Drive-by Saviours (22 page)

TWO MEN IN THE WORLD OF CHAPTER 17

T
he harder Sarah tried, the more I withdrew, from
her, from everything. I left work earlier each day. Each day I bought a paper in front of Pape Station and read half a story. Then my fingers got itchy and I covertly sketched the people on the
TTC
—the Torontonians I wanted to know but was too shy to meet. I filled a sketchbook a week, but every sketch remained unfinished. I couldn't commit to any one person's face. I had to know them all, or at least know their silhouettes.

I preferred dark faces. Maybe I fetishized the noble brown man, his pain and strength. But also, they were easier to draw. White faces came out so lifeless, outlines of black around where flesh should be. But even dark faces were hard to concentrate on for long. My excitement always faded before I brought them to life. Maybe I just didn't have it in me to make them breathe, like Michelle could with her model cities. Better an incomplete possibility than a completed failure.

The face that most excited me became the most troublesome. He was a handsome brown man in grease-stained brown polyester slacks, scuffed black dress shoes and a green army surplus coat open over a white t-shirt, also grease-stained. He wore no jewellery and had no tattoos. He stared at a closed book.

He looked familiar but I hadn't met him. I had seen him somewhere before. Maybe he had been a client, but probably not. Everybody needs help sometime, but not this guy. This guy was dignity, even though his worn good looks were periodically scrunched up by little facial twitches, during which he rubbed his chin on his right and then his left shoulder. Even those twitches looked familiar. He was the dignity I'd always wished I could personify.

My charcoal pencil blew over the page like a gentle breeze, of its own volition. I could have put it in my weak hand and had the same results. But I was interrupted. He caught me in the act.

He stared at my pencil, as if he knew it was beyond my control. He put his book into his knapsack but he never took his eyes off the pencil. I put it and the sketchbook back into my briefcase and took a last good look at his features. Maybe I could recapture the magic and finish the sketch later.

He stood and approached me.

“Sorry to bother you, Sir,” he said. “Why are you drawing me?” He spoke in an accent, but not a strong one, and not one I recognized.

His question was straightforward enough, but the answer was complicated. I had been drawing since I was a child. The more life pissed me off the more I drew. To draw was to release. My sketch pad was like those little stress balls the other social workers liked to squeeze after tough appointments. I never put much thought into how my own release worked, or why drawing made me happy even though I wasn't all that good at it. It just did.

“I'm not sure,” I said.

He cocked an eyebrow at me.

“You have a beautiful face,” I said.

It was a stupid thing to say to a stranger, but it was true; his face was beautiful. And it was true that my desire to draw had something to do with the beauty of Torontonians' faces. I'd always longed to know that beauty somehow, especially since the blackout, when the light pollution fled the city and returned to that generator in Idaho or whatever damn place. In the dim emergency generators of the public transit system, in the warmth of humans bonding in the face of the same mysterious event, their colour and verve were revealed to me, as if replacing the other energy we'd lost, the one that turns everything grey. Why had I never seen it before? It was unfair that people hid their beauty like that.

The man looked at me with his same blank expression that conveyed, falsely or truthfully, a deep, cold anger. “I have rights,” he said. “This is a free country. I have my rights.”

I didn't see what he meant by that. Canada had never seemed all that free to me, and rights and freedom had little to do with drawing him. “What do you mean?” I said.

“I mean…” he trailed off. “Why are you drawing me? Why really?”

I took a deep breath. “Remember the blackout?” I said.

He nodded.

“Ever since the blackout I just really want to know people,” I said.

“You have no right to draw me,” he said.

“I'm sorry,” I told him, but I didn't feel sorry. I felt robbed.

“Why do you draw me?” he said. He came closer to my face and his own reddened. Dark veins appeared across his eyes. His beauty was putrefying.

I tried again to explain about how his face had inspired me.

“You gay?” he asked.

“I have a girlfriend. For now. That's maybe part of my problem.” I felt a little guilty then. Maybe it wasn't right to just draw people without their permission. Maybe I'd have better judgment and less desperation for human contact if Sarah, the woman I had lived with for the past five years for God's sake, understood me at all.

“Sexual crisis?” he said.

“Sort of,” I said. “No, not really. I think you mean sexual identity crisis, so no. I'm just having a tough time so I need an outlet. So I draw people. Badly.”

“You can't draw and yet you draw me? Let me see this drawing by a man who can't draw, please.”

I told him it was bad, unrealistic, and that I was a bit embarrassed to show it.

