Where Death Naps

By the time the government announced the COVID-19 lockdown, Z had already rehearsed his death, checked every weak point of the whole structure of his departure, tightened the screws, and put barbed wire where unwanted holes existed. 

He wanted Death to have no option but to wield his scythe over his head and put an end to this sadism of hovering around with that constant reminder that one day he would strike. Such suspense was better left to detective stories. Z also wanted to control his departure, to author it, and not wait for sickness to eat his body and leave behind a skeletal outline. He disliked the accident route because it didn’t have a 100% success rate. Chances were that an attempt to depart that way would leave you all mangled but still alive.

The last time he had tried an accident, it hadn’t worked out. Not even 1%. 

He remembered how, driving past the rundown buildings of Maruta Shopping Centre at 2 a.m., he, without prior planning on his part, saw a more efficient departure using the machine that, at that time, was cruising at the legally allowed 60 km/hr. The road was deserted. He had just flown in from Switzerland where he had attended an academic conference during which he had chain-smoked until he was coughing out phlegm stained with tobacco smoke. The idea was to pollute his lungs so badly that a single cough would send chunks flying like mincemeat from a meat grinder. But that didn’t work. It had only served to exacerbate his feeling of desolation and bring back unwanted memories. 

His wife and kids had left him to haunt his house alone like a trapped ghost. The leaving was only the penultimate chapter in what had always been an interminable absence. When people who live a whisper or a touch away become absent, the effect is more depressing than physical absence. When the physical absence finally happened, it merely gave him more time to contemplate the coldness of human relationships, culminating in his desire to play no part in a human life in which one’s usefulness was no better than that of a donkey or a dung beetle. Not that his kids had played an active part in any of this. They were too young to understand the responsibilities human beings have to each other. In fact, they were like strange apparitions with which one had not had enough time to form a relationship before they vanished.

He remembered that during the 18-hour flight from Switzerland, he had nursed his loss of faith in humanity like it was something that needed to be archived or curated into some museum for future reference by those lucky to be alive in that illusion called the future. And because the future was an illusion, he didn’t want to be a part of it. He wanted to salvage the remnants of his perforated reality. And what better way to do that than by manufacturing his own death!

So, as the car was approaching the five-kilometre stretch that led to Chinhamo Bridge, Z closed his eyes, removed his hands from the steering wheel and pressed his foot on the accelerator. The Volvo S40 resisted the command at first, seemingly bowing its head and grumbling against this sudden whim from its capricious owner. But the bowing was merely meant to brace it for the sprint and in a matter of seconds, the speedometer had shot up as if an invisible hand fortuitously working to help Z fulfil his mission was pushing it. The car hurtled towards Chinhamo, its nose extended forward like a horse on a winning mission. The world became suspended from Z’s senses and he seemed ensconced in his own time-space capsule that had slipped beyond the known laws of motion. He expected the capsule to disintegrate any time, leaving his body mangled in its wreckage, or if things happened more efficiently, leaving his body dismembered so recklessly that people would have to scour the bush for his fragments. Or even employ the services of police sniffer dogs. He especially wanted them to find his head last. He didn’t really know why he preferred to have his head last in the body bag. Probably because the mouth he used to scowl and laugh at the world was located on it. He imagined how having his head in the body bag last would allow him to have what he thought was the last laugh before the rough hands of the police officer zipped the bag shut. 

Z had his head still caught in the bunch of Death’s underwear when it dawned on him that there was something wrong with his car. Not wrong in the sense of metal clanging against metal, but wrong in the sense that nothing had happened at all. It was as if the car had disobeyed the last wish of a dying man by conspiring with Death to play a trick on him. He opened his eyes and for a moment couldn’t tell where he was. He slowed the car to a crawl, followed its beam and saw black and white drums by the side of the road. It was the spot where the police usually set up a roadblock. He glanced to the side and caught a glimpse of an airplane’s tail whizzing past. It was then that he knew that the car had traversed the whole five-kilometre stretch to Chinhamo without any hiccup that collocated with death. He had bet on the Chinhamo Bridge’s lucrative history of burying cars to not let him down. He stopped the car, got out, lit a cigarette and looked at the sky. Stars hung on the underbelly of the sky like profuse decorations on the ceiling of a lavish and impudent prince’s mansion. There was no moon to complete this garish display. In the distance, the tower lights of Zengeza gazed at the sky, unperturbed, unaware that somewhere near their vicinity, a death had refused to happen.

