scene. This was her first chance since we'd met to be the conductor of a more intellectual, maybe even political, chemistry. She ran full-tilt from kitchen to front, stopped abruptly, did a little booty shake, and pulled open the door. “Lily!” she cried, as if surprised, and hugged her new friend.

I stood in my spackled overalls, just outside the bathroom door at the end of the hall. I first saw Lily's face over the shoulder of my partner and it struck me like a dull axe. She was pretty, with sharp European features and white skin accentuated by thick dark hair and large brown eyes, but that wasn't how I saw her. I saw her in incandescent charcoal. She wore an evil cartoon smile underneath a salon job hairdo that came in straight fat needles. They pointed out the most striking features of her face: high cheekbones, faraway dream-weary eyes, cavernous dimples and a jutting chin. Worlds collided in her face and it represented, to me, all of humanity's recent intermingling globalization, our attempts to shrink-wrap the world and develop super-everything from diseases to drugs to highways. Her smile was easy and it made me dizzy. I shook her hand too vigorously and said I'd heard a million good things, pulled a one-eighty on my heel, marched to the living room and dropped myself onto the couch.

We made small talk over brandy and Sarah got to the point during the main course, suggesting that perhaps I could do a feature on Lily's work with the refugee centre in an upcoming issue of the social workers' newsletter. I nodded my agreement.

Lily was more measured. “What would be the focus, me or the refugee centre?” she asked. “And also who are your readers?”

I explained that the readers were professional social workers and that in my column I usually tried to find some interesting or innovative approach to the issues they faced. Settlement for new immigrants is a hot issue in Toronto so I was certain that we could do a popular story about her work, but of course it helps readability if there is some personal information about the people doing the work—the human interest angle.

“What about the refugees themselves, aren't they interesting enough?” she asked.

“Sure they are,” I said. “Go ahead, tell us all about them.”

“You need to see the refugee centre for yourself,” she said. “Come next week.” She forked a piece of lasagne into her mouth. Case closed.

A TYPICAL TORONTO BUNGALOW, LILY'S REFUGEE CENTRE ALSO
served as the home of Lily's parents, Gwen and Jose Luis, who everybody called Jose ever since he became a Canadian citizen in
1996
. They welcomed me and invited me to join the family, staff, volunteers and clients for lunch. There was an incredible warmth and openness to the house, and Jose explained that for refugee claimants Canada can be a very unwelcoming place while they await their hearings and are without any useful status. Furthermore, he explained, most of their clients are from Latino countries, and they are used to eating meals communally at work, and engaging with people warmly and openly. The lunch was simple but exotic to me: corn tortillas, beans, rice, a little grated cheese and salsa, all made by Lily. It was delicious.

After lunch Lily explained their free services: clients could avoid the trap of the immigration lawyer piranhas and get trustworthy legal advice from volunteer lawyers, have their testimonials—usually stories of torture and persecution from home—translated, get help filling in legal and administration forms in English or Spanish, get assistance finding affordable housing and—unofficially and not to be included in my article—find out where to get under-the-table work for cash until they got status.

This was the explanation of what I witnessed, which was phones rattling off their perches, volunteers poring over case files, people dropping in every few minutes with questions, staccato Spanish language conversations—a maelstrom of hyperactivity. No one left without being served.

I conducted my interview with Lily in her bedroom, the only place she could guarantee privacy, most likely uninterrupted. I asked her what got her family interested in working with refugees. “It's shared experience I guess,” she said. “I mean, we're not refugees exactly but my father and I come from a war-torn country, and my parents both fought in the revolution there. So our experience isn't completely unlike the stories we hear everyday from our clients.”

And so she told me her own story, starting with how her parents married in Nicaragua after the war. They filed an immigration claim for Jose Luis based on family reasons, namely their marriage, their Canadian citizen child and Gwen's desire to return home with her husband. Realizing the claim could take months to years to process, they took the risk of bringing him to Canada on a one-year visa.

It wasn't until years later, after Jose Luis had been deported, that Lily finally learned the truth about her father's other family. His ex-wife, Concepcion, had kicked him out of their home, Gwen told Lily in Jose Luis' absence. Soon after the revolution Concepcion found out that Jose and Gwen were having an affair, and she filed for divorce. Concepcion decided that in the new Nicaragua, no man, not even a revolutionary soldier, would be allowed to humiliate her like that. The divorce didn't come through until after his marriage to Gwen. That made at least one of his two main reasons for coming to Canada, his marriage, null and void.

“You should have seen the look on my face when my mother told me,” Lily said. “You should have seen the look on Mom's face when she saw the look on
my
face! Like this.” She dropped her jaw all the way down to her collarbone. “She couldn't believe how much anger her little girl could have in her. I was mad. I guess I felt like this all made me null and void too.” Lily had convinced her mother to take her back to meet her stepsisters and brothers, without informing her father, who had returned to Nicaragua.

