Drive-by Saviours (10 page)

Guilt wouldn't stop me though. I was addicted to the protection of the pack, the safety of friendship, and especially to the comfort of its loyalty. I needed the thrill of the verbal hunt, lusted for the spill of my sister's blood in the court of public perception. It was the only arena where I knew I could beat her, especially if she wasn't actually there to defend herself. The pinnacle of my assault was a junior high presentation called ‘Why My Sister is a Big Fat Jerk From Another Planet.' It got huge laughs and a B-.

Maybe I knew she was suffering. That suffering was plain enough to anyone who dared to look. But my parents kept berating her, “Stop twitching! Get out of the bathroom! Clean your room!”

I turned my back on Michelle, her weirdness and on everyone else's meanness about it. Fuck her. She betrayed me first.

ONE THOUSAND AND EIGHTY-NINE SCHOOL DAYS TO CHAPTER 7

I
n 1983 the government of Indonesia decided its Education
as Development Program had done wonders for the children of Rilaka, who by that time spoke excellent Indonesian and were learning valuable new-economy survival skills. The program had been so successful, in fact, that it could be discontinued in order to save money, and still be called a success, and so it was. No more Rilakan children were brought to Makassar.

Bumi and his cohorts became the only living symbols of a job well done. In order to demonstrate that achievement, Bumi's class would stay on in Makassar beyond the initial four-year plan, right up until their graduation from secondary school, with no visits home. Contamination from the backwardness of their origin was still a threat to their development. During their three weeks off per year the children took extra credit in English to get a head start. Being linguistically inferior to their mainland schoolmates they would need it.

Three years later, by intergovernmental decree from the same international origins and through the same channels as the orders that brought Rilaka's children to Makassar, a hygiene program was introduced in schools throughout the Asian archipelago. The first exiled boys and girls of Rilaka received the benefit of hygiene education in
1986
, during the wet season. They learned proper washing techniques to erase deadly body-wide bacteria. The hygiene lecture was accompanied by pictures blown up from microscopic images into nine-eyed monsters. They resembled the monsters Bumi had once imagined lurking in the sea, lusting for fishermen's flesh. Apparently these monsters lived deep in his own skin.

It was that same year when first one, then another and another of the boys in the Rilaka dormitory discovered the joys of self-love. As others caught on, the dorm became filled with undercover hand jobs in a masturbatory marathon. When they were finished the boys had little time for guilt or embarrassment as a sweet natural sedative set in. Bumi was an exception, not to the jacking off, but to what happened afterward. The words of his teacher, Pak Guntur, pulsed powerfully through his brain: “Nothing kills bacteria like hot water and soap.” While the other boys made do with cold water and soap the next morning, Bumi could not erase these monstrous microscopic images with cool sweet water, and he could not wait til morning. The words of his teacher rang in his ears.

Seeing those things on his hands, his penis, his face, in the form of acne, Bumi wanted the bacteria dead. After five years of ducking teachers and local government peace and order officers, fighting classmates verbally and with fists, learning about dictatorship and international corruption, crime and the oppression of his country, its stagnation and conflation while its so-called leaders fattened their waddles and pockets, Bumi made bacteria his worst enemy, one he'd risk everything to destroy or at least keep at bay.

There was no hot water in the rooms, just one large basin on each floor, filled daily from a communal tap. The only place where hot water could be obtained was the school kitchen. Accessing this facility at night required sneaking out of the Rilaka boys' floor and past the other dormitories, a risky manoeuvre that no sane boy would attempt. But Bumi saw tentacled, nine-eyed bacteria marching through the front lines of his skin. Come whatever hellfire may, he needed hot water.

Bumi soundlessly made way for the kitchen, heated a burner, boiled water, removed the kettle from the heat just before the whistle and managed to make not a single sound until the one-hundred-degree water hit his left hand and burned it severely. His screams surged through the night.

A crowd of people, including the headmaster, chief cook, three teachers and a nurse, descended upon the screaming boy within minutes. But such was their alarm at his pitiful sight that no one thought to cane him until eight days later when his hand was fully healed.

