Guntur glared into Bumi’s eyes, and decided to buy the act. “Never mind,” he said. “Next time you want to bring a guest to class, ask my permission first. Now go back to your seat.”
The overwhelming relief that leaked from Bumi’s lungs betrayed him when he saw Guntur drag Hafied toward the headmaster’s office. With all the fight scared out of him, his survival instincts kicked in and he found his seat in the classroom. He put his head down on his desk and heard utter silence in an atmosphere of confused fear. Guntur returned soon after, without Hafied, and proceeded with his geography lesson as if nothing unusual had happened.
DRIVEN BY PANICKED THOUGHTS OF SINISTER SCENARIOS INVOLVing state-sanctioned torture of an innocent, Bumi swallowed his fear hard and approached Pak Guntur after class. “What happened to Hafied?” he asked.
“I sent him home with the headmaster,” Guntur answered.
“Oh, thank you, Pak. Um, is he in any trouble?”
“No Bumi, he’ll be fine. If anyone was in trouble, well, it wouldn’t be the child. He’s innocent enough. Just be careful Bumi; please, just try to be a good boy.”
“Yessir,” Bumi blurted before bolting to the bus stop. He took a direct route to the market. Once again the bacteria monsters taunted him from their billboards. Their evil intentions compounded Bumi’s guilty imagined scenarios of Syam under torture, needles under his fingernails and toenails, electric shocks to his genitals, gang-rape of his wife, karate practice on his back. Bumi knew the stories of how the New Order gleaned information, or took revenge for the vaguely suspected crimes of their potential enemies. As Syam had once noted to him, the Indonesian authorities were not very good at discerning between enemies and friends, and tended to treat most people like the former. He had to get there fast to confess his sin, perhaps take the torture off of Syam and his family and onto his own body. He needed to be there immediately.
There was a large crowd surrounding the market, throngs of people standing around. Cursing, Bumi paid his fare and jumped into the outskirts of the crowd, yelling at people to make way for an emergency. One woman turned and scolded him, “Young man this is an emergency. A man has been killed!”
Bumi snapped back, “Well if he’s already dead what’s the emergency? My friend is in real trouble, and is hopefully still alive.” He pushed past with disgust at the people stopped just to stare, throwing elbows to ribs and making as rapid progress as his big awkward frame could. He barged right to the middle section of the crowd, where he saw a piece of daylight and charged for it, stumbling right to the body. Looking down his heart stopped beating for the second time that day. He recognized the bloodied face of his long-time friend. Pram.
He fell whooping like a wounded beast. He beat his chest in anguish. He cut his flesh with his nails. He tried to tear the pain and guilt away.
If only he hadn’t gone to Syam’s at all, he could have been with Pram, could have prevented it. “What happened here?” he cried to the crowd, who saw him as a madman now, so bereaved over a vagabond, to them a curiosity and, at best, an intellectual exercise in logistical planning. What does one do with a dead vagabond in the middle of the market?
NO ONE SAW WHAT HAPPENED. PRAM HAD SIX LARGE, BLOODY bruises across his face, like he’d been pummelled with a blunt object. There was no sign of Arum.
Someone called the police and a truck was on its way to take the body somewhere else. The police had no interest in solving the crime. There was no crime, they said. Just an accident. Bumi was torn between staying with his friend’s body and going on to save stupid Syam, with his meandering theories, his abstractions on the danger of abstractions and their unintended consequences.
His guilt was enormous. Stupid and brash to bring stupid brash Hafied to school. Unintended consequences. And no sign of Arum. With her mangled feet she couldn’t have gone far.
Bumi decided his own words were true. Pram was just a body now and Syam and his family might, with luck, still be living breathing human beings. He abandoned the body and, temporarily, his grief, and ran to Syam’s house. He expected the police to be swarming the place.
