Drive-by Saviours (24 page)

But I couldn't ask him how much. He was proud enough to offer to buy me coffee. It was no time to offer a handout. “Bumi, I have one question,” I said. “Are you sure you want to go back? Are you sure it's the only option, or the best one? Is there no other way to get your family here, where people won't accuse you of evil just because you wash your hands a lot?”

The last traces of Bumi's smile vacated his face and he assumed the serious look of the coffee shop revolutionary he used to be. “Having sampled two oceans now as well as continents,” he said, “I feel that I know what the globe itself must feel: there's nowhere to go. Elsewhere is nothing more than a far-flung strew of stars, burning away.”

“Who said that?” I asked.

“Joseph Brodsky,” he said. “Exiled Russian poet who lived in America. People are the same here, Mark: afraid and cruel. Only it is not home.”

THE LAST FEW WEEKS BEFORE CHRISTMAS ARE THE MOST
difficult at cubicle farms across North America, and mine was no exception. The wilful preparatory slowdown is incongruous to the needs of clients, which tend to increase around that time of year. End of year reports and start of year budget proposals are due in January and, with half our staff on holidays and the remainder in a corporately cheerful mood, mounds of papers and megabytes of emails surrounded my thoughts and dreams. My own mood had an inverse relation to the prevalent Christmas spirit and I felt a sort of solidarity with Muslims, Jews and people of other faiths being ignored or mocked by looming neon spruce trees and shopping sprees.

Christmas of
2003
was a particularly difficult one for me. During the forced slowdown when I needed to speed up at work, my relationship with Sarah was marching a forced up-tempo and I needed a slowdown. Since she had twisted my mind, spinning her latest web of connected world systems that were meaningless or nonexistent to me, our relations had improved considerably, mainly because I had lost my fight. She had mastered me with theories and facts that had my brain factory working overtime. I had no time left to worry about how I felt. At home I became a futuristic robot from
1980
s television. I rolled around and dusted things and served drinks, offered idle chit-chat as needed.

My mind was also clouded with Bumi and his problems and—for the first time since I was a child—my older sister and hers. Why did I link those two so strongly? Just because of a few similar bizarre habits, a similar unrealized potential and a similar kind of genius.

In the final working weeks of
2003
my co-workers slowed their pace of work as they got excited for a break and a party and a new year. I slowed my pace too, but only because I was too distracted by thoughts of Bumi and Michelle to get much done. When I was invited to the lunchroom for Christmas cupcakes or shortbread or some such sugar binge, I was glad for some forced socialization with people who did not look to me for help in anything beyond the administrative.

Not one to charm an entire party, I find it best at these cookie-cutter functions to hone in on the least offensive person in the room and fire away with whatever questions come to mind. Having an aversion to the condescending caterwaul of immaculate social workers out to save the world by correcting the bad behaviour of immature or immoral mothers, I chose my boss, Sherry. Her most admirable and annoying characteristic was her ability to be astounded by and marvel at every individual thing in life with aggregate amazement. Perhaps I was driven further in Sherry's direction by my own anxieties about Bumi and my sister. Sherry used to be a psychologist before she got her promotion to full-fledged senior bureaucrat.

“I wanted to ask you one thing,” I told her, skipping the small talk and stepping between her and the door on the other side of the cafeteria.

She smiled and threw back the shoulders of her power-suit. “Hit me,” she proclaimed boldly.

“I have this friend.” I started with Bumi's hand-washing, moved on to his ritualistic counting and patterned chanting and ended with his inability to read.

“Come,” she said. She stepped around me and waved her hand. “Follow me.”

I nodded and smiled to Mabel as we passed. She was flirting with the doctors again. She smiled back and nodded vigorously. “Merry Christmas, Mark!”

Sherry led me to our resource room's psychology section, pulled down a large folder from the shelf and handed it to me. “It sounds like your friend has obsessive compulsive disorder,” she said. She emphasized every syllable of the name of this obvious menace. “The sceptic's disease.”

“Sceptics?”

“Where your brain tells you bad things and turns you into a sceptic, sceptical of all the evidence disproving the bad things.”

I myself was sceptical. This disease sounded like the contrivance of some hokey backwoods optimist club. “But surely there
are
bad things,” I said.

She nodded affirmative. “Of course. But with
OCD
the bad things are very specific thoughts that have no evidence and little basis in reality. Read up on it.” She patted the file and flashed her perfect smile. “Let me know if you have any questions. But like I told you once before, you have to be careful about diagnosing friends. Your friend should see a trained psychoanalyst. I can recommend some for you.”

Amazing. Several lifetimes of agonizing doubt, spread across oceans and continents and bang, with the straightened white smile of a bureaucratic optimist who had never missed a dentist appointment or grammatical error, the truth would be revealed in a mauve file folder held in my trembling hands.

NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES LITTLE JIMMY CHECKED THE
alarm, he remained sceptical that it was on. When its electronic screech finally pierced the air at
7
:
00
AM
, he was already awake and convinced that it would fail him. He went to school and slept through math class.

No matter how many times Dr. Cabrera returned to the crash site and found no bodies or signs of damage to his Nissan, he remained sceptical that there had in fact been no accident, that he hadn't killed anyone. He couldn't stop checking. Each highway-side visit's sense of relief proved temporary and made him that much later for work, made his queue of waiting patients that much longer.

