Drive-by Saviours (23 page)

If he was bored he hid it well, with well-timed questions and exclamations, and an occasional brief anecdote of his own. “My wife works in a sweatshop,” he told us. “Not so bad like some of the ones you talk about.”

“Not
as
bad
as
some of the ones she talks about,” I corrected him. Sarah squinted at me, kicked me under the table and refilled my wine.

“Yes,” he concurred. “Not as bad. But still hard. She is paid very bad. She works very hard. Long hours. Lucky for us her brother and father makes good money.”

“Couldn't your father or brother use their connections to find her something better?” Sarah asked.

“Well, her job is good for a woman without university. Many womans in Indonesia work for the informal sector. They sell junk, beg, prostitute, make very small money,” he explained. “Her job is not so bad.”

Sarah nodded and repeated what he had said back to him in short-form and said, “Still, it must be difficult for her. And it must be so hard for you to be away from her and your children.” Sarah was a natural-born social worker. “So, do you think your wife will join you some day?” The flip side of the gift of Sarah's openness is her complete lack of tact. Not everyone can be so revealing with the facts of their lives, especially those residing under dubious circumstances.

Bumi took a sip from his tea and fished his fork around the crumbs remaining on his plate. “Not yet,” he said.

“That must be difficult,” she told him. She touched the raw, red skin of his right wrist. “I imagine you hope to be with her again someday.”

“Of course,” he said. “One day. Anything is possible.”

“Is that why you work so hard? Are you saving money so they can immigrate?”

Bumi cleared his throat a little and shifted in his seat. I kicked my beloved under the table, hard.

She kicked back and glared at me, either oblivious or defiant. A brick wall had wounded our swift conversation.

Bumi looked down at the table and mumbled, “It is difficult to say.” He cast me a lifeline-seeking glance. In all my conversations with Bumi he'd never talked much about his family.

Sarah blazed forward. “Yes, it must be so difficult to be so far away from them. Do you hear from them often?”

“Not so often, not yet,” Bumi said. “I miss them, yes.”

Sarah nodded.

“There is dessert!” I announced. I smiled at Bumi, who smiled thinly back.

We ate dessert without much further conversation. Bumi excused himself only an hour into primetime. “I must work early,” he said.

“You work so hard, Bumi,” Sarah told him at the front door. “There must be an easier way to reunite you with your family. You should meet my friend Lily, shouldn't he Mark?”

I nodded, swept away in the tornado of Sarah's enthusiasm. She did this to me sometimes and I hated it. How could I protest? Love is oppressive sometimes.

“Hang on a sec, Bumi,” Sarah said.

She jogged down the hall to our bedroom, leaving Bumi on the porch in a dirty, worn winter coat with fur collar pulled up over his head. The coat looked older than Bumi.

“Sarah is very enthusiastic,” I said.

“She a wonderful woman,” he said.

“She
is
a wonderful woman,” I said.

Sarah jogged back to us. She laughed at her own shortness of breath. “Here,” she said. She handed Bumi a piece of paper with Lily's name and number on it. “She is an amazing woman who deals with all kinds of international workers, immigrants, asylum-seekers, you name it. Please give her a call. You never know.”

“Anything is possible,” Bumi said as he backed down the steps to the sidewalk. He waved and grinned from under his fur lining. “Thank you so much for
a
wonderful night.”

Sarah and I stood arm-in-arm and watched him walk down the road. When he was out of sight I turned on her. “Why did you ask him all those personal questions about his family?” I said. “Didn't you see how uncomfortable he was?”

She defended herself with an analysis of human interaction that would have made an academic sociologist blush. She said that in a time of severe social isolation the individual constructs a thick veneer to protect himself from the prying eyes of the public sphere.

“It's worse in rich countries,” she said, “where we worship almighty individualism. We even have commercials telling us not to follow the pack by drinking the sugar products they're selling. They tell us to look out for number one, but numbers two through six billion seem to be organized against us.

“Enter Bumi, the product of a collectivist society with an oppressive government that stuck its nose into his personal business. Yet, as a product of a collectivist society, he's probably, subconsciously, seeking out allies in the likes of, say, a social worker like you.

“In other words, Mark, he is dying to open up, but he can't yet. And you are so blinded by your own desire to be his Canadian pal that you can't even see how he's reaching out to you. That's why I pried.”

What could I say to this great lover of mine? I was a slave in her presence, albeit a lazy and messy one. Her mind's ideas were far too big and fast for me to keep up with whatever connections she was making. I just wanted, for once, to help one person in one tangible way, instead of writing euphemisms convincing people with money that the existence of their beloved society depended on trickling some of the Queen Victorias in the direction of my agency. I was good at that kind of bullshit. Maybe Sarah was too and was using it to weave fireworks around my mind and paint a rose-coloured image of her own actions.

Bumi had taken Lily's number. It was up to him what he did next. If he called her it was up to her if she was willing to help. If she was willing then it was up to greater forces to determine Bumi and his family's fate.

I accepted her argument, even though it was ethereal to me, and possibly just a bunch of random shit coming out of her mouth. I would sleep on it, try to remember the logic of it and see how it sat with me.

“Anyway,” she said, “hopefully he'll go see Lily. If anyone can help him, it's her. She's amazing, as you well know.”

I had to acquiesce. She was calling in a favour. This was her reimbursement for letting my Lily crush blow over so peacefully.

“Hey, what's with his hands and all those nervous twitches?” she asked, officially changing the subject.

