Drive-by Saviours (37 page)

DISAPPEARANCE JUST NORTH OF ZERO IN CHAPTER 24

I
t never occurred to Bumi to leave. he had no desire to
be beaten again, but giving up on his children was no option. He knew staying in Tana Toraja could cost him his life, but he could no longer imagine a life that didn't include them anyway. The Sunday after he was beaten he took revenge, of a sort, on his nemesis.

Bumi watched Mathias pull the two reluctant boys from the house toward the church. Yaty walked two steps behind him. Baharuddin walked with Mathias. The boy rolled back his head, the same motion Bumi had witnessed earlier.

“Stop twitching!” Mathias snapped. He swatted the child hard on the back of the head, snapped his face forward. The boy cried out in surprised pain.

Bumi, still stiff and sore everywhere, was on his adversary like a left tackle before anyone could react, his hands around Mathias's throat. Bumi screamed insults and profanities as if Mathias were a lifetime of undefeated rivals. Yaty and Baharuddin tried but failed to pull Bumi off.

Red-faced, Mathias clasped Bumi's wrists and tried to pull the angry hands from his neck, tried to kick the angry body from atop his own.

Bunga saved Mathias's life and Bumi's too when she ran from the house and looked her biological father in the eyes, pleading, “Please don't do this, Dad. Please. It's wrong.”

Bumi's harsh breath calmed and slowed as his fingers loosened their grip on flesh and vein. He pushed himself off of Mathias, stood and looked down at what he hoped was a broken man. He prepared himself for a retaliation that didn't come.

Mathias stood, dusted himself off, reclaimed Baharuddin and Beti's hands, and continued his stroll to church, head aloft. He breathed a bit heavily but otherwise seemed content with the world. His wife followed a few paces behind him, saying nothing.

Bunga took Bumi's hand and led him back to his tent. He sat heavily on his sleeping mat in front of the tent. He spread his elbows over his knees and pressed forehead against forearm. He felt old, as if an intense desire to restore his youth had flowed from his angry fingers into Mathias's stupid neck.

Bunga squeezed her own forehead against his, nudging his arms aside.

He reached up with one tired hand and stroked her hair.

“What's wrong, Dad?” she asked.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“What for?”

“Everything. Except maybe what I did just now. He shouldn't have slapped Baharuddin.”

“So what? Every kid gets slapped sometime.”

Bumi raised his head from his arms and she raised her face to meet his eyes. “A very Indonesian statement,” he said. “Parents who slap their children need help.'”

“Were you helping Mathias?” she asked in a flat voice that left Bumi unsure if she was being funny or earnest. Sarcasm wasn't really her way.

“I don't like how he makes you do so much housework,” Bumi said. “Like he's training you for the domicile. You are too smart to be some Big Man's servant.”

“Tell Mom that,” she said.

“You can tell her I said so. And you can also tell her that her son is sick. Baharuddin needs medical treatment, not slaps.” He decided to finish the attack he had started, enough living like a dog or a ghost or a creep in the night.

“I'll tell her,” Bunga said. “What's wrong with Baharuddin?”

“He's got what I've got, what I've had since I was his age,” he said. He told her about
OCD
, that it's a genetic disorder. He asked her if she'd noticed a change in her brother.

“He's always been weird,” she said.

“Does he wash a lot?”

“All the time,” she said. “With buckets of hot water. He wastes so much time heating pots of water, puts it in the bucket, and there's only one he'll use. He scrubs like crazy.”

“How long has that been going on?”

“Maybe a few months.”

“Tell your mother it's very serious and I need to talk to her,” he said.

Yaty had sworn loyalty to Mathias and that she would never again talk to Bumi. Her true loyalties were with her children. It took nothing less than the possible grave illness of her child, however remote that possibility, to convince her to break her promises to Mathias.

She visited his tent that night and made it clear that Canada had polluted his mind, and Torajans wouldn't see things like he did. “You lived off my labour for years,” she said. “You left me alone to clean up for you, to protect you from germs or spirits or whatever. You left me completely alone to fight your cause. And now you dare criticize Mathias for making Bunga do housework?”

“I was sick,” he said. “I didn't understand what I was doing. How much you put up with. How much I was hurting you.”

She didn't relent. “You must still be sick to attack my husband like that. What did he do wrong but enact a little discipline?”

“It was that same discipline my father used to enact,” Bumi said.

“It was just a little slap,” she said. “Not even a proper beating.”

“A proper beating? What is that?” he asked.

“You know what I mean,” Yaty said.

“No, I don't,” he said.

“Then your mind is definitely polluted.”

“My mind is clearer than it ever was before,” he said. “Listen, you don't understand. Baharuddin doesn't need any beating and it has nothing to do with my mind pollution.”

Yaty fidgeted from her crouched position but declined Bumi's offer to join him on his camping mattress.

“Remember how I used to be, Yaty?” Bumi said. “So uptight, so easily disturbed by any disruption to our space. My fidgeting, my routines, my washing? How I couldn't sleep at night?”

“Of course I remember,” she said. “Who do you think carried that burden?”

“You did,” he said. “And I'm sorry for that.”

“It was my pleasure as your wife, my duty and my honour.”

“It was too great a burden. I had no idea then, but in Canada I learned.”

“You learned corrupt Western ideas,” she said.

“Please,” he said. “I was corrupted by western ideas long before I left. We all were. It was revealed to me in Canada that I have been afflicted with something called obsessive-compulsive disorder.” He explained the nature of his obsessive fears of germs, failure and evil, and the compulsions designed to ward off such frightening outcomes, just as he had explained it to Bunga. He showed her his little blue miracle pills, told her how they, along with some self-awareness, therapy and discipline, had changed his life. “Haven't you seen how Baharuddin is developing these same behaviours?”

