Drive-by Saviours (18 page)

She left the bed to sleep on the couch while I moped.

Now I wondered what Lily would think about saving the world. She didn't strike me as naïve. I thought about how she'd gone to meet her half-brothers and half-sister when she was only eleven with such high hopes for new relations, new blood ties, allies, cohorts. All that hope dashed so efficiently and she could just turn off her memory switch, forget about those people—if they weren't interested neither was she. I don't know if I could do that. I don't know if I could be that strong, or cold.

Yet from a young age she committed herself wholly to helping some of the world's most vulnerable needy people, who have more excuses than most as to why they might be broken-down. Lily told me her story when prompted, but seemed more comfortable expressing continued amazement at the indomitable nature of other people.

She told me about a woman who, after hearing her husband rape her daughter in the next room at night, stayed awake for the majority of a six-year span to make sure he stayed in their own bed before fleeing with her daughter. She told me of a man in a wheelchair who, after watching his own father executed gangster style, spent nine years in a Chilean jail and had karate practiced on his back by the guards each night. She told me of another woman who had been brutally raped by soldiers representing both her government and the guerrillas fighting against her government in a one-week span and carried two souvenirs of those experiences:
HIV
and a baby boy who could only get the medicine and
HIV
tests he needed in Canada—for him she fled. Lily also told me of a man who followed his instincts, which took him deep into forest hiding, and returned the next day to find the friends and family who'd laughed at his paranoia massacred, and then walked from Guatemala to California on foot, illegally, and was smuggled to Canada by a trucker who told him his chances of being received as a refugee were better there.

Half these people were accepted as refugees and the other half were sent to Buffalo to find their own way home. These kinds of stories inspire me to shake my disgusted head. They inspire Sarah to complain angrily and loudly. They inspire Lily to offer all her skills and knowledge to maximize the odds that people find refuge from persecution and a stable new home. Her anger had somehow not turned into cynicism, and for this I put her naked form through my brain in endless cycles while my frustrated girlfriend slept on the couch.

The more Sarah complained, the more I distanced myself from her, the less I let her be my inspiration, the less willing I became to inspire her and the less I reciprocated the attention she lavished on me. The meals she made became more elaborate and were hand delivered to me in greater quantities. I ate more and better but made fewer appreciative grunts and lip-smacks. The nightly seduction routine started to feel like reality
TV
auditions as she dreamed up new schemes to accompany sexy outfits and theme music with driving beats, while my exhaustion became chronic and severe. The calls at work and love-poem emails became more frequent and I became busier, terser and more dissatisfied with the results at the end of the day. And to thank Sarah for her hyper-anxious efforts to save what had long been a relationship that made us both better, happier and sexier people, I fantasized about the new friend she'd introduced to me.

I don't want to imply that my girlfriend was flawless. She could be as stubborn and pig-headed, as temper tantrum prone, as nagging and manipulative as any man. And the vanity of her industry had its influence on her tendency to judge other women as flawed. Judgement was salve for her insecurity that I had become bored with her body. She claimed her body was the only thing about her that really interested me. She said that interest was as susceptible to time's brutality as a glossy monthly magazine. But her commitment and kindness to me were flawless, her brilliance still illuminated my world and her passion for life should have remained contagious. Its failure to do so was entirely my fault.

I took only misery and guilt from sketching Lily, the Goddess of my Mind. She sat with royal posture on a high-backed chair in a bright yellow summer dress as I salivated and reluctantly moved my pencil over the page. I couldn't capture her soul because she was too perfect in my eyes, suffering as they were from their schoolboy crush. She was the best of the United States of America, the best of Canada, the best of Nicaragua, the noble savage civilized, educated and christened. She was perfect, and I was so defective.

I tried to focus on her form but the more I focused on curves the more guilt tugged at me from the inside. I panicked, pretended that my phone was buzzing, actually faked a conversation with Sarah in which I was needed for some unnamed emergency, and fled with a photograph of her as a young girl in Granada tucked into my breast pocket for future reference. She had offered me two recent pictures of her but I knew that I could only draw her as a child, asexual and unknown, a stranger just like the ones on public transportation or World Vision commercials.