They arrived in one of the dingier parts of Granada, a fairly large city in western Nicaragua, and found Jose Luis holed up in a little room owned by a big family. He'd taken a job laying concrete. It was long hours, hard labour, low pay, and left Jose Luis living in a tiny room with bullet holes in the graffiti walls. “It smelled like piss and tobacco,” Lily told me. “He didn't have any furniture or extra blankets, so we slept together on the floor sharing a tattered little sheet.”

In the morning Lily's mother accompanied her on the bus and walked her to the driveway of Concepcion's house, then hawk-eyed her from about fifty metres down the road as she approached the door.

When Concepcion found Lily shuffling her feet on her doorstep, she invited her in. “She said she had wondered if I might come there some day,” Lily told me. “She seemed to understand why I was there, but she was cool and she kept a close eye on me the whole time.”

Lily's three elder half-siblings were herded into the kitchen to meet her. “They stood in front of the stove and each of them shook my hand. The oldest, Edwin, teetered slightly on his right foot. It had no toes. Other than that they didn't move at all. They just stared at me, just like Concepcion.

“So Mom and I returned to Jose Luis and lived with him in his piss-stink room for five months until the divorce was official and we could come back to Canada.”

I HAD MORE THAN ENOUGH INFORMATION TO WRITE MY FOUR-
hundred-word column on the refugee centre and its permanent inhabitants after about twenty minutes in Lily's room, yet I had no desire to leave. I pulled things out of my briefcase and played show and tell. I grew suspicious that the feeling was mutual when she took great interest in my sketchbook and its collection of abstract public transportation faces. “Where'd you learn to draw like this?” she asked.

“Partially self-taught, partially art class,” I said.

“They're so beautiful,” she told my ego. On the sound of her words my body went into some sort of spin cycle. The sense of comfort I'd felt since my arrival at her house rapidly dissipated and I felt nauseous, dizzy and sore.

“Thank you,” I muttered. I felt neither gratitude nor sincerity, just a desire to run.

She gushed on, mistaking my fear for modesty. “No seriously,” she said. “It's like… I don't want to sound like a cliché or whatever but, it's like you really captured their soul, you know?”

I spit out a laugh to relieve the pressure and, showing no signs of offence, she giggled. “Okay that did sound cliché,” she said. “But really it's like you just made all these people so beautiful, but without glossing over them to avoid the ugly pieces. They are ugly yet beautiful. This is still cliché, I know, but that's what I'm seeing here, and I feel like I know your subjects as well as you do just by looking-”

“You do know them as well as I do,” I shouted, too emphatically. “Because I don't really know them. I literally did these of strangers on the subway.”

“Hmm,” she said. “That's too bad. I'm impressed, but wouldn't it be better to have their permission? I don't know.” We stared at each other in silence while my brain screamed excuses to leave that my mouth refused to utter. “It would be interesting to see what it would look like if you sketched someone you knew,” she said. “While they knew you were sketching them too.”

“How about you?” I said.

She nodded her consent.

Our respective work demands prevented any sketching on the spot. We agreed that I would return on Saturday afternoon. She suggested that I could include it in the newsletter and I agreed, even though I doubted they would print it and didn't much care if anyone saw my drawings anyway.

I SPENT THE NEXT THREE DAYS THINKING OF LILY POSING FOR ME.
I had drawn nude models in art class, but that was nothing like this. That was a paid stranger on a sanitized table with instruction and trained eyes on students. This would be intimate: me, Lily, her bedroom and my sketch pad. No money would change hands.

The art models always seemed hard up for cash. Not necessarily desperate, but certainly in need. They were mostly young, probably students who didn't want to deal with the public in a customer service job. Lily was something else: strong, accomplished, ruthless yet so utterly moral. My thoughts drifted into fantasies of a large studio with Lily spread naked like an antique tablecloth sewed by master craftswomen and embroidered by world-class artisans, and me with absolute permission to gaze at her and shift her position as necessary to forge the greatest re-creation of her mixed-heritage beauty.

These were the dangerous thoughts of a man who, I must admit it, was becoming increasingly miserable. The happy memories of the past four years were becoming tainted with disillusion. My high hopes of making a real difference in people's lives had never reached fruition. It should have been simpler, more direct, but instead I expertly shuffled paper and that was somehow supposed to save people. I was incompetent at real social work.

Sarah's astute gift of observation, which had smitten me just four years back, rubbed my most raw wounds like a conscience. “What happened to the man I fell in love with?” she asked me one night after I told her I'd rather read than make love. “He had such passion.”

“I'm just not in the mood.”

“Not only do you no longer have passion for me, Mark, you don't seem to have passion for life at all. What happened to the man who told me he could save the world?”

I told her she shouldn't have believed such naiveté.

“The way you said it,” she said, “didn't sound naïve. You had me convinced and it didn't sound like salesmanship either. It was incredibly sexy and I never doubted you. I don't know where that guy went.”