SUICIDE

“Did you really want to die?"
"No one commits suicide because they want to die."
"Then why do they do it?"
"Because they want to stop the pain.” ― Tiffanie DeBartolo

 “Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.” ― Seneca.

Coagulating blood and milky-white brain matter had spilled onto the floor courtesy of the sprawling man at the center of the white-tiled bathroom. He was spread-eagled, like Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, his mouth agape in an expression that must have been wordless pain.

He killed himself, one said.  Abomination, another muttered.

“Has he solved any of his problems by killing himself” A woman clad in a Guinness-branded T-shirt asked perhaps rhetorically, because no one replied. I wanted to reply. He indeed has solved all of his problems. He cannot face them anymore. No one can claim to have started living until he confronts his own mortality, contemplating a quick exit from what could be a supremely terrible existence.

The judges and mourners had gathered even before the police; they made comments about him, premature eulogy and spoken epithets. Some of them passed easy judgments on the deceased.

“He cannot go to heaven. There is no need to pray for him. The Bible does not permit suicide.”

“Yes. It is a mortal sin.”

The Bible may not permit suicide but it has never been known to stop a man from unloading thick lead onto his skull.

“He had such a wonderful life, a wonderful wife…three wonderful kids.” A man commented from the bathroom doorway.

“Sometimes I wish I was him.”

“I wished I was him all the time.” Another man added.

I do not know who they were. They are probably family and friends. I do not recognize any of them. Until two weeks ago, the deceased was a complete stranger. However, from all intents and purposes, I had known the deceased more than even his family and friends for he opened up to me, a complete stranger, united to him by our frequenting of one Lounge, ‘CASANDRA’ and our frequent ordering on one beer, Heineken.

Two weeks ago we started talking in the bar, perching often on the two long seats in front of the beautiful bosom barmaid whose job was not only to serve us our poison but also, maybe as a matter of rule and as stipulated in her employment letter, to flirt with all the customers, bending down ever so slightly to reveal an ample cleavage accentuated by a push-up bra which she wore daily, maybe also as a matter of rule.

Not that he noticed the flirtations, he always seemed a little too-absorbed in his own world and rarely spoke to the Barmaid except to request for another bottle of Heineken. Some nights he spoke to the Barmaid only thrice, other times four times and in the weekends he spoke ‘at’ the buxomed-lady most times, often six. We exchanged less words than he spoke to the lady before us. We did not chat, we had chosen to be loyal to our personal nightmares.

But then inside of us, our souls had matched. He had met a kindred spirit. Our nightmares had spoken to each other and became friends even before he bought me his first drink and asked me what my name was and extended his hands for our first handshake. Before then, we did not do anything beyond nod at each other and exchange knowing looks recognizing our brotherhood in pains for both of us strangely acknowledged that our nightmares were not merely hanging onto our backs, they were albatrosses strapped across our shoulders and with time sewn into our skin, muscles and bone marrows with our arteries and veins as the threads. At those times before we started talking to each other, we raised our bottles to the television in front of us, hanging from behind the barmaid’s spot, too terrified to speak to each other, continuously worried about what terror we would find in each other’s heads. In those times before the words, we dealt with uncomfortable gazes from the rest of the lounge that most definitely found us as odd as we found ourselves. Two handsome men sharing a silent companionship while barely noticing in front of them a beautiful girl with impressive chest that was extended to humongous proportion by a push-up contraption and her unrelenting overtures.

The ladies looked mostly at him for he was more handsome, taller and essentially more charismatic and I became as handsome by association. However, he always left the Lounge utterly drunk but never with any of the ladies who gave him the eyes. We were united in that. Our demons demanded that we suffer alone.

However when we started speaking, opening up each other in a manner that could only be surgical, an avalanche of grief rolled off us into the green bottles we bore and we guzzled them down again, feeding the grief that welled up from our guts in a virtuous cycle.

I had told him that my name was Ewenike and he told me he was named Agude.

“You know all these people see are the designer clothes and nice cars that we hide in.” He told me gesticulating with his glass of drink towards the rest of the lounge. That was just a week before I saw him and his innards splattered on his bathroom floor.

“At least you had the cars and the designer clothes.” I had replied

“It’s a shame those cars and clothes cannot return your affection.” He retorted.

“But at least we get to be miserable with a roof over our heads and some nice clothes.” I had quipped in “It would be much worse if we are this miserable and homeless.”

He scoffed in place of laughter.

“You will live longer than me,” He had said looking into the bottle as if it contained the very meaning of life itself.

“How do you mean?” I had queried “I believe that we run a parallel and equal life expectancy”

“No...We have one common difference between us.”

“What is it?”

“You still crack jokes and laugh. You still find fun in your sadness” True, he does not laugh. I have not ever seen him laugh. The best I had ever coerced out of him was a scoff and a smirk whenever he pitied my attempt at humour and wanted to reward my efforts.

In retrospect what saved me from putting a gun to my head or strangling myself with my black leather belt were that tiny part of me that saw the funny side of my misfortune.

“Yet you have a beautiful wife and three kids who live for you.”

“The kids are not even mine.”

“Yea yea…Mhmm” I muttered feigning thoughtfulness “No one would know if you don’t tell.” I added.

“So I live for what others would think and say?” He asked me. At that time the entire lounge started shouting uproariously. He paused then to look behind him. I did so too. A slim girl of about 23 years of age clad in the shortest blue gown imaginable that threatened the existence of all other min skirts was twerking. The short skirt riding up to her hips outrageously and at times revealing the red panties she wore underneath it.

“Go! Go!! Go!!!” The club roared its encouragement a decibel higher than Phyno’s ‘Turn Down for What’

Ewenike only gave the girl a fleeting gaze before sighing and turning away. He was not moved. He could only be moved if the distraction was a barrel-chested, hairy, hunky man swinging seductively.

