Burridge Unbound (8 page)

“Where is it?” Joanne asks. She’s standing by the door of my apartment dressed in a black silk shirt, burgundy bolero jacket embroidered in gold, and flared, 1970s-style pants. She’s even in cloggy high-heeled shoes that make her tower over me. She’s a bit like looking at the sun, she’s so brilliant, and so I keep my eyes lowered. Not for me this beauty, not even if I wanted it.

She repeats her question and I say, “I have no idea where it is. Some things are beyond my shrinking brain.”

“They don’t have to be,” she says. “What’s it called? Wicked Ash?”

“I have no idea.”

“If you don’t use it you lose it.”

“That’s one theory,” I say. “The one I’m operating on is ‘Take it easy, don’t wear yourself out.’ ”

Joanne eventually figures out where we’re going. Wicked Ash Gallery in the Glebe. I let her explain it to the cab driver, Abrahim Abinulla from Nigeria. He drives with one eye on the road and the other looking back at Joanne. Normally she can wheedle a life story out of a taxi driver, but this time Abrahim has her talking about her one trip to Lagos.

“My friend was supposed to meet me at the airport. He was teaching in a village about three hours away and he said, ‘If I’m not there on time you wait. Don’t go off with any Nigerians.’ ”

“Careful, careful with Nigerians,” Abrahim says. I expect a grin but he’s serious. “Some of those guys slit your throat to get your passport.”

“Well, I waited and I waited, no Jeremy,” Joanne says. “I had no one to call. It got dark. These men kept approaching me, offering to bring me to a good hotel. I said my friend was coming to get me. The men said they’d bring me to stay at their aunt’s house. She had an extra room and would give me a good price. I said, no thanks. They went away and came back, went away and came back. Soldiers kept looking at me. There were police too, walking by, staring. Not good. Finally it was midnight and I knew Jeremy wasn’t coming. I picked up my pack and three soldiers started to trail me, two police, another bunch of men. The guy with the aunt. My God. I started to run. They followed. I felt as if I’d been separated from the herd by hyenas. I saw this taxi and jumped in and locked all the
doors. Do you know why I’m so good to taxi drivers? Because of Charles at the Lagos airport. He knew exactly what was happening and he sped away even before I told him where we were going. He said, ‘Sheraton Hotel, yes, ma’am?’ and I said, ‘Sounds good to me. How fast can you get there?’

“We hit a roadblock almost immediately. Soldiers, only they didn’t act like soldiers. They wanted me to get out of the car. I said, forget it. I showed them my passport through the window. Charles talked to them and then some more soldiers came up behind us in a Jeep, the same ones from the airport. I slid down in my seat. Charles talked and talked. He wouldn’t leave the car either. I don’t know what he said to get us out of there, but he got me to the Sheraton Hotel that night. I paid him seventy-five U.S. dollars and told him to be back to get me at eight o’clock the next morning. I bribed my way left and right, flew all the way to Cape Town to get back to Kigali. Goodbye, Lagos! I’ve never felt so relieved to be leaving a place.”

Abrahim says much of his family is still there. “I keep sending them money,” he says. “I think I support half the country by now!”

Joanne tips him well. “This is for Charles too,” she says, stepping out.

The gallery is small, glassy, new-looking, in an old building sharing a block with upscale coffee shops, boutiques, and stores with Third World crafts. Several people are already inside. I see my parents through the window, am surprised. Joanne has also seen some people she knows but stays outside with me for a moment. I ask her what happened to Jeremy.

“He had some story about a flat tire. I told him on the phone he almost got me killed.”

“Did you see him for long?”

“Pretty hard to with him in Nigeria and me in Rwanda. My nerves were jangled by then anyway. I heard he’s gone back to England.”

Occasionally Joanne will talk about some of her old boyfriends. There was an American serviceman (“God, he was pretty”), a Dutch boy who wore his blond hair over his shoulders and brooded even on good days, a Frenchman who was too pure. “He didn’t even drink wine, for God’s sake!” Joanne said. “You have to wonder about someone who’s so far removed from his own culture.” She seems to me the kind of woman who never goes for long without a man – it takes no effort, they gather of their own accord. And yet she admits that she chooses badly. The flaws that later are so obvious hide in the heat of the moment or appear worth the gamble.

