Burridge Unbound (20 page)

“Are you awake?”

“Hmmm.”

Shoulders, neck, lips, cheeks. With her fingers and then her lips, and now she does press against me, it’s been so long, it feels like forever I’ve been stretched like this, aching and waiting. I turn and pull her against me and she laughs, pulls back, says, “Slowly,” so soft and low I nearly lose it.

“You’ve been waiting for me,” she whispers.

“Yes.”

“When you should’ve been sleeping.”

“Could’ve.”

“Yes?”

Straddling me, pressing, opening, her fingers guiding me inside.

“Maybe.”

Half-asleep. Rocking at sea, crying salt tears, it feels like it’s been forever, like nectar, like you could take away everything else but this, or the memory of this. To keep it somehow, it’s all I’d need. It’s been so long. I’d forgotten, blocked it out. Now to be back, to find every nerve has memorized this feeling, has soaked in it so that it would be there all the time, I just had to ask.

Everything’s here. The smell of her, the night’s sweat and her lipstick and the vague traces of cigarette from her artist friends and the wine she’s had. Her impossible softness. Muscled but soft, how is that accomplished? The turbulence of hair and suddenness of want, of her wanting me …

The suddenness of losing her.

Everything, all at once – smell, touch, sight, oh the sight of
her, gone, taken, about to be taken. It can’t last. Even stored inside me it can’t last. It isn’t now. She couldn’t want me. That was a hundred years ago. Before I fell down the rabbit hole. A hundred million years gone by.

“Bill?”

I’m sorry. I try to say the words but they won’t come out. It’s that kind of a dream. I know the words to say but my mouth won’t co-operate.

“Bill?”

I try to get her back. Just the light touch was enough. In the darkness, the sound of her clothes sliding to the floor, the soft approach. Just to get that back. The anticipation. I used to be part of a life with anticipation. And love. I used to yearn for it, live for it. But when you’re a hundred and eighty years old no one will …

No one.

“Bill?”

Eyes open. Strange light. What place is this? Not before, not … 
back there.…

Yes. All right. I know.

“You slept,” Joanne says, like it’s a minor miracle, which it is, I have to admit. Just the word –
slept
. It has such an exotic feel.

She’s about to tell me it’s morning. She’s going to say what’s planned for the day. All my directions will line up in just a moment.

“Good dream?” she asks in her wicked-innocent way and I know, immediately, that she knows. She couldn’t have been looking in my head, but she knows anyway what was there.

D
ay two is quickly soured with a bad feeling, an anxiousness and growing anger that’s hard to place at first, but there’s plenty of time to think in the hearing room at
Justico kampi
. We go through a carbon copy of the day before – Justice Sin begins his remarks; I fiddle with my headphones and complain about lack of translation; aides appear concerned, check the equipment in apparent amazement that it could still be malfunctioning, then leave to do, it seems, nothing.

I don’t have this much time to waste. Sin Vello, Mrs. Grakala, and me – we all look as if we could expire at any moment. But Sin Vello seems happy to pontificate; Mrs. Grakala reads till her eyes droop. And I sit here, silent, stewing, understanding nothing. This isn’t a show for me, not with my heart the way it is.

As with yesterday there is a sumptuous luncheon. This time we’re seated with a number of township mayors who have no connections to the commission at all, but appear to have used the excuse to come to the capital. There are photos and toasts
and phony smiles, and through it all the veneer of my courtesy becomes more brittle. I make a point of crossing the room to corner Minister Tjodja and inform him that the translation service has been useless so far.

“Mr. Burridge, please do not worry yourself over such technical difficulties,” he says. “My staff is fixing them as we speak. Have you met Junta Gund from the Chamber of Excellence?” Junta Gund rises from his dessert and I give him the barest nod before turning back to Tjodja.

“Well, until the service is up and running, perhaps
you
could provide summary translation for me for this afternoon’s session. Your English is excellent, Mr. Minister.”

He blanches. “If only I had the time,” he says. “But we are fortunate that there is no afternoon session planned for today, and I am certain everything will be functioning tomorrow. It’s all formalities, anyway, Mr. Burridge.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean so far. Justice Sin has been setting up the administrative workings. It’s nothing for you to concern yourself with.”

