by Alan Cumyn
Maybe I won’t. I breathe and breathe but my heart won’t slow down.
Joanne says it as well. “Calm down. It’s all right. You don’t have to go anywhere.” I sit at the table in my apartment downing my pills.
“He had this look of triumph,” I tell her. “He’d heard this human-rights crap for so many years and had finally figured out how to stick it all back up my craw–” Derrick stays silent. There they are, the two of them, waiting while their boss cracks up. “Don’t you see? They’re going to use my refusal to discredit me, make me look like a chickenshit advocate who runs away when he actually gets a chance to do something.”
“Maybe,” Derrick says. But uncertainly, as if he’s only saying it because it’s what I want to hear.
“Don’t baby me!” I blurt. “For God’s sake! I don’t want to be surrounded by people who are afraid to tell me what they really think!”
I notice Derrick and Joanne exchange looks.
“I’m all right!” I say, too loud. Then softer: “I’m all right. Derrick, what do you really think about all this? I need your clear head. You don’t think I should go?”
“No. Obviously,” he says. No hesitation.
“But if I don’t, are they going to discredit me? Did Waylu set this all up?”
Like talking to the walls. Derrick looks at the floor, at Joanne, anywhere but at me.
“What?”
“Obviously you shouldn’t go back there,” he says again, finally looking at me. “But you have to remember, Waylu is part of the wind faction – he changes with the political climate. He would never act on his own in something like this. He speaks for the government of Santa Irene. That’s who this invitation is from – Suli Nylioko. She wants you on this commission. Waylu is just the messenger.”
He stops while I digest this.
“You’re telling me this is a serious invitation,” I say.
“All I’m saying is it could be taken that way.”
“To ask a torture survivor back to the scene of his personal hell?”
“I think they see the head of an important new human-rights organization, someone who has profound personal knowledge of their little country. It’s as Waylu said – the fact that you have tried to defend the human rights of the very group that terrorized you speaks volumes for your credibility. That’s what they need for their commission.”
I let him go on while I just stare.
“From our point of view,” Derrick continues, “if you could go, it might be very good for the organization. It terms of coverage, profile. Repairing the damage.” Of my meltdown on television, he means. “Suli is sexy right now. Politically, internationally. She’s Corazon Aquino just after ousting Marcos and before she turned out to be so mediocre. Suli might be Nelson Mandela with a beautiful face. God knows. But she seems to want to do good things for her country. She’d love to drape her commission in your flag. That’s what this is about. It could be good all around.”
He shifts in his seat, looks away in discomfort. “I know how awful this could be for you, and for that reason, of course, I’m advocating that you refuse this invitation and stay home. Of course. But just look at another side. If you went, and if it worked out, this could do a lot for our funding.” He clears his throat nervously. “I’m the only one thinking about money here,” he says, still not looking at us. His face so red. “I’m sorry!” he says, rising, pacing. “Money is an evil word here, I know, no one wants to think about it. You’re the organization, it’s your face everyone knows, but I’m the one who signs the cheques and I’m the one who has to troop off to the bank to explain why so much is going out and nothing’s coming in. I don’t mind it, I can do it, I’m good at it. But I’m just reminding you, I’m the only one thinking of these things. I’m telling you, don’t go back to Santa Irene. But if you could it might not be such a bad thing. For starters they’ve offered senior U.N. rates, right? I assume expenses would be included–”
He stops, sees the way I’m looking at him.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “You’d rather not worry about finances. I know. And this is about much more than that. But you asked me to be candid.”
“Nothing in this life obligates you to ever go back there,” Joanne says.
“Obviously,” I say.
Obviously. It echoes in my mind long after they’re gone. As I sit by the window watching the city settle into sleep. I’m not supposed to go back. I was never supposed to go in the first place. I was never meant to be a diplomat and I paid for my bad luck – with my health and my family, my sleep and the great solid middle of my sanity. I paid. I owe no dues to Santa Irene.
Nothing.
