The Wait

It is 2:03 am

He turns off the car headlights; not the  engine. The engine is still revving - a low, soft purr, like an animal’s. His mind is not on it right now. He reaches to the backseat for his bottle of vodka, the one he carried from the bar when he stepped out. It’s halfway done. He makes to open it but he changes his mind and places it on the car’s cup holder next to his seat. He lights a cigarette instead, his tenth in under an hour, and closes his eyes. He has always said to himself that closing his eyes makes him one with the smoke. Makes them bond at a deeper level, helps him meditate same way that monks recede to a monastery to engage with their spirituality in a place of quiet and solitude. He takes a long drag at the cigarette. Smoke fills his soul. Without opening his eyes he reaches for the button on the side of the door and lowers the window and lets smoke crawl out of his nose and the corners of his pursed mouth into the cold, chilly night in a lazy trail. He sits still. The cigarette smolders in a dull ember between his fingers. It’s almost soulful, almost visceral, the glow.

He slowly, even achingly opens his eyes and looks at the lights of the city in the distance. At 2am the city is asleep, but again the city is unlike you and me. It’s a different animal. A part of it never sleeps. And that’s the part that tells its story. A plane flies over the city now. It looks like a fire fly from here. It descends and disappears in the smorgasbord of lights and buildings. He can see lights move, which must be the city traffic. An earlier drizzle had left the air a little heavy with moisture and so from here the lights look like miniature blobs. Sometimes they look like spread-out dots of light that flicker and dull, as though breathing. He looks away.

In his car, at the edge of a cliff overlooking a massive ravine. That’s where he is. This is a place that tourists like to come to. Perhaps that’s because of its breath-taking view of the ravine that slopes miles and miles below in endless vastness and rock and vegetation and just plain old unadulterated beauty, raw and naked, like a caveman.  And then there’s the city sitting on the other side, solemn, looking in as though sighing to the beauty of the ravine. The view is so off the charts you’d think it’s a prank. And tourists come here, I guess, not just to take pretty pictures on expensive cameras but also to find themselves. This place helps you find yourself. There’s a presence about it that goes beyond the ephemeral; a presence bigger than life. You get the feeling that you're breaking bread with the gods, sitting here. Or perhaps that you've kissed a mermaid. It’s deeply humbling. Thoroughly grounds you. God should live here. He drove out here tonight for that magic, and who's worthy to blame him?

Now he reaches for the bottle of vodka next to him and chases the smoke down his lungs with a long swig. His throat burns but it makes him alive and he doesn’t miss the irony. Nothing matters anymore, and that’s why he is sitting in his car at the edge of a bloody ravine at 2 in the morning, getting wasted. Tears sting his eyes and he bites his lower lip, daring them not to come because even in this moment he still wants to maintain a level of dignity. He tries hard not to cry. He stares defiantly at the dark void, which is what the ravine looks like at night. He stares out into the distance and fails to see the beautiful sleeping city. It’s a smudge of lights. His eyes sometimes linger on a speck of light in the fringes of the city and he imagines someone sitting in that house watching a late night show, filling out a job application, packing up for an early morning journey by bus, eating a late meal, reading the dying chapters of a novel, tossing in bed. Life continues in seclusion of his woes, it dawns on him.

He had come home in the evening, today after work, and had changed into his work-out gear and gone out to the gym. After working out he had then taken a long, warm shower – longer than always – and then trimmed his side-burns and moustache and applied some aftershave. He had looked himself in the mirror, made faces, imitated his pot-bellied supervisor Mr. “Yay Yay” making a speech, and laughed. Mr. YY (as they all call him) giving a speech is the funniest thing you ever saw. It’s stuff of legend. He then had put on a pair of khaki pants and a gray polo shirt. No belt. He had crowned this look with his favorite coat, a brown corduroy coat. He loved that coat a lot, a present from his cousin Leah, the only person who seemed to give a shit. It’s a fancy coat. You know the type you see models don on fashion runways. Yeah, Leah has tremendous style. On his way out of the house, he had decided to throw on a scarf because it was chilly. Then he had looked around the house one last time and killed the lights before heading downtown to Plato’s for some on the rocks.

Now he sits here. He reaches into his back pocket and fishes out his wallet. He has a photo of his son. The last time he saw him his mother was dragging him away from him, screaming profanities at him. That was 6 years ago. He must be a big boy now, he thinks. He wonders what’s going on in his life. He sure misses the boy. He feels his heart sink. He continues to flip through his wallet; he has a credit card and two debit cards. There’s a business card with a name he can’t place. He thinks for a minute then tosses it away into the night. He then tosses away his debit and credit cards, one by one, and watches then float down and disappear in the grayness of the night. He has some money in the wallet, not much but enough to buy dinner at a decent restaurant. He tosses away these as well. He thinks to toss away his wallet too, with all its remaining contents, but he kills this thought. He places the wallet on the co-driver’s seat then takes a deep breath to calm his jittery nerves.

It’s 2:54 am

He grabs his phone from his coat pocket and calls the one person who would take his calls at this time of the night. The phone rings a long time and when he’s about to hang up she answers. “Hey,” she sounds sleepy, whoozy.

“Hey, Leah,” he mumbles, “sorry to call you so late…”

“What’s up, everything fine?”

“Yeah, am home. Just struggling to sleep,”

“What time is it?” she asks, sounding like she’s turning in bed.

