Burridge Unbound (17 page)

“Nothing that will work. A twister coming on is unstoppable. Once you reach a certain point–”

“But
before
you get there. One safe, rock-solid thought. Don’t tell me, don’t tell anyone, but fix it now in your mind.
Just hang it up where you know you can reach it in an instant. Can you do that?”

The only protector is Joanne. I look at her, her red hair and those gentle eyes. Joanne walking with me by the Ottawa River, Joanne coming through the door, Joanne any time, Joanne right now.

Joanne.

T
he heavens are unloading on us. Tumultuous rain on a black night, the sound almost more unsettling than the water. The air is sweating hot, heavy with the smell of rotting vegetation, of diesel fumes, and soaked black jungle soil, of too much life. Not the cold, raw, deadening wind of an Ottawa October. They’ve packed us in a military Jeep, the plastic flaps that pass for windows keeping out only part of the spray. Our driver laughs with every jolt. The guard beside him, a thin, sleepy-eyed man named Nito, smokes idly and drums his fingers on the doorframe. My personal protector! He looks as if he’d have a hard time fighting off a dragonfly.

But I feel surprisingly calm. It might be because of Joanne, who now has returned to her old self, laughs along with the driver and throws up her hands as if she’s thirteen and this is a roller coaster. It might also be because we’re in a convoy of about thirty military vehicles bristling with weapons.

Almost anything – the darkness, the slashing rain, the smoke from Nito’s cloved cigarette, the mysterious flow of
Kuantij in male voices – could trigger a twister in me. And yet all is still so far.

“Sorry we could not send you a limousine,” Mr. Tjodja says. He’s squashed in the back, his black suit getting rumpled, muddy, and wet. I’ve already forgotten his title – minister of reconciliation? Perhaps that’s it. He stood waiting for us at customs, waved his hand once and we were through. A small, broad man in tiny black Italian shoes. “Many of the government vehicles were burned in the uncertainties,” he says. “The luxury ones, I mean.”

“This is better than a limousine!” Joanne yells back at him. “Does it always rain like this?”

“We will soon be in the rainy season,” he says. His hair slicked back, his purple tie flashing in the night, the tight twists of his mouth when he speaks and when he stays silent.

“Has there been any more violence?” I ask him.

“Very peaceful now!” he says. “I think you will find it quite a change. We’re all pulling together. Suli has brought new co-operation to the people!” A gleam of near-malice in his eye – hard to see in the dark, so maybe I’m imagining it from the tone of his voice, parroting slogans. He seems cultured, looks rich enough to be part of the upper-class
lumito
, for whom everything was going great until the assassination. Maybe the collapse in the economy has meant he’s had to snag a government job.

I’d forgotten the totality of this darkness at night, our headlights carving shallow tunnels, small buildings emerging then disappearing. No streetlights yet, though there is a sudden sign for Marlboro cigarettes and another for Kalio, the local soft drink. The company is owned by one of Minitzh’s sons and was given a monopoly. The last place on earth untouched by Coke and Pepsi? Perhaps not for long.

The last time I arrived it was daylight. Peter from the embassy drove. Maryse sat still, holding herself, and Patrick watched everything, especially the guards at the checkpoints. The checkpoints are still here but we’re just speeding by them.

Into the city now. I think we’re passing through a section of Welanto. When I ask Tjodja he nods his head and starts telling us about the fires. We can’t see anything in the black but there is an acrid smell, lessened but not quite washed out by the rain.

Nearly midnight local time, I don’t know what time by my body clock. I’m longing for the solitude of the hotel room. Just a few hours to collect my wits. But at the hotel, the Merioka (“Prosperity,” I whisper to Joanne), there’s a reception planned.

“Don’t worry. Nothing elaborate!” Tjodja says when he sees our faces. Then in a low voice, “You know it is our custom to have a ceremony on every possible occasion.”

“We can’t. I’m sorry. It’s too late, we’ve had a very long flight.”

“Yes. Yes, of course!” Tjodja says, as if he agrees completely. But then he insists. “It is just for a few minutes. Everyone has been waiting. It would be a terrible disappointment.”

The Merioka is a gleaming high-rise down by the harbour, the most expensive part of town. I silently try to calculate the cost of our rooms. It used to be four hundred U.S. dollars a night, but those were better days for Santa Irene. With the violence and uncertainty tourism has disappeared and prices collapsed, I imagine.

Through the lobby, which looks subdued, or maybe it’s only the hour.

