Burridge Unbound

by Alan Cumyn

  “Yes,” I say. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Maybe right now,” Joanne says.

  “I should check the news.”

  “The news will be there when you get back.”

  “Yes, but a lot has happened just while we’ve been walking.”

  “It isn’t dawn yet in Santa Irene.”

  “But around the world. I need to read my e-mails. There was a new one from Jaswant. And I think Ravi sent me something about T.J.’s cousin–”

  “It’ll all be there when you get back.”

  “And I didn’t write my son …”

  She’s led me into a trap. We cut up the steps to the Supreme Court parking lot and a taxi is waiting. She has already made an appointment with Wu. In ten minutes we’re in his tiny, incense-laden waiting room.

  “Yes, harro, Missa Burridge? How-you?” Wu is, as always, cheery, calm, and gentle. He seems to get younger every time I see him.

  “Not so good, Wu. I’ve had some setbacks.”

  “You practise to you breathing, uh-huh?”

  “Sometimes,” I say. “When I can.”

  “Animulse?”

  “When I can,” I tell him, which he understands to mean no, I haven’t practised my animals. There are twelve of them; I’ve learned only six.

  “First animulse,” he says. “Then treatment.”

  We head into his studio. Wu teaches qigong and martial arts to a very few students, usually other instructors in town. The studio is for his own practice. He told me about coming from Taiwan fifteen years ago, how he wanted to continue practising outside for the fresh air, the natural energy of the sun and earth. But then November turned to December and there were no warm sea breezes in this cold town. Hence the studio.

  We warm up gently with breathing, stretching, and shaking exercises, the sort of thing I need to do every morning and every evening but can’t seem to find the discipline. Doing them beside Wu I feel a tingle and warmth and general blanket of well-being that I never feel when I try it alone. The energy must be coming from him.

  “Dragon,” he says, standing back and gesturing to me. I assume my ready position, a cat stance: weight on my right foot, left toe pointed in slightly, hands open near my hips, as relaxed as I can manage. Then I lunge forward, my fingers aimed at an imaginary neck.

  “Turn you heel!” he says, and I do it again and then on the other side. Then he stands opposite me and launches a slow punch at my face. I intercept it with my forearms as I lunge, turn him as I turn my heel.

  “Slowly-slow. Relax. Keep going!”

  The “keep going” part is me jerking his arm, then thrusting towards his neck again as I step back. These are nasty fighting techniques, these animals. The lun, a mythical creature with the body of a cow, the scales of a fish, and the head of a lion, intercepts a punch, snaps the arm, then chokes the neck as the victim falls forward. The pang, a great bird, snaps the arm in a different direction, chops the throat, then pecks the side of the neck when the victim tries to defend himself. The mandarin, a little bird, stops a low, hooking punch, whirls the arm around, and strikes twice at the neck. The snake cracks the neck and attacks from below; the ape breaks the arm then shudders the body with a terrible spasm. They’re all part of liu he ba fa, water-boxing, which Wu says is a gentle but effective system of self-defence, especially good for overcoming opponents who are stronger, and for building internal energy. The theory is good and I enjoy practising with Wu, but the details are overwhelming: back straight, bum in, chin tucked, tongue on the roof of the mouth, weight distributed through the heel, elbows out, turn the heel, catch the arm with the side of the forearm, not the wrist or hand. Do this not that, that not this.

  “For confiden. In case attack again!”

  I think Wu gets a certain pleasure out of turning me into a pretzel while he shows me the various applications. It is for my confidence, but I can’t think I’ll ever be attacked again the way that I was. It was a once-in-a-lifetime event. For no good reason either. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and I learned what none of us needs to know for sanity or happiness: how merciless and harrowing the universe can be. Once you know you can’t stop knowing. You work and work but in the end you still know.

  For a warm-down we do more breathing exercises, which Wu claims will restore my “manlihood and vigour.” In one I swallow my breath and hold it for up to a minute while gently pushing it down to my testicles, then recuperate with bellows breathing before trying again. In another I imagine I’m pulling up my lifeforce from my sperm – what sperm? I think – and channelling it up my spine, into my head, then down through my nose, throat, and chest to circle my navel. Any energy flow is subtle at best, and probably all in my hopes anyway. I really would like to believe in Wu, in the possibility of using dormant lifeforce for revitalization. But I know that as soon as I leave his office my resolve will fall away. He talks about tapping into the energy of the universe. I feel like my molecules were ripped apart by unimaginable emptiness and cold.

