Drive-by Saviours (31 page)

Bumi agonized through his behavioural therapy with the same willpower he had shown slaving through the discards of the patrons of the restaurant for a single, long-distance hope: family. The result was a new Bumi: more cantankerous, irritable and confused. He limited his washing rituals to once a day and resisted checking the alarm with Bang's help, but he lived in an intensified fear of infection and further tragedies befalling his family.

Bumi was afraid to call them and have his worst fears confirmed. As long as he had doubt he had hope. Only when his debt was repaid would he allow himself the luxury of proof of their safety or demise.

Bumi looked haggard. Red lines through the whites of his eyes and yellow sacks of skin underneath a layer of slick sweat gave a grotesque sheen to his eroded features. What started as vibrant discussions during chess degraded into lectures by Lady Juanita. It took all of Bumi's deteriorating concentration to make a move. The duration of the matches continued to lengthen because Bumi often fell asleep on his bench. Lady Juanita kept talking until Bumi's head snapped forward and he woke up. Lady Juanita's lectures were fascinating but I had neither the knowledge nor the fortitude to contribute much. If Bumi had been his old vibrant self he would have drawn out what knowledge I did have. He would have steered the conversation toward the realms where I could participate.

The haze over Bumi was profound and impenetrable. For two months we had beaten back his obsessions with drugs and denial and they had come back with a vengeance that sank their victim. Dr. Biachari suggested a second anti-depressant and sleeping pill to accompany the initial prescription. Bumi was doubtful that more of a failed tactic was a wise prescription. He was already severely constipated and sweated like a thousand-round prize-fighter. Dr. Biachari recommended staying the course until the end of the trial because the drugs could still kick in at the last moment. His recommendation was another reminder that I lacked the patience for real health care.

On the administrative side Sherry and I distributed grant proposals at an unprecedented rate with preliminary positive responses. It was robotic and lonely work in which my telephone became my only lifeline. In synch with the automation of my new position I called Michelle every second Tuesday morning at
11
:
15
. She always answered groggily and we always complained about our jobs, made fun of our parents and bragged about our girlfriends. We never discussed the real past, the scars of a loving kinship gone wrong.

I always ended the call before the risk of opening those wounds became greater than the comfort of illusion, which usually took about fifteen minutes.

Two weeks before Bumi's drug trial period was up, I caught Michelle in the early stages of a hangover and in a mood bitter enough to break our protocol and complain about her girlfriend. I sensed trouble and told her to sleep it off, hung up in a hurry and called Sarah.

“Why don't I have the guts to talk to Michelle about
OCD
?” I asked.

“Why don't you have the guts to dump me or marry me or make up your mind?” she said.

“Fuck,” I said. I was about to be held accountable again.

Sarah apologized. “I just got canned,” she said. The lady-razor maker didn't approve of the appearance of varicose. “The gig is up,” she said. “I'm too old.”

This was a conversation too profound and complex to navigate without careful planning, contingencies and safety equipment. It was about her life and mortality and her career and its mortality. It was about reincarnation and transformation, about new opportunities, about her business plan. It was about insecurity and vanity and patriarchy, and it was too hot to touch while I still suffered from excessive self-interest. Sarah's termination needed long, careful, open, sensitive analysis—but later.

“Did you hear me?” Sarah asked.

“Yeah, sorry.”

“That's it?” she said.

“I was just thinking,” I said. “Look we should discuss this, but I'm at work right now.”

“Nice. I just got fired,” she said.

“It's just one contract,” I said. This was not obfuscation. It was poking around the outside of the wound with a short stick. I awaited a verbal barrage that never reached me. She said nothing.

“It sucks,” I said. “And I'm really sorry. I just mean that you have other contracts on the go, more coming down the line as usual. This isn't a career killer.”

“They said I'm too told, Mark. That's the kiss of death for a model.”

“Sarah, I wanted to ask you something,” I said.

“Right, why you're a coward.”

“Maybe we could sponsor Bumi's wife and kids to immigrate,” I said.