SARAH AND I WERE PROUD TO BE GUESTS AT A PARTY CELEBRAT
ing the refugee house's tenth anniversary, and I was especially proud to present Lily with a copy of the newsletter with a brief article about the refugee centre and a sketch of a young Nicaraguan girl in a cute summer dress with scabs on her knees.

Lily was equally proud to introduce us to her girlfriend, Julia.

“You know,” Sarah confessed to me back at home, “I totally assumed she was straight. I was even thinking of introducing her to one of the agency guys—a male model with a conscience. I have to admit that she doesn't fit my stereotype of a lesbian.”

“Too much hair?”

“Too pretty, no tattoos—I totally have a stereotype.”

“Don't feel too bad, I guess it's a learning experience for both of us.”

“You assumed too?” she asked, a little too casually.

“Yeah, I guess so. I wasn't planning to set her up with anyone.”

Sarah pulled my chin to hers and accentuated a frown with narrowed eyes.

“Maybe I had a little crush on her,” I admitted.

“Had?”

“Have,” I corrected myself.

To avoid further inquiry I kissed her gently and continued until we were making love and reconciliation as best we could.

TWO HUNDRED VOLTS IN CHAPTER 13

W
hen Bumi regained consciousness he smelled
coffee, urine and something he didn't recognize. There was the sound of muffled male voices, and intense pain in his wrists. He tried to collect his thoughts with his eyes still closed.

His worst and least rational fear had caught up to him: he'd been arrested. Perhaps his few banned books had been found. Perhaps he had been betrayed. If only he had studied Pak Syam's methods of bribery more carefully.

Perhaps the trouble began when he overhead his managers' conversation.

These false theories all made sense but he knew the real reason for his predicament. He had done it after all. He had no memory of being such an evil beast but all his life's rage and frustrated powerlessness must have spilled out in acts of violence against society's weakest and most vulnerable. He was worse than America, worse than Holland, worse than Suharto. He had exerted his meagre strength over the only ones weaker than himself: little children. He disgusted himself.

He'd never had an urge to hurt children. He'd fantasized about killing his bosses, his family elders, members of the military and the World Bank and his old teachers, but he had never once wanted to kill children. He loved children. What had he done?

He squeezed his eyes shut tighter. He feared the visual evidence they would bring him. He became aware of pain in his shoulders, like he had been climbing a rope. He squirmed and found himself restrained. The pain of curiosity overcame all else. He opened his eyes.

He was in a tiny jail cell, a closet with a steel door. Slivers of light through cracks in the door gave the only illumination. He was standing despite his exhausted legs. There was not even room to squat. The walls were too close. Looking down he saw beady eyes peering back at him. He snapped his head back up and pressed his face against his shoulder, stifling a shout.

His hands were above his head, and looking up he saw the source of his physical pains. He was tied by the wrists to a bar running across the cell, just under the ceiling. His head was throbbing too, possibly the result of the blow from the policeman's stick. He swallowed his anger and fear and sorrow and looked back down at the rat, which squeaked back at him. He also saw what appeared to be the source of the urine smell, a dark spot in his underwear. He wore no other clothes. His feet were about six inches from the ground, and there was no conceivable relief for his arms.

He pulled his knees up to his chest. He extended his legs straight so that they were perpendicular to his torso. He repeated the exercise several times but it gave him neither relief nor satisfaction, and served only to kill thirty seconds. He waited motionless for another thirty seconds, and realized it would be hard to maintain his sanity for long in that predicament.

He struggled to free his hands, which caused the rawhide rope to burn his wrists badly, and he cried out in pain. He immediately heard chairs scraping. The door opened and a rush of white light flooded his eyes. He cried out again and closed his eyes, turned his head.

“So, Child-killer, it hurts, heh?” a gravel voice said. Bumi forced his eyes open and saw a short, stocky young man. Three other figures stood behind the short man.

Bumi shook his head in disbelief.

“Don't bother trying to deny it,” another of the policemen said more kindly. He was thin and middle-aged. “You'll only make things worse for yourself. The sooner you confess, the easier this will be for all of us. Especially you.”

Bumi couldn't believe what he was hearing. All his fears that he was the murderer were based on nothing but his own mind, which had betrayed and tricked him at every turn. He couldn't actually be guilty. “What am I accused of?” he asked. He dreaded the answer but he needed certainty.

