Drive-by Saviours (27 page)

She pointed out that my stepfather worried about my health, what with the smog and the traffic, the
SARS
and the guns.

“I need Mikki's number,” I said.

“What for?” She seemed a bit taken aback by the interruption. I usually let my mother explain her husband's theories and worries for hours or however long it took to alleviate the guilt of my absence from the sadness of their lives. At that particular moment my guilt had already ebbed because I was after all on a mission of mercy, one that I was not ready to explain to anyone who didn't have obsessions stronger than a hazy fear of homeless people and other races.

“I need to get a hold of her,” I said.

“What for?” she said. My mother with all her neighbourhood accolades and nominations for sainthood is an innately cautious woman. I should have anticipated her need for complete information instead of fantasizing about her maternal joy at the potential reunion of her offspring.

“I just thought I should call her,” I said. “See what she's up to.”

“She teaches at that English school in Portland,” she said. “It's long distance.”

“So is this, Mother.”

“Your dad doesn't understand why his kids choose to live so far away in such big cities with so much crime.” She had bent to my stepfather's insistence that he be called our dad.

“You lived in Toronto too,” I said.

“Scarborough, Dear,” she said.

“Can I have the number?”

She ceded the number, told me to give Sarah a hug, explained that my ‘father' thought Sarah was a really great woman. “He says you should seriously consider marrying before she comes to her senses.” She promised to send me some video she'd recorded from the news about avoiding the
SARS
.

The die had been cast and the sound waves set in motion. I tried Michelle right away and it was busy. Most likely Mother had called her immediately to let her know I'd be calling. I hung up the phone and, feeling a surge of anger, pounded my palm on the kitchen table.

“What?” Sarah asked lazily from the living room couch. She looked up from her most cherished project, her dream incarnate: the business plan.

“Busy,” I said.

“Well goddamn,” she said, her voice alight with playful sarcasm. “Burn down the phone company.”

“Sorry,” I said with an evil grin on my face. I made my approach.

She waggled a finger warning of dire consequences to any interference with her work. With my mind firmly on my momentous need to release all pent up energy I ignored the ominous finger and threw the business plan to the floor. For that rebellious act I was forced to struggle through one of Sarah's legendary headlocks. I rolled on the floor in neck-bound agony and heaved her off the ground in my arms with her arm still wrapped round my neck. A series of pile drivers, body-slams, suplexes and corkscrews followed. We fell amidst our scattered belongings, panting and laughing. And on we fought.

“Oh shit,” I said. I saw the
VCR
clock from under a half-nelson submission hold. “I gotta go meet Bumi.” I squirmed loose and kissed her. She caught the back of my head and pulled me back for a long, close-eyed sucking of lips that left me breathless. “See you,” I said. I left her lying decimated in the ruins.

CONVINCING BUMI THAT HE WAS SICK TURNED OUT TO BE A
smaller obstacle than my mother or any frightened bureaucrat.

“So I am crazy,” he said when I finished reading the contents of the file aloud.

“Not crazy,” I said. “Sick. Maybe.”

“Sick in the head,” he said.

I read out to him the cases that most resembled his own symptoms. First, one of the classic hand-washers. Second, a checker who spent hours a day ensuring that the elements were off and the alarms were on. Third, a man who had to count to a hundred between each word he read.

“One hundred!” Bumi shouted. “That is the wrong number.” He shook his head.

Fourth, a woman who conducted an elaborate series of ritual body movements associated with life's simplest activities: walking down the road, entering the house. If she did them wrong she would get stuck.

“Crazy,” Bumi said.

“It's kind of like you, though,” I said, more easily than I could have to my sister. “With avoiding all cracks and the thing you do with your chin and elbows.”

He smiled awkwardly and I pressed forward to what I expected to be more controversial: a man who was convinced he would be blamed for crimes he did not commit and a woman so obsessed with environmental contamination that she had a plastic seal placed over every millimetre of her home and refused to go outside. She had supplies delivered by her husband through a series of sealed antechambers.

“Totally nuts,” Bumi said.

“They don't remind you of yourself?” I asked.

“The first two, yes,” he said, his voice cracking slightly. “I thought I was the only one.”

Bumi's acceptance that he might have
OCD
came easily, and his desire to learn more and treat it was strong. The obstacles that remained were his lack of legal status and his legitimate fear of deportation. “I have no health card,” he said. “No
ID
. No nothing, here or anywhere. I am dead at home, illegal here.”

“A lot of illegals, I mean people without status, get medical help here.” I told him about the Don't Ask Don't Tell campaign to ensure that non-status migrants living in Toronto got the services they needed without any risk of government interference. “I'll ask Lily about it. We can trust her.”

He nodded assent. Lily's advice was simple and unhelpful. “You work in the health care sector, not me,” she said. “Ask someone in the know at your work. Someone you trust.”

IT'S FUNNY HOW WITH CERTAIN PEOPLE, NO MATTER HOW LONG
you know them and have effective, friendly relationships with them, you never really learn anything about them. Sherry was one of those people for me. No matter what questions I asked her or what she revealed everything came back to the same basic biography: she was a hard-working, patriotic East Yorker, total health care practitioner who loved her hubby and kid, hated mornings and was very finicky about written reports. Even when Sherry introduced me to new contacts, her relationships with them always came back to the same basic facts.

I, on the other hand, had carefully extrapolated pieces of my own life to present her with the story of how I had come to know Bumi, the link to my own familial past and even some of the discontent being stirred by this man's presence in my life. I explained that he had no legal status in Canada and, based on his previous difficulties with official powerdom, feared seeing a legitimate, state-certified doctor. Sherry coolly wrote down a name and number on a blank recipe card and handed it to me. “I'll let him know to expect your call and not to ask any unnecessary questions,” she said.