 

***

Z’s desire to exit the world became so obsessive that he started to write poetry. He loved the way his poetry made Death mutate into this likable person with whom one would want to have a beer or even make love like that lonely cellist in Saramago’s Death at Intervals. But he also hated the fact that when he posted one of his poems on his Facebook wall, he got one hundred likes and forty-four comments. Many of the comments had the impersonal ‘Nice’ and a few were clichéd and pompous attempts at engaging him in a poetry duets of sorts. He hated that. None of the readers even attempted to ask if he was alright. That was where he had this beef with the world. Nothing shocked these people anymore. They liked everything. Suicidal poems. A Facebook post about losing a loved one. A photo in which one lay on a hospital bed with tubes creating a spider’s trap above one’s head. A failed marriage from which one exited with puffy eyes, clutching frenziedly at the threadbare ends of life. People liked that shit. They liked it without even attempting to bridge the emotional distance between themselves and the person isolated and lost in the vast desert sands of a nonchalant humanity. But having that shit hit them in the face always made people come to terms with the fact that reality, real reality, is not about Likes. And it was that reality that he wanted to give them through his departure. 

But Z also loved the way poetry created an alternative world for him. Not just a fantasy, but a world that one could actually invade, mangled parts and all, and leave the world behind open-mouthed with shock. It was while he was contemplating the best way of physically transitioning to this alternative world that he wrote one of his most-viewed poems on Facebook, which received hundreds of Likes but no in-boxed message asking if he was fine.  

 

what if…

(dark thoughts)

 

what if the missing teeth of the moon

are the reason why I can’t chew this bone?

what if these silent journeys 

are harbingers of silence’s eternal reign?

 

what if this incarcerated smile

morphs into a guttural cry?

 

what if beyond the cliff edge of this moment

I fall into all the happiness the world can offer? 

 

what if these two are not one 

but many layers crying for air?

 

what if these words are just fugitives

scuttling away from the recognition of the reader?

 

He wanted to pay back the Likes that came after this post with something so shocking that the Likes would fold back into clenched fists, tear their clothes in shock and grief, wear sack cloths, cover themselves in ashes and wail like a forest during a thunderstorm. Those who lived their lives as if he didn’t exist would acknowledge his existence through its absence. 

But after the failed attempt along Seke Road, he began planning something more effective, an act he could control from A to Z. But this time, he didn’t want the idea to come on a whim. He wanted to plan with care and precision, to make sure that every minute part contributed to the bigger mission. So he researched vigorously on the many ways of killing a cat and chose one that had a lucrative track record of delivering results; one that, once in motion, could not be stopped by human intervention.

Unfortunately, the lockdown started on the day that he had chosen to make his exit. And he had to find an alternative under lockdown conditions.

 

***

The glass of water which Z has planned to mix with rat killer sits innocently before him, looking like any other glass of water that a human being under lockdown can drink. He has heard that rat killer kills with aplomb. You writhe, curse, vomit, fart and release diarrheic filth before the poison shakes life out of your body, leaving fear-stricken, regretful and hysterical people behind. Let me see those Likes when the acrid smell of death suffocates the flared noses of your hypocrisy, he thinks to himself with a mischievous smile on his face. But then, he remembers that water has this capricious vibe to it and would probably sabotage his plan. One can never trust water. One moment it gives life, the next, torrents pour from heaven’s asshole, inundating earth and making human beings just a bunch of irrelevant and puny particles all along living under the tragic illusion that they have everything under control. Control, my ass! Let me show you what control looks like. He goes to the sink where he empties the glass, then opens the refrigerator and retrieves a beer bottle. He pours its contents into the glass and shuffles to where the rat killer rests on the table like some harmless prescription from a bored doctor. 

He trusts beer. 

There are many things that it has made him do – things that bare their hairy asses at the high heavens of people’s pretentious righteousness and cautiousness. Like that time when he…damn, forget it!

He takes the packet of rat killer and pours all the contents into the glass of beer, downs the contents, smacks his lips, belches and waits for his departure. 

***

When Z awakens, the TV is sounds  as if someone were  choking it. Above the sound of the TV’s frantic wheezing, he hears the second hand of the clock on the wall dragging itself along its cyclical journey, its hangers-on in the form of the minute and hour hands tagging along reluctantly. 

Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. 

He stares at the wall clock and sees the hour hand pointing at 3 and the minute hand pointing at 2. Ten minutes past three. An atrocious thirst sits heavily on his throat and the way it is sitting means that only a beer can dislodge it. There are certain kinds of thirst that even water cowers from. He drags his feet to the refrigerator, whose hum shakes with fervour, and retrieves a can of beer. He pops it open, and foam gathers around its mouth. He breaks the opener and throws it inside the can, a habit he had learned from his college girlfriend. She had also taught him how to make love without coming too soon. But that was many years ago when a heartbreak could be cured by a couple of trips to the bar.