All was quiet when he ran inside. The family of three was just sitting down to supper. Syam eyed Bumi from behind the small kitchen table, with eyes like Yusupu used to have before he delivered a particularly savage beating. They were hot eyes, glistening with a deep invisible, yet tangible somehow, fire.
Bumi dropped to bended knee and laid his head on Syam’s forearm. He cried softly, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Syam, who had never laid an angry hand on any child, stood and pushed Bumi away. He towered over the boy. He pulled him up roughly and forced their eyes to meet. Syam was only two inches taller than Bumi, but he was a man and had twice Bumi’s strength. “Bumi,” he grumbled. “Who do you think you are? I, I gave you everything I had, my friendship, my globe, food, my knowledge… and you repay me by taking my son away from his own afternoon classes? Do you know the police were here asking us questions about communists?”
“They were here?”
“Yes, they were here. Fortunately they’re nothing more than trained baboons and I told them my son probably heard about communists from the crazy bums in the market, not from me. Fortunately, I’m well respected as a teacher and intellectual, and known as a patriot, otherwise the safety of my family could have been jeopardized. You know my family means everything to me.”
Bumi bolted out the door. He wanted to avenge Pram’s death, restore his honour and dignity—through violent means. His anger was toward Syam, his mentor, tutor, and friend, but looking deeper he had to acknowledge his own role in bringing goddamned stupid Hafied to class. Hafied, the little football junkie, had to choose that moment to take an interest in the words of his father.
Bumi ran back to the market. The body was gone. He ran through the market, up one street and down another, searching for Arum. He found no sign of her. He ran the five miles back to school. He arrived at the school-ground drenched in sweat. Daing wasted no time in delivering a wisecrack. Bumi levelled him with a vicious punch and descended upon his fallen body with several more, drawing spurting blood until his friend Robadise pulled him off and dragged him away from the scene before any teacher got involved.
DRAFTS FIVE THROUGH EIGHT IN CHAPTER 8
Good social workers don’t share my fear of action and conflict. Some of them crave it. The best ones have a conflict switch that shuts down their own feelings so they can strategically dissect the heightened emotions of others. They have bagfuls of touchless tactics. They can throw bureaucracy at anger, they can speak in calm soothing tones that smother panicked screeching, and they can use just the right language to help a client accept the blame for his own problems.
It’s not that social workers don’t see the way society crushes people. But good ones know they can’t do shit about it, so they focus on the possible. With time, effort and smarts they can change how a client deals with the world.
I’m not a good social worker. I’ve been fleeing conflict since I was a child. I ran from family conflict to join my friends, and I ran even farther away as soon as I got a student loan. I fled Nova Scotia, returned to the big city of my early childhood with saving-the-world dreams.
My sister flunked out of high school, remained at home and worked full-time at the local paper mill. During my undergrad I studied a lot of Freud-babble about family and childhood; learned strategies, tactics and techniques for counselling people who had suffered family trauma, or were living in dysfunctional situations. These theories fascinated me but I never related them to my own family. We students had been warned about our tendencies to self-diagnose, usually incorrectly, when learning about new disorders and behaviours. I hardly thought about my family at all. I put them out of my mind, barely kept in touch. And in the case of my sister, our adult relationship existed only through my mother’s updates. Michel
le and my stepfather never bothered to talk after she moved to the U.S.
The blackout, and in particular Hardhat’s proclamations of Osama and the bomb, reminded me of Michelle’s model cities and the havoc she brought down on her own creations. After the blackout, the Toronto Transit Commission and its crowds of civilized people going to work brought her to mind.
I had promised myself I’d be more open to people when the power came back, but when I saw them all I was hit with agoraphobia. I sat down at the front of the bus, which you’re supposed to leave clear for the elderly and the disabled. I pulled out my sketch pad and sketched the lot of them, all hobbled together, like a comic book proof before the colour artist does her magic. For the thousandth time I wished for my sister Michelle’s talent.
