Free Burridge Unbound by Alan Cumyn Page 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.
    Flatten and pave a field
,
the grass still pokes through
,
water widens the tiniest crack
.
    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