And there will be other ways to rebuild my reputation.
This is all obvious. But why can’t I just dismiss it? My mind doesn’t work that way any more; it seizes on certain thoughts and plays them over and over obsessively. I wait for it to hit the press. BURRIDGE REFUSES POST ON TRUTH COMMISSION. The thought won’t leave me alone. I don’t have to go, but what if I did? What if going back to clean out the shit of that country helped me wipe this virus from myself? What if I could lie down and sleep the night through without dreaming of cut glass and burning flesh and being back there in the hood and the darkness and sweat and fear?
“Obviously you’re not going to go,” Joanne says to me. Days later and still I’m obsessed with this. “Put it out of your head.” We’re walking beside the scummy surface of the canal. A noisy paddle-wheel contraption churns past us, scooping up the masses of weeds that grow now that the water has been cleaned up.
“But it would be something,” I say. “To be part of the healing.”
“It’s not worth the risk.”
“To be in on a society that’s making this kind of transition. Especially there.”
“Bill!”
“I know!” I say. “I’m just talking. Just for debate. I could never do it. It would kill me. But somebody really pure of spirit. Gandhi. Mahatma, not Indira or Rajiv. It’s something he would do. Be a torture survivor who returns to the scene and does something positive for that country.”
“You don’t have to be Mahatma Gandhi. Bill Burridge is good enough.”
“But what if I did, what if going back to the valley of the shadow–?”
“The what?”
“To the heart of my own personal darkness. Maybe that’s what I need.”
“You need time and you need therapy,” she says.
Churn, churn, churn. The boat struggles under the bridge, barely going faster than our shuffling walking pace. This is what happens when you clean things up. A new kind of murk descends. Nothing stays clear.
“I’m just talking. You told me it would be good to talk.”
“With a therapist, Bill. You need specialized help.”
I’ve tried three already. I thought we were done! I thought I’d never have to talk to another therapist–
“I could set it up,” she continues. “I heard of this excellent woman. She does a lot of work with refugees and with battered spouses. She is booked for months ahead of time, but I know from a contact that she would make time for you.”
How marvellous to be a special case.
“You don’t have to decide right now,” she says.
There is a world out there. I sit alone by my window and read an account of a Chinese journalist sentenced to thirteen years of reform through labour for “leaking state secrets” – reporting on Li Peng’s family-planning speech the day before the official version was printed. He was taken to a dusty, grim facility in Heilongjiang Province and forced to work in a leather factory, barely clad, standing in vats of unknown chemicals, eating dirty rice and spoiled vegetables, meat once a month, letters never, thirty-one prisoners in a room, sleeping like sardines. “The guards sent prisoners to beat me when I failed at self-criticism. I would write: I am very bad at understanding the politics of human terror. But now I am learning. I am learning so much.”
It’s like hund
reds of accounts I’ve read, from China and Burma, from Indonesia, Guatemala, Chile, Pakistan, from too many countries and too many people. Their names mean nothing, the details blur. So-and-so had his leg muscles crushed, this woman was raped, this boy disappeared coming home from the union office where his father worked. They’re just words on the page, and there’s no reason to cry, but here I am, weeping, stupidly, alone and with no way to stop. I get up and I breathe, I wipe my face and roam the room, but my face is washed with tears whether I’m pacing or still. It isn’t the story. That’s the horrible thing, the story means nothing, less than nothing. Another atrocity in the endless list.
I’m just crying. For nothing, for everything. I wait for it to clear, but it won’t clear. It’s never going to be clear. Maybe that’s why I can’t stop.
10
“Ashes.” The word hangs between us in this comfortable, professional, insulated air. I can see the garden out back – Maryse would know all those flowers. Purple ones, obscenely lush. The name will come to me in a minute. I should know it.
Irises. And the orange are tiger lilies, and the huge, red, floppy ones are poppies. There. Not such a bad brain. This is the house Maryse and I looked at in our other lifetime. A house just like this, with a ground floor stuck right onto the earth. Solid, brick, big rooms, hardwood, furnishings from around the world. This woman takes trips. A successful professional sitting opposite me in a long black skirt and a silky purple blouse that seems too dressy.