“Good,” he said. “We can destroy it. Give it to me, please.”

I looked down at my briefcase. “It's locked,” I said. I didn't want to give it to him. I had high hopes for that drawing.

“Unlock it, please,” he said.

I unlocked the briefcase and pulled my sketchbook out. I flipped through to the last drawing and ripped it out.

He took it from me and glanced down at it, stopped and said, “It's not done.” He handed it back to me.

I took it from him, expecting him to laugh or smile or crack up like a sociopath. His head stayed down and all I saw was his tussled, dandruff-infested hair. “Not finished,” was all I could think to say.

“Sorry,” he said. “My English is not good.”

The social worker part of my brain, which slept soundly during off-hours, snapped awake when I heard those words. I shifted mental gears. Instead of a guilty party caught red-handed, I became an ally for an oppressed minority.

My English is not good.
It was the most common gripe I heard from the immigrants I worked with. It was usually a mere echo of what they had been told by people who tried to maintain their positions of privilege by putting down the new kids—playground rules. It might be false modesty or some sort of reverse psychology suck-up, or perhaps just the lack of confidence that kicks in naturally when working outside of one's comfort zone, but on an almost weekly basis I'd hear some articulate expression of how bad someone's English was, complete with profuse apologies.

I answered him with both of my standard lines. The first was designed to mirror his frustration back to him and demonstrate my solidarity, to allow for the legitimacy of his words. The purpose of the second was to instil confidence and compare his frustration with the positive perception of another. “English is a very difficult language to learn,” I told him. “Your English is actually very good.” From there I improvised as appropriate to the specific file in hand. “The mistake you made is very common, even among native English speakers.”

He cocked his eyebrow at me. “Please finish,” he said. He pointed to the picture. “This picture,” he added. “I can show it to my wife one day. So she can see what I look like in Canada.”

Relieved, I agreed. “It will take some time,” I said. “If you give me your mailing address I can send it to you.”

He shook his head. “Give me your address,” he said. “I will pick it up next week.”

I wrote it down for him with my name.

“Mark,” he said.

I nodded my head and offered my hand.

He glanced to his left and back at me, then did another twitch, touching his chin to his right shoulder. Finally he grabbed my hand with a firm shake. “Bumi,” he said.

THIRTY-THREE SHOPPING DAYS LEFT IN CHAPTER 18

“Y
ou draw nice,” Bumi said when I handed him the
picture. He stood on my front porch and looked down at the finished product.

“Nice-ly,” I corrected without thinking, like some annoying, condescending father.

“Nicely,” he repeated.

“It could use something in the background,” I said, “to fill out the white space.”

He tilted his head, did that twitch of his, touched his chin to each of his shoulders. “Don't know,” he said. He looked up at me for the first time since I answered the doorbell. “Excuse me, may I use your toilet?”

I let him in and pointed down the hall. “I just put in new floors,” I announced.

He handed the picture back to me to hold. I had wanted to draw a few policemen behind him, off in the distance, maybe peering intently his way but trying to hide their interest. It was beyond my skill level. I did add in the closed book he'd been staring at. I even remembered the title, and I found the author on Google. It was called
The Fugitive
and it was written by a man named Pramoedya Ananta Toer, from Indonesia. He wrote much of his work in a prison colony during the Suharto regime, which is maybe what made me think of police officers watching Bumi from a distance.

Bumi spent a good twenty minutes in the washroom. Steam leaked out through the doorframe. “Everything alright?” I asked. I wished Sarah were home. She had a way with awkward situations. That is to say, she had a blind-spot to awkwardness. Why would she worry about a strange man emitting steam from our bathroom?

“Just one moment,” Bumi said from somewhere beyond the steam. He emerged a few minutes later rubbing his hands. I handed him back the picture.

“Who are you?” he asked me. “Why you so interest in me?”

I resisted the urge to correct his grammar. “Like I told you, I'm Mark, Mark McCloud. I'm a social worker.”

He raised his eyebrow at me. “Why you care about this?” he asked. He pointed to the drawing of his book.

“It's just a detail I remembered from the bus,” I said. “You were looking at this book, like you were reading it, but it was closed.”

“You think I need social worker?” he asked.

“
A
social worker,” I said, still correcting his grammatical errors on automatic.

“
A
social worker,” he said. “You think I need
a
social worker?”

I shook my head. “That's not my decision,” I said. “I mean, if you think you need a social worker you can get one. Or if you commit a crime or something you'd have to see one.”

