THE DAY DEATH FEARED TO DIE By Mide Benedict

His chest pounded very hard. He could feel it as it vibrated from his chest to other parts of his body. It was as if he was listening to the sound of a well sun-heated talking drum, sounding some kilometres away from where he was standing outside his room, yet was as if it were near him, as close as his ear drums.

 He was in a blue boxer pant. An image like the head of a woman with dreadlocks, and if viewed in another way, was like a lion’s head was sewn to the band of the boxer pant. On top of this image, which apparently is the logo, a little line was drawn from one end to another and on it was written, Vaserce, revealing the dexterity and duplicative prowess of those making the Aba-made versions of the world-class fashion designer, Versace. On his legs were a pair of yellow bathroom slippers. He had no real shirt on, definitely not while he was on a boxer pant, but rather, he wore a white singlet –covered with so much sweat that it had become slightly translucent, rendering his six parks visible as it gave the singlet some gallops, like bumps made on expressways to cub mad truck drivers and buses from giving innocent citizens’ bodies and goods free rides to unknown destinations –leading them straight to death.  

From his head to his chest, sweat rolled down like great amount of water falling from a very high place down into his boxers.  It was a perfect sight of Erin-ijesa, as the remaining absorbed sweat left by his boxers came down from around his buttocks unto his hairy laps. The hair on his skin stood like soldiers on attention, but this could only mean something. Either he was feeling very hot or he was afraid of something or someone. 

Red, hard, and harsh were the looks that projected from his eyes, producing a sight that was only to be seen in the eyes of marijuana addicts, whose life-wires have being connected to drug, that once such addicts became born again, death would be born again to their lives. As coping with such conditions would be very difficult for them, except those who were ready for change. Since change dwells not in the tongue but in action through determination. 

But Tayo was not an addict. His face, except his eyes that were betraying him, crossed a heart for his cool-headed nature.  Everyone knew Tayo, he was popular in school. So many termed him an example of a good leader for the numerous things he had done to change people’s lives while in school: organising programs on student financial development, fighting for students’ right and so on.

In fact he was the general secretary of the Life Integrity Society on campus, an organisation charged with the duty of ensuring comfortable campus lives for university students. Even if Tayo had a burning sensation in his mind to puff smoke into the freedom drunk air, he wouldn’t be able to. His position in such a big campus organisation and his status as a look-up-to would immediately give that sensation a give-up blow, rendering it to a never-to-be dream. So, that he had taken something of such was a lost option in an impossible jungle.

Tayo’s room had a number in front of it. It was written in chalk with a handwriting that took the form of a thunderbolt. His room was the seventh room of the fifteen rooms located in the building. The building was a small bungalow with rooms that looked more like stall rooms divided into halves to form equal rooms that were enough to contain not three persons, not two but one, comfortably. They were very small, but for a house like that to have had iron-made protective doors, which is popularly known as bullet-proof doors, indicated that the occupants had paid more than a fifty thousand naira as rent. That was unchallengeable. Houses were very difficult for students to possess for low prices outside the school campus. The lower the prices the tougher the living experience. 

There was an open space at the centre of the house, which gave the house a square-like shape. Worn-out cloth lines were drawn from one end to another like webs webbed by a dinosaur-spider. Despite the condition of these lines, old and weak, numerous cloths, such as: underwear, bed sheets, shirts, bikinis, etc., were dried on it, giving it a view of insects trapped in the edges of a web –waiting patiently to be eaten up by a hungry giant spider, except that the unsmiling sun, shinning immensely all over that afternoon was the supposed hungry spider.

Tayo looked to and fro from where he stood like a thief running from a police chase –trying to examine a proper position for a hideout. The way he looked at each room was very strange, yet sharp and quick. After glancing at each pot-like rooms, he gazed at the centre of the building. His eyes ran through the web-like lines. It was sure he was examining the lines, but that was strange. If anyone had seen him in that state, looking enthrallingly at cloth lines, such a person would assume he was going crazy. He would pause at the end of each line and then continue with another until he reached the end. 

He noticed that the webbed lines were just a single rope, tied from one end to another. He sighs, taking a deep breath, before proceeding to the centre, and then began to detach the long rope from one end to the other, dropping the clothes on the ground like ice balls falling from the sky unto iron roofs, only that a supposed thunderous noise which would have sounded if it were real ice balls was void. Now the line was finally down and the clothes were scattered all over like houses in Old Ibadan. He rolled the rope round his left hand but it was too long, so he carried the rest with his right hand and headed for his room.