He gulps down the beer thirstily and aims the can at the waste basket in a corner of the room. 

He misses. 

It suddenly dawns on him that he is still alive. The TV that has been choking has outwrestled its demons and is now breathing normally. ZTV is repeating the same movie for the umpteenth time. 187. Samuel Jackson is cycling feverishly, like he is demon-possessed, past a bridge, past a street with cars haphazardly strewn on it, past a rubbish dump, past himself… Z sighs and goes back to the refrigerator where he retrieves another beer. This time he drinks slowly like someone who wants the beer to help him ponder on a matter of utmost importance. 

Samuel Jackson is having a screwdriver stuck into his back several times and is later left lying prostrate in the bathroom. But he doesn’t die. 

With his eyes on the empty rat killer wrapper, Z sits heavily on the couch. What the fuck went wrong? he wonders. The glass from which he drank the rat killer is still on the table. The dredges of the contents sit at the bottom of it and an adventurous cockroach is making sporadic raids during which it immerses its head in the dredges before swiftly travelling up the glass to psyche itself up for the next raid. This goes on and on until, satisfied, the cockroach scrambles up the wall into a crevice created by flaking paint to spend the rest of the day there. Z takes the cue and shambles into his bedroom, the beer can still in his hand.

 

***

Day 13 of the national lockdown is like a heavy blanket under which the occupant can neither see nor hear. It is like a capsule which shuts out its occupant from the outside world until the occupant has lost any sense of time or place. It’s evening. The hiccup of the previous attempt at exiting this world hasn’t dampened Z’s obsession with leaving. If anything, it has made him decide to look for more creative ways of leaving, ways whose track records are unanimously respected. Leaving shouldn’t be such a headache when the world is brimming with methods.

He has run out of beer. But he remembers that there are several bottles of cheap whisky and vodka hiding in the pantry. He retrieves one and finds a clean tumbler. The fiery passage of the vodka down his oesophagus leaves him grimacing. Damn! This shit needs to be diluted, he speaks under his breath. Shuffling to the refrigerator and retrieving a water bottle, he moves back to the couch where he commits himself to the bottle which sits before him, ready to be consumed. He works his way down the bottle until the last drop falls into his tumbler. He feels light-headed and intelligent now. This makes him bolder in seeking a way out. For the first time in thirteen days, he unlocks the door and goes outside. A chilly wind is blowing and trying very hard to breach the layers of heat that the vodka has ensconced him in. The moon sits snugly on the base of the sky, serenaded by millions of stars. He stares at it, at the woman and the hare trapped inside its belly and wonders how those two can escape. It is while staring at the woman and the hare that an idea strikes him.. 

Light.

Fire.

Electricity!

The light on his front porch makes many things visible to the eye, including the naked vein of an electric wire that has escaped from its coating. And with enough magnetic force to make him throw away the glass he is holding, the wire calls, directing him towards the security wall above which it is suspended, pulling him towards his exit. He clambers up the security wall and like a sky-walker, with arms spread out for balance, walks towards the wire until it hangs invitingly above his head, ready to catalyse his passage and leave behind a charred monstrosity for the living to shrink from. He looks up at the vein for a long time and smiles at the mystery of coincidences like this one. There are things that come to us, not because we have racked our brains in search of them, but because we are there and they are there. Like this wire, he thinks to himself. Like myself.

Suspending all thinking and only allowing the effort of touching the naked vein to move in the wires of his brain, he stretches his hands to touch. The naked vein connects with his hands. 

Nothing.

Nothings happens. His body isn’t hurled up by an angry electric current and doesn’t vibrate with the fervour of electrocution. The meaty, bloody parts of his body remain meaty and bloody. The dry ones like his locks and clothes remain dry. He looks around and is shocked to discover that only the light of the moon remains. The porch light has been turned off by some invisible switch. And so are all the porch lights of the houses of his street. Even the tower lights of his neighbourhood have closed their eyelids. 

Then he sees her. 

The combination of her light nightgown fluttering in the wind and the moonlight makes her look alien, like a resident of the world he wants to leave this one for. They stare at each other silently, Z standing on top of the security wall, gazing down at her, and she looking up at him from below. It is like that for what seems like an eternity separated from the present moment in which they are caught, until she averts her eyes and turns back, disappearing into her house and closing the door softly behind her.

When he goes back into his house and lights a candle, he looks at the wall clock whose second hand is dragging its hangers-on along its endless journey.