By the time I found Sarah snoring on the couch I had too many thoughts of ancient family history swirling in my head to bother with her. I went to bed and thought about Michelle some more. I thought about the girl she was, her genius of creation, with talents that far surpassed anything I could ever hope to achieve.
I’ve been drawing since I was a child. Once I entered the workforce I took classes every week. It kept my hands busy, scratched the itch that my computer keyboard gave me every day. I learned the techniques illustrators have used since the pencil was invented. But I was more craftsman than artist.
Then there was Michelle. Michelle was a true creator. She could make something out of nothing. Those models she made as an early teen progressed from representations of places she’d seen in books to thin-air creations. She invented entire cities writ small. She could have been a planner or an engineer, at least on a model scale. Real life was a different story.
In real life Michelle taught English as a Second Language to immigrants in Portland. It was honourable work but it wasn’t exactly earth-moving, for a genius. I thought about it all night, until my stomach hurt. I called in sick in the morning.
WHEN I TALK OF POST-BLACKOUT FREEDOM I’M NOT TALKING about a lottery win or a road trip. I still had to squeeze through the crush to work each day.
But after the blackout I attacked my sketchbook with a new vigour. I was after the freedom of creation. I drew pictures of faces I saw on the bus. But they weren’t just faces. They were fully formed stories that would break the hearts of any refugee hearing committee, if they dared let them through their fortresses of red tape.
The faces in those stories stood falsely accused and got locked away too young. Its wardens were my co-workers, all of whom became stupider and more annoying as the universe expanded. The turn of each new season, in this case summer to fall, brought new paperwork to file with my boss, Sherry, who had a remarkable gift for strategically repressing and unleashing the power of her perfectionism. Her micro-managerial tendencies sliced into every proposal, report or update I wrote for the pullers of our purse-strings. In times of planning ahead or executing daily mundane administrative tasks, I could easily go for weeks without a single Sherry sighting. As soon as the deadline approached for an important report she would begin a slow repetitive circle around my cubicle, popping her head in periodically with a cheerful ‘got a new draft yet?’
I was hesitant to expose the existence of even an unpolished draft to Sherry. It felt like placing a newborn into the claws of a velocisaurus raptor. You might get something back but it had no chance of resembling what you hatched. The predator would return with a bloodied tangle of frayed chunks of flesh and bone and say, “Great start. I just did a little word-smithing.” You’d want to hate the beast but you knew it was just behaving according to its nature just like anyone else. At least it was polite.
I’d return to my desk with my lifeless infant in hand, determined to bring it back, and I’d reconstruct it little by little, make it stronger and more velocisaurus-resistant, toil overtime if necessary, hot blood streaming through full veins at max pressure to stave off the sharp eyes of our predator of the skies. You can’t stop the inevitable and all my overtime probably only served to accelerate her next swoop. “Got that next draft ready for me?” Swoosh, snip, cut. The document gone only hours returned whimpering for help, breathing but barely alive, begging for another resuscitation or a swift mercy killing.
By the fifth through eighth draft I hated her and could not rationalize the hate away with pitiful excuses about the nature of a carnivore’s nutritional needs or even that she was just building my baby’s strength so that it could survive against even greater, more pitiless adversaries: government bureaucrats. I hated her more with every crossed out comma, every simplified sentence, every large word replaced with a smaller but equally effective synonym. I hated her until the final draft was done, printed, signed and shipped.
Then we would celebrate with a coffee. We would make limited small talk and discuss ‘next steps,’ what reports were needed soon by whom, and what other funding opportunities we could capitalize upon. Capitalize on. I had complete trust in her abilities and her character and she reciprocated that trust.
Aside from her carnivorous hunger for grammatical shortcomings, the only things I knew about Sherry were that she hated mornings, she had a toddler, she had been married two years, and she had vigorously opposed the amalgamation of Toronto’s neighbourhoods and regions into the Supercity in a series of letters to the mayors of what were then separate cities. She had lost the campaign but she still listed her city of residence as East York and refused to use Toronto as her return address.