It was Lily's suggestion, the last resort to bring in a sweatshop labourer with no education, no proficiency in either of Canada's official languages and no legal relatives in Canada. If we pledged financial responsibility for Yaty, Bunga and Baharuddin for ten years and thus guaranteed that they wouldn't drain the system, Canada would consider taking them as landed immigrants. The severity of the consequences of being caught without papers would increase for Bumi because being deported would then mean leaving his family behind a second time. However, it would allow them to be reunited earlier. If Bumi was destined to suffer from his obsessive-compulsive thoughts and behaviours, at least he could do so with the support of his family.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Sarah said. “Who are you?”

“I'm the naïve idealist you fell in love with,” I said. “For once I would actually like to act on my ideals.”

“The man I fell in love with, Mark, was not a paper shuffler, and he would have gladly been there for me when I needed support, regardless if it was during his work hours, which were by the way not so extensive when I fell in love with him.”

She hung up. I wondered if I should call her back but the phone rang again. I picked it up and Michelle's long-distance voice asked me, “So, why are you suddenly so interested in my life anyway, Little Brother?”

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY DEGREES IN CHAPTER 21

I
asked Michelle what she liked best about her new
home, and she told me it was the mountains around the city. She said they reminded her that there were bigger things in life than her daily routine. She never went near them but she could always see them.

I saw them myself, in the distance, as I stumbled off the city bus. They were splendiferous green, peaceably tranquil, ominously big. The city itself was an even flow of logical materialists not letting things get to them. There was a mild yet exciting disturbance that turned out to be a small anti-invasion protest. In the city Bush called ‘Little Beirut' for the verve of its protestors, the small gathering of doe-eyed hippies was nothing to the thirty thousand dub poets, street theatre puppeteers, stilt workers and Bay Street bankers that marched on Toronto's U.S. Embassy in the face of a long line of heavily armed police on horses and snipers.

Portland had all the makings of a real city with the added benefits of old-growth trees, enviable public transit, an overground network of tantalizing greenery and sparkling waterways. It had open-air junkies and harm reduction clinics offering free clean needles, mega-shopping complexes, backpackers, yuppies, hippies, chai and latte, passive-aggressive commuters with explosive personality disorder driving through bike and car lanes, music, festivals, multiculturalism, fine dining and an abundance of homeless people.

But it lacked the self-righteous action I'd grown to love about Toronto, the sense of purpose with which Torontonians walked. Whether it was work-bound on Bay Street, past the homeless drop-in centres in the west end or shopping in Chinatown, every Torontonian seemed to be on a mission for the betterment of the world and that certainty never wasted a moment pondering philosophy in a coffee shop.

Michelle's apartment was extraordinary in its neatness. Both it and she had adapted to their environment and culture. Gone were the city models and demolition projects. It was as if she'd found a real version of her best attempt and given it all a rest. Gone were the sporadic towers of dirty clothing connected by fallen articles of underwear and blue jeans. Gone were the holes punched in walls and doors. In their stead was pure white wall-to-wall carpeting and floor-to-ceiling pure white walls with tasteful portraits and nature scenes, all neatly framed so that the viewer knew it was but a glimpse into a world he wasn't a part of. The clothes had been picked up, seared under a hot iron and hung in a closet segregated by colour. Michelle's girlfriend Toni could have used the image as a segregation symbol in one of her anti-racism educational videos.

The sheer size of the place made me feel like an echo. Most of Sarah's and my flat could have fit in the living room. There was a full kitchen, a four-hundred-square-foot bedroom and a slightly smaller office, and a bathroom with a deep old-fashioned tub that Michelle never used because she hated the idea of soaking in her own filth.

We sat at the round white kitchen table while Michelle put on some tea. The springtime rain drummed on the windows and put us both in an Earl Grey mood.

“Did you just move in here?” I asked.

“Just two years ago,” Michelle said.

“Since when are you so fucking neat?” I said.

She laughed and stared through kettle steam at the wall. “Ever since I got cured I've become a lot neater,” she said.

“Cured,” I said.

“I used to feel this need to arrange my things in a certain way on the floor. It just felt wrong if they weren't that certain way. If they got disturbed it was a major problem. Now I just like it neat. It's more efficient that way.”

