Burridge Unbound

by Alan Cumyn

  “But that could be another of Suli’s challenges,” my voice says, “dealing with a rebel group that fought for so many years against Minitzh and that probably feels it is owed a share of power.” Secretly staring into the light of death. The man with the goggle-eyed stare. Probably they’ve backlit some comfortable scene. A book-lined office. The human-rights defender. Still held hostage. Now there’s a headline.

  The program shifts to commentary from a reporter on the scene, with, I imagine, shots of jubilation, of flower-draped tanks, of people praying and singing and dancing together, waving the abandoned uniforms of the soldiers like victory flags. I imagine, because all I see is the white light. In this chair I’m strangely calm. It’s the middle of a twister, the calm place surrounded by chaos.

  “Just to return to you, Mr. Burridge, how closely are you going to be monitoring the emerging human-rights situation in Santa Irene? With Minitzh dead, isn’t it time to give the transitional regime some breathing room before being too critical?”

  No words come out. I’m waiting for the appropriate response, but there is none.

  “Mr. Burridge?” the Goddess voice asks. My jaw works up and down but no sound comes out, and suddenly I’m not in the calm middle of the twister any more, I’ve been booted out to the edge, spinning violently in the chair, gripping as hard as I can to hold on. My jaw works but of course now no words can come out, all language is swallowed in the intensity of the wind. The light collapses suddenly into blackness and then the door opens behind me and Cheryl is there but her words are indistinguishable from the rage of the moment and she and the techie have a hard time prying my fingers off the chair – they don’t know, they don’t realize if I let go, that’s it, I’m flung off into oblivion. They pull and pull but I can’t let go, it would be suicide and I’ve done that already, it doesn’t work. I mean to tell them, but it isn’t them any more. It’s Josef, my keeper. We’re back in the basement, we never left, I never got away. His black moustache, wedge face, all the same, the same as ever. And he has the video camera, that beautiful piece of machinery. He’s pointing to me and I know what I’m supposed to say. I know but I’ve forgotten for the moment, all I can think is it’s me on film, Burridge, but the Kartouf is hiding in the shadows, strapped with explosives, ready to take everything out in a moment. Whole city blocks. Lives of the innocent. Pedestrians and children and government figures, everyone.

  I know what they want and I do it, as always. “Burridge O-K,” I say, staring straight ahead. Such wind and noise. I know it’s impossible but I can’t let go till the twister is over …

  Sad lights. Can’t speak of how sad they are. Almost grey in their fluorescence. Or is that the medication? The medication, the medication. As if there were only one medication. I’m trying to remember the name of one of the drugs. It’s tangled in the lint. If I thought clearly I could pull the name out of the mess, shake it briefly, hang it up to dry. It would be clear, identifiable. Just one.

  I have a funny memory of a time in childhood. There was a gang of us on bikes, pedalling down a narrow path along a creek in the middle of the woods in the middle of the city. That creek by Billings Bridge. A strange part, quite wild for a stretch, although just a few hundred yards away were houses, streets, porches, sidewalks, a big mall. You couldn’t see any of that from where we were, though. It was all thick brush and mud, strange insects, poking sticks, burrs and needles, weird-coloured water you wouldn’t want to fall into. Wild urban creek water. God knows what lived in it. Strange species of fish and frogs and water spiders, toughened by chemicals and sewage backwash, toxic to touch, unkillable. A smelly place, wild in ways God never thought of, and this pack of boys on bikes disappearing from civilization to trace its dark turns.

  I remember Graham falling in, how the other boys didn’t want to go in after him. They were too frightened of the sludge, the bluish green metallic poisons we imagined would burn our skin. But there was Graham floundering, immersed in mud. I remember the suck at my feet, my anger at Graham, and at the others for abandoning us, the sense of panic, then relief when after all it was only mud, there was no burning acid, nothing to kill us right away. Graham laughing when my hand slipped and we both tumbled back. The cold and the grip of the mud, how easily it inserted itself between my clothes and skin, under fingernails, in my eyes and nose. Washing myself clean – clean? – with the odd water from the creek.

