Burridge Unbound (3 page)

Behind the flat screen of the computer words fly around the planet, pulsing with life and meaning. In seconds I can connect with Amnesty International in London, Human Rights Watch in New York, a State Department friend in Washington, a journalist in Karachi, an amateur human-rights observer from Thailand who now lives in Moose Jaw … and with thousands of people I’ll never meet. Eight hundred and two logged onto my Web site while I was in New York panicking at the United Nations.

The world doesn’t sleep. Bombs rip through U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and tear up a shopping district in Northern Ireland – places where peace was supposed to reign. The Russian ruble loses half its value overnight and Serbs
murder Albanians with
NATO
looking on. Famine seeps soundlessly through Sudan while Chinese doctors remove organs from condemned prisoners for use by aging cadres and Israeli guards legally torture prisoners for information. Indian and Pakistani generals ponder nuclear war over the mountains of Kashmir, and Aung San Suu Kyi sits on a bridge for endless days in Burma in a stalemate with the military.

The world doesn’t sleep, why should I? Why should I submit to the degrading treatment of my own mind? Alien abductions! If only it were so simple, Cheryl Ann. I’d welcome those long fingers with light at the tips. My dreams are of cold darkness and they don’t end with any sort of rosy dawn or willed waking of the mind and spirit. They last the entire period of my own abduction and include every electroshock, rape, hallucination, humiliation, starvation. My magnificent brain has saved and stored each morsel in sequence and can play them back, beginning at any time and ending only with the soul’s near-total exhaustion, with Joanne wrapping me in sheets for my own protection and my body thrashed and wasted. If only I could have a nice alien abduction! Maybe I’d meet your father, Cheryl Ann, and we’d tell tales about our children and what the food is like in captivity.

Heat bakes the city most of the day and then strong winds bring a new front through, so that by the time the cars are stalled on the bridges for their homeward journey rain lashes my windows and we slide into a premature night. Derrick calls to remind me he’s starting his two-week holiday and Joanne brings dinner and pills, but she can’t stay – some friends from Médecins sans frontières are organizing a mock refugee camp downtown to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – as long as I’m all right, she asks, and I am. This is home, safe and aloof and connected at the same time. I haven’t had a twister originate from this apartment in several months, and I can usually tell now when they’re coming on – my anxiety level rises, my jaw clamps, my heartburn flares, my breathing races shallow and fast. I can almost believe I’m more or less a whole person, talking like this, the smell of stir-fry on the table.

She really must go, she says. Yes, but she stays while I tell her today’s e-mails. I have her cellphone number. She’s taken a room nearby so that she can be here in minutes. The stir-fry has ginger and garlic and strips of chicken and vegetables coloured with extra vibrancy as if auditioning for a spot in a glossy magazine advertisement.

Then Joanne leaves and I’m stunned by how completely she takes all vitality with her. In a moment the apartment is a cave
of gloom. The storm outside intensifies and my insides protest the richness of the food just as a headache arrives and the walls start to close in. I settle back in front of my computer, my steady friend, my refuge. The night stretches in violent wonder pulsing around our planet at the speed of electricity. And so conveniently in English! Thank God for the British Empire and American know-how.
The South China Morning Post
and
Hong Kong Standard
publish pictures of the flooding Yangtze River, run stories on the villages officials have decided to sacrifice in order to save the large city of Wuhan.
Dawn
and
The International
in Karachi write about the suspect caught there in the African bombings of U.S. embassies, and about the
MQM
factions killing one another in the streets. The Colombo
Daily News
speculates on the standing of Clinton after the confession of his “inappropriate relationship” with Monica Lewinsky. And in Santa Irene,
AP
reports a protest of students about the tripling of tuition fees and inflation in general. The Asian economic crisis has even affected drug profits, the article says.

