Drive-by Saviours (15 page)

ZERO TO SIXTY IN CHAPTER 11

I
n his six years as a factory worker Bumi became an
almost complete insomniac, read hundreds of books a year, lost complete touch with his coffee shop friends, and was in constant conflict with Yaty's family. He was forced to counter his unpleasant and unwanted fantasies of killing them by praying for their well-being to a God he deeply mistrusted. It was only his devotion to Yaty and his children that kept him living.

When Baharuddin was born Bumi was surprised to find himself as amazed by his second child as he was by the first. Bumi's dazed amazement inspired Yaty to choose the boy's name, a description of newness. Newness never fails to astound.

A week after Baharuddin's birth, taking inspiration from the novel
Roots
, Bumi took his seven-pound newborn into the small courtyard and cradled his whole backside in his dirty, calloused hands, and lifted the boy to the stars and the black heavens. He said, “Look my son.” Baharuddin cried as his white cotton blankets unfurled and fell around Bumi's hand.

“Look son,” Bumi repeated in a loud deep voice. “I want to tell you something very important. You are immensely special and important. Never let anyone tell you otherwise. In this world you will be expected to conform and you will receive nothing if not pressure to be numb, to obey, to feed the collective ambiguity. Don't let them do that to you. You are the most important thing, other than what you see high above and around you. Always remember that.”

Bumi gathered the crying infant back into his arms, covered him again and whispered gently into his ear, “You are more important than anything except the universe itself. God will never help you through this life and I am not a strong man. I will always give you my love and let you be what you want to be. The rest is up to you.” His best wisdom shared, Bumi returned the infant to Yaty and washed himself thoroughly for several hours.

Bunga, now five, was the consummate talker and regaled Baharuddin with tales of the schoolyard playground. Her monologues left Bumi longing for his long-abandoned sister, and covered his few sleeping hours with a rambling dream of Rilaka, in which Grandpa's ghost, Yusupu, Win, Syam and Pram stood all together around a bubbling pond. Overwrought with perverse curiosity, Bumi found himself emerging from the ocean water. He stumbled onto the shore and shook off the salty film, lunging arduously toward them, calling their names soundlessly and feeling very heavy. When he reached their circle they took no notice and went on chatting amicably amongst themselves as he nudged at their elbows. He was small again, smaller than he ever remembered being, though heavier, and the equal weight of his words were stuck in his throat. Noticing the absence of Alfi he began to panic. He kicked sand at the backs of their knees, trying unsuccessfully to shout.

Finally, he dove between Grandpa's bow legs and found himself tangled in Alfi's boiling limbs, his face against her rubbery face. He screamed a soundless scream and woke up with a quiet jolt in the hot dry morning, sweating a river over soaked sheets. He consoled himself with a reminder that the dream could have been worse, it could have been one of the usual dreams of numbers, germs, counting, washing, and chasing after unaccounted-for strangers. It had been a sounder sleep than usual.

It was Yaty who gave Bumi the news that the neighbour's son, an occasional playmate of Bunga and Baharuddin, had been found dead. Bumi tried to separate his dream from the reality of the dead boy, who was found bloated and drowned in his own vomit.

When Bumi had time to consider the unknown cause of death he was visited by the most disturbing of all the bizarre ideas he'd ever had: it was he who had killed the child. He knew in fact it was not his doing. He had no real memory of committing the heinous crime and there was no evidence that foul play was involved.

Still, it could have been him. Perhaps he had given the boy a dirty look across the fence one day that somehow led to heart failure, or perhaps an ill thought about the child and his family had strayed into the night and committed the foul deed. Maybe it was his dream that had put murderous demons in the child's heart. That thought tortured Bumi's head, chest and guts with its constant visits. He would logic it away and turn his thoughts elsewhere, only to find it standing once again in his mind's path with counter-arguments. “No evidence of foul play, but no evidence of anything else either,” it teased. There had been no illness forewarning the presence of
paddengngeng
, the invisible Buginese horsemen of death, yet the four-year-old child was banished to the Land of the Dead, an island in the far west, to await Judgment.

Bumi found it impossible to disprove the accusations of his twisted mind so he did all he could to repent and to assuage his painful guilt. He helped in the ritual bathing of the body and even contributed to the family's fee to the keeper of the heartland, paid via the local mosque, from his meagre resources. These traditions meant little to him because Rilaka's dead are bathed and buried by the sea, and recycled by the sharks. At school he had been taught to worship Allah, but any spirituality that lingered in his muddled scientific mind was of a more Animist nature. Having once known paradise on earth he had little use for a Supreme God or unknown future Heaven. He had, however, learned to hide his anger at God and it was never noticed or condemned by any human authority.

In helping his neighbours mourn and move forward he felt a connection to them for the first time in seven years living with Yaty's family. He felt that connection watching Bunga tell wide-eyed Baharuddin about the small dead boy, and how they had been playing together near the canal just the other day, and now he was gone. Bumi envisioned his life as a factory drone without these two small wonders awaiting his return home each evening, and he felt connected to his community in fear. The connection intensified his guilt and the tempo of his ritualistic mental dance.

A team of highly educated, specialized and extensively trained doctors with a combined hundred years' experience in different elements of the human body could not explain the boy's death. They autopsied, probed and pulled apart what remained of an innocent life-form and could not trace the source of evil. Bumi's brother-in-law, with his giant intellect and hulking size and his wide web of loquacious political connections, availed their considerable resources to smoke out the nefarious rat.

Surely Bumi would be caught and punished any moment. He tried to convince himself to confess and then countered that he hadn't actually done it. He decided that if indeed he was guilty he would be caught and properly punished, and that would only be fair.