“It just isn’t right, Mark,” she told me at lunch hour a week after the blackout. We had just submitted a half-million-dollar proposal. She pointed to a piece of junk mail addressed to her. On it her city was listed as Toronto. We sat at a picnic table outside the health centre, the envelope flapping in a cool autumn breeze. “This is not what the people wanted, and this is not in the best interest of our city.” Every word Sherry uttered was a well-enunciated public announcement. She spoke as if even a private conversation could be taped and later analyzed for the quality of her diction.
“I’ll drink to that,” I muttered through a smile. We clinked coffee cups. I could think of nothing else to say. I scanned the cafeteria walls for small-talk inspiration.
“What are your weekend plans?” Sherry asked.
“Going to Ottawa—Sarah’s mom and stepdad,” I said. I had little interest in Ottawa and even less interest in explaining why I was about to celebrate Ukrainian Christmas in October. I had other things on my mind. “Sherry,” I said, “say you were to psychoanalyze the social workers in this room. How would you diagnose them?”
“I think you are all healthy, hard-working people committed to making the world a better place,” she said. “Besides, it’s dangerous to psychoanalyze your co-workers or your family or yourself.”
“Really? Why?” We weren’t hack students any more.
“Because then you will see nothing but illness everywhere, including in yourself. Instead of helping people who really need it, you’ll end up badgering people who don’t. You could become obsessed with the sickness you see in people.”
“Speaking of being obsessed—” I said, thinking again of Michelle, but I didn’t get a chance to finish the thought. Mabel had found us.
“Hi guys.” Mabel was there when you needed her and when you didn’t, with that same emergency-prepared energy.
“Hi Mabel.” Sherry enunciated.
“Hey Mabel,” I mumbled, feeling the chasm between myself and my colleagues widen. Sherry sighed as Mabel sat down under the still-green maple tree and regaled us with her extensive Christmas plans and her ethical and practical struggle to decide whether to get an artificial or real tree.
Sherry looked Mabel in the eye without blinking. She nodded at the benefits of each option and shook her head with a tsk tsk at the senseless destruction of forests and emissions of tree-making factories. Why didn’t I care that the planet had come to depend on such inane human d
ecisions?
Behind me, at another picnic table, I could hear some of the MDs discussing the ongoing search for some sort of retrospective rationale for the invasion of Iraq, led by the elephant to the south of us. Now this, something over which I had no influence whatsoever, was an interesting topic. I took my nodding and head-shaking tsk tsking cues from Sherry and tuned my ears to the talk of war.
“One bullet,” Dr. Richard was saying. Dr. Richard was middle-aged Tom Selleck-handsome, very popular with patients. “One bullet to Saddam’s head could have saved a lot of lives. And money.”
“True,” Dr. Yvonne said. She was new, not far removed from med school. I once overheard her confess that she had spent a good chunk of her student loans on hip-hop dance classes.
“If you could find him. I guess, I mean, doesn’t he have all those doubles going around the country like some comic-book creep? It’s weird, eh?” She was too smart to let some cafeteria chit-chat force her into a position. I wondered if she diagnosed patients with the same lack of commitment.
“It’s all so fucked up over there, man,” Dr. James said. “It’s just gonna get worse. I can’t believe the shit I’m reading on Asian Times about Bush and Saddam. But they had to get rid of him somehow.”
I’m not sure if Dr. James, the youngest of the doctors, meant Bush or Saddam, but I had once heard him refer to himself as a self-loathing liberal, a comment that made me feel akin to him. But he was a doctor and I just a lowly social worker, a desk one at that. I wanted to join their conversation, maybe even a racquetball game or two, but I was at the top of my own class and unlikely to jump into theirs without re-tethering myself to some educational institution, propped up by the strings of bank interest and principle repayment.
As I eavesdropped Mabel talked herself into a real tree—locally grown—thanked us for our help and moved on to chat up the doctors. She had no awareness of class or professional divisions.
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