On and on I travel and read, but I’m one man against the night and the odds are ruinous. Eventually the screen dulls, my eyes tire. I breathe and breathe – little sips of air, but from the diaphragm, a
qigong
meditation that sometimes sends subtle waves of energy through my body. But tonight the air has a hard time passing my throat. And now my leg makes it impossible to sit anyway. I pace the short section of rug past the west window to the north and back, try to keep track of how many times I turn around (as if that statistic will somehow keep me anchored). I should have exercised today. Why didn’t I? Everything was so good. I felt as if I could go forever. Who needs to eat, walk, touch the earth, talk to a human being face to face?

It all sours so fast. What kind of wonderland was I inhabiting? This is my true reality. Total exhaustion. But stay away
from sleep. Sleep is torture. The Kartouf own sleep and Burridge has been banished from its gates. I dial Joanne. I should just let her have her evening but I can’t. I need to know that she’ll be able to come.

“Bill? Are you all right?”

“Yes.” I breathe for a moment. It’s true. Just having her to call has calmed my heart. I’m still pacing, but it’s manageable now. I’m okay. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I had some anxiety, but it really wasn’t so bad and now it’s fine. I shouldn’t have bothered you. How’s the refugee camp?’

“Soaked with rain,” she says. “It seems like old times. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I seem to be fine. I think I just needed to know I could reach you. I’ll do some more computer.”

“How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?” she asks.

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not funny!”
she says. “You should put on Abbott and Costello.”

I tell her I will. Slapstick suits me fine most of the time. Buster Keaton, Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers. Nothing too lowbrow for my taste. I have a nice collection. They remind me of childhood Saturday mornings watching cartoons with my brother Graham. Bugs Bunny and Road-runner. Woody Woodpecker. Popeye and Olive Oyl. Just reading the video titles starts to cheer me up. Suddenly I wish to God Patrick were here to watch with me. We’d snuggle on the couch and share a blanket, stuff ourselves with milk and cookies. Charlie Brown.
The Grinch Who Stole Christmas
. That little puppy pulling the huge sleigh, teetering on the brink of oblivion.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
. The two outlaws trapped on the cliff. Sundance won’t jump because he
can’t swim. Why does Sundance end up with Katharine Ross?

Katharine Ross
. Whatever happened to Katharine Ross? I’m soaked suddenly in sadness about her. She was so beautiful in
The Graduate
, but why did she go for Dustin Hoffman? He was bad news for her in that movie. Bad news or good news? I would’ve crashed the church at her wedding too to get her. That final look as they pull away on the bus.
Now what?

Now what? Now the night stands before me. I’m pacing again. I take the uneaten portion of Joanne’s stir-fry and mulch it in the trash compactor. I’d go out for a walk, but the storm is blowing too hard. A cold rain like that could land me with pneumonia. Just what I need. I sit back at the computer but my leg jumps –
whack! –
within seconds. A hot bath. I head for the bathroom, change my mind, pace some more. If only I could sleep. It would make everything better. Maybe I’m on an even keel again and it’s the lack of sleep that’s throwing everything off. If I just went to sleep I’d be fine.

I try to clear room on the bed. It’s covered in old newspapers, magazines, Action Alert printouts, Death Penalty logs, and the like. The slaughter of the Kurds. Ethnic cleansing in Albania. Sixty-three bodies with slit throats in Algeria. A crackdown on religious minorities in China.
The Silent Slaughter
. I push them all aside and lie with my face in my pillow.

This isn’t how to go to sleep. I have a vague memory. I need to take off my clothes and put on pyjamas. Sip hot milk, take out and brush my teeth. Read something light before turning off the lamp. Any one of the above would be an improvement. But my body doesn’t move. I need to take off my shoes and socks.

I think I’m rising to do some of this, but it turns out nothing like that. Part of me rises but my body stays immobile on the bed. I should’ve eaten more. Then I’d have the energy to get
up and do all the right things and fall asleep properly. But now I’m split and watching myself, not properly asleep at all. My leg starts twitching. It’s amazing to see. Still one moment, jerking out the next. Articles scatter every time. Soon there’s going to be nothing else left on the bed. Everything will be out of order. (Is it in order now?)

