For Iwaya

Some men are destined for greatness, this we all know. Other men, we are equally aware, aspire towards greatness and miss their goal. This is one of too many definitions of tragedy.
But then there are others, those whose place on the ladder of success is just beneath that of those who failed greatness. They are those who failed to be satisfied with being average. Those who wanted more. A lot of the time the dissatisfaction sits in them like a cowering stowaway hiding in the shadows with a bad smell, evident but indistinct, and they cannot tell what exactly it is they want about more, just that what they have isn't enough. In some ways this is worse than tragic. It is pathetic.
Sebastian the welder’s son had a good childhood: hearty breakfasts, stern parenting, and plastic footballs for Christmas. He even had a period, between the last year of primary school and the middle of the second year of secondary, when he was an above average student. Then he found other pursuits all of a sudden. Drink, girls, rap music, nightclubs, and became an average student again. He felt it was an acceptable compromise, a fair trade. He saw the options thus: work now and have fun later (in the Future, which teachers spoke about with a capital F) or have fun now and work later. Work now and have more fun later, when you are rich, or work later and have more fun now, when you are young. He was smart enough to know that he would probably grow to regret it, but he was also smart enough to know that there were no guarantees that hard work would bring him success. Besides, youth versus wealth? He figured out, quite precociously, that it was a no-brainer.

“The modern age,” he said to me one day last week, “is the age of paradoxes. The very term is a paradox. Age. The word implies a wide stretch of time. (He stretched his arms apart) Modern. A very specific present. (He held up a pinch in his fingers, as if to show a pinch of time.) Paradoxes.”

His shoulders were drooping. They would be hunched and tense in a few moments, once he walked into the office, punched in, climbed into the elevator, up, out, and walked down the hall. As he progressed down the hall, his lazy foot-dragging slouch would be replaced by a more hectic frog-march. The change would be both quick and imperceptible. He would end up at his desk. When he had pulled his chair to his desk, put his files on his desk, popped the cap off his pen, the shoulders would jerk upwards, and stay there up there for the rest of the day.

“In the modern world we bury men at eighty, ninety, even beyond that. The national statistics in Uganda tell us that the average life expectancy is forty-seven, but the average life expectancy, in this modern age, is lower. It is roughly twenty-seven. That is about two years after a man gets a job. At twenty-seven the job has finally got the man. And the man begins to die. And he dies until he is eighty, ninety, even beyond that. Then we bury him.”

In the middle of a street in the middle of the city a man with a bald spot in the middle of his head had been crying out to the passers-by, who always ignored him: “Don’t you see? You have to believe, that’s all. You just have to believe. You have to believe that we can be pure and vital and … and we can be beautiful. Only if we believe. That’s all it takes, why can’t we understand that? That’s how beauty becomes truth— when someone believes it. Please, please believe that you can be that you can be worth the breath you breathe… please, all you need to do is believe!” the man begged us, but we walked on and never heard him. Walked past, drove past him in our cars and headed for our offices, our elevators, our punch-in cards, our desks, our deaths.

“You see, when you get here, you stop seeing your life in those terms— you don’t see it as a life anymore. Your perspective narrows. You see it in weeks. Let’s break it down: you spend the whole day processing these files, and then you go home tired and exhausted. You need to sleep, so you do. Until the next morning when you take the revitalisation gained from the night to go back for another day of processing files. You work so that you can work. Five days go by, the weekend comes, you rest, get the energy for the next five days. You spend week after week doing nothing but processing files. When you are not tired, you are processing files. When you are not processing files, you are too tired to do anything else. So you end up doing nothing but processing files. For weeks that turn into years. Is processing files living?”

It was a rhetorical question.

“That’s what I mean. You start processing files, you stop living. You start to die.”

I followed him into and out of the elevator and down the hallway. He waved at two people in their cubicles, one a pretty woman with a coffee cup in her hand, the other a chubby man with plump cheeks that made him look smiley. I did not like that smile. It was not the smile of a person who was happy, it was not the smile of a person who was amused. It was the smile of a person who … a person who just smiled. The natural state of his face at rest was that smile— his default countenance— he would smile until something entered his mind and caused him to register a real reaction to the world around him. Until then, as long as there was nothing to frown at, or scowl at, or scream at, he would smile. Even though there was nothing to smile at. The smile was meaningless.

”My friends,” he said, foot-dragging along. ”The term has a different meaning now than it used to have before I came here. In school, on the playgrounds, in my youth, friends were different from what those two are.” He looked at me. ”I share no secrets with them. I don’t know whether I can trust them because it wouldn’t be proper to try and find out. We just share a conversation. The same conversation, basically, every time we meet. We voice the approved opinions about the topics on the list. This boat is not rocked. That is why I feel so… becalmed.”

There must be a life outside this office, I ventured, wife, family, that sort of thing.

”I don’t believe in marriage. Not for me. I have never felt lonely, so I don’t feel the need for a wife. I could get one for sex, and for the financial advantages of having an extra paycheck with which to buy things, but it wouldn’t be fair. And I think, I fear that in the long run this injustice would hurt her, and she would turn against me. I don’t want to have to regret something like that. I already have my regrets. Thankfully, none are of the magnitude of marriage.”

You still have family, don’t you? Father, mother, siblings?

”Yes. But they all have jobs. It’s not the same. I hate the fact that Christmas is not the same as it used to be when I was a child.”

This was when I had to ask. I had been restraining myself, because it seemed impolite, but now I realised we were too far gone over the bounds, politeness was now plainly dishonest. I asked him if that was the reason for the bomb. That he wanted to get Christmas back.

”I don’t know what will happen after the bomb. I don’t think it will bring Christmas, or childhood back. I am not doing this to create or to recreate anything. It is a bomb. Its job is to destroy.”

He walked into the office and mumbled at the shy secretary at the filing cabinet. She smiled back at both him and I. I nodded slightly at her.

He placed his briefcase on the desk and removed some papers. ”This is what you’re looking for, Beatrice,” he said. He handed her a pale blue folder.

She took it smiling bashfully. She mumbled something that could have been thank you but was so whispered I couldn’t make out the exact words.

”I took it home to finish it there,” he said.

You took work home last night when you were going to blow up your office this morning? I asked.

”Strange, isn't it? Force of habit. Now you see why I have to do this? I have to break the habit.” He chuckled. He thought he had cracked a joke. ”I will work on a few more projects now. Until my lunch break. That is when I will leave. I will not come back. There will be nothing to come back to.”


I mentioned it a few days later to Meeks, when he was putting a coin in the beggar’s can. This day the beggar was begging for money, he was not begging us to believe in the purity of beauty or anything like that, and I remembered the file processor. ”This dude the other day. He took a bomb to his office and blew it up.”

”Yeah. I read about it in the papers,” Meeks replied.

”The funny thing is, the whole thing was premeditated. He knew that morning, when he walked in, that he was going to blow up the place at lunchtime. But he still sat down and did a morning’s worth of work. I would have thought he would go in, put the bomb down, and leave. Or if he had to wait until lunchtime, at least not work, do something else…”

Meeks chuckled very much like the file processor had done. ”It was an act of insanity. You can’t expect it to have been carried out rationally.”

There was another bomb explosion in another office later that week. As in the first, no one was hurt, but the damage was such that the company had to shut down for a substantial period of time, and the employees had to leave. They would have nothing to do until the repairs were finished. A week later another explosion took place. The ex-file processor was on a crusade. It was saddening. He did it to break free. To not have a job. But now that he was no longer a file processor, he was an arsonist, a bomb-placer. I don’t know if that qualified as life now.