  I remember pulling ourselves onto the bank, then walking home with our bikes in the rain. It might have been October – it was cold enough and we shivered badly, and our long wet clothes wrapped our limbs and weighed us down. The tightness and the mud. The effort of every step. Our shoes squelching, feet plodding, heads drooping. Against the rain and up the hill and it seems to me now there was a wind against us as well, and our parents’ wrath to anticipate all the way. But mostly the heaviness of the mud and our wet clothes.

  It’s the way thoughts are now. The way everything is. Here in this hospital bed. In this sad, sad light.

  “You have to be careful, Bill,” Joanne says. She looks like she’s tripped into a wild urban toxic creek herself, is pale and small somehow, fallen into herself with worry and guilt.

  “I will,” I say. “You know I will.”

  “Well, you weren’t!” she says unpleasantly, and the veins in my skull pulse just like that. I’m reminded that my head feels permanently bruised.

  “You abandoned me,” I say. “I’m not the one who walked off!”

  “Bill,” she says, holding her breath. It looks like an anger-management technique. “You said you didn’t want me to come to the studio with you. You said you were fine on your own.”

  “That’s a blatant lie!” I say, and another part of my brain gets bruised, just like that, hit by a rubber hammer.

  Holding her breath then letting it out. Calming herself. Like she’s dealing with some …

  “We talked about it on the phone,” she says, too calmly. “You said you wanted to go alone. You insisted. You sent Derrick off to Toronto to talk to the PEN group and you told me you were going to handle it all on your own. You said, ‘I can do this now!’ ”

  “Jesus! Why is everybody lying to me?”

  “Don’t get angry, Bill.”

  “Well, everybody’s rewriting history here. How am I supposed to not get angry? Joanne, it’s me. Me!”

  “I know it is,” she says, calmer now, and I cry against her.

  “It’s me,” I say, “it’s me, it’s me,” just so she’ll know, so they’ll all know. I can’t tell them everything, but they’ll know.

  “You have to be careful,” she says, in her right voice again, the one I hired her for – her flannel-sheets voice, her everything-okay voice.

  “It’s me,” I tell her, brimming with tears again. “It’s me.”

  8

  There’s a strange relief in failure, a release from the normal bonds of time and duty. When you’ve been in the hospital, sedated, insulated from the world, a week feels like a journey to the far side of the moon. When you’ve collapsed on network television, when your credibility has leaked away, when the phone doesn’t ring … then the old sense of urgency relaxes its grip on your neck. Lets other things in.

  Suli Nylioko. Suli Nylioko. The sound of her name insinuates itself between my bones and sinews, in the lighter passages of my mind, in the soles of my feet and the remaining roots of my hair. Suli Nylioko. This woman the world now knows simply as Suli. For a time she’s everywhere: visiting the graves of the dead, holding hands with the wounded in hospitals, reviewing the troops, addressing a throng of well-wishers, praying alone in a square with a mere ten thousand others, the women wrapped in their saftoris, but only Suli in brilliant blue. Leading a revolution in prayer and song, in meditation and good thoughts. Good thoughts! Suli Nylioko. The sound of her name soothes through my body like an antidote, an incantation. Suli Nylioko. Stares the soldiers down and kisses away their fear. Suli Nylioko. Holds a child whose parents were burned in the
Welanto fires. Suli Nylioko. Tells the aging white gentlemen at the IMF that they must allow her to pay for milk for pregnant mothers. A typhoon hits Kolaba in the north and Suli is there, setting up a hospital. Suli Nylioko. Rides in a helicopter to the scene of a ferry disaster and three hundred fishermen follow in their boats, scooping the survivors out of the water. Only twelve dead! It could’ve been much worse, but for Suli Nylioko.

