Burridge Unbound (2 page)

Still the Spaniard speaks on. I’ve been so preoccupied keeping back the mudslide that I haven’t paid attention to the crawling, itching, pulling in my leg. Now I squirm. Sweat seeps down my face, onto my shirt collar and jacket. Why did I agree to wear a tie? Respect for the goddamn United Nations. Stupid, lame, impotent organization. Begging for money. They don’t even have air conditioning. What a travesty. I was clear with Derrick and he was clear with them. No fucking speeches. I don’t need to hear this Spanish crap. It wasn’t on the schedule and I don’t have to put up with it. My
leg burning now, I can’t keep it back. I should’ve videotaped my testimony and stayed home.

This is my last thought before my leg jerks out and slams the underside of the table. Everyone’s water jumps and Derrick’s pen flies out of his hand. At least the Spaniard stops talking, but the damage is done – my pants are now full of runny, toxic, smelly shit. Joanne knows exactly what’s happened and knows too she can’t do a thing about it. Derrick gets out of his seat to retrieve his pen. The Spaniard finishes up. My leg slams the table again and another jet of shit surges to freedom. In my incarceration, in the closet in the hood with my limbs shackled, I learned to be still as a rock under a lizard. But no more. I have control over nothing.

Everybody’s staring.
Now
it’s my turn to speak. But if I stand up the shit will run down my trousers. If I stay seated my leg will just keep jerking up every thirty seconds – Restless Leg Syndrome.

Joanne leans in. Everyone is watching. “Do you want to leave?” she asks in a voice as soothing as flannel sheets on a winter’s night. I think that’s why I hired her. For her jokes, her voice, and her eyes, a thousand shades of green and brown. I can imagine those refugees staggering into the holding camps, rubbing the dust from their vision. We soak in energy from people and sometimes it’s cleansing and sometimes it frazzles and defeats.

“We can come back and do this another time,” she says. “It’s just talk.”

It is. Just talk. Talk can happen now or later. Talk changes nothing. Words are written on paper. Sounds vibrate eardrums and the words go onto different paper, are printed up and mailed to libraries and offices around the world where they sit largely unread. Nothing actually changes. Helicopters still arrive in
mountain villages and huts are still set ablaze and children are gunned down as they flee. I’m not the only one who has seen it and talked about it. But I
suffered
and I’m an ex-diplomat. I come from the moneyed part of the world, so prizes have been bestowed upon me for that and for my useless bloody words.

I get to my feet before my leg jerks out again. Maybe they can’t see. Maybe they’re all diplomats, so they purposely don’t notice. It’s only three or four steps. My hands can’t keep still to hold Derrick’s speech, so I just set the papers down and grip the sides of the lectern. Breathe and breathe and breathe. Look to the horizon. I jiggle my leg to stop the jerking and more shit slides down, now onto my socks and shoes. The scent of my own rot. So familiar. Let them smell it. The reek of a life coming apart.

“In the mountains of Santa Irene,” I read in my quavering voice, using the Spanish pronunciation,
Ee-ray-nay
, “government troops are carrying out a systematic slaughter of villagers suspected of harbouring guerrillas of the rebel resistance group Kartouf. They arrive sometimes in broad daylight, but usually at night, two or three helicopters in a pack. They rake the village first with machine-gun fire and then they set fire to the huts and the surrounding jungle. The villages are small but often thirty to sixty people die at a time, sometimes as many as two hundred.”

I lose my place briefly. Derrick has triple-spaced and used a large font, but when I’m tired my vision can’t be trusted. Sometimes the world goes blurry. No doubt the pause makes the delegates wonder if I’m overcome with emotion. I’m just trying to see the words. I blink and look, blink and look. Breathe and breathe and breathe.

“As many of you know,” I say finally, abandoning the text, “the Kartouf are a terrorist organization. As a junior diplomat
only three weeks in the country I was kidnapped and suffered their hospitality, longed for death every moment under their care. I harbour no protective feelings for the Kartouf. But the government of Santa Irene is committing cold-blooded murder of largely innocent people. They have used my incarceration to step up their campaign, which infuriates me no end. I’m personally involved in this struggle. My organization, of course, advocates peace, justice, and human rights around the world. Blood is flowing in so many parts of the planet. But I’ve come to add my voice to this one small struggle for the human soul. I’m asking you to add your voices as well. Create an international outcry. Use my name as much as you wish. Our report is in front of you. You don’t really need to hear the words from me. You already know the right thing to do.
Do it.”

I’ve said enough, but for a time I look back at Derrick’s notes to try to see what I’ve left out. The sources of documentation. The names of the villages. The letters from survivors. What was it one of them said?
They eat us like locusts and our blood becomes the soil
. I know these words are there but my eyes are blurry still.

I don’t sit down, don’t wait for the clapping, for questions. My leg has to move anyway. I think it’s this way. In a moment Derrick and Joanne are back with me. I feel smaller, bent like an old man, though not yet forty. I feel like I’m walking up an endless hill. “I’m sorry,” I mutter over and over.