“I have noticed that he has become more like you since you returned to haunt my backyard,” she said.

Bumi smiled and bowed a little, knowing they had reached an impasse. “I humbly posit that Baharuddin can be treated by a modern medical doctor, and that slapping him will do no good because there is no deterrent strong enough to stop what is going through his mind. Nothing will scare him more than the perceived consequences of stopping his rituals.

“You can see for yourself the change in me, that I am more at ease, even living here in this dirt. Please, take the boy to see a head doctor.”

YATY HAD NOT GIVEN HER SECOND HUSBAND ANY WARNING THAT
she would communicate with the first, but once the conversation was complete she made no efforts to hide the broken promise.

“Bumi tells me he has a head disease,” she said to Mathias as she helped Bunga untether a buffalo. “He wanted to talk to me about it because he thinks Baharuddin may have inherited this disease.”

“Sick in the head?” Mathias said. “That's obvious enough.”

“I know he was never exactly a normal person,” she said. “He was very obsessed with dirt, and with strangers. It's hard to explain.”

“I've heard about his black magic, Yaty.”

“It wasn't black magic, exactly. It was rituals to protect himself, and his family.”

“Sounds like black magic to me.”

“He said he saw a doctor in Canada who gave him pills that helped. The doctor said he had something called obsessive-compulsive disorder. And now he thinks Baharuddin has the same thing.”

“Go make supper,” Mathias told Bunga.

“He thinks we should take Baharuddin to a head doctor,” Yaty continued.

Mathias nodded his head with pursed lips. “No,” he said. “We will take him to the priest tonight.”

The priest gave Baharuddin a new ritual: prayer. Bunga consulted the closest Imam, who recommended even more frequent and reverent prayer. A spiritual friend of Yaty's consulted a
bara
, a Torajan spiritual leader, who said that the boy was probably under a curse, and that if he survived and became well again he was likely gifted himself, and ready for apprenticeship. Mathias, an ardent Christian, refused to take Baharuddin to the
bara
's office, which he referred to as the ‘Hocus Locus.' “We don't play with spirits in this house,” he said.

Mathias was slightly less sceptical about Western medicine, but he refused to accept that the boy was really sick. “He's too much like his father,” he said. “If he prays for guidance he'll learn to act properly in time. We will all pray together as a family.”

Within a few weeks their prayers were answered, and for the second time Bumi gave his own thanks to God. Through still puffy lips he told Bunga one night, “Thank God for my influence over Baharuddin, that he is an obedient boy and that he responds to the same medicine I do.”

Back inside Mathias told Bunga that God answers the prayers of the faithful. “Now if only the boy would stop gaining weight,” Yaty said.

“Maybe we should get some of those diet pills,” Mathias said.

AFTER THREE MONTHS OF SHARING HIS PILLS WITH BAHARUDDIN
Bumi ran out of medication. For nine months he had practised Doctor Cherian's behaviour therapy with the same commitment he had once practiced counting and checking rituals. He had learned the logical tricks to counter the obsessive thoughts that pummelled his brain the moment his synaptic guard was down. He was now aware that, theoretically at least, the germs in the dirt were less threatening to him than his own thoughts about them. Literally, if he ignored them they would go away. But it was easier logically than practically. Intuition was a dangerous crutch.

Fortunately for his sanity he was living in an optimal high-exposure environment, exactly the atmosphere needed to challenge the logic of his obsessions. By their logic, he should be dead in hours without constant hot water purifications, not to mention counting and reciting to protect loved ones, the most important of whom he could observe and scrutinize daily. Bumi rolled around in the dirt each morning and muttered, “Fuck you, Germs. Come and fucking get me if you have any guts.”

Baharuddin had not had the mental and behavioural training Bumi had. To date no one had mentioned
OCD
to him. His only advice had come from a priest whose faith he didn't share. He'd been force-fed pills he didn't understand, and he'd been denied access to the most exciting and authoritative source of knowledge: the local
bara
clinic, the old way.

A combination of prayer and pills drove all his most annoying thoughts away, which freed him to draw his fantastical interpretations of reality. With the pills gone, he became scared again of germs and had persistent guilt that he had done some nebulous and horrible thing, though he couldn't finger what it was. The best he could do was draw scenes of a small masked figure plunging daggers into shadowy bodies, and when his sister and mother found these they immediately destroyed them before Mathias saw them and thought the boy was demented. And they took his sketch pad away, just for a little while they said.

Without his sketch pad, Baharuddin felt even more lost, more convinced he'd done something terrible. He confessed to his stepfather's best friend, a policeman named Edi, that he had committed murder, but that he couldn't remember who he killed. Edi asked just a few questions and brought Baharuddin home, where he pulled Mathias aside. He whispered but was loud enough for Baharuddin to hear. “I don't want to cause you alarm,” he said, “but I think the boy needs professional help.”

Mathias nodded and thanked Edi, saying he should come by for dinner some time.

BUMI WOKE UP TO THE SOUND OF BAHARUDDIN'S CRIES, AND ONCE
again saw red from his blind spot to the bridge of his nose. He rushed to the house, in through the back door, to the family's sitting room, where Mathias held Baharuddin tight by his scuffed collar.

Mathias turned to Bumi, red-faced. “You,” he said.

“Help me, Daddy,” Baharuddin whimpered.

The two men stared at each other. Bumi's shoulders heaved. “Let go of my son,” Bumi said.

“He is no longer your son,” Mathias said. “You left him.”