“Two!?...or maybe three!? Am not so sure. Am sor…”

“Not so sure, huh? Thanks for waking me up!” she scolds.

“Listen, I just wanted to say that I won’t be able to see you tomorrow. Something’s come up,” he says.

“And this couldn’t wait until morning? Anyway, let me know when you are open…at a decent hour.”

He manages a little laugh.

“Leah?”

“Yeah?”

Brief pause.

“Never mind. You have a good sleep. Take care of yourself, okay?”

“Sure, talk to you tomorrow. Get some sleep. Goodnight.”

When he hangs up his lips start trembling.

Time check: 2.56 am

He feels like someone’s seated in the car somewhere, watching him go through this. He’s sweating now. He feels a thudding in his heart that almost shakes him. A tattoo of death. He feels pain over that thud, like a punch. But mostly he feels fear, a potent and evil hand that grasps his heart and squeezes. He thought getting drunk would offer a shield from these sensations he now feels: the harrowing anxiety of the wait as the clock runs down, the twitching of his muscles, the angst in the pit of his belly. The hollowness. He feels dread, and dread feels like death. As the hour nears he feels ever more empty, like someone has dredged purpose from his inside. The last year has been nasty alright but what he feels now is only matched by the profound sense of rhetoric that the whole scenario has unfolded to become. He looks at his life – what he has done, what he wishes he did. He wishes he was a part of his son’s life and a drop of tear begins to run down his face over the beads of sweat. He wipes it with the inside of his palm. He loves his job, though. And he’s mighty good at it. He’s a fine journalist, something of a superstar in his field. A force of nature. This is the apex of creativity sitting up here in the middle of nowhere at an ungodly hour drinking hard Russian liquor and freezing his tits off -the very best - he thinks with half a smile.

He thinks of his brother who works at the stock exchange market in Gaborone. He wonders what he’s doing right now. He wonders what he’ll be doing when they call him to tell him about him. He thinks of his estranged wife; how evil she is. He wonders what he saw in her. It saddens him that he could have been so wrong about her, so blinded by her phony demeanor. He thinks of the music he enjoyed listening to. “Diamonds on the sole of her shoes” by Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Paul Simon comes top of that list and yet he never really loved it that much. He always liked Tracy Chapman, everything about her: how she strum on that guitar, how she sang from somewhere deep, how her songs came through as though riding on the wings of a butterfly, soft as the soul. Wasn’t she a beauty? He loved her dreads and how shy she seemed. He purposefully avoids thinking about his mother, because he loves her insanely. It would sear his heart, it would make him numb. He thinks of Leah and a deep sense of loss washes over him.

At 2:58 am

He starts to cry. A soundless cry. More like a sob. His jaws clench and tears roll down his now cold cheeks. He cries in silence. He cries like a sheep facing the butcher’s knife. He weeps, softly, with dignity. He weeps the way you’d weep when someone is not watching. Last time he’d cried like this was 6 years ago, when she took his son away. That bitch! They’d broken him then but he wept like a man: with dignity. He owned his pain.

When the hour comes around, he is numb. He longs to be saved from himself. He remains a shell of a man. He remains void and pitiful. A deep fear takes over him and he cannot feel his hands. The fear of death. He stares out at the dead city yonder but he doesn’t see the lights anymore; it’s a black hole. A light, cold wind blows through because the car window isn’t rolled all the way up but to his ears the wind sounds like a dirge. He is a man besieged by his own choice and he dies even before death receives him.

He is no longer crying, he doesn’t need to because his die has been cast. He takes a last swig from his bottle, puts out his cigarette and tosses it away in the ash tray. He takes a deep breath. He doesn’t pray.

At 2:59am

His phone alarm buzzes. He pushes the gear lever to “drive”. He then closes his eyes and steps on the gas pedal to the floor. The vehicle rushes forward violently off the edge of the cliff and starts falling, hitting rocks as it goes tumbling down.

His life doesn’t flash before his eyes. The ball has left his court. His fate is off his hands now. He feels the hand of death reaching out to him, cold as only death can be.

As he stumbles down he is unaware of the amount of pain he has already created. He is unaware that his only sibling, his brother, will crumble on the floor of his office and weep when he hears the news. He doesn’t know that his mother will be so shocked by the news she will plunge into a depression that she never quite recovers from. He doesn’t know that his buddy Joe, with whom he had a drink at Plato’s tonight, will blame himself for not having seen signs, any cracks. He doesn’t know that his father will turn in his grave with disappointment. He doesn’t know that his estranged wife will choke upon hearing the news, and cry herself sick. And Leah, oh poor Leah. She will play the last conversation in her head over and over. She will remember the labored, little laugh. The pause. She will remember the last words, “… take care of yourself, okay?” These immortal words will be the bricks to her citadel of guilt, a tall structure that will forever cast a shadow on her life. She will join a choir. Although they were close and she will miss him every day, she will hate him with equal passion, hate him for being selfish. And she will grow thin from thinking about him. His girlfriend of 3 months will refuse to believe the news. She’ll be in denial a long time. She will not know who he was. Everyone will be puzzled, unable to reconcile him with this. Question marks will stick out of everyone’s head.

He doesn’t know any of these as he falls.

The final moment is hazy and turbulent. It’s chaotic. He doesn’t open his eyes but he feels as though he’s rushing into something. Fear matters little now. The last thing he hears is a loud bang. It ends it all.