Bumi always learned quickly, and knew upon second attempt to let the water cool slightly. So as not to risk too much time in the midnight kitchen he next developed a process of mixing boiling water with cool water in a two-to-one ratio for a sterilizing, skin-ripening effect that left most of his flesh intact.

These midnight trips brought dawn's early classes faster and harder. Punishment for latecomers was swift and no excuses were heard. On two occasions Bumi returned stealthily from his midnight sterilization so tired that he forgot to set his small alarm clock and had to be hauled from his bed after first class by an angry teacher. On the second such occasion Bumi happened to be naked—a result of mid-dry-season heat—and fully erect. Despite the other boys' nightly masturbation, they laughed at him.

Bumi became so scared of sleeping in that he could barely sleep at all. He checked his alarm clock throughout the night. When it went off in the morning he was so exhausted he just turned it off and slept late anyway, often right through his first class.

Fortunately for Bumi, his first class was literature and he'd long since read all the officially sanctioned Indonesian novels, poetry and other nationalist literary trumpets. It was second class, mathematics, where the trouble began, despite his head and heart for numbers. While the other boys learned the basics of algebra, Bumi became lost in standard numeric patterns and began creating his own codes linking numbers and simple dotted pictures to letters, words and, eventually, visual waves. His greatest joy was derived by mapping x and
3
x(1-x) on a graph using a series of incrementally increasing values for x, with thousands of different values, and creating a piece of abstract art.

Fascinating as this work was to Bumi, his teachers were not so thrilled. When his midterm test was returned to him with the number ‘
33
' on it, thirty-three became his new obsession, and the more he explored this obsession the more convinced he became of its universal significance, a double fortification of the magical triad, three being the only prime that is one less than a perfect square.

Three makes a triangle, the strongest thing in nature whether at the core, mantle or crust of the third planet from the sun, on which atoms have three components, molecules bond in three ways, and our species uses its id, ego and superego to perceive three spatial dimensions and three hues of colour. Even the soul itself has been divided into the hungry, the spiritual, and the rational, and in the modern-day materialist world we find upper, middle, and impoverished classes of human beings in first, second and third world countries.

There are three kinds of shaman, those of the forest, those of the mountain, and those of the water. There are three kinds of witches too: maiden, mother, and crone. Taoists have the Three Pure Ones. Buddhists make three counter-clockwise rotations of the temple to show reverence for the holy Buddha, who has three bodies. But the holiest and luckiest number for Buddhists is
108
, and 1 +
0
+
8
=
9
, or
3
times
3
. As for Hindus, they believe in three cosmic functions: creation, maintenance and destruction. Christians revere the Holy Trinity and believe that their Saviour rose on the third day, just like the three wise men knew he would, with their three gifts. In Bumi's half-hearted religion, one makes pilgrimage to three holy cities. The Jews have Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot; Moses, Aaron and Miriam; the Torah, Nevi'im, and Ketuvim; Shacharit, Mincha, and Maariv; and Kohen, Levi, and Israel.

Three is said to be ominous in many cultures, like those Chinese triads, but it is also the number of generations of human rights principles.

Bumi spent innumerable hours at the school and municipal libraries reading anything he could find related to the numbers three and thirty-three, the age of that Christian saviour who had so shaped America, which Syam said controlled the World Bank and which Syam also said had come up with the development scheme that landed Bumi in this hell because they wanted to make him civilized. Yet strangely, civilization, that mysterious word that Jesus' followers wanted Bumi to become part of, was born at the latitude and longitude of
33
. These were the things Bumi studied in his thirteenth year. Nonsense of no particular nature.

Thirty-three would have been Yusupu's age by then. Thirty-three squared equals the number of days Bumi spent in school, to the day he got his algebra test back. Nonsense of that nature.

Bumi spent the entire ninety minutes of his second algebra test on the first question, which happened to be worth one third, or about
33
percent, of the total grade. He completed the equations correctly within ten minutes, but from there his answer transformed into a pattern analysis and a treatise on fatherless children.