The name on the card was Dr. David Biachari. “How do you know him?” I asked.

“He was part of the anti-amalgamation campaign,” she said. “He's a good man.”

If it hadn't been the campaign, he would have been a friend of her husband's or a colleague from another health centre. Sherry either ran in very limited, well-trodden circles or she kept a great deal of things to herself.

DR. BIACHARI MET US AT 7:00 AM, WELL BEFORE HIS POSTED
office hours. My expectations of a dim, empty room with sliding panels and secretive eyes were quickly replaced by the reality of a standing room only waiting area filled with the sounds of Spanish, Italian, Korean, a variety of African languages and English in various accents.

Biachari's receptionist took Bumi's first name, handed him a questionnaire and asked us to sit once a seat became free. Trying to read the form, Bumi muttered, “I concur, I concur.”

I took the questionnaire from him and waited a minute until he stopped muttering. I read the questionnaire aloud and my voice joined the cacophony in our patient ghetto.

“Do you have any of the following concerns?” I asked.

He did.

“Do you have any of the following compulsions or repetitive behaviours?”

He did.

“Are you unable to stop these thoughts and/or behaviours?”

He was.

“Do these thoughts or behaviours interfere with your working, social or private life?”

They did.

“Do you spend more time and energy fighting these thoughts and behaviours than you would like?”

He did.

DR. BIACHARI WAS A TALL, SLIM MEMBER OF THE BABY BOOM
generation with designer spectacles and an artist's goatee. He spat short sentences with a thick West African accent. “Please, have a seat.” His voice was a smooth tenor. He sat across from us and took Bumi's form, perusing it with one long “mmmm-hmmmm.”

“How often do you wash your hands, Bumi?” he asked.

Bumi washed his hands and arms for about three hours in the morning and three hours at night under running hot water, for which practice his employers and landlord deducted fifteen percent of his pay for hydro bills. This loss in pay translated to an extra year and a half Bumi would be away from his home and family, but he couldn't help it. Better to extend his leave than succumb to the vile germs and viruses that hunted him. After washing, Bumi shoved his hands into a pair of thin gloves for around the house. In public he left his hands bare to avoid attracting scrutiny. Scrutiny was as bad as germs.

He took great care to avoid exposing the vulnerable flesh of his hands, where most disease enters the body. He used his elbows to open doors. Upon arrival at work he immediately slipped into a pair of rubber gloves, which were removed only during household deliveries. He gave his hands a quick wash upon return to the restaurant before returning them to his gloves, which were off limits to all others and were stored in a sealed zip-lock bag. Any fool joker who dared break that seal would suffer Bumi's considerable agitation.

Dr. Biachari nodded. “How many times do you check your alarm clock at night, Bumi?”

The number of times he checked his alarm at night was one thing Bumi did not count. He estimated a checking rate of once every ten minutes for however long it took him to fall asleep, maybe two to three hours. Bumi slept anywhere from one to six hours a night, depending on social commitments (i.e. Sarah and me), shift length and the strength of his obsessions that day.

“How often do you engage in counting rituals, Bumi? I mean, how often do you count to
33
or recite the name of a loved one thirty-three times and so on?”

Bumi recited the names of loved ones and people he wanted to protect thirty-three times for each time he committed an infraction of the rules, such as stepping on a bad place on the ground or thinking an evil thought such as killing Robadise or abandoning his family, taking the easy way out or doing himself in. These recitals were mostly in his head but he was occasionally conscious of mumbling out loud in the presence of people with whom he felt comfortable such as Bang or myself.

The internal chanting was an almost constant part of Bumi's thought process and he had become somewhat adept at compartmentalizing his brain so that a separate section could engage in other thoughts such as work and conversation.

“Bumi,” Dr. Biachari said. He scratched his goatee. “I need you to tell me more about your obsessions. You are very concerned about germs and so on. What about environmental contaminants? Poisons. Do these concern you?”

Bumi was concerned that four children living in his neighbourhood had died from environmental contamination in the canal, but he couldn't be sure that was how they died. He was concerned that maybe he had been responsible because he worked for the company that may have caused the possible contamination. Others thought that he had used black magic to kill the children, but that was absurd.

“Really?” Dr. Biachari asked. He stroked his goatee with two frantic fingers. “People blamed you for the children's deaths?”

They had.

“Were charges pressed?”

Bumi looked at me for guidance. He had kept his past within a very tight circle. Now this white-frocked man in a back-door office with unknown qualifications wanted the kind of information that kills.

“Bumi didn't kill those children,” I told Dr. Biachari, daring him to reveal the nature of his interest in Bumi's past life. Sherry had promised no unnecessary questions.

“Forgive me for asking,” Dr. Biachari said. "In order to make a correct diagnosis I need to understand the circumstances where your obsessions take hold of you. We need to separate realistic concerns from any possible obsessive concerns.”

“I was arrested, Doctor,” Bumi said. He lowered his chin and pupils toward the white linoleum floor.

“Bumi, do you think you were guilty of killing those children?” the doctor asked.

Bumi did not know. He had no specific memory of killing them but remained haunted by the possibility, sceptical of his memory. Maybe he had not performed his rituals, his ablutions, faithfully enough. Maybe his critical thoughts about his neighbours, about his society, had reaped a hideous punishment on the victims of his judgment. Or maybe he was somehow responsible for the fire, the leakage into the canal, the poisoning. Maybe his powers, his understanding of the need and means to implement order in a world of chaos, had escaped him in the form of the dark arts, and done those children in. None of these things could be completely disproved, no matter how hard his ingenious mind worked on the matter. He was too far from the material evidence now. He lived with the guilt of a survivor.