Burridge Unbound

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Burridge Unbound

BOOKS BY ALAN CUMYN

FICTION
Waiting for Li Ming
(1993)
Between Families and the Sky
(1995)
Man of Bone
(1998)
Burridge Unbound
(2000)
Losing It
(2001)

NON-FICTION
What in the World Is Going On?
(1998)

T
his is the moment people remember: the sudden intake of breath, the shift of attention. It’s Geneva or New York – for now I’m not sure which. If I thought it through I’d know. I haven’t entirely lost my mind. Things just fade in and out sometimes. I’m learning to live with it, as with so many other parts of my condition.

We’re a small group, just me, Derrick Langford, and Joanne Stoddart, the complete staff of Freedom International. Derrick has all the files, Joanne her nurse’s bag. I walk empty-handed. I’m the point-man, the face and mouthpiece; my job now is to not fall over. I try to stand straight, to do my breathing, to turn my elbows out a bit (for energy – everything is for energy). Derrick walks ahead because he knows where we’re going. Joanne stays a half-pace behind, her right hand free in case I stumble. If I stick to my breathing (abdominal; slow sips of air) and watch the horizon I’m usually all right. The table is grand, not the circle I expect but a huge rectangle, and the chairs have high sweeping backs and swivel soundlessly. The windows are high so nothing outside can distract us.

They’re all watching me. Men mostly, senior, overweight, distinguished, from two dozen different countries. They don’t rise, just stare. The special rapporteur – his name escapes me though I’ve met him before – half-rises and holds out a hand, which I grasp momentarily as I pass. He’s a Chilean with tiny, intense eyes and too firm a grip; every pore reeks of nicotine and worry. There are few smiles. One woman, the only female I notice besides Joanne, pales when she sees me but doesn’t look away. I’m the man who walked through the valley of the shadow of death. I didn’t succumb and yet I didn’t entirely survive either. I
became
the shadow of death. Despite the suit, the vitamins, the best efforts of modern medicine, damnation is written in every jutting bone of my face.

We reach our seats finally and I clutch the armrests like life preservers. So often people are struck by how still I appear, and yet my heart labours as if stuck in the wrong gear. Joanne reaches to touch my arm. “Breathe,” she says softly and I do, and it makes things better for a bit.

Derrick pours me a glass of water. I drink, close my eyes, try to focus. It’s New York. The United Nations. I threw up in the cab on the way here. My leg is already feeling uneasy. Shit for that. I’ve been fooling myself. Too much pressure. I shouldn’t have come.

More water. The special rapporteur speaks in solid, professorial paragraphs – long, structured thoughts laid like paving stones, the designs careful, crafted without wobbles or loose dirt or unexpected outcomes. He holds up my book, speaks of its “integrity of voice,” “passionate detail,” the “honest and personal account of horrors beyond our imagination.” The book has sent my voice around the world, I suppose, but mostly it sent my face, the dark ragged stare, the eloquence of the unexpressed.

It’s turning into one of the most famously unread documents of the decade. Briefly I did some talk shows, put up with interviews from young media people who didn’t seem to know what to ask or how. There have been prizes from humanitarian organizations, too many to remember – not that my memory has been much to rely on. I dwell on too much of what I need to forget, and have a tenuous grasp of everything else. Derrick has managed to spin the prizes into grants. I stole him from Amnesty International. I don’t know why he came, really; I couldn’t offer much money, and I’m not all that pleasant to deal with. Maybe this puts him more in the limelight. I’m the face and the name but everyone knows Derrick does everything. Don’t they know that?

Drifting again. I have to keep my mind focused. Especially in public. Everyone is clapping and I don’t know why. What did I miss? I look to Derrick but he’s clapping too. A large black man from Nigeria thumps the table with the palm of his hand. The special rapporteur stands and so does everyone else. I start to stand too but Joanne puts a hand on my shoulder. Of course. I’m three-quarters stupid half the time. It’s my condition. That’s what I tell myself anyway.

When the ovation is over Joanne passes me a note. The paper has the blue U.N. symbol in the top corner with
HUMAN RIGHTS COMMITTEE
in large black letters. Joanne’s writing is spidery, with thin pointy letters designed to be packed onto an airmail sheet.
“Why does the Pope keep his eyes up when he’s in the shower?”

I start to laugh as soon as I read it. Our oldest joke. Near the end of the interview in my sparse apartment, when she’d reviewed the long, daunting list of my ailments and had talked about her nursing stints in Rwanda, Sudan, Mozambique, I’d suddenly asked her to tell me a joke. Without a second’s
thought she asked about the Pope, and delivered the punch-line with genuine glee. “Because he doesn’t want to look down on the unemployed!” Her great bush of red hair shorter then, skin deeply freckled from so many stints in the tropics. Just the slightest shadow in her gaze, a tenseness in her shoulders and jaw, otherwise she looked untouched from her years of dealing with refugees. I told her most of all I needed someone who could say something funny on command. It doesn’t have to be new or in good taste or even particularly humorous. Just an attempt to lighten the mood.

The Spanish delegate is speaking. Again, I haven’t been following. Derrick has been taking notes. He has brown curly hair, intense eyebrows, an enormous head on quite a young body. His doodles range from the margins to the middle of the page, at times blocking out sections of his notes. Sometimes I’ve turned his pages upside down to look at what I’d swear were sexual organs, male and female mixed, pendulous testicles and breasts, a storm of pubic hair and vagina lips angling into a thigh that narrows phallic-like. Or maybe it’s just my mind.

On and on he goes, this Spanish fellow. If I plugged in the earphones, if I found the right setting for translation into English, I suppose I could follow what he’s saying. But I know already, have heard too many of these sorts of speeches. The words are careful, diplomatic, righteous in safe ways. They weigh in against torture, extrajudicial executions, disappearances, defend the individual from tyranny without naming the individual or the tyranny. Words we all can support without risking anything at all. I don’t need to hear them but I nod my head, giving the impression, perhaps, that I’m following in Spanish.

People will believe almost anything about a torture survivor – that I have a greater consciousness, a more developed
sense of conscience, a supernatural refinement of the higher emotions. That I don’t have a back passage. But I do, and the Spaniard has been talking too long. I clench, but everything about my bowels is delicate. I forgot my breathing. I deserve diarrhea. I forgot my fucking breathing! I try now to get it back against the panic. I’m going to shit my pants in the United Nations. The Spaniard goes on and on and the shit is coming sure as a train on greased rails. I knew I wasn’t ready. I could’ve just sent Derrick. He wrote the brief and he can read it better than I can anyway.

Joanne has a whole drugstore in her bag. Sometimes one little pill can make all the difference. I ought to know. Amitatriphyline for stress, insomnia, and depression. Cisapride for heartburn and my various digestive disorders. Furosemide and metoprolol for high blood pressure. Aspirin for my weak heart. Those are the ones I remember. Joanne keeps track of when and where and how much. I can’t keep it all in my shrinking brain. The metoprolol and aspirin work against the cisapride and mess up my digestion. Almost everything ruins my sex drive, and my heart is too weak for any new anti-impotence drug. Then there’s all the chemically induced laundry lint in my brain. Daily reality for a human-rights defender.