  The final part of my visit, the real reason for seeing him, is Wu’s massage. This is what most people come for: the way his gentle fingers find and soothe every knot, stimulate those magical points in the neck and shoulders, down the arms and the spine, in the legs and feet. More and more I’m convinced that not only is he tweaking my feeble points, he’s pouring his own energy into me. When he rubs my scalp the pressure eases; when he presses his thumbs along the arches of my feet heat rushes through my body. I could stay for hours, but the feeling is of timelessness, as if he has administered a drug to liquify the moment and stretch it beyond where it should be.

  I hate to leave a session with Wu. I feel so sad, almost bereft. He brings me within close memory of what normal is supposed to feel like.

  “Practise animulse. Breathe. Every day. Twice, three times!”

  Yes, yes, I tell him. I’ll breathe at least twice every day.

  Joanne pays him, has a taxi waiting for us. I don’t carry money any more, hardly do anything on my own – don’t feed myself, don’t shop, don’t make my own appointments.

  “Someday I’ll buy my own diapers,” I tell Joanne, and she laughs so beautifully, rich as water from a winter melt. I’d swear she can read my mind sometimes, knows all the inner dialogue that has led to a particular statement or idea. It’s a wonderful thought, but turns sour even as we ride through quiet backstreets. She’s as desirable as a woman could be, and here I am trapped in this deadwood body, unresonating, dying of cold and fear.

  Sinking. Sadness. This always happens after Wu. I’m tired of this aching, this lack of fixative. There’s no starch in life any more, nothing keeps its shape; it melts in my hands, press it as I might. I try to do the breathing. There was something there when Wu was beside me. Now my body is wooden and lost. I can’t keep a good feeling in place except with the most crushing concentration. The shit of the world is my proper domain. Bombs and torture and coups d’état, dogs writhing in the street in far-off lands most people don’t care about. These things stay fixed: regimes are replaced but men still get hung by their arms in the airplane position; international declarations are signed but banned groups are still hunted down; reports are published but mothers who ask about their sons in detention are still drawn aside and raped. Here is my permanence: sadness, disaster, impotence, indignation. They belong to me. They look like they must lead to something else, something better, but they never do. They stay fixed while everything else crumbles.

  Softly, I think. Go softly. This is just a moment’s blackness.

  Joanne makes me dinner while I stare stonily out my apartment windows at the dark clouds of August. Salmon, with baked potatoes and fresh corn, cut off the cob for me because of my dentures. She hasn’t served any for herself and I feel put out. She’s going to leave. She gets paid for certain hours but she doesn’t have to abandon me. She must sense my depression. It’s particularly bad tonight. She’s a smart woman. But she wants to escape me. Well, let her go. I don’t nee
d her. I’ll be fine.

  “If it’s all right,” she says, gathering her sweater, “I said I’d meet some people for dinner. You’ve got my number?”

  “Yes, fine,” I snap. The salmon is undercooked. What’s she trying to do, poison me?

  “I’ll stay if you like.”

  “No. Go!” I say, not looking at her. She can’t stand being with me. Who can blame her? I’m such a stupid, suffering, helpless bag of bones. Live your life. Grasp it. Don’t let the drowning pull you under.

  “I’ll check up on you later.”

  “No. I’m fine.” I put my cutlery down on the plate and the noise resounds like a metal garbage can clattering in an alley.

  “You should try to get some sleep. You usually sleep well after Wu.”

  Like fuck I do. I’m usually depressed as hell after Wu.

  “I’ll be fine,” I say, picking at my salmon again.