With fifteen minutes left he managed to forcefully rein himself in from linking forced migratory education of peasant children to global economic forces and spent the final fourteen minutes checking and re-checking his initial equations, correcting minor mistakes and rewriting for legibility. For his equations Bumi received
32
out of
33
; for his patterns he was given five bonus points, and for his discussion on broken paternal bonds he received a written reprimand on wasted potential, despite his having specifically avoided any content criticizing the teacher's employer: The Government of Indonesia, for being a patsy of Uncle Sam and other neo-colonizers.

Bumi's overall score was
37
, an improvement of four for an average of
35
, which gave way to a whole new obsession with increases and averages. His goal became to maintain an improvement of two points per test. He failed to do so because he was unable to complete the first question on any given test. His teacher Pak Guntur reinforced that tendency by giving him a slightly less than perfect mark each time, and was increasingly reluctant to give bonus points for unsolicited Dictums of Pattern, regardless of how advanced they were. To his own and his teacher's chagrin, Bumi was going to fail algebra despite his overdeveloped parietal cortex—perhaps in part because of it.

Bumi's saving grace was his literature class, in which he wrote his first short story, '
33
,' about the effects of severing one boy's connection to the age-old pattern of his family line. The disconnect was the result of alcohol abuse and pragmatically made no mention of government, school or even fishing. Like so many children of national despots before him, Bumi was learning how to stay out of trouble.

BUMI LEARNED THE MOST FROM PAK SYAMSUDDIN, WHO EXEMPLIFIED
his lessons on trouble avoidance in a mundane daily existence, whereby even his wife and children had no idea how communist his intellect was. Communism had been a crime since its practitioners and theoreticians were hunted down and massacred in
1965
.

Publicly Syam was a quiet man, grateful to be employed as an educator, a lover of the objective realities he taught, dispassionate and disinterested in politics, a mild-mannered husband, father and homeowner who was gracious enough to guide an angry miscreant like Bumi onto a path toward respectability. Syam did not attend underground resistance meetings, nor did he take part in protest rallies.

His resistance was in mind and pen. He kept and hid journals meticulously, almost neurotically, so as not to get caught. Syam slept almost as little as Bumi, always assuring himself that his beautiful Eni was sound asleep before allowing himself to dig out his books and pen. Then he'd read and write furiously about the news of the day and how things could be different if the People could regain the run of their country. He recorded for future reference the activities of neighbours and colleagues who might have been suspicious of what went on in his mind, and the bribes of diplomacy that kept them on his side in practice if not in true sentiment.

Though Pak Syam owned a modest house and was not a man of great means, he was widely regarded as generous, sometimes to a fault. His generosity was a survival skill, one Bumi would have easily acquired under Syam's influence, had the boy owned any asset to bribe with.

Syam taught the boy much about politics, science and survival, but little about himself. He was a loving but distant tutor. Any personal disclosures were just part of his teaching. “Do you know why I became a teacher?” he asked Bumi one afternoon when the boy was showing more interest in the clock than his lessons.

Bumi shook his head.

“I could have been an academic star you know,” Syam said. “I finished my Master's when I was just twenty-one. I had full funding for a Ph.D.”

Bumi nodded.

“But I just couldn't handle the intellectual masturbation anymore.”

Bumi flinched at the word ‘masturbation.'

“What's wrong?” Syam asked.

“Well, what does that mean?”

Syam squinted at the boy.

“What you just said,” Bumi said. “What does that mean?”

“I'm sorry,” Syam said. “Can you remind me what it was I just said?”

Bumi gritted his teeth and said, “Intellectual masturbation. I've never heard those words used together before. Is that an oxymoron?”

Syam snorted and considered the question. “I suppose it could be,” he said, “if you consider sex unintelligent or intellect asexual. But my honest opinion, Bumi, is that neither is necessarily true, and the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Sex can be an intellectual endeavour. But I'm not sure I'd recommend it that way. And it's certainly a learning experience, if you do it right.