“I told you. He's very obsessive. Washes his hands all the time, and how he counts to thirty-three or says things to himself thirty-three times. He told me he used to love to read. Now he gets stuck.”

“Stuck?”

“Stuck. Can't get past a few words. I don't understand it either. He's such a brilliant guy and he's just really stuck. I'm glad you gave him Lily's phone number, I really am.” I didn't mention my sister or how Bumi's habits reminded me of her. I never told Sarah much about Michelle. Just that I had an estranged sister in Portland.

Sarah shook her head. “Maybe I should have given him the number for my mom's therapist,” she said.

We went to bed together for the first time in a week.

I SAW BUMI THE NEXT WEEKEND. I RENTED A CAR AND TOOK HIM
up to the McMichael gallery in Kleinberg. He particularly enjoyed the Haida masks. He told me his Javanese mother used to tell him about the old
wayang
puppets and he described the pointed masks he saw in tourist shops in Makassar. “We tried to sell those in Makassar,” he told me. “Those tourists there just want snorkel equipment and boat rides.”

The
wayang
masks with their condescending toothless grins were not at all like the stark terror inspired by the Haida carvings and the animal clans and netherworld characters they represented, but they reminded Bumi of home and those ancient
wayang
plays anyway. “So long ago,” he said. I don't know if he was speaking of cultural or personal origins.

After covering the Group of Seven and Inuit art sections we stopped for a coffee and a sandwich nearby. I bought as always. Bumi never objected.

I'd decided by then to tell him about my sister, how Michelle, Mikki, reminded me so much of him, right down to the nervous tics and the always red hands. I knew it wouldn't be easy to talk about because I'd never told anyone about Mikki since I left home. After a few years defending my own position in my community and family by secretly berating the monster with whom I lived, I'd had enough of the mythology of it. I shoved the beast in my closet and locked the rusted door.

But here was Bumi, who according to Sarah was reaching out for help in his own subtle way. And I had no clue how to help him. If he had been a client maybe I could have asked the hard questions, but Bumi was becoming a friend. All I could think was to share my own stories with him, and hope that since he and Michelle were similar, he'd identify and reciprocate.

By the time we sat down with our coffee and food I had myself sufficiently psyched up to tell him about Michelle. But just as I opened my mouth, Bumi beat me to the story.

“I saw Lily,” he said.

Lily hadn't heard much from us since the refugee centre's tenth anniversary. I always meant to call her just as soon as things calmed down. But I felt awkward. My unrequited attraction left Lily completely asexual in my idiot mind, and to lust for something asexual was a bit repulsive. Easier to let Sarah be our joint correspondent with Lily. But Sarah had little desire to represent a fool like me to Lily, whom she so admired.

“How is Lily?” I asked.

“Great,” Bumi told me. “Like Sarah said. She says to say ‘hi' for you and Sarah.”

I corrected his grammar and he thanked me. “Lily says I can file for official refugee status,” he said. “Because of political persecution for my beliefs and for my behaviours. If I did that Canada would deport me. My request would be denied because of
reformasi
—our dictator has fell, and because I did not file immediately when I arrived in Canada. Or, I could stay here illegally and Yaty and the children could apply to immigrate here. But they would likely be denied because Yaty have no formal education or white-collar skills.”

“Sounds like Lily wasn't that much help after all.”

“She cured my short obsession about being a refugee,” he said.

His words seemed a good segue to my original intention to talk about my sister, but I'd lost my nerve. Bumi's situation depressed me and I felt more impotent at that coffee shop than I did at work. The rules had been written and approved by those with the votes, who had unintentionally colluded with international criminals and a now-retired dictator, and together they delivered the news, via Lily, that the thousands of miles and billions of litres of ocean separating Bumi from his family were nothing compared to the quantity of red tape that stood in his way.

“Bumi, do you think it would be safe for you to return now?”

“That is very difficult,” he said.

“Why?”

“I have the debt,” he said. Bumi had three more years of eighty-hour work weeks to go:
12
,
480
hours of hard labour before he could hope to see his children. If he reneged on his debt he would have no family to return to. Robadise's Chinese friends were more powerful than a corrupt Indonesian police force, especially now that the highest levels of corruption had been shuffled.

“Why did you run?” I asked. Sarah had planted a bold seed in me.

In barely a whisper Bumi told me a story, one that I'll never forget, about grotesque dead children and misplaced blame, about mental and physical torture and about a narrow escape across the ocean. I had to imagine the journey as a dotted line being drawn over a map. But rather than excite me like a journey should, Bumi's words made me feel powerless and constrained. There were too many crazy things happening that I couldn't stop. Bumi smiled at me and I noticed his big, off-white teeth with gaps, the only flaw in his facial beauty. It was the first genuine smile he had ever given me.

“All that is over now,” he said. “The next coffee on me.”

“Save your money for your debt,” I said.

He laughed. “Haven't you wondered how I get home with having no papers? I have wondered that. Lily give me the answer. I claim refugee status. I just wait until three more years, claim refugee status, and the government send me home. Lily has saved me ten years more debt! I thought I had to get smuggled home. Now I know better because you and Sarah helped me. Please, let me thank you in a small way.”

He smiled again and I could do nothing but laugh and slap him on the shoulder. I had never touched Bumi and even to touch his shoulder was electric, warm and radiant, like he was emanating heat stored from his equatorial days. I wondered how much his debt was. Maybe it was low enough that some good folks with moderate salaries, maybe a paper-pusher and a medium circulation catalogue model, could cover a portion of it and save him a few months.