The policemen laughed. “You are accused of the most heinous crime of all,” the middle-aged one said, “killing innocents. Will you confess now? Or later?”

Rage consumed Bumi again. Robadise should have protected him from this. Unless it was Robadise who betrayed him. He screamed at the thought, “It's not true!” He wondered why he hadn't seen it coming. The situation was too ridiculous, too inconceivable, too painful, to be real. The pain was greater than when Pram died, greater than when he was taken from Rilaka, greater than anything he could remember or imagine.

He closed his eyes and thought of his wife, of their bed, and hoped it was all a dream. “It's not true!” he screamed again.

He heard the laughter of his accusers, and the question repeated, “Hey loudmouth, ready to confess?”

Bumi gave a quick silent prayer for forgiveness. “I want to see my family,” he told them with all the bravado he could summon.

“Oh, these ones?” the short cop in front said, pulling Bumi's most prized possession from his shirt pocket. It was a picture of Yaty with Bunga and Baharuddin. The cop placed it on the floor under Bumi's feet as the beady-eyed rat watched from the corner. The cop pulled down his zipper and pissed on Bumi's family as Bumi and the rat looked on. Bumi tried to look away from his family's now pitiful urine-soaked faces, but he couldn't, not until the cop was finished.

When he looked up Bumi saw four pudgy faces staring his way in anticipation. He opened his mouth several times, trying to find some appropriate words, but there were none. He wanted to scream again but fear clutched his howls and held them in his throat. It was a useless fear, he realized, because no matter what he said or did, he was in for pain like he'd never known.

“He's not talking, boys. Looks like he needs some encouragement,” another of the policemen, a tall muscular man with a nasal voice, said.

“Where's Robadise?” Bumi blurted to much raucous laughter.

“Your in-laws can't help you now,” the middle-aged one said. “There is no protection for what you did,
pantat!
Did you think you could get away with it? Officer Kartiman's daughter was one of your victims you know. Perhaps you'd like to get to know him better.”

The one officer who hadn't yet spoken, Kartiman, looked at Bumi with a taut-faced snarl. Bumi wondered how such an enormous man would possibly fit into the closet of a cell with him. Kartiman pulled a small hunting knife from his boot, reached up and cut the rope just above Bumi's wrists without even standing tippy-toed. Bumi slumped against the back wall and stepped on the rat, which squeaked, jumped and ran over Bumi's feet and out of the cell.

One of the other cops handed something to Kartiman, who held it behind his back. “Show me your right palm,” Kartiman said.

Bumi felt his body tremble against the cement wall like a cold rainy night. His bowels gave out and he felt a warm stream down his leg. He couldn't move.

“Now!” Kartiman barked, giving Bumi another chill. Kartiman's tone was not one of anger after all. This was not personal. It was business. Kartiman pulled a three-foot cable from behind his back and forced it into Bumi's trembling hand. “I'll be back,” Kartiman said. “Think about what you have done, and how you did it. I want details when I return.” He slammed the cell door shut and Bumi was left alone in the dark. His hands went numb and he dropped Kartiman's cable. It landed on Bumi's family portrait with a clang, and he heard the sound of scattering roaches.

THE ORDEAL LASTED ABOUT THREE DAYS. BUMI COULD NOT TELL
day from night but the faint call to prayer reminded him of God's power over all of this five times daily. That whole time there were intermittent periods of darkness and bright white light, utter silence and blasts of Weird Al Yankovic at top decibel, but no extreme ever lasted more than a few hours.

He was beaten on the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands, pissed on, sprayed with a hose and given electric shocks to the fingers, tongue, anus and genitals. His body convulsed so violently against the walls that he fractured a collarbone and lost a molar. He was left alone with the pain and the smell of smoke from his own burning flesh. Sometimes they hung him by his wrists from the ceiling. Sometimes they left him standing. He couldn't lie down at all. His constant companions in the vertical coffin were the rats and the cockroaches.

He reached a point in pain where the things that once haunted him became his only comfort. He counted repeatedly to thirty-three in an effort to right the toppling universe, but always there was the knowledge that more would come, and he would break. He would admit to anything just to be left alone with the rats and roaches and the piss and shit. Yet he had other fears, the usual fears inflated by circumstance. The skin on his wrists was being slowly torn off by the rawhide rope and in these unsanitary conditions he worried about bacterial warfare. The piss of these dogs was the greatest horror, and only God knew what was in the cold water they blasted him with every time he passed out.