Bumi's head snapped back like I'd punched him. “No, Mark, I have not committed a crime. Never.”

“Oh I know,” I said. “I'm just saying.”

I thought I should explain that “just saying” is an expression but he nodded his head as if it was all understood. His paranoia left me on edge. Maybe he did need a social worker. A good one. “So you okay with the picture?” I said. “I mean, we're good?”

“Yes,” he said. His gaze fell back to the picture. “Thank you.”

“I hope your wife likes it.”

Bumi snapped his head back up and he met my eyes. “My wife?”

“You said you'd send it to her.”

He nodded. “I will.”

“Do you want a cup of tea?” I said.

“No, thank you,” he said. He took a quick look at his watch. “Well, okay. Thank you.”

HE DIDN'T STAY LONG. I POURED HIM A CUP, TO WHICH HE ADDED
about ten spoonfuls of sugar, and he downed it in two gulps. He looked at his watch again. “I have to get to work,” he said.

I shook his hand at the door. His grip was gentler than I remembered. He smiled and stooped a little. I thanked him for coming and my gratitude was sincere.

“You are kind,” he said.

I wanted to know him better. I wanted to ask him where he worked at least, or why he was separated from his wife. But he was so paranoid. In his quirky mannerisms, his twitches and his herky-jerky changes of heart, he reminded me of Michelle. But Michelle was long gone, and he was right in front of me. “Look,” I said, “do you like basketball? Because I have some free tickets from work, for the Raptors.”

TO KNOW BUMI I'D FIRST HAVE TO REVEAL A BIT OF MYSELF.
I hated talking about myself, especially my past. My present was no fun either. And I didn't have a lot of hope for the future.

There were those first years with Sarah that were pleasant to remember and talk about, so I started there. We somehow ignored the pyrotechnics, multinational advertisements and general blare of the basketball game and I told Bumi how Sarah and I had met, and how she told me such great stories.

He shook his head as if he couldn't believe how amazing she was.

“How is she?” he said.

“Meaning?”

“How is she like?

“
What
is she like.”

“
What
is she like?”

“Some people can be described as an accident waiting to happen,” I said. “Sarah is an accident in perpetual motion.”

“I don't understand,” he said.

“I didn't explain it very well,” I said. “Sarah is fiery. She has a passion that cuts deep, like she has this knowledge of the right way of doing things, and God help you if you violate her rules.” All those useless words were just remnants of our latest first-thing-Monday-morning fight.

“She is a great woman,” Bumi concluded. “I like to meet her.”

“You
would
like to meet her,” I corrected

“Exactly,” Bumi said.

We laughed but I was afraid. I didn't want to introduce Sarah to Bumi. I was content to have him, to have anything, for myself.

Bumi changed the subject. “It is nice for you to help me improve my English,” he said.

“Nice
of
me. I notice you make some small mistakes but not many, and I can always tell what you mean. If you want we can meet again and work on some basics.”

I GOT HOOKED ON BUMI OVER A SERIES OF COFFEES AT CHEAP
cafes, which led to art galleries and tourist attractions like the
CN
Tower and the Royal Ontario Museum. I didn't mind paying his admission. Somehow I just found the money and the time that was never available for my clients. Things like recreational basketball, household renovations, Sarah and work paled in importance next to my need to be with Bumi, to converse with him, to go over any grammatical mistakes he made. We tried reading too, but he couldn't do it.

“I get stuck now,” he said.

It was no easy task to open him up. Long before he told me anything about his life I told him all about my miserable job and how the blackout had awoken me to something greater, yet made my nine-to-fiver that much more miserable. I explained to him again my fascination with faces, my increasing desire to draw them and to feel what I see in them. I explained that every day I sat and listened to people's problems and felt nothing, but I took one look at a faraway face and grabbed my charcoal pencil and forgot everything else except that face's life story. And the further away the roots of that face, the more excited I became.

Bumi nodded sagely at these confessions, but he didn't say much. He would have been a great social worker or therapist. “Maybe you should bring your pencils when you meet clients,” he joked one time.

Though he shared little, I assumed our interest was mutual because Bumi cut his weekly working hours down to seventy during those weeks leading up to Christmas. “Why do you work so damn much?” I asked him over chicken souvlaki sandwiches late one night. He had just come off a fourteen-hour shift. It was the first thing I had the guts to ask him. I had a feeling he was a refugee who had probably been through some nasty Suharto shit, and worked to get his mind off the past, or just to make enough to survive the present. I was in the right ballpark, but my guesses were vague and useless compared to what he told me.