  At night in my apartment I practise my animals. Dragon, lun, pang, mandarin, snake, and ape. And now the bear: trap the punch, smack with the back of your fist, shuffle in and paw-punch once then twice. Knees bent, back straight, head high, chin in, elbows out, tongue on the roof of the mouth, eyes on the horizon. On Suli Nylioko. She stands in a bright light, dressed in blue, looking so dark and confident, her hair black as the night sky in fall. A strange energy coming from her. Suli Nylioko persuades the World Bank to fund the reconstruction of the island education system. Suli Nylioko sweeps the elections, then allows ten opposition members to sit in the Kuente anyway. Suli Nylioko prays with striking civil servants and they agree to return to work without their back pay. For the good of the country and your neighbours. It will all be made good. The People’s President. Suli Nylioko.

  There are walks along the river with Joanne, in rubber boots in the rain, water into water, summer gone, an old memory, autumn too sliding away so quickly. The leaves turn their colours and the sky deepens and one or two warm spells fool no one, the real weather is the rain and cold wind, dragging us down into winter. Every step, strangely, the name courses through my body. Suli Nylioko. A breathing thought, intravenous energy, hope, and grace. Suli Nylioko. The whole world watches the American president twist in the wind over his silly little affair, every apology getting worse and worse. He needs a name, a cure for his own staggering stupidity, something soothing in his veins.

  Suli Nylioko.

  Suli names her cabinet – half are women. Suli opens the first safe house for teenage prostitutes in Santa Irene. Suli cracks down on the sex trade. Suli knocks on the doors of the United Nations to ask for money to build a new police force, set up a system of health care, combat the drug trade. It all comes down to money. Possible now, perhaps, because Africa is so hopeless, money sent to most countries there seeps away and resurfaces somehow in Switzerland. And money sent to the rest of Asia evaporates in the economic free fall. But money sent to Santa Irene goes through Suli Nylioko, the beautiful woman in the blue saftori, whose bright light, by so many accounts, has transformed the whole country into a place of song and prayer and good works. She stood between the tanks and the soldiers melted, dissolved into boys who loved her. Everybody loves her. Suli. Suli Nylioko.

  A political widow who plays the innocent, claims the high road. Too shining new to show any of the mud. I know this. And yet …

  Say her name once and then again and it steals inside you like a spirit. Why not? Other spirits hide inside us all the time. Viruses lurk inside our organs, come out for a while to announce themselves, lure the drugs, then hide away again. Like the Kartouf camped out in the darkness of my brain. There’s treatment but no cure. Burn one part of the forest and they move to another; destroy a mountain village and they reappear somewhere else. Like spirits. Why not a spirit of light? Why not an angel called Suli Nylioko?

  A U.N. delegation becomes the first international group to visit a prison in Algeria and somehow they fail to talk to even one of the twenty thousand prisoners held for terrorism. Somehow they have nothing to say about the murders and bombings and other atrocities. The U.N. commissioner for human rights visits China but does not visit a single political dissident. T.J.’s cousin is not heard from despite my pleas to the prime minister, but one man does escape from a secret prison in Vavuniya, torture marks all over his body. He holes up in a church and is saved from the militia by a priest and by the police. The police!

  The world turns in all its old ways. But now there’s Suli Nylioko. “The difference is like night and day,” writes a gushing columnist. “For a time we were killing one another and now we sing together every night, clean streets together, help in the markets and the fields. It is hard to believe the difference one person can make.”

  One person. Suli speaks on the radio and expatriate Santa Irenians double their foreign remittances. Suli brings inflation down to double figures from triple and then to single. Suli negotiates with Kartouf fighters and two thousand rifles and small arms are collected in one weekend. And yet where is Kartan Tolionta? He’s nowhere and he’s everywhere, in the back of everyone’s thoughts (in the recesses of my mind), in a cave somewhere up north, in the jungle, in Welanto, safe in some village in Thailand – no one knows where the leader of the Kartouf is, and no one knows what he thinks of Suli Nylioko. One blast and he could bring her down. She moves without security, passes among the throngs, is as easy to spot and target as a bluebird in a field of snow. A bomb destroys a loading dock at the post office – no one killed, no one claims responsibility. Another bomb weakens a bridge at the north end of the harbour – but at three in the morning, no one was on it. No word on who might have planted it. These are minor blips in the celebration, reported and then mostly forgotten. It could’ve been drunken soldiers, some bad police, a gang of kids. The Kartouf is quiet, sleeping. Let them sleep.