When he got to his door step, he dusted his legs on the foot mat, causing a small amount of dust from inside the mat to occupy the air up to his ankle level. Holding the door-handle, he opened the door and went into his room. The atmosphere in his room was different, though the sun was shining greatly, resulting to a hot working breeze, but the situation in the room was not so good –the little breeze in his room was like an imprisoned helper, locked up in jail, and was trying to get help, but with the use of heavy locks and thick net against its power was only able to get its voice echo out a little, at least making sure there was no issue of suffocation in the room.

On the walls of his room were beautiful paintings of himself and pictures lined from one end to the other, but in order. Tayo was a very good artist, as a matter of fact, he was recognised as the second best in the art competition organised by the fine and applied art department of his school. He lost to a guy, who was very good and was in some areas, where he was clueless, better.  Tayo, after the competition went to the winner and gave him a handshake accompanied with an eight word sentence, you are the best, I must confess. He had a very big image of Jesus Christ nailed to the wall; it was a painting too, and most likely done by him. The room was lighted up by the light coming in from the eyes-of-a-needle kind of window. The heat in the room was nothing to write about. It was like the heat coming out from an ignited incinerator.
He began to sweat heavily and the whole sweating cycle began again: sweat, rolling from his face down to his buttocks and then to his laps, but he cared not for this, not even with his hands, did he try to wipe it off. There was a ceiling fan in the room – brown in colour, but there was no power supply, so it was not on. It was a self-contain apartment. That is, it had a bathroom and kitchen, which were both covered with long ground-sweeping curtains to hinder anyone from peeping or seeing what was going on in the two rooms. Especially to stop the smell of fly-inviter from escaping into the room. In case any one came visiting, it wouldn’t chase the visitor away –that awful smell of rotten digested beans, matching down the final ejection channel into the water closet, making some noise like a big stone throne into a river and apparently when flushed, would journey into the castle of mature maggots where it would finally be laid to rest, leaving a souvenir behind, just like how it was been done in the human kind of burial ceremony, for anyone in the room to take inhale and then tell the story.
Tayo laid his hand on a school bag, lying beside his rumpled bed. And from it, he brought out a pen with a blue coloured cover on it. He also brought a book from the bag, and from it he tore out a leaf, then he began to write in it. At a point the pen stopped working. He had to remove the ink then shook it very hard till it woke up from the slumber and then he continued writing with it –it never stopped working after then, up to the time he placed the final full stop after the last letter. 

After few minutes of writing, he dropped the note on his reading table which was scattered with books. He untied the rope from his hand and drew a small stool to himself, placing it directly under the ceiling fan. He stretched his hand unto the curtain and released it, making the room very dark and vitamin D appealing.  Climbing the stool, he tied the rope to the brown-coloured ceiling fan and put the rope through his neck.  Tears fell from his eyes to his cheeks. 

He waited for some seconds before tightening the rope properly to his neck and without waiting no longer, he pushed down the stool with his two legs and instantly, his body was left hanging in the air, as he groaned in pain. He shook his body in great speed, and might. His eyes were now very dark and his tongue was gradually pushing itself out of his mouth like the way goats died when being slaughtered.

As he continued to shake in pain, the old rope he had taken from the line and the part that was connecting his neck to the fan began to tear steadily. Tayo couldn’t shout, except some bleh– bleh… buzzes fleeing from the cupboard of his speech arena. The rope hanging him had held his throat very tightly, as a result of this, air could not, in the required way, pass through his oesophagus into his voice box, therefore hindering him from producing any noise that was anywhere near human’s. 

Tayo fell suddenly to the ground, landing on his back and making a loud sound like a blown up mountain. He could not move, but his eyes, dark and full of tears, were opened slightly. Saliva was all over his mouth and mucus rivered from his noise to his lips. Soon he began to wheeze and cough heavily at the same time. The old rope couldn’t hold his weight, hence caused a tear and dropped him to the ground.

Tayo was very lucky that his plan to purge his life from the earthly realm came only that day. But he had been depressed for about a week. He went nowhere, he ate little food and he had not slept for more than twenty-three hours that week. Tayo had gone on Monday to a café in school to check his results after some departmental birds whispered into his ears that his department had released a result and had been uploaded to their online undergraduate home page. 