  When she leaves I turn on my computer, but The Islander is still carrying today’s paper even though they’re well into tomorrow by now. Bloody incompetents! It strikes me as personal somehow – they’re so inefficient that they can’t post their news when the whole rest of the world is waiting for it and it’s the only thing I personally want to read. What am I supposed to do now? A country is crumbling and it isn’t being covered. Two other papers from Santa Irene have Web sites but they’re in Kuantij, and anyway they haven’t even posted today’s paper yet, much less tomorrow’s. Jesus!

  I click onto my e-mail and wait, impatiently, for the messages to appear. But instead of messages I get a little screen apologizing: SmartMail is unavailable. Try again later. Unbelievable. I wait several seconds and click again, again, again. SmartMail is unavailable. I try again. I wait and I try and I wait and I can’t believe it. The whole fucking world is going to shit. Everything I touch. I click again. Standing now. SmartMail is unavailable. Right. Try again later. Later. Later. Later!

  It really doesn’t take much to push a computer screen off a desk. A little shove will do it. Hardly anything. A gesture of impatience. Then the screen falls on the hardwood floor. If the cables are short, like mine, the computer starts to fall as well, then goes completely off when I decide to help it on its way. They bounce and roll badly and the screen goes black when the connections rip.

  Then the phone rings. It sounds like an alarm. I stare in disbelief at what I’ve done. The phone rings and rings and I’ll be damned if I’ll answer it. The machine is supposed to pick it up after four rings, but of course being mine it malfunctions. Ringing, ringing, ringing. I have this sudden vision of computer police spying on me through the modem and knowing exactly what I’ve done to an innocent piece of electronics.

  I grab the damn phone. “Yes!”

  No answer. Of course not.

  “Bill?”

  “Yes!”

  “Bill you don’t have to yell. It’s me.”

  Me. I don’t know who me is. I don’t have a fucking clue. Why don’t people -?

  “Bill, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” It’s my wife, Maryse. I knew I shouldn’t have picked up the phone.

  “Bill, I’m calling because Patrick had a bit of an accident. It’s nothing to get too upset about. He was hit by a car this afternoon–”

  “What?”

  “He was on his skateboard, but it really isn’t serious. The car had slowed down. He bruised his shoulder …”

  “What hospital is he in?”

  “… and he suffered a slight concussion.”

  “Oh, Jesus! Can you not keep an eye–”

  “I didn’t call you right away because I knew you’d react like this.”

  “Like WHAT? How am I reacting?”

  She doesn’t answer. I picture her standing with both hands on the phone, her shoulders shaking.

  “He’s staying overnight at the children’s hospital. I know he’d love a visit but I think you should bring Joanne if you’re going to come tonight.”

  “Are you telling me that I can’t see my son at hospital? Where the hell do you–?”

  “Bill,” she says, and something gets through. I close my eyes and grip the edge of the table. “It’s just me, Bill. He really is all right. But if you want to see him, bring Joanne.”

  4

  “It looks like a refugee camp in here,” Joanne says softly as we walk into the hospital lobby. She’s right. There’s an impressive mix of families here: African, Middle Eastern, East European, South Asian. A tiny Chinese-looking boy with tear-puffed eyes holds his arm and looks at us dully. A tall, deeply black woman in Muslim dress cradles a sleeping child. A Caucasian family – Russians? Czechs? – huddles around a chessboard.

  I’ve yanked her from her dinner and friends, the tyranny of the cellphone. Not to mention the tyranny of the needy.

  The nurse directs us to another nurse who takes us to Patrick’s room. Maryse leans against the wall by the door and goes immediately to Joanne when she sees us. Standing apart, I catch strands of the discussion.

  “… just out the door for a moment … the tires squealed … told him to be careful …”

  They’re nearly the same height, which surprises me – Joanne seems too tall. Maryse got some sun at her parents’ cottage, is looking healthier than she was before. When did I see her last? It must be two or three months. In the spring. Her hair so white, still a shock. My legacy.

  While they talk I slip into the room and see Patrick sleeping, a bandage around his head. Otherwise no scrapes and bruises. A picture of serenity. He’s clutching his black, ragged teddy bear. Maryse has let his curls grow quite long; they’re matted against the side of his cheek.

  I need to say something to Maryse. Something small and kind and uncutting. It’s hard when all the knives have been sharpened from the separation. I needed a nurse and she couldn’t be one and had a hard enough time dealing with her own and Patrick’s nightmares, waking and otherwise.