Maryse and I stood in a house just like this looking at oak cupboards with Patrick in her arms asleep.
“What do you mean by ashes?” she asks. Ashes? Slowly the word comes back to me.
“It’s what I felt when I embraced my wife,” I say. “When I got home.”
We’re digging through the shit of my life, which is necessary, somehow, part of my purgatory. I wonder, how long does this last? Not the therapy – I told Joanne I’d only stay an hour. But the churning, that seems to go on forever. In the hood, I thought I was being a hero by hanging on to strands of who I was in my old life. It was a conscious effort, I escaped the present every moment I could summon the energy. But when I got home–
“Bill? Can I call you Bill?”
Yes, of course you can call me Bill. You’re going to bill me anyway. I start to smile and then I realize I didn’t tell her the joke. I never said it. The words stayed in their distant orbit.
“I’m the world’s worst patient,” I say. “I’m really hopeless. I don’t do well any more down on the earth. That sounds strange. But when I was shackled to the wall for nine months – it was a kind of reverse birth. That’s how I thought of it. I felt like I was buried under the earth. I didn’t know why it was happening and I still don’t, but I thought my job was to get smaller and smaller and then die. And I couldn’t even do that right. I was a fuck-up all the way along.”
“So your surviving, that was a fuck-up?”
“Other people died because of me. Marlene, the Australian woman who helped rescue me in the end. The soldiers shot her down in cold blood. She knew too much, I’m sure that was it. And Josef, my keeper. Well, I killed him first, but it was a hallucination. The only time I actually tried to help myself, and it was all in my head. So I never tried after that. I was already part ghost.”
“What do you mean?”
I can’t talk about this. Most people don’t understand, that feeling of being half here, half in some other reality. There are realms and dimensions far beyond what we know ordinarily. Places of refuge and torment, of other ways of being. I look around the room. Most doctors post their credentials. I see instead batiks and traditional cloths from some native group, God knows where. I see her professionally concerned eyes and her jade earrings and her wedding band and the pictures of her children on her desk. Her desk by the door by the garden.
There are tissue boxes everywhere. This quaint little countrified house where carrot juice is served and the windows are so new and clean.
“I’m sorry, I’ve only had time for a quick read of your book,” she says. “It’s very moving. Did you find that writing things out helped you to deal with them?”
“Absolutely.”
She waits for more. She’s very patient. She gets paid by the hour. She crosses her legs and leans in and fixes me with her therapist eyes tractor beam, trying to extract my thoughts. My precious thoughts.
“It helped a lot,” I add, unhelpfully.
She crosses her hands on her crossed legs. Her married, successful, full-life hands. She ordered those windows. She paid for them from sessions like these with other sunken wretches. She paid for the trips and her husband is an architect, I put it together in a flash, their children are in private school, they go to Jamaica on spring holidays and Spain in the summer.
“Bill?”
“I need to focus.” I say it before she does.
“Bill, post-traumatic stress is a tricky thing. It takes many people a lifetime of effort to overcome it. To keep the flashbacks in check, to get beyond the trauma, to generate some forward momentum in their lives. You have to be willing to talk about it, to revisit the worst so it will let you go. Your book is a powerful expression of what you went through. It must have been rewarding to write it, to get it out on paper. But you have to express it again and again, in many different ways, to really root out these demons. There’s no way around it. If you close the door on these things they fester. You’ll spend the rest of your life trying to keep it closed.”
Those big, beautiful, professional eyes. No festering in her closet. Whereas I did fester, literally, for nine months I festered. It should be my name, Fester.
“Did I say something funny?”
She says it in an unfunny way, like a schoolteacher who’s being laughed at. Well, children, let’s all share the joke …
“Tell me about your ex-wife,” she says, groping. Wife, I think. She’s not my ex yet. Dr. what’s-her-name gets up, a little irritated. I’m not taking this seriously. I’m scared shitless.