“I have debt,” he said.

I nodded and left a silent space. I hoped he'd fill it with more details, but it was a long wait, probably a full minute, before my patience was rewarded.

“I hear Suharto may even go to jail,” he said. “If I pay these men back I may go home and see Yaty. And my children.”

That's as much as he said about his family then, but he talked at length about his friend Bang, and the rest of the Indonesian men he worked with, how their desires to return home had compounded tenfold since Indonesia's
1998
reformasi
—the downfall of Suharto and his cronies that happened two years after Bumi got to Canada. This too was a new clue—he had never told me how long he'd been in the country. Seven years is a long time away from everyone you love.

He told me the restaurant workers had all celebrated the first free Indonesian elections in thirty-three years with an all-night dance in the street, during which they composed a
wayang
puppet show about the gas riots that started the greatest Indonesian political change of their lives. But they were stuck in Toronto, indentured to Chinese restaurateurs.

Any time Bumi spent with me amounted to wages lost, and therefore to time away from his family. He must have liked me on some level, or at least gotten something out of our cross-cultural exchange.

I GREW TIRED OF HIDING MY FRIENDSHIP WITH BUMI FROM
Sarah. I grew tired of lying about my whereabouts whenever I met him for coffee or some cultural event. It took me a month, but I did tell her all about Bumi. Over a late dinner I laid out every scrap of information he had shared. I spoke fast and it took just minutes. She was convinced this Bumi was my latest crush, that I was either bisexual or Bumi was actually a woman.

“Christ,” I said. I stood and headed for bed without another word.

I told Bumi about Sarah's ridiculous assumptions a couple of days later. I snorted and hoped he'd find it funny, but the more I complained about Sarah the more he wanted to meet her.

I invited him for tofurkey dinner a few weeks before Christmas. “I know you don't celebrate Christmas, but…”

“Jesus seems a lot nicer than his father,” Bumi said.

A HOUSE PREPARED BY SARAH FOR A NEW GUEST IS IMMACULATE
and comfortable. She shows her guests the charm of her grandmother Ingrid and great-grandmother Valeriya, yet none of their pressure to conform or abstain. She peppered Bumi with her usual specialties: deep fried goat cheese, homemade bread and salsa, stuffed mushrooms wrapped in mock bacon and cognac. He ate and drank voraciously, outpacing our own boar-like consumption. It could have left an awkward pause as we waited for the main course, but Sarah filled the gaps with her stories. She repeated to him the little facts from his own life that I had shared with her, and asked for elaboration.

Bumi reciprocated her charms and became a storyteller. In moments she opened him up like I never could. He told us about the fishing island where he was born, about how he had invented new fishing techniques and become invaluable to his father at the market where they sold the fish. He told us that government officials had taken him away from all that. He told us about his friend Robadise, who helped him survive some tough times in school, and became Bumi's brother-in-law and helped him find work to support the family. Bumi spoke as if recanting an old folk tale, as if it hadn't really happened to him and first person was just a useful device. We were so engrossed that the tofurkey was drier than the wine by the time we pulled ourselves up to the kitchen table.

Bumi reversed the gentle inquiry and asked Sarah a few standard questions. He was better at small talk than I would have guessed.

Sarah switched to her own storytelling mode. The fashion industry, as told by Sarah, was one fraught with idiots, talented artists, sycophants, hangers-on, creeps, perverts, brilliant designers, astute planners and organizers and more ego than the isle of Manhattan. It was a miracle she'd suffered only mild bulimia, which was by then under control, in such an oppressive industry.

The political analysis she offered the industry was unique, in that she was its only member who seemed to have one at all. She was worried that the capitalist fashionistas would mock her dream to create her own fashion line, one free of sweatshop labour. Instead they proved to be quite supportive of the idea but questioned whether a model could reach such entrepreneurial platitudes without first becoming famous from Paris to New York. “A catalogue model could never succeed in business,” they told her. They said she should leave Toronto, her beloved home and the home of her beloved. They told her the best she could hope for here was an occasional role in a throwaway Canadian art film. She earned decent money as a model and squirreled most of it away. She had a business plan on the go.

I heard this same story of idealistic vision and dogged determination on our first date, and about
587
times since. I was becoming as tired of it as Sarah seemed to be of my inability to dream anymore. I gnawed at my dry tofurkey from her first anecdotes about Parisian modelling gigs to her visits to Mexican sweatshops, hoping my boredom didn't show, and that Bumi wouldn't share it.