“We can’t go to the reception. Perhaps another time would be better,” I say.

“Yes, yes,” Tjodja says.

“You should show us our rooms.”

“Of course.” And we follow him … to a glitzed reception hall crowded with slow-moving people wrapped in smoke.

“No!”
I say at the door. “I told you–”

“Bill,” Joanne says, “I’m fine. If it’s just for a few minutes.”

“Yes! Yes!” says Tjodja, pinching my elbow, dragging me in.

“Mr. Burridge! What a pleasure to see you again! Happier circumstances, happier circumstances!” exudes a short, burly man in a tuxedo. He looks like he’s been drinking for two days. Most of the others look that way as well. It’s a debauch, an attempt at the old style, but far more tired and tawdry. “So fine to see you!” the man exclaims. “So fine!” Pumping my hand. “So…
. fine!”
He turns to Joanne. “And your wife, Ms. Lorraine –
lovelier than ever!”

“Uh – this is my
nurse
, Joanne Stoddart,” I say. “Joanne, this is–” And I pause because I haven’t a clue, although I should remember, I’ve seen him before. But the burly man doesn’t take the hint. He’s grasped Joanne’s hand and gazes longingly into her eyes.

“–this is, uh–”

No help. Finally I say, “I’m sorry, sir, your name has slipped …”

“Of course it has!” he says too jovially. “I’m a slippery fellow. Burridge, I have to tell you, you
do
surround yourself with striking women!”

And you
lumito
men are still arrogant jerks, I think.

There are drinks on little trays held aloft by waiters who seem only slightly less intoxicated than many of the guests. A ragged-haired man in white tearfully renders “Love Me Tender” on the karaoke machine in the corner of the large room, by the velvet curtains. Several of the women in long gowns have formed a protective circle on the other side of the room and talk amongst themselves. A large semicircular banner
in fluttery gold lettering near the bar reads,
WELCOMMING YOU MR. BILL BURRIDGE
.

“We have had a month of solid terror and uncertainty,” the burly man says in a low voice, suddenly thoughtful and morose. “Everything was turned upside down!
But now you’re here,”
he says, emptying his glass. Cognac?

The crowd slowly awakens to the fact that the guest of honour has arrived. Several more tuxedoed men shuffle towards me and Joanne. Her red hair is like a flag of sexuality to them on this island of black hair. Drinks are thrust at us; twelve conversations start at once. The karaoke machine gets louder and a different drunken voice launches into “The Impossible Dream.”

“Bill?” Joanne says to me, looking over several heads. “Is our two minutes up yet?”

“It must be!”

But we can’t leave. An enormously wide man in a sloppy black suit wrestles with the microphone until the karaoke singer finally gives up. What follows is a twenty-minute soporific in Kuantij that the burly drunk sums up in just a few sentences. “He is welcoming you. You are such a hero to our people. You suffered so terribly the last time you were here. But now everything has changed.”

“Mr. Alijo,” I say, remembering his name.

“Franja,” he says, correcting me. “Alijo has gone to Switzerland. No doubt he’s climbing mountains as we speak!”

I met them both at a diplomatic reception at Minitzh’s Pink Palace in the days before I was kidnapped. It seems a hundred years ago. Franja. He was a parasite then, like so many of Minitzh’s hangers-on. Smiling, cultured, wealthy, spoiled men and women – who stage sudden, tumultuous, drunken applause. Hands push me forward. “No,” I say, definite this
time. I do not want to speak. It’s too late, I’ve already stayed longer than I’d agreed. Where’s Tjodja? I need to tell him, but he’s disappeared.

“I’m not going to make a speech,” I say, craning to find Tjodja.

“Please – just a brief few words!” Franja says, pushing me forward. “We’ve all been waiting!”

After a while it doesn’t seem worth the fight. I wade through the crowd, shake hands, get thumped on the back. At the front I make a short meaningless speech thanking them for their welcome, asking for their help in the days ahead. It comes out as automatic jargon, barely better than Tjodja in the car. “And now,” I say to their uncomprehending stares, “I look forward to some quiet rest, then the beginning …” The beginning of what? Several phrases present themselves:
the first step in the long road … the difficult process … the march towards healing and a chance at justice
 … A chance at justice? I’d like to think it’s more than that. I ponder some more and the phrase hangs incomplete –
the beginning –
until Franja starts the applause and everyone joins in and I don’t have to worry about it. The beginning of what? Of what I’ve gotten myself into.