Heads turn as soon as we enter. Conversations lull or stop, the focus shifts to me and Joanne, the survivor and the striking beauty. My mother crosses the room and hugs me. “You haven’t been eating!” she says. She glances harshly at Joanne, just the once then not again. Somehow she seems to have reached the conclusion that Joanne stole me from Maryse, is performing the duties a good wife should be performing. I tried to tell her that Maryse and I mutually agreed to separate, that I hired Joanne much later, that everything is strictly professional. It doesn’t matter what I say. She believes what she believes.

“You don’t look like you’re eating so well yourself,” I say. She has sagged visibly, is ashen except for two pathetic spots of rouge on her cheeks.

“I’m doing the best that I can!” she announces. “Say hello to your father before he wanders off.”

He’s hiding by a tall, skinny tropical plant. He looks worse than I do in a suit: his hands shake and his face wasn’t properly shaved this morning, his eyes are sunken and glum.

“Hi, Dad!” I say, gripping his hand just to keep it still. “What do you think?”

She hasn’t been trimming his eyebrows. They droop over his eyes. Is this what happens when your brain goes under? Things start growing out of control?

“It’s quite a party, isn’t it?” I say.

I let go of his hand and it resumes shaking. He doesn’t look at my face but down at my shoes.

“My son painted these,” he says, still looking down.

“Not your son,” I say, too loud.
“I’m
your son. It’s your daughter-in-law who painted these paintings.
Maryse.”

“My son did,” he says.

“I’m
your son. I’m right here in front of you, Dad!”

“He painted all these.” Still looking down at my shoes. He backs away from me, bumps into the skinny plant, knocks it over.

“Careful!” I say, grabbing him too hard. “Here, do you want to sit down?”

Maryse is with us in an instant. I smell her before I see her – the scent of her hand lotion. She holds him by his elbow and shoulder. “Come on this way, Dad,” she says, and he goes with her meekly.

“Did you see my son’s paintings?” he asks her, and she finds chairs then sits beside him for a bit while I awkwardly right the skinny plant. She’s taken my place, I think. They love her like a child. I’m the one who has fallen out of the family.

Someone brings me a drink and asks me about the situation in Santa Irene. We talk about it while I hold the wineglass, which is too full, I have to be careful. The man is brusque and worldly, his grey hair so neat, like a carefully tended lawn. Do I know him? It’s quite possible that I do, but I’ve forgotten entirely. He probes me repeatedly about Suli Nylioko.

“She really is a phenomenon though, isn’t she?” he says. “The country seems to have fallen in love with her.”

The news coverage was sparse for a time, overshadowed by the stock-market crash and Russia’s woes. But the image of Suli Nylioko praying between the tanks is starting to garner attention.

“Do you think she has a chance? How long can Suli and her people last? Any feel about this from your sources?”

He pushes, but I’m stuck on trying to remember who he is. From the suit he looks like Foreign Affairs. Probably quite senior, from his age and confidence. What’s he doing here? Has he just come to talk to me?

Patrick runs by then wearing orange goggles and I excuse myself. “Hey!” I say, spilling my drink. I put it down on a little table, try to see where he’s gone.

Many more people have arrived now. The talk fills the few spaces not occupied by bodies, jams the air above our heads like a physical thing pressing down on us. Patrick squirms his narrow shoulders between the hipbones of two young women dressed in black and white. “That’s the husband,” a young woman says when I squeeze past, my ear not two feet from her mouth. She raises her voice so her friend can hear her above the din.
“The one who was tortured!”

Somebody asks me to sign my book. I haven’t brought a pen, but he has, and I stand staring at the title page trying to remember his name. He’s in international development, I knew him from before. He and his wife used to come to our apartment when there weren’t any kids. A hundred years ago. We went to their cottage once and got eaten by blackflies.
Click, click, click
. The gears in my brain slowly turn over. He’s on the West Africa beat, smokes cigars in the backyard and brews his own foul beer.

“Who should I sign it to?” I ask finally, looking him straight in the face. He hasn’t changed a bit, is so dramatically unchanged that he looks like an old photograph fallen out of an album. That sense of ages having passed.

“Just sign it to me,” he says, unhelpfully, and I stare back down at the page, the pen poised.

“To me and Cecile,” he adds to complete my bewilderment. Cecile? Do I know anyone named Cecile?

Finally I leave out both names but write this quote, the one thing that stayed with me from my time in the hospital.

It was hand-printed in careful block letters in the margins of a handout called “Keep a Good Thought.” The hospital stamp was in the top corner of the cover page. There was one good thought for every morning – something short and sweet for lint-brained depressives on medication. I can’t remember any of the standard-issue ones, but when I saw this one I made a project of holding it in my head. It only took a week.