He became curious and twitchy, fear began smoking out of his skin as he grabbed the thirty-five minutes internet time from the long-bearded café attendant. Speedily having his seat, he typed in the school’s web address into the box provided on the screen and when it opened, the undergraduate log in page was displayed. 

Tayo typed in details in a rush. He was not stabilized, therefore making him to repeatedly type in wrong passwords, causing the computer to display, ‘have you lost your password?’ Tayo gave a damn-it-face, before calming down to type in another password. As the page was loading, his mind was in between the heaven and hell of fear and joy that would be brought by the authentication of the password or the other way round, because if that happened again, he would be directed to report to his level-counsellor for help. And he didn’t want that. But he felt relieved when it displayed the passport photograph he took while in part one –four years ago. 

He used to laugh then whenever he saw the photo on his page in the past. The picture is my worst picture ever, he would claim. But really he was right. His eyes were closed in the picture and his face, indescribable. That relieved state of mind concerning the password soon was joined by what was displayed on his result register. He placed his two hands on his face and down, he wiped it with his hands. He couldn’t scream. No one must know about his present condition. He thought straight about his position, his pride, his popularity, so he couldn’t give all up just because of a moment that was actually worth a shout and tears. He couldn’t cry neither could he smile, nor fake it, not when he found out that his G.P that has been placed on life support ever since he got to his third year and now in his final year, first semester, had breathed its last. 

His heart was heavy and his brain empty at the same time. He assumed it was over. He had being lying about his grades to the members of his organisation, friends, parents and poke-nosing colleagues who would by everything necessary want to have access to his result assessment. He thought he could manage to escape such a scene till that day when he would wear his graduation cap on his head. Even though he had carried-over courses already pregnant with kids, he still wanted to struggle to get out of his situation, but that failed to work. Certainly, he was aware of what would happen next. That very soon, a letter would be sent to him, giving him the advice that could never be rejected, ‘The Advice to Withdraw’, from the management, and that would lead the cat he had been keeping from the public, out of the basket. 

After thinking of the shame that would be poured upon him, he wanted to escape from everything: hope, school, shame, life, etc. before the letter would be issued him. That very thought drove him to that frustrated wall which made him decide to kill himself. 

Not thinking of the pain he would cause his parents, friends, and everyone he had helped. Not thinking of the story that would become of him after he was gone, nor the lies that would surround his death. Not thinking of the lives he had built with his organisation and would count him a bad model and example. He forgot that committing suicide could only do one thing, destroy everything he had ever worked for on the face of the earth. Even Alaafins in the old Oyo kingdom, didn’t want to die when given parrot heads or empty calabashes, but he felt there was nothing in life for him anymore.  He left all, giving in to one failure and forgetting all of his successes, he decided to chase after death, the death he met and engaged with but at the end when life almost gave up on him as he gave up on life, the rope he got from the line became his angel sent from heaven.

 Only because he had no time to prepare himself from the suicidal act, that gave him no choice but to use the over-heated and time rejected rope. Or maybe God still needed him alive than being worn a white cloth and then placed inside a box that would be buried in the graveyard of his unfulfilled grave. Maybe those were the reasons that made the rope not to accomplish its duty. But for whatsoever reason, he was alive.

Tayo, after some minutes of taking much breath, sat down, stretching his legs nonchalantly at different latitude and longitude of his room.  His head was bowed to the ground and his two hands were placed on his thighs.  He shook his head and silently gassed out few words from his mind through his weak and crushed mouth.

‘If I only knew that death was not as easy as that, I would not have dared it.’

He had felt a little bit of the other side and he knew dying wouldn’t solve anything but bring more pain to him. That was what he failed to reason with before betraying life by granting death access to it. 
He crawled to his bed and as he was landing on it, a knock came on the door. 

‘Who –who is that?’ he asked in a low voice.

‘It’s me, Segun’ the voice and the name sank into Tayo’s ears.

‘I just want to know the idiot that did my white shirt like this. Do you have any idea who could have done so?’

‘Oh God!’ Tayo exclaimed internally. ‘The cloths on the line!’ 

‘Hello!’ Segun’s voice came again, but Tayo was silent.

Now he wished he had died, rather than suffering from abuses curses and if not careful, would be beaten for doing such a thing, but death by one’s own hand was something to shiver about. The voice banged again, trice and higher, but Tayo refused to reply. Silently, he pretended as if he was long gone into the world of dreams.

• Dear reader, I hope you enjoyed the story. But always remember that we are the society and the society is us. We have to change what needs be changed and leave what needs be left.

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