After the speech Tjodja reappears and takes Joanne and me to a huge penthouse suite on the twenty-third floor with a chandelier, grand piano, bar, and hot tub, the harbour lights flickering in the black distance behind the window, the bed large enough for a half-dozen restless sleepers.

“Where’s the other room?” I ask the minister of whatever.

“I’m sorry?”

“Joanne is my nurse. We ordered two rooms.”

“Ah,” he says, his eyes telling me he comprehends –
appearances must be kept
.

“There is an adjoining suite,” he says, showing us the way.
What looks like a closet actually leads to a small bedroom with a dresser, television, and bathroom of its own.

After Tjodja leaves, Joanne says, “Everyone thinks I’m your mistress.”

“Not much we can do about it,” I say.

“As long as Maryse doesn’t think it.”

“Maryse knows I’m incapable.”

A quiet pause. Her sudden intensity tilts me off-balance.

“Some things get better,” she says quietly. “You have to believe that. You know how I feel about working with chronic cases.”

“Maryse has asked for a divorce, actually,” I say, failing to keep the bitterness from my voice.

“Oh, Bill,” Joanne says. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”

“It’s like there was a fire in the house,” I say, slowly, trying to think of it exactly. “Even though you douse it early and the walls are still intact, there’s been so much smoke and water damage, the electrical system is shot, the pipes are ruined. You might as well tear it all down and start over.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” she says again. “If there was one couple I thought might pull through this sort of disaster, it was you two.” She squeezes my arm briefly, then shoulders her large knapsack, a swift, powerful movement, full of youth and life. “I’m turning in,” she says and closes the door.

I sit on the bed. I have returned to the valley of the shadow and it looks like … every other hotel room on the planet. Not true. It’s a luxury suite twenty-three floors in the air. Perfect for me. Either they did their research or it’s a happy coincidence. I want nothing near the ground.

I lie back, blink at the ceiling, white stucco with glinting specks. Listen to Joanne running the shower in the other room. We could be anywhere. The Kartouf could be anywhere.
In my liver, blood, kidneys, brain. Behind my eyelids, in my marrow. A quiet cancer. Peaceful for now. Perhaps happy to have me back.

I don’t sleep, of course, but it’s a surprisingly peaceful sort of unsleep, not a twister, no disasters, not even acidic, regretful thoughts of my failed marriage. Just a quiet seeping of darkness into light. From my window I watch the sun levitate out of the depths of the ocean while hulking cargo ships nod at the dock and the gulls circle. It’s odd to gaze from such a distance behind double glass – no sound, as if the volume has been lost on the television. The
tritos
begin to clog the avenues, multicoloured, chromed up, gleaming, outrageous, taxi-buses that dart from one lane to the next, nearly up on the sidewalk to win riders, men in untucked white shirts and loose black pants, and women in office skirts and blouses, others in
saftoris
. Farmers ride on jury-rigged mini-tractors, pulling their pineapples and papayas to market, little boys sleeping in the back, their faces deep brown with sun and dirt.

Joanne emerges rumple-faced and drowsy. “Oh God, what a horrible night!” she says. “I couldn’t fall asleep until about four or five in the morning.”

“Yes, I heard you.”

“Well, you’re used to it!”

She slogs off to the bathroom.

And suddenly I am certain this has been the right thing to do. I’ve returned to the valley of the shadow but I’m used to it, and there is a peace here at the core that could never be mine away from it. This is where my most terrifying, exciting, difficult, heroic, agonizing moments were spent. Where I was most
alive
. I was put to the fire and lived to tell. And now it’s mine to put water to the fire. How could it be otherwise? I wouldn’t miss these days for the world.

B
reakfast is in the Kamus koriala – translated for foreigners as the “Happy Mouth Lounge” – a cheerless room decorated in a plastic bamboo motif with black velvet moonglow paintings of bucolic village life: a peasant in a cone hat leading ducks home across a bridge; a barefoot boy chasing a dog; two women bending low in a rice paddy. Joanne has weak tea and even weaker toast, and I try the fruit plate, which arrives in a swirl of colour, from the creamy white of the lychees to the scarlet of the local
huilo
to the greens and purples of unknown varieties. Our young waiter speaks no English, and we communicate by pointing to the pictures on the menu while he bobs and says “Huzza-huzza!” no matter what we’ve asked of him. Nito, our security man, quietly smokes in the far corner, near the door, watching but not watching.