  I phone my son on his birthday. We talk about school and what Joanne bought for him in my name. I sit through an afternoon holding my father’s cigarette while my mother gets her hair done, goes to a movie, reassembles her nerves.

  No one from the media calls me again. My meltdown on the national news lasted only a few moments before the link with the famous human-rights defender became “unavailable.” I hear nothing more about it, but no reporters call, I’m not asked for follow-up commentary. Santa Irene largely slips from view again anyway. The drama is over, Suli has won, the angry dogs have skulked away and peaceful days do not make headlines. But more than that, the word has gone out over the unseen network: Burridge is unstable. He’s post-traumatic, can’t be trusted. They brought him to the hospital. It was in the Globe and Mail. No letters arrive asking me to speak at conferences. Everyone knows. Derrick hopefully fills out the grant forms, but it’s different now, the name has lost some of its magic. Burridge was like Suli in a way. There was an aura, not of grace but of the integrity of suffering. Now the aura has dimmed, the whiff has increased – mental illness, instability. Do we want to send money to someone who goes goggle-eyed on the national news? Who thrashes about in his chair and then goes blank? Even though everyone knows I was in the hospital before, that I tried to kill myself several times – it’s well known – I went goggle-eyed on television and that’s different. It’s as if it has really happened now. Like Clinton apologizing on television. We all knew but now we know. The madness is official.

  I finally write the note to my wife.

  Dear Maryse,

  The whole sky is mine tonight, there are no clouds, the last of the airplanes has just blinked by. I think of who might be up there: the young businessman coming back from a hectic day in Toronto, the maiden aunt who has been to Vancouver to visit her sister’s bratty children and is relieved now to be heading back to her cats, to not have children of her own. The alcoholic newsman who couldn’t write another original sentence if his life depended upon it – everything that happens now reminds him of something else that happened when he was younger and the world was more interesting and the details mattered and he wrote about it then anyway. All of them – the young mother with her two-month-old baby and the confused granny who couldn’t buckle her safety belt without help and the professional athlete who’s pissed off because his six-figure salary is in Canadian dollars not American – all of them are a few inches of metal from total oblivion and yet it feels as if they’re sitting in their own living rooms. Or maybe they’re not so relaxed because of Flight III that went down in Peggy’s Cove – there’s been so much coverage, so many of the passengers were U.N. officials and other accomplished types doing
important work, and they too were sitting relaxed as if in their own living rooms, veterans of so many flights, no doubt, that went off without a hitch.

  For us too the few inches of metal gave way, brought us into oblivion and yet somehow didn’t erase us completely. Improbably, impossibly, we survived the fall, can even walk now, carry on, look more or less normal – at least you do, you still have life and beauty. My fall was further, I suppose, from outer space, but somehow I didn’t entirely burn up upon re-entry. I can’t say the angle was correct and yet here I am, a wreck, but a walking one.

  I don’t know why I’m still here, but we both know the reasons for our separation. Closing the door felt like another death, and yet also filled me with perverse relief – another responsibility I could leave behind, another room to shut off and ignore. Having eaten bitter for so long the smell, the possibility of sweet, was unnerving. I’ve said this before and will say it again – it was never you and Patrick, it was always me floundering in the bog. I’ve never gotten over the belief that it would’ve been simpler for all, better even, if I’d only died in my agony as I was supposed to.

  And yet lately – the last few weeks perhaps? – something else has seeped into my soul which I wasn’t prepared for. It’s nowhere near joy, or contentment, or ease. Nothing bounding or extraordinary, no somersaults to land me flat on my back – just a few steps really on what feels like firmer ground. I don’t know why, or perhaps I do and am afraid to say.

  I’m not afraid to say that sometimes now I have small daydreams of being with you both – that time Patrick crawled into the laundry hamper to be among the warm clothes; that day I stayed home from work and we all played on the floor of the den in our pyjamas and when Patrick conked out we covered him with a blanket where he was and then slipped off back to bed ourselves.