“Then perhaps I do not need to attend,” I say sharply. As I expect, he backs off.

“Tomorrow will be very different,” he says quickly. “But please have patience with us. We are just a backward country. What would be done with a snap of the fingers in the West is much more difficult here.” His head droops slightly as he delivers this last spineless comment, but I manage to leave before I say anything insulting.

“You’re awfully quiet,” Joanne says in the taxi back to the hotel. We’re stuck in traffic again. We could have walked, but even yesterday’s wall of rain was more inviting than today’s
oppressive heat and pollution. The cloudburst will come later. For now the air is sweating and breathless and mildly poisoned, and it presses down on us heavily.

I tell her about
liir
, island spirit. “It’s a funny term, meant pejoratively–” As soon as I mention the word both Nito and our driver turn and smirk, although they can’t follow the rest of my explanation. “There has been such a parade of colonial powers through here – the Spanish, Dutch, British, Americans – that for centuries it’s been considered a patriotic duty to make sure nothing runs smoothly. So when Tjodja dips his head and tells me I can’t expect a functioning translation service in such a backward country, he’s really expressing a perverse sense of superiority.
All these rulers have never changed us – what makes you think
you
will be able to get anything done?”

Joanne grins. “You’ve just described most places on this planet,” she says. “The trick is to figure out how to keep from having that whatever –
liir –
swallow you up.”

Our driver tries to turn left at an intersection, but no one will let him through and we get caught. The light turns red but we can’t clear, it’s jammed up ahead. We can’t go back because a
tritos
is trying to bull through behind us. The oncoming traffic fills up whatever space was left. Now the light cycles fruitlessly: red, green, yellow, it doesn’t matter. We honk and the
tritos
honks and everybody else too. We inch forward and stop, inch forward, stop. A man on the corner wades into the thick of it and waves people on, stops others, yelling instructions and collecting tips. Inch and stop and inch and honk and pay and inch and stop again.

“Where there’s a will there’s commerce,” Joanne says, shaking her head.

In the evening we are invited, suddenly, to a gala folk-dance performance at the Minitzh Arts Centre. The name is yet another reminder of his legacy, like the airport, like the soccer stadium, and the Minitzhi katra dinga, the central post office. There is little time to prepare – a messenger delivers the invitation just as we’re finishing dinner in the Happy Mouth Lounge. I’ve brought nothing as fancy as a tuxedo, and have given up even on neckties, so my batik island shirt will have to do, and Joanne wears a simple black cotton travelling dress with a string of pink coral bought at a stall outside the hotel. We ride this time at high speed in a black limousine along avenues that seem to have been cleared of traffic for the event. Nito is much more nervous than in any falling-apart taxi we’ve been in so far. He glances frenetically out the various shaded windows at the tropical darkness. I see nothing but shadowed buildings, checkpoints, soldiers in armed Jeeps patrolling the side streets.

“It looks like they’re getting ready for a coup,” Joanne says nervously.

But it’s not that, it’s a night out with the spoiled upper-class
lumito
. The Minitzh Centre stands glittering and new, flooded in purple and pink lights, the one corner that was blackened by fire in the riots looking in this light softened, like a bruise. We leave our limousine and walk arm in arm past a phalanx of photographers. Everything is excessive – the jewelled and sequinned gowns, the slicked hair, the perfume, the teetering shoes and tinkling chandeliers and delicate glasses of champagne handed out with the programs as if the country were overflowing in riches.