There should be an order, but there isn’t. I shouldn’t be able to watch myself sleeping, but here I am hovering near the ceiling. Sometimes in the hood in the closet with the heat and insects and immobility and starvation eating me slowly slowly I’d hover like this above my body and feel a great sense of lightness because of how close to freedom it all felt. Release. This isn’t the same. (That wasn’t the same either. It was all wrong. Every bit of it.) This is disjointed. If not for the ceiling I’d just float off and never be heard from again. Now I want to be joined. I want to be part of that body and make it sleep properly again. Not articles on atrocities raining all over the bedroom.

I want to, but I can’t. And now the ceiling is opening up into blackness. The ceiling opening up and I try to get back to my body. I try to turn and that works, I can turn, but I can’t get anywhere. There’s nothing to push against. I try but my limbs have no substance. No substance but all the pain of my wretched body. Who rigged the rules in this universe? If you don’t have the substance you shouldn’t have the pain either!

I need to call Joanne. If I could just get to the phone but there’s no way to move and anyway they have the phone they pull the strings I couldn’t even remember the number
just hit redial
a voice says clear as anything if I could just get to the phone and hit redial she’d know and she’d come but there’s no hope of it they have everything attached and are asking me again in Kuantij I can’t understand a fucking thing I shouldn’t have gone I shouldn’t have taken the damn car it was just
badminton an accident a flat fucking tire and if I hadn’t stalled the gears that one time when I was almost away I wouldn’t I wouldn’t I wouldn’t …

Her voice again. Jesus. They’ve got Joanne. I can’t believe it! I writhe now spit scream shit ache turn
not Joanne
she’s the safe spot the warm voice
damn!
I can’t move it’s all pressing down
don’t touch her!
a slope of earth turned mud and sliding now burying me take the house swallow the town your kids your life
not her!
I hear her voice now from way up on the surface shrieking God I know what they’re doing I can’t stand it I shouldn’t have called I should’ve just let them kill me don’t they know one shock too many and my heart bursts that’s it end
fin
I’m free I didn’t need to call Joanne I’m sorry so sorry I brought you into the trap
goddamn them …

Hands now on my face going for my throat ripping into me burning fire arcing across my limbs and I need to go deeper into blackness down into the hood just further and it goes away it does they never kill me they never do it just will go like this and on until it doesn’t until …

Breathe and breathe and breathe.

It’s what you do after the twister has left. When you’ve been shipwrecked and lie on the beach seven-eighths dead with the cold waves washing you and your skull feels like cracked eggshells your skin tissue paper guts a mudslide trees upon houses and cattle corpses and dead cars and mud, mostly mud.… I open my eyes and for several heartbeats cannot comprehend what reality this is. Slowly the world returns. I’m wrapped stiff in bedsheets. Joanne is holding a warm cloth on my head. My tongue feels swollen, eyes beaten, pores exhausted. It’s morning. Which morning? Sometimes I find myself days later. I was doing so well. Wasn’t I doing well?

Joanne unwraps me, cleans me gently, draws a hot bath. I hobble out of bed, soak in the water, sip hot lemon-and-honey tea with the lights off. “When did you get here?” I ask softly.

“That night,” she says. “I should’ve come when you called.”

“I told you not to.”

“Yes.”

Soft music in the background. My eyes are so sore, but I don’t want to close them. I lose so much when I do.

This is how it is after a twister: you’re thankful to be breathing still. You don’t know how you survived. It’s internal, a savage storm that comes from nowhere, goes to nowhere … A virus injected with all the other drugs. The Kartouf virus. It shifts, lurks in my organs, my brain cells. Attacks now and again just to let me know:
you never really escaped
. I’m not free. I will be destroyed, any time they choose.

This is what terror is all about.

The water turns cool and I reheat it, turns cool and I reheat. Just want to stay here. One breath at a time. Scrambled eggs and more tea. Served in the bath. Sometimes months go by with nothing. Just the threat, the knowledge. The Kartouf is still inside me.