Still he worried about Bunga, Baharuddin and Yaty. Maybe Yaty was involved in this betrayal. Perhaps during the late-night rap sessions of their early years he had complained too much about Robadise's drift from the Warung Bali paradise, from the paradise of youth, how he'd sold out like in the
Catcher in the Rye
. Maybe the loyalties of blood trumped those of marriage. He worried about Bunga playing by that contaminated canal. He wondered about her loyalties. No young girl could resist the pressure applied by her peers to join them in fun without her father around to prevent it.

The pain and the worry and the fear of more pain, the confusion of days and nights rolled tightly into hours of coming and going uniforms and shifting shadows like
wayang
villains, almost made him confess. He decided that he must be guilty somehow of something. This was just the logical conclusion of the sinking of a boy genius that had started some place so far away, in some World Bank boardroom so many years before.

But if a child died while he hung that would prove his innocence and they would have to free him. He held onto that dim and guilty hope as long as he could visualize it, as long as he could picture returning to his family redeemed and to his brother-in-law martyred and reborn, which was only a short time. Like those before him and those after, his body outlasted his mind and soon all thoughts were fleeting and all ideas were dental floss in a windstorm. He couldn't grip them anymore to follow their thread, and there was only pain. Just as a certain pain became normal another kind of pain would replace it.

It was then that Bumi realized his threshold for pain was low, which is probably what prevented a confession. Several times under the grip of pain emanating from his organs and flowing through veins and arteries into every crevice of his physical being, Bumi realized what they were after long enough to think the phrase they wanted to hear from him: ‘I did it.' Several times he opened his mouth to transfer the false information from mind to matter and instead screamed and passed out.

HE AWOKE IN HIS BROTHER'S ARMS. “COME ON, BUMI, LET'S GET
you home,” Robadise whispered in his ear as he half carried, half dragged Bumi's slumped body out of the cell, down the hall and into the backseat of a police car.

HE AWOKE AGAIN, THIS TIME NAKED AND SCREAMING AS THE
light hit him in the face. Yaty was rubbing alcohol onto his wrists. He hugged her mightily and they clung to each other symbiotically, both shipwrecked and both life preservers. They cried softly until Bumi noticed how gentle this light really was, cascading through the west window and illuminating a star system of dust particles. “What… day is it?” The words rolled lethargically from his belly.

“Friday,” Yaty told him.

He should have been at work. He said nothing because he knew that his world had changed, that the essential rhythmic torture of his old life no longer applied, but also that nothing had improved. Things had only worsened.

“I should get Robadise,” Yaty said.

“Why? Don't go Yaty, please.” He knew he sounded like a child.

“I'll be right back.” She twisted herself free and hurried from the room, closing the door behind her. Bumi's eyes gazed vacantly at the closed door. He tried to maintain her image, as he'd done in his torture cell. Everything hurt now, wrists, shoulders, teeth and bones.

True to her word, Yaty returned in less than a minute towing her brother by his arm. He ran directly to Bumi and hugged him gently. Bumi felt small and fragile in the arms of this giant of a man.

“I'm sorry, Bumi. Please believe me, I'm sorry,” Robadise said. “I never thought they would come for you. No one told me until it was too late, and you wouldn't believe the bureaucracy to get you out. Those fuckers! Sorry, forget it. I'm sorry is all—that this happened to you. But don't worry, I have a plan.”

Yaty heaved a sharp sigh.

Bumi directed his response to her. “Plan?”

She ran from the room.

“Bumi,” Robadise said, drawing Bumi's gaze back on him. “I don't know how to tell you this, but you're screwed. Our neighbours have fucked you.”

“Fucked me?” Having remained outwardly calm through his entire ordeal, Bumi became engulfed in panic at home in his bed facing his brother-in-law. “
Our neighbours
fucked me?” he screamed.

He could feel razors dancing at the edges of his heart, cutting their latest chunk, the piece that esteemed, admired and above all trusted Robadise. He was getting fucked alright and he knew who the real fucker was. Drawing strength from some untapped reserve Bumi shoved Robadise aside and bolted from his bed. He immediately slipped and hit the floor.