No matter how many crimes Julia confessed to with no convictions and no evidence other than her own confession, she could not shake the guilt that haunted her every hour, waking or dreaming. She remained sceptical of her innocence.

And, most commonly, no matter how many times Mr. A, B or C washed his hands and arms, no matter if the skin covering these appendages was all but melted off from scalding hot water, he remained sceptical that they were clean, safe from insidious infection.

In a world of propaganda, euphemisms, outright lies, statistical manipulation, media bias and snake-oil salesmen's bullshit, I sat with a file full of true stories of intelligent sceptics whose minds betrayed them. That six ounces of pink circuitry more complex than its own inventions had made up or exaggerated the worst possible scenario and ignored the ample evidence disproving the tall tale of things that could go wrong.

This disorder was a dictator's wet dream. It had, after all, immobilized two of the greatest minds I had ever encountered, one of which had every reason to organize itself and other people. Rather than buy the products produced by Suharto's propaganda machine, Bumi's brain had, true to its nature, one-upped that most powerful general of a seventeen-island army, and created its own obsessions: germs and numbers.

Suharto's New Order (
NO
) government says, “Fear the insidious evil of false ideals like communism.”

Bumi's brain wades into all ideals and takes the parts it likes best, leaving the rest, and dreams up something completely different to fear.

NO
says, “Report anyone you suspect of communist thought, exploration, activity, sympathy, or propagandizing because it is better to cage or kill twenty innocents than have one guilty go free.”

Bumi associates freely with twenty guilty men and reads the words of hundreds of others, and says, “Take action against any and all possible bacteria because there are billions of them and one survivor can end your existence long before you find the truth of its essence. While you're at it avoid all those cracks, dips and bumps in the pavement because they are caverns of evil that could befall the few people you love and depend on for love in this dirty world of ours. If you should make any mistakes be sure to take corrective action in the form of thirty-three apologies or incantations of the names of your most precious associates, because three is a magic number and thirty-three is enough to be certain.

This sceptic's disease file was the stuff of a psychological thriller. The brain-quacks could have easily called it the disease of faith. Its victims are the truest believers and most rigorous practitioners in their own personal religion or form of mysticism. They have an attuned awareness to how ridiculous they look, and how absurd the absolute moralism attached to their underlying obsessions really is.

There was even a case in the file of a young Catholic named Rita who confessed the tiniest and most obscure supposed sins to her priest on an hourly basis. “Reverend, I had a pee and it gave a pleasing feeling where it shouldn't have.” She knew her sins were the product of being an organic being and yet she could not shake the guilt or the fear of eternal damnation.

The file was not all bacterial apocalypse and murders so devious the perpetrator could not prove the crime. A remarkable feature common to many of these sceptics was a tendency toward success in professional life. Many were rich or prominent or had further hallowed the halls of some ivy-covered institution. It seemed that they could turn the obsessions off when absolutely necessary, like when performing surgery or explaining relativity through the use of quadratic equations, or in Bumi's case, washing dishes, and in Michelle's case, teaching English.

As I closed the file my stomach growled and the clock's little hand approached six. I had wasted the whole afternoon reading things that had no relevance to the report Sherry expected on her desk when she returned from vacation. I called Sarah to explain that our dinner plans were off.

Her charm, once applied so liberally to my ego, was by this point reserved for others. “Come on,” she said. “I've barely seen you all week.”

I explained to her about the
OCD
file and she failed to see the relevance of a bunch of anonymous self-absorbed freaks to our sushi plans.

“It's all about Bumi,” I told her, knowing that he had made as strong an impression on her as he had on me.

“How can they have a file about Bumi?” she asked.

“This may be what he has.” I was convinced of it. “That's why he washes so much. And apparently the tics and shrugs he does are common with this.”

“So his mind is full of these same kinds of obsessions,” she said.

“I don't know,” I said. It would explain the behaviour.

“So he's like Howard Hughes.”

“Who?”

“
The Aviator
. You remember that movie?”

I hadn't seen or heard of it.

“He's the guy who invented the Hercules warplane,” Sarah said. “He also made all these gory movies in the forties. Big tycoon. He was obsessed with germs and he'd always repeat phrases over and over.”

“There was a movie about it?” Having felt like I'd stumbled onto some high-level state secret, the existence of a Hollywood movie about the obsessions and compulsions that had taken my family from me, and Bumi's from him, was a betrayal. There was a damn movie and no one had told me.

“There was also
As Good as it Gets
,” Sarah told me. “Jack Nicholson's character had it. And the guy in that new
TV
show too.”

“What show?”

There seemed to have sprung an entire pop-culture genre of this disease while I remained completely ignorant of its existence.

“I forget what it's called,” Sarah told me. “Some detective show where the guy is all obsessive. My mom loves it.”

“Why didn't you tell me this?”

Why hadn't anyone told me this as I threw my sister's bike in the lake and cursed all death and demons upon her? No one ever told me that my curses had worked so well, that she was fighting them in her head all along.

“Why would I tell you? I guess I never made the connection to Bumi. I only met him once.”

I heaved my shoulders, breathed heavily into the phone, watched the little hand eclipse the six and pursed my lips in self-inflicted anger. I couldn't worry about the damn government report now.

“I'm sorry,” Sarah said. “But you figured it out on your own.”

“Sherry did,” I said.

“Well, whatever,” she said, trailing off. She left a silent distance between us until I mustered my confession.

“I just wish I'd known before,” I said.