When I'd told Michelle on the phone about Bumi and my discovery of
OCD
I expected her to be angry, or shocked, that I would imply that she was mentally ill. Instead she said with deathly calm, “Yeah, that's what I got.”

I explained from my learned social worker's stance that she couldn't be sure until she received diagnosis from a psychologist or physician.

“I did,” she said. “Years ago.”

A FEW YEARS AGO MOTHER LEARNED ABOUT OCD FROM OPRAH.
The goddess of television herself told my mother to take her loved one in for analysis immediately because of her compulsive hand washing.

“I always felt she needed loving professional help instead of harsh words,” Mother said to the television, as if Michelle wasn't sitting right next to her. Apparently Mother even attended some therapy with Michelle and discussed some of her own issues.

Michelle tried several prescriptions over several years before finding an effective one. She finally responded well to a combination of drugs and behavioural therapy, and then she got as far away from home as she could without leaving the continent.

In Portland, with a mind that had been vacuumed of nagging fears of contamination and a unique sense of order, Michelle found herself staring at a university job board with nothing but the new dress she wore (the first she'd owned since puberty), the tattered blue suitcase in her hand, a pocketful of maxed out credit cards and a high school equivalency certificate. Her cross-country flight from the sticky weight of personal history had burned what little social capital she'd had in Nova Scotia. In Portland she had no connections and no knowledge of local people, institutions or ways of being. Her knowledge and skills were limited to the artistic drive of the angst of youth and mental illness. She was clean, free, lost and empty.

She pulled the few positions for which she was nominally qualified down from the board: childcare, housecleaning, roadside construction, tutelage of foreign students learning English, assisting the immobile and physically handicapped. None of these required formal education or training, only a willingness to stand in the dust of passing vehicles holding a sign, or to clean people's shit, play with their kids or help them with their homework. Michelle instinctively chose the option that involved machinery rather than people. She figured that all the dirt and fuel emissions would be a good test of her tolerance for invasive particles.

She lasted two months in construction, two-and-a-half including the two-week, unpaid roadside safety course. Her freed mind, having once been so fraught with purposeful worry, wandered aimlessly while her rooted body held its sign.

SHE WONDERED FIRST HOW HER LIFE WOULD BE DIFFERENT IF
she had never been afflicted. She remembered the nightmare of her paper route, which she thought would be an easy way to earn money, and having to re-check every house to ensure that she hadn't missed any deliveries. All that wasted time cost her a burgeoning relationship with Martin Bellamy, the cute new boy who had just moved from Quebec with his cute new Quebecois accent. Martin had gone on to marry the high school valedictorian before doing a PhD in male breast cancer, while Michelle languished at her parents' house.

Before high school Michelle had been a top student and a candidate for valedictorian herself. What she'd thought was teen angst had derailed her academic prowess and popularity with boys, whom she grew to fear when she learned about
AIDS
. Mostly boys weren't all that interesting anyway, and she didn't have time for them. She had to wash morning, afternoon and after midnight when her family succumbed to deep slumber. It was then she became the prurient somnambulist. She removed the accumulated bacterial junk dumped on her by the hordes of humanity that traipsed through a large public high school. Only at night could she find peace, and morning always came too early.

Only the severe rhythmic pounding of our stepfather's fists on Michelle's door roused her to face another humiliating day. Her telltale hands, bloody and raw, became the butt of many jokes in the halls of a teenaged academy and publicly funded babysitting service. Michelle's former friends took juvenile delight in taunting the bedraggled freak in their midst.

So, she took pride in being alone and independent and sneered at the pack-dog mentality of her more vicious male peers and the sheepish girls who followed them around in giggly fits. She had one close friend, Estelle, who had uneven legs and enormous thick glasses and who was magical with her ability to make my sister laugh.

As an adult in Portland, Michelle couldn't guess what she might have been without
OCD
. Maybe something respectable, something people depend on, like a meteorologist. Everyone wants to know the weather.

She remembered that Oprah had said that two million Americans suffered from
OCD
. Two million! That's as many Americans as there are in jail. And as many as there are homeless. Were they the same people?