Ewenike was gay.

I tore my gaze away from the beautiful distraction. She was my kind of poison and I found men like Agude nauseating. I am homophobic.

Yet something strange bound us to each other; our communion in pain and regret.

“I have landed myself in this mess because of what people would say and what they said.” He said quietly. I strained to hear him over the sound of the loud dance music. He was not actually trying to get heard. He apparently had been tired of trying to be understood.

“I opened up to my Parents when I was twenty-two, seeking their understanding but I failed.”

I remembered his story. He had opened up himself to his parents seeking their understanding but had returned monumentally disappointed. His mother had burst out in tears calling on all the angels and saints and ‘Holy Ghost Fire’ to save his son from imminent death and eternal damnation.  Being Catholics, he woke up the next day hearing that his mother had booked a novena mass for him.

His father had never been a man of much words and thus asked him to consider himself disowned and disinherited until he denounced that abominable lifestyle.

He earlier called his bluff until he started hearing weepy tears and gnashing of teeth coming from his bedroom. That hurt him more than the shouts he hears from his mother’s room while she submits her son’s unacceptable peculiarity to higher powers.

“I disavowed my sexual orientation when I heard that my Father had suffered a heart attack arising from a high blood pressure.” He emptied his third bottle for the night and glanced at the voluptuous bar maid. She obliged with a fourth and uncorked it rather aggressively such that it came off with a pop rather than a fizz.

“You know what he said when the Doctor asked him why he was worrying too much. He was well to do; he has an heir and three daughters that are already married.”

I know what he said, Agude had told me that already that same night.

“Ask Agude why he does not want me to hold my grandson.” He spoke in vain mimicry of his father’s apparently hoarse voice.

“Hold my grandson…Hold my grandson.”  He scoffed and took a long swig of his beer. I took mine trying but failing to keep up with him.

“You know very well that the issue was not about any grandson?” I asked him.

“Of course, Ewenike.” His voice was becoming weepy and he could hardly force them out “My Father…was…invariably telling me that I was…I was…killing him. That if he drops…dead anytime that it was totally my fault.”

“How could I be that kind of a son? Eh Ewenike?” I could see the glimmer of tears in his eyes as it refracted off the light in the lounge. He sniffled, reining in the tears and adjusted his posture, straightening his back in defiance of his ill fortune. I admired his strength but in his tears and hoarse cracking voice, I could hear a man at his wits’ end, a drowning man caught in fates’ own quagmire trouncing and flapping as he desperately tries to keep his head above water, reaching for an elusive vine that would grant him redemption.

I share some similarities with him but my tragedies were not recent and certainly not as profound. I had started to feel useless. I could sometimes feel my life slipping away from me like a fistful of sand. And it all happened in six months.

First, I lost my job.

Then, I lost my girlfriend.

And lastly I lost my mother to the merciless hands of cancer.

My trinity of tragedy was complete before I resorted to the bosom of ‘CASANDRA’ Lounge. I had nothing to live for. I had lost my relevance with my job, lost my joy when I lost my girlfriend, Ifunanya and lost my very breath with the demise of my mother.

My relationship with my mother was that of a stem of a tree with its roots. With her death, I lost the connection I had to earth and life itself lost all colors.

That is why I sort color in the lounge picking courage from liquor and drawing some morbid sort of strength from the graver miseries of people behind me.

I loved seeing mad men strolling aimlessly while chattering with the beings in their heads for it told me that I still was lucky. I was still making choices, with a roof over my head and with food in my belly. I loved seeing the tragedies in Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia and South Sudan; it encouraged me to live on. A whole lot more people have it worse.

Men like Agude made me want to breathe on, live on. His pain and loneliness was familiar. In a world full of people who would only judge us based on the fineness of our profile pictures and how fantastic we appear in a picture that only showed the aspect of ourselves we believe to be camera-worthy, in locations were we may have been to only once: when we took the picture and possibly faking our own excitement to make others feel like we are having an awesome time; we stand out or rather we stick out like sore thumbs.

That is why we share those drinks, tell and re-tell our tales of woe, our miseries kissing and copulating in empathy.

The day he died, I knew that he would. He was still his usual taciturn self but he spoke to the barmaid eleven times. The only words he said to me was that he cannot go on. That his kids are not his and his wife was not his and his parents are not even his anymore. The wife had opened up to his parents that their only son was gay and had not sired all the kids they cradled lovingly.  His indiscretion had become popular social media news and he had just escaped lynching earlier that day. His partner was not so lucky and is currently hospitalized after that attack by homophobic mob at the gay club.

People cursed him on Facebook and his picture taken while he hurried away, was vilified.

“How would my children look at me? I can barely look at myself without wanting to throw up.”

I tried to talk to him, tell him that he gave me the will to live on after my heavy losses, tell him  that death will not solve any of his issues.

“Can you drop me off at this address?” He asked me scribbling something down.

I obliged taking the piece of paper from him.

He dropped his wallet on the tab and asked me to handle our bill.  I paid and tipped the barmaid and half-dragged him out of the lounge. He retched twice but did not throw up.

Twenty minutes of his slurred directions and I stopped in front of his house.

He told me he can handle himself, thanked me while I left him in his car after honking at the gate. I hung around until the gateman came.

I left him alive that evening but before I could take fifty paces away from the magnificent gate of his compound, I heard a gunshot and then a shrieking cry.

I started back fearing that I had already known what happened.

Agude had killed himself.

I envied him and his bravery.

I wished we could trade places.

Right there in his house with him sprawling in his bathroom, I still wished I had escaped.