Ten minutes past three in the morning.

***

Day 21 of the lockdown feels unreal. The mind has become so numbed that many things have a certain surrealism to them, as if during those twenty-one days everything retreated from the level of familiarity to another level where one needs to name everything again. Only one bottle of whisky and a joint remain. Since 7pm, Z has been pouring from this last  bottle, sipping slowly, wanting it to last. The rolled joint lies on the table. He decides to wait until he has poured the last drop from his whisky bottle before hitting the weed. Drinking after taking weed feels funny to him, like something that people who are desperate to get drunk do. But for him, weed is to drinking what ice-cream is to dinner. Some kind of dessert. 

His minds drifts slowly, very slowly, clandestinely, to his female neighbour. He last saw her the day the electricity company foiled his departure. Their two houses seem like two countries, sharing a border but very far from each other. Since she moved into her house two years ago, he has bumped into her on a few occasions. At first, no familiarity would register in their eyes, until the day they closed their gates to go to work at the same time, and their cars crawled together slowly along the dusty and potholed road that led to the main road where the fracas of traffic swallowed them in and they both became part of this huge commotion of crawling creatures going to the city. Later, a nod would suffice. Then one or two words – the weather, the difficulty of finding petrol, the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan and other such subjects as two neighbours finding themselves in each other’s vicinity would routinely talk about. But it never went beyond that even though their loneliness, which was like a common denominator of their two countries, wasn’t hidden from them. 

After swallowing the last drop of whisky, he picks up the joint and lights up. The grade is dope. The shebeen queen from three streets away promised him that he would come back for more after tasting her grade. The smoke rises to the ceiling very slowly, unhurriedly, drawing patterns that get disfigured when the smoke hits the ceiling. Some of the patterns get inside his head and he feels like he is floating. The floating takes him to the ceiling where his body is made to hug it like a lizard basking in the sun. Then he is spun around and the ceiling becomes the underbelly of the sky from where he gazes at the earth which appears to him as a vast stretch of blueness. Water, he says to himself. 

Water.

Water!

Why hadn’t he thought of it before? All he needs is to make water angry! When water is angry, it exhumes huge rocks from the belly of the earth and excites them with destructive vehemence until whole cities are buried under the blanket of its anger. Sometimes water gets so angry that it lifts its head to the sky and looks down at the earth with fury, the human beings on it looking like ants scurrying for cover. When water pulls off such a stunt, you should know that human beings have committed a crime against it. That’s exactly what he needs. A crime against water.

When he finally finds himself on earth, Z strips to perfect nudity and staggers to the bathroom. He steps into the bath tub and decides to trap the water and himself in it. All he needs is to curl in the tub, open the faucet and trap the water. The water will get so worked up that it will smother him to death. He has read of so many bathtub deaths that his own would add to the glowing resumè of the bathtub’s exploits. He tries to lie like a cadaver in a coffin but he is too big for the tub. So he drapes his legs over the edge of the tub and immerses his upper body in it. He opens the faucet and water bursts out of it, gathering under his buttocks and tickling them as if the water and Z are lovers. But he knows that the love affair will soon be over. 

Then he waits.

***

Z wakes up to see a face peering at him in the fog of his sleep-tortured eyes. For a moment, he finds it difficult to tell where he is exactly. He is still trying to figure out what the hell is happening when the face speaks.

“There’s water all over the house. A whole flood of it everywhere. Some of it is flowing past your gate. That’s how I got to know. I had to break your lock. It will take until sunrise to clean the mess. Then you’ll need to take lots of stuff outside to dry in the sun. What the hell were you thinking?”

He tries to speak but fails. When he tries to adjust his body, water spills out of the tub onto the already flooded floor. Then he looks closely at her. She is wearing the nightgown she was wearing the day the electricity company sabotaged his departure, and beyond it, outlines of her bra and underwear are visible. The cold has numbed his body but the numbness fails to hold a line of defense against a stirring that crawls to his loins. 

“What time is it?” he finally finds his voice.

She takes a phone from her bra, checks the time and says, “Ten minutes past three in the morning.”

He laughs.

“Care to join me for a bath?”

She laughs.

Her laughter clears the fog in his mind. He stretches his hand towards her and she extends hers towards him. When their fingers interlock, he smiles. For what seems like a lifetime, they hold each other in their gazes. He suddenly becomes aware of a peace that has hitherto eluded him. His next destination becomes clear. 

“Hi,” he finally speaks. “My name is Z.”

“Z?” she asks with mock confusion on her face. “Z, as in the last letter of the alphabet?”