  She took care of Patrick while I was kidnapped, told him gentle stories and rubbed his temples and held him in the middle of the night. Then later, when I was back and it was all supposed to be so happy, she took him those several times to the hospital to see me in my self-inflicted agony. Where was I? Teaching him how to throw a football? Quizzing him on his spelling? Responding to his e-mail messages? All the time I was away she built me up in his imagination and then when they wheeled me off the plane I wasn’t the hero he expected, I was a fuck-up and a coward. I could barely stand.

  She finally said the words. That last time I was leaving the hospital. “I don’t think you should come home, Bill.” Her eyes strained, her thumbnail pressing into the white of her fist. I know what’s it’s like to do whatever you have to do. I could see it in her. “We need a separation for a time. I’m not helping you and we are tearing ourselves apart. If we go on like this none of us will survive it.”

  Saving her child. Cutting me loose. I remember the burn of rejection, the surprising gust of relief.

  She saved all our lives. And now I need to say something nice, non-confrontational. He’s beautiful, Maryse. You’re doing a good job with him. You look well.

  I step back out into the hall, the phrases labouring in my cobwebbed brain as if I were an adolescent trying to ask for a date. You look well. He’s beautiful, Maryse. You’re doing a good job.

  Maryse and Joanne stop talking when I approach. Maybe it’s the dull light, but Maryse’s skin still looks like that of a twenty-year-old. Her eyes are as dark as ever, but harder somehow, on the edge of attack. The kind phrases fall out of my head. I need knives. It’s a matter of self-preservation.

  “I bet he wasn’t even wearing a helmet,” I say bitterly.

  “Oh, Bill–”

  “Aren’t there parks for skateboarding? You probably should just make a rule with him–”

  The dark eyes look down at her lace-up boots. At any moment the points might come right up into my groin.

  “Did this driver give a statement? Are we suing? You probabl
y didn’t even get the licence number.”

  “You just fuck yourself,” she hisses, then her boots click-click down the hall.

  “That was accomplished,” Joanne says, and I nearly light into her as well. But something holds me back – some small thread of sanity remaining in my ugly mind.

  “What kind of parent–?” I start, but she touches my shoulder and the thought evaporates.

  “Save it,” she says. “Is Patrick awake?”

  She goes in to see him and I stand in the hall, feeling like a tree somehow engulfed by miles of ocean. What did I do? It’s not my fault. It’s not my fucking fault. Any father called to the hospital in the middle of the night to see his son …

  “He’s a treasure,” she says, tiptoeing out. “He looks like an angel.”

  Outside, waiting for the taxi, I say, “Maybe you could write her a note.” She laughs, not a happy sound, but sudden and harsh, like cars colliding.

  “All right,” I say. “I’ll write her a note. You just tell me what to say to make everything better. Some little graceful card. So she’ll read it and know I was fucking tortured within an inch of my life and that inch is all I’ve got left and it’s not much to work with. I’ve done a bloody good job.”

  “That would make a handsome card,” she says.

  “Yes,” I say. “Handsome. It would fix everything, wouldn’t it?”

  “She’d come running back to you. Romantics the world over would flock to you for advice.”

  Breathe and breathe and breathe. How much longer do I want to put up with this? I have work to do. I can’t let myself get sidetracked by these petty, insignificant … these distractions. They’re fine for everybody else who has more than one inch of life left to work with. But not for me. I have to look out for me.

  No one else will.

  In the taxi. I watch the passing streetlights, headlights, donut-shop fluorescence all poking impotently into the black of this night. The driver is from Lebanon. His smudged photo ID makes him look like a drug smuggler. Husayn Awada. Before long Joanne has got him to tell us his life story. He came to Canada in 1982 in the wake of the Israeli invasion. He was an engineer in Beirut; in Canada he’s been a baker, waiter, pizza deliveryman, school janitor, Christmas-tree salesman, and, mostly, a taxi driver. He has three grown sons, all engineers, and one daughter, now married with twins. His wife runs a restaurant. Neither of them has taken a vacation in sixteen years.