It wasn't long before Robadise came knocking on Bumi's bedroom door. Having raised ballyhoo with all the neighbourhood bullies and found no signs of foul play among the young boy's friends, Robadise entered the private abode of his sister and brother-in-law in the full uniform of the local law, his gun dangling, aligned with the stripe of his pants.

Upon Robadise's arrival Bumi was engrossed in an illegal translation of de Tocqueville's
Democracy in America
and longing severely for a nation that had use for his ideas. Bumi marked his page and with a raw, reddened hand gestured toward the old La-Z-Boy in the corner.

Yaty and her family had long since become accustomed to Bumi's eccentricities: his incessant purification rituals that crossed the line toward self-abuse; his long morning routine of dressing, undressing, and redressing multiple times until he got it just right, which left him still somehow slovenly. His use of elbows and feet instead of hands, which were often protected in plastic bags; his strange and complex series of patterned twitches; his silly way of walking on the street, touching every post, and spinning and wiggling as he entered the house; and his harassment of strangers as they passed on foot, writing down their names and purposes or fretting inconsolably if they refused to provide the information. Even this room was forbidden to all but himself, his wife, and Robadise, and Yaty did her best with her rare and precious time to maintain it ‘just so' for him.

Besides the rituals were his late-night streams of audible profanity at whatever demons he was wrestling, his red bleary eyes, his vicious abuse of inanimate objects. These were tolerable and to be expected from someone of his genius, as long as he never laid hand to the children or his wife. The family was on a conscientious watch in case the focus of Bumi's abuse shifted from inanimate objects to human family members, which would result in swift banishment to the deepest, darkest corner of the most hideous penal institution Robadise could lay claim.

Despite Bumi's rage and twisted idiosyncrasies, Yaty and the children gazed upon his face with eyes filled only with awe and love. After his ten-hour shift he'd chase them through the house, build swords for them out of wood, wrestle with and toss them high, make up epic stories of gallantry and justice for them, all the usual fatherly demonstrations of unconditional love. He knew that life was hard for Yaty, and he didn't make it any easier with his strange habits and weird sense of order. Rather than complain, Yaty learned his ways well and kept things the way he liked them. In return he massaged her sore feet and hands and kissed her with a tenderness he only felt in her presence.

Here in the room where they still found time to make love at a far better than average frequency and clean up after themselves afterward, Bumi's one-time best friend, childhood companion and now brother-in-the-law sat like a Lieutenant-Governor or a French Naval Captain, face grave and eyes unsmiling, and prepared to pick at Bumi's mis-wired brain.

“So Brother, crazy about our neighbour's little boy, ya?” he began.

“Insane,” Bumi agreed nervously.

“An evil thing,” Robadise opined.

“Evil?” Bumi questioned.

“Don't you think? I mean how else would you describe the death of an innocent, one who had never hurt anyone? To die so suddenly and inexplicably. What would you call it, Bumi, if not evil?”

Bumi was uncertain which question to begin with but he feared the tone of this komodo-of-a-brother. “Tragic,” he muttered quietly, thinking, he knows it was me and now he just has to get my confession, or prove it somehow.

“That's remarkably objective of you,” Robadise replied, shifting his policemen's belt. “So, what do you think caused it?”

Whatever theories were swirling about Bumi's brain, and there were always theories swirling in there, he didn't much care to share them with Robadise, particularly his own fears that perhaps, somehow, he himself was the culprit. Bumi held tightly to his irrational fears and obsessions, and almost as tightly to his more rational ideas. He had learned in six years of fatherhood that knowledge and ideas come at a cost. They came easily, but in Indonesia they didn't come cheap. You read a few books and engaged in lively debate or conversations with your mates, drew out the thoughts of your exhausted spouse late at night, observed the events of your life and the events of those living around you, and came up with theories to explain all these things and the connections between them—or reasons behind them, that fit the facts as you saw them and experienced them. But if any of these theories happened to offend those in power and you happened to divulge such theories, bad things could happen. God help you if you lived your life in such a way, like Pram did, that contradicted the theories of those in power.

Bumi had learned this the hard way and had made a concerted effort to live his life in the safest Indonesian way. He responded to the calls for prayer; he made his Friday visits to the mosque; he helped his neighbours when they had need; and he even had a vasectomy soon after the birth of his second child. These were expected of a good Muslim in Makassar.

The only risk Bumi took was keeping his book collection, which he knew stood as potential evidence that he thought in ways contrary to expectations. He took what precautions he could, stored the books in obscure locations, behind panels, under clothing in drawers, propping up desks if necessary. The text of any book on Suharto's extensive banned list would pass before Bumi's eyes and into his brain within hours, late at night, and become fuel soon afterward. These practices he first learned from Pak Syam, but unlike Syam he lacked the means, charm and time to keep his enemies onside with subtle and minor bribes of kindness. He was too busy keeping the universe in check with his scientific rituals to worry about the small-minded and almost powerless idiots of the world around him. It was only the strangers wandering around his turf that worried him, until he figured out their purposes and missions.

Bumi did endeavour to enhance certain security practices and, on the advice of Robadise, had burned several philosophical journals of his thoughts on how best to organize societies. Robadise knew the art of covering one's trail frontward and backward and explained that only the most foolish criminals keep true records of their transactions, so Bumi's old journal was replaced with occasional minor opuses to the military and political genius of Indonesia's elite.

But Robadise's aim was more precise than all that. He repeated his question, interrupting Bumi's fearful thoughts. “Bumi, what do you think caused the boy's death?”

Robadise would never accept or believe, “I don't know.” Bumi admitted that he had given the matter some thought. As a diversion he confessed the dream he'd had about Alfi, his long-ago abandoned sister.