Joanne finds the washroom. Derrick goes back to deal with the committee. He knows the details anyway. I feel so humiliated. The washroom is finely appointed, as they say, everything mirrored and gleaming. I lean against the counter – marble? certainly cold, hard, and smooth – and I fail to look away from the mirror soon enough. That haggard face, the doomed eyes, the sparse greying hair. It’s me. I look like a street person. Two
years after freedom and I’m still so far beyond the bandwidth of normal human experience.

Joanne peels me down and wipes me. Slowly, calmly, rinsing her cloth from time to time, soiling the beautiful sink. Does the world know what expenses have been lavished on the United Nations’ washrooms?

“I was travelling once in India,” a voice says. I hear it as in a dream. “On a train, in Maharashtra. Third class. I thought it was all I could afford.” Such a voice, I’m thinking, my head down, my eyes shut tight. Joanne daubing me clean. What if someone comes in? I don’t even know if this is the men’s washroom or the women’s. I didn’t notice urinals. I wasn’t looking for them.

“It was alarmingly hot, and we were wedged in like cattle. You know those trains, the peasants riding on the roofs with all their bags. I actually had a seat inside, but I didn’t dare get up to pee because five different people had been standing for a hundred miles staring at me and my seat. I was twenty-one, I didn’t know any better. I just crossed my legs. Sometime in the night my period came, and I still didn’t want to get up. I thought everybody knew. They could smell me. Some of them slept standing up. One little man fell asleep on the floor with his head under my seat. I thought I was going to drip on him.”

Daubing, wiping, cleaning the cloth. Cool on my legs. Of course the voice is Joanne’s.

“It was so hot. I’d sweated through my clothes, I thought everyone could see right into my underwear. The train eased along at about twenty miles an hour and we were stewing. I felt like the frog in the pot that just keeps heating up. Why didn’t I buy a first-class ticket? I had two hundred dollars’ safety money sewn into my bra. I was saving it for a real emergency. But something happens to your brain in the heat. After
a time I knew I was going to die but I decided I’d go nobly. Without a word. I’d just … 
expire
in my seat.”

The cool cloth on my legs, bum, testicles. Those silly, useless ornaments. A beautiful woman is washing my body. If I were a teenager I would’ve exploded already. Now – sagging meat. Pitiful.

“Somehow I lasted the entire night without moving. I willed myself into another state. I think I was seeing angels by the morning. I finally got up and went to the bathroom. My God. The door was broken. There was absolutely no privacy. I didn’t care by then, I was in such need. But from where I crouched I could see in a cracked mirror a Hindu woman performing her morning ablutions. She had almost nothing – her sari, her fingers, a bit of saliva. But in five minutes she’d washed herself completely, had wiped away the dirt and fatigue, the grinding desperation of that journey. Just rubbing herself here and there. She emerged the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen: refreshed, radiant, like she was floating a few feet above everything.”

Joanne tosses my underwear in the sink. I tell her to just throw it out, but she soaps and rinses it instead, wrings it with her strong, competent hands. “Whenever things got really bad in the camps,” she says, “I thought of that Hindu woman. And I always made sure that I cleaned myself at the start and end of every day.”

She fits me with an adult diaper. There’s another name for them. She’d suggested I wear one in the first place but I told her I wasn’t going to the United Nations wearing a diaper. Idiot. It feels bulky and completely conspicuous. Everyone will know instantly. Why does such a skinny man have such a huge butt? But it doesn’t matter. “Thank you,” I say, again and again, as she rinses out my trousers.

“Did you hear about the bombing in the New York City police department?” she asks gravely.

“No. There was a bombing?”

“In the washroom,” she says. “They’ve just started their investigation.
So far police have nothing to go on.”

Her smile. That’s the best part of any joke she tells. Like a sly bend of a creek in sunshine, heading back into shadows. It’s such a slight and ridiculous straw, you’d never suspect it could hold the weight of a grown man’s life, through days like this of sewage and despair and worse, I’m afraid, far worse.

“How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” she continues, now using the hand-drying hot-air blower to dry my pants.

I shake my head.

“One to nail the bicycle to the wall, and three more to put the giraffe in the bathtub.”

“Yes,” I say, standing in a diaper in the United Nations, waiting for the streak of sunlight on the bend in the creek.

Sometimes when I sit in my corner office in my apartment, twenty-seven flights above the ground, I have the illusion of
flying. Not as in an airplane, but like an eagle, soaring over the city at dawn, the sun reflecting purple on the Gatineau Hills, pouring liquid light into the Ottawa River. The whole world stretches before me. It doesn’t look like a wounded place, but large, big-shouldered, impassive in the face of what we’re doing to one another.

Clouds move in slowly and the light turns ordinary. The traffic starts to build on the bridges across the river, and the deep green of the trees surrounding Parliament Hill turns dull and unremarkable as the morning stretches. From where I sit I can even see the smog line and the blue above it. It’s late August – no leaves have turned yet, but we know what’s brewing.