“There must be a lot of issues around the break-up,” she says, hopefully. Issues. Yes, there are many issues. But not about the break-up of my marriage. That’s not what I want to discuss.
She pours a glass of carrot juice from the tray on the table between us and offers it to me, but I refuse. In Santa Irene I lived on wood jelly and water. Sometimes I think that’s all that’s left of me.
“Say something,” she says, but gently; it takes me by surprise. She leans in and caresses my hand. Not a professional thing to do at all. There must be a code of ethics. Or maybe there’s just a bag of tricks. But it works. It gets me going. Goddamn her.
“My wife is not, was never, a really nurturing kind of person,” I say. This is not what I want to talk about! That glass of carrot juice. If I won’t have it she won’t either. It’s just going to go to waste. “She’s an artist, she’s a talent, she’s exciting and beautiful and full of life, and I dragged her off to Santa Irene because of my career with the foreign service. And she stopped painting, you know, because of me, because of what happened. She stopped painting, she went white. Her hair was black as night except for one streak of white when I met her. You know, she had the face of an eighteen-year-old, but there was that streak of white in all that black. Am I babbling? I’m supposed to babble, yes? Babble is good. Then when I came back, from my little … time away, my trip to the dark side … she’d gone all white, her hair was – what do they call it? – a shock of white. A shock. It was. And there was one time … well, there were many times. I’ll tell you about one time. I tried to kill myself. Uh, three times. It was really … disappointing for all of us, you know. Our hero survives worse than hell, and then …”
And then the words dry up because of the way she’s looking, so satisfied on a professional level. Here is her famously taciturn patient opening up when other therapists failed to get him to communicate. It’s written all over her face. The opening lines of her paper on treating Bill Burridge, torture
survivor.
“Yes?” she says, hopefully. She has the air of – of what? Of an irrepressible optimist. But she wouldn’t understand having your body broken, smothered, beaten, buried, forgotten for hopeless months but not giving in because of what’s inside you, the universal force, the seed, the tiny sprout that pushes through asphalt. The pain and terror of that push. No other choice so you do it.
“Is the time up?” I ask.
“No. I don’t want you to be concerned about time.”
“Oh,” I say, disappointed. If I wore a watch I’d be able to tell when the hour was finished.
“One day Maryse and Patrick came home,” I say. Without thinking I pick up the carrot juice. It’s unbelievably rich, it seems immoral somehow, far too much.
“Don’t stop,” she says. But without that look of professional triumph, so I keep going.
“They came home and Patrick saw some blood on the kitchen floor and he started screaming. I’d never heard such a scream. Well, I had, that was the problem, I’d heard it all too often. It was my own scream. The Kartouf used to hook me up to an electric-shock gizmo, a black box. They tried it everywhere on me. I think they were experimenting. Trying to get the hang of it. They’d had it done to them but they weren’t so practised at doing it to others. They’d shock me right to the edge and then shoot me up with drugs to keep me for next time. They were incompetents. They didn’t know what to do with me. That’s why they held me so long and why they fucked me up so badly. They did, literally, they fucked me. And they burned me with cigarettes. Just the smell of the smoke as they approached. It drove me wild with terror. They put me through a mock execution. I knew they would, I’d already figured it out, I just didn’t know when, and it doesn’t matter, because when they do it you’re terrified, every cell in your body screams in panic, nothing can prepare you for that. You see, I don’t really have trouble expressing this stuff. I wrote it in my book, I took my skin off in public, I could talk all day about it. I could talk all night, and all the next day. I could never shut up and I’d never get to the end of it, you see, there’s a Niagara Falls of shit here, an everlasting resource, and if I let it that’s all I’ll ever do with the rest of my life, process my own shit. And that’s not what I want. I want to do something useful for other people. Which is what I do. As you know, with my organization. I’m processing misery for a lot of the world. I don’t need to say any of this personal stuff. You know it and I know it.”