And it takes some time now to get it all down. When I’m finished I look at my scrawl – the scribblings of a madman. My signature especially has become a black storm of meaningless scratches.

I hand the book back and look now for my son’s orange goggles, wedge myself between bodies. Suddenly no one is familiar. Joanne has disappeared, as have my parents, Maryse, Patrick. Replaced by these young chattering souls in their black and white clothes. How can they all be wearing the same thing? “Sorry. I’m sorry!” I say, fumbling. More wine spills. “I’m sorry!”

Finally I see Patrick crouched in the corner beside my father, who sits on the floor with his knees drawn up close to his chin. The two are looking at something in front of them. A spider dragging a broken leg, scurrying from Patrick’s corralling hands.

“How are you, son?” I ask, and he looks up at me, eyes bulging behind the goggles.

“Dad!” he says, and for a moment I’m transported to somewhere light and joyful. A spontaneous and utterly unreserved hug. “I hurt my head and went to the hospital!” he blurts.

“I know, I saw you.”

“You did?”

“I was there. You were sleeping though. Didn’t your mother tell you?”

The spider steals his attention and in a flash he’s back after it. “I’m trying to get it outside before someone else steps on it.”

It seems a dreadfully important mission. Patrick herds it towards me and I scoop it up in my hand, then the three of us head for the door across the crowded room, Patrick pushing his little body between the adults, me and Dad following in his wake.

“Is everything all right?” Joanne asks.

“Fine. We’re saving a spider.”

“You’re what?”

More spilled drinks. What a night. Patrick gets white wine on his sweater and I get soda splattered on my shoes. We don’t stop. “It’s a wounded spider!” Patrick announces, pushing on. “We’re saving a wounded spider!”

Outside, in the fresh air, I walk a few paces and then release the prisoner. My father stays right at my elbow. He seems
happy to follow along. Look at him quickly, in a certain light, and he just seems odd, not addled with Alzheimer’s. Patrick says, “Dad, you ate spiders when you were captured.”

“Did I?”

“You told me. You used to eat them for protein.”

“It must be true then.”

“Well, didn’t you? You said!”

“I said it, so it must be true,” I say.

“Can’t you remember?”

“Some things I don’t want to remember.”

“Grampa can’t remember anything. He calls me Graham.”

“It’s because you fall down all the time,” I say. “Just like Graham.”

“He fell from a roof,” Patrick says.

“When does the game start?” Dad asks. Here but not here. Patrick says,
“What
game?”

Dad says, “You know. What you were talking about.”

“We weren’t talking about a game! I said you always call me
Graham.”

“Where’s the fire, for Pete’s sake,” Dad mumbles, his hands shaking, shaking. It’s always been one of his great stock phrases, delivered not as a question but in affirmation of the chaotic state of the world.
Where’s the fire, for Pete’s sake
.

Patrick tells me about school and soccer, about being in the hospital and how important it made him feel, just like his famous father. “I didn’t remember a thing!” he says about the accident. “Just like you!”

I’ve told him this story many times, to keep him from asking for details. And he’s just young enough to still buy it, even though he knows that I’ve written a book about it all.

“What are the goggles for?” I ask.

“Mommy gave them to me,” he says. “They’re all steamy and I can’t see a thing. She told me I could wear them tonight so it’s all right.”

Yes. It’s all right. We could all use a steamy pair of goggles tonight. I return indoors, talk and visit and sip soda and the clock swings round. Eventually I have to look at Maryse’s exhibit:
Shards
. A series of luminous acrylic paintings of women in ordinary scenes: standing in a kitchen at night, washing dishes in the sink; reaching for a bottle of ketchup in a hyper-coloured supermarket aisle; in a white slip brushing thick black hair in the bathroom mirror while a baby examines a red rubber boat; stepping onto a bus with a briefcase, a purse, a skirt twisted in the wind; sitting in the sun by a flower garden, a white blouse rolled off the shoulders, face lost in the shadow of a huge sun hat. In fact, the face is obscured in all the pictures – turned away, looking down, or the figure shown only from the back. The light is intense, dazzling, the colours radiant, almost overwhelming; the skin especially approaches translucence. And it’s only when you get quite close that you realize that it
is
translucent in some areas – that bones are showing underneath, naked to the world, white and ghostly in some pictures, darkened slightly in others, with fracture lines and small brownish growths.