Maybe there was something special about the number two million. But numbers weren't Michelle's particular obsession. For her the number two million was too abstract to matter much. She couldn't visualize two million people, not even two million very tiny people living inside one of her old city models. But regardless, it was a lot of people. She'd always thought she was alone, but all those people suffered just like she did. For a social animal the pack had turned against, this Oprahtoid was a monumental relief.

Standing on the roadside before a mile-long stretch of impatient automobiles with her stop sign held loosely in hand, Michelle wondered about all those undiagnosed geniuses in prisons, on streets or trapped in lonely nightmares throughout the world. She wondered if they had their own version of Oprah to diagnose them. She doubted it. She wondered how the world would look if they did.

As my sister wondered these things, on her fortieth day on the job, her loosely held stop sign flipped around in her hand. The driver of the first stopped car in a long line couldn't tell which side was he was meant to see. He shrugged his shoulders at Michelle in a silent request for clarification. Michelle, lost in thought and oblivious to the traffic and its operators, did not respond except to scratch her head with her free hand. The driver at the front of the line took this to be a ‘go' and tramped his foot on the gas pedal. Thirty-eight other drivers followed behind him with no thought or attention to Michelle and no idea that they were headed directly toward another stream of forty-six vehicles headed in the opposite direction.

It took Michelle's wandering mind the better part of a minute to register that her lane had jumped the signal and that her loosely hanging sign was the culprit. On this realization she immediately corrected the position of her sign and frantically waved her arms until the line of traffic came to a confused and irritated halt, at which point Michelle radioed an
SOS
to her foreman.

A fast-moving jeep was dispatched through the slow-zone and its two occupants managed to stave off disaster. It took several hours to get traffic sorted because the lane without traffic was covered in fresh asphalt, scattered steamrollers and dump trucks.

Michelle gratefully accepted being ‘laid off due to insufficient funds' but she didn't have enough hours in to get the pogey. Her layoff didn't last long. After several days of careful consideration and library research she was unable to conceive of how to find let alone free the millions of lost geniuses imprisoned by poverty or illness. She found ample evidence that she was not alone in this ignorance, and several examples of what not to do courtesy of the Canadian government. She was on a park bench reading one such example, a late
1800
s document called ‘The Chinese Immigration Act of Canada,' when a pre-school East Asian girl tugged at her sleeve.

When she looked down at the source of the tug the girl said, “Please read to me English.” Her hair was in pigtails, she had on a plain pink dress and held firmly to the gnarled hand of an old lady, maybe her grandmother.

Michelle closed her eyes and shook her head as if trying to get Kafka out of there. When she opened her eyes the little girl still stared at her as the old lady looked ahead at some faraway thing.

Michelle read aloud, “No vessel carrying Chinese immigrants to any port in Canada shall carry more than one such immigrant for every fifty tons of its tonnage.”

“Not that!” shouted the girl. She handed Michelle a Disneyfied Winnie-the-Pooh book. “That.”

Relieved, Michelle invited the girl and her grandmother to sit on the bench with her. The girl rested her head on Michelle's elbow. Michelle delighted the girl with Pooh's hapless search for hunny.

The girl giggled in all the right places as if she had been there before. When Michelle finished the story, the girl collected her book, thanked Michelle and led her grandmother further down the path.

Michelle sat alone with her Chinese Immigration Act wondering what could have led her to believe that she hated children. The next day she applied for a six-week course in teaching English as a second language to children.

WE MET TONI, DREW, KIA AND ESTHER AT A PUB WITH HUGE
Jack Daniels posters on the walls, a jukebox, pool table and no menu. They were already two pitchers in on a Tuesday night. With every pour we clinked glasses and shouted, “Tuesday!”

They all taught English as a second language together at the same school, and they were all immigrants themselves, Kia from Japan, Esther from Ghana and Drew from northern British Columbia.

Toni came from Halifax. Her ancestors had followed Harriet Tubman up the Underground Railroad to the freedom of living as highly visible ex-slaves surrounded by stoic white fishermen. She spoke both of Canada's official languages and taught herself Hausa after tracing her family history roughly to Niger, where she planned to make a pilgrimage of sorts during Ramadan. She was intense and serious, the way I remembered Michelle.