We sit front-row centre, drawn and pressed here by the crowd, stuck to this spot. The dance is a solo by Marika Contala, the most brilliant
feriko
dancer of her generation – it
says so in the English insert of my brochure. So why can’t I get translation for the commission?
Feriko
is a complex series of sudden, sinuous movements brought to a periodic halt, the pose held five to ten drumbeats before the dancer melts into other movements, hands and arms snaking, legs twisting and stretching, eyes doing most of the communicating. Only one story is told in this type of dance, but in several variations, of the attraction between the pure Princess Tarlan and Gnotka, the horned ruler of the underworld whose heart has not held love since Mother Earth abandoned him as a young man. In some versions – again, according to the program – the innocence and purity of Tarlan wins out, and in others Gnotka’s darkness envelopes them both. Marika plays all the parts, soft and slight yet tall as Tarlan, a rigid and powerful little toad as Gnotka. Joanne quickly becomes entranced by the performance, but I can’t relax. I feel oddly complicit. They need me here, I think, to validate their opulence amidst suffering and poverty. I look around, wonder if Suli Nylioko will make an appearance. But later, when she doesn’t show, I realize that the People’s President wouldn’t come here. Not even Sin Vello and Mrs. Grakala came. I was the only one and this is my last time.

It’s hard to stay awake. The music seems strained, difficult, the clues and messages of the dance too obscure and coded to pick up. When it’s finished – Tarlan has won, I gather; Gnotka has been transformed into a shining prince – there’s a reception, but I plead fatigue, try to keep the disgust out of my voice.

My bad mood carries over to the next day. Joanne has a hard time marshalling me through medicines and breakfast, and we arrive late at the
Justico kampi
. Sin Vello is already talking to his assembled aides; Mrs. Grakala is already nodding in her
seat, the papers piled around her. I walk directly to my regular seat and snap on my earphones as I sit down. That familiar deadness. It’s not working. They’ve done nothing. I jam through the channels:
janal lito, janal ista, janal trikos, janal kolian
 … Dead, dead, dead.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m just …”

“Calm,” says Joanne beside me, but I can’t stay calm. I smash my fist on the table and rattle my headphones.

Mrs. Grakala starts awake and looks to see what the disruption is. Justice Sin opens his palms in a gesture of monumental concern and powerlessness, and two aides rush to my side to fiddle with the connection, as if that’s the problem.

“You haven’t
got anybody translating! Don’t treat me like a bloody idiot!”
I start to gather the new papers – no, for God’s sake, they’re all in Kuantij! So I scatter them in the open area in the middle of the room, where our witnesses are supposed to testify. If we ever get around to calling any.

A clamour, of course. Aides rise, try to smooth the feathers of the ruffled foreigner. But none of them can speak English! The minister, Tjodja, appears, not the least bit embarrassed about having told me yesterday he was too busy to deal with the commission. “I need a full translation service,” I tell him, trying to keep my temper from going completely off the rails. “I’m not going to sit here and validate what I can’t even understand. And I want to see your president today, or else I’m going home!”

“Bill,”
Joanne whispers, her hand on my back.

“But Suli is not available!” Tjodja says. Squeaking in panic.

“Well, maybe I’ll have to make
myself
unavailable!” I say and storm out, Joanne in tow, papers dripping from my briefcase, who cares?

Tjodja begs me down the hall, but I tell him, again and again, what my conditions are. I’m not here to see this commission become a joke. I’m not lending my name to a sham and a farce.

In the hotel room Joanne sits reading a novel and I steam, pace, fume, mutter.

“You gave your conditions,” she says, turning the page, not looking up.

“I did. I made a stand. This whole situation is ridiculous.”

“Absolutely,” she says.

I slam the bed with my foot. Several useless stacks of commission paper jump, then settle back.

“Why don’t you do your animals?” she asks languidly.

“I can’t. I can’t relax.”

“But I thought the animals were supposed to
help
you to relax.”

“They’re to help me kill people who attack me,” I say.
“Then
I can relax.”

“Listen – the ball is in their court and it might not come back for a while. Who knows where Suli is or how long it will take them to get the translation service working?” She doesn’t look up, but sits engrossed in her book, stays infuriatingly calm, like some wife who’s been thinking rings around me for years.

How long am I prepared to wait? Through room-service lunch, the fruit plate that’s already growing tired, and stale bread that seems purposely unappealing, as if part of a larger conspiracy to make me leave. What’s the point of staying in a luxury suite if the food is bad? Through the long afternoon of nothing but fuming and self-doubt. Through the sun sinking back into the other side of the ocean, but false somehow, like a cheap effect liable to fall over at any moment.