Before the man spoke again, he leaned back in his seat and held his fingers in an interlock, during which time the silence between us had gone on longer than was comfortable. In my usual manner, I began to search my mind for something to say, but in the end could decide on nothing in particular.

Eventually, as fate would have it, a voice from the speakers made an announcement which, among other things, served to stir a wave of murmur among the rest of the passengers. Their voices, like a tennis ball bouncing within the confinement of a box, began to ricochet at all corners, gathering momentum here, losing it there, until inevitably, I found myself again easing into a conversation with the old man beside me.

Long after he’d began to speak, I noticed that his fingers remained interlocked and that he kept his gaze in front of him — only occasionally glancing in my direction for brief moments before turning away. Even when the bus swerved sideways, the whole of his body moved, but each part retained their positions — as if the weight of the memories he shared with me bound something inside him and kept him rooted to his past, so that the events of the present had no effect on him.

The longer he spoke, the more it seemed to me that he had a lot to say, but was perhaps uncertain if I was the right audience for his story.
In turn I gave a few well-timed nods, asked some follow-up questions, until soon, by my estimation, he felt comfortable enough with me to share a story from his childhood.

“When I was twelve,” he began, “my father lost a leg in an accident. I was at the bus stop and he was on the other side of the main road — a cup of ice-cream in hand — about to cross over to meet me. It was a harmattan evening, and after four months, I’d just returned from boarding school.”

I pictured father and son. I thought of nostalgia for home and the chill of harmattan winds giving way to the warmth of familial embrace.

The man made to go on talking, but it seemed as though his words, like a pack of caged puppies, were struggling to break free all at once. He paused, looked out the window at the slush of comers and goers, then at his now trembling hands, before he resumed his story.

“My father was an agile man. At twelve you learn to expect your old man to be the strongest person alive, you know?” he grinned and chuckled under his breath.

“I was fiddling with something — I think a foil wrap or a piece of paper, when I heard the noise. My father was caught midway on the main roads when the first motorcycle sped past in front of him. By mere chance, he took a few steps backwards, and so managed to escape being hit — but just then came another vehicle from behind him — a grey Sedan, its driver whom, as we later saw, had been drinking. Can you imagine that?” he turned to me.

I shook my head in shock.

“As my father lay unconscious on the ground, the driver, who had pulled over at a corner to join us in the crowd, in pretence to making a distress call, slipped back into his car and drove away. A few chasers went after him, but in the end, nothing came of it — besides, the main focus was my father who was still unconscious, his femur disconnected, blood haemorrhaging by his side.”

The man’s fingers still hadn’t changed positions. Between us a chill snuck in along with the lull. I thought of how quickly people’s lives change, and wondered how we can still maintain that the world is the world in the face of all the uncertainty that surrounds such a rapid transformation. Is harmattan still harmattan, if between each gust of wind, a man and his son are about to hold each other, while in the next moment, a man is lying unconscious, his son left to bear witness to his pain?

“Was your father able to get help on time?”
The man nodded, then added that they’d been to a bone setter, but in the end did not succeed in saving his father’s leg.

After he’d said this, we fell silent yet again as the bus sped past the greenery of fallow land. When we drove past a flock of grazing sheep, he turned to me and, seeming surprised by the fact, said that it’d been ten years since he last shared his story with anyone.

“I met the driver some nine years after the accident.” He resumed his story after a moment’s digression. “At first I wasn’t sure it was him, but the longer I observed, the more certain it became to me.”

The runaway driver was drunk as usual. The old man, then twenty-one, was by contrast sober, alert and vengeful. He watched the drunk man as he staggered to his grey Sedan. The man got to his car and searched his pockets for his keys. On not finding them, and perhaps too drunk to figure his next move, he slumped to the ground beside his fore wheels and began to mutter something to himself in the dark.

At this point the old man paused as the train neared the mouth of a tunnel. Once we descended below, the walls of the underground cast a network of irregular shades on different sections within the train. We took a turn to the right where the light from the outside seemed to realign in a semicircle. Above the old man and me, a dense shadow hung for a brief moment before fading away as we took another turn leftwards.

For a while I thought about trains and the shadows of the underground. I thought of the travellers that had gone before us, and those that were still to come. It occurred to me that right there, within the unmoving recesses of the tunnel, was a different world spinning to its own set of laws. Train after train would go back and forth, each one of them eventually having to turn rightwards or leftwards if it were to emerge at the other end. And those shadows, irregular as they were, would remain. Day after day they’d fall on a different passenger, each one with a different story to tell.

The longer the pause between the old man and me ran, the more convinced I was that his was a story I already knew: A quick-tempered boy loses his father to a careless man. He bears the loss the only way he can — by means of rage tempered only by the hope of revenge. But by the time the old man concluded his story, it became clear to me that like the tunnel, with its twists and turns, all of our stories were subject to change. That from the smallest detail can emerge the difference between a life lived in regret, and one of eternal youth.

“Have you ever wondered what the purpose of death might be?” the old man said to me abruptly.

Just then the train finally emerged at the other end of the tunnel. A blend of light and fresh air filtered in.

“The purpose of death?” I turned to him, surprised and half-expecting that the question was not meant for me.

“It’s something I still find myself thinking about to this day. I think it’s worth considering. Most often we like to philosophize about the meaning of life, but I wonder if perhaps the answer to that question eludes us because it lies outside of it.”

“In death, you mean?” I ventured.

The man nodded.

“A few months after his accident, my father passed on,” he continued. “It seems silly to me now, but I can understand the mind of a boy in his youth going through the loss of his parent. As far as I was concerned, the drunk driver killed my father, and was going to pay for it. I was a quick-tempered kid who had just been unhinged by grief. For years I carried that rage inside me, like a tiny spark awaiting a catalyst to spur it to destruction. I’d memorized the driver’s features — his large frame, pot belly; his square face and large eyes.”

Weeks morphed into months and years and each time the old man spotted a grey Sedan, he’d tail behind it, only to discover a different driver behind the steering wheel.

The man paused yet again. His eyes were alert, his brows unmoving. The whole of his face was suddenly rigid with focus.

“And so that night, once I spotted the man and was sure he was indeed the drunk driver from nine years ago, I ran into a nearby welder’s shop, from where I soon re-emerged with the metal handle of a steel torque wrench. There I was, weapon in hand as I stood over the inebriated man, ready to bash his head in. With little effort, I could recall the event of my father’s accident. I could summon the rage — that long-buried spark finally ready to engulf from the bottom that for which it was made. I could feel my pulse move in tandem with my slowly rising arms. This was it. The long-awaited moment. The world was still. My anger had been borne by the vast-flowing pools of time to that moment. Nothing was left of the world, except for the man in front of me. All I had to do was strike him. One quick blow to his temple and I was sure to end him. And yet I knew deep down, that for every thought that nudged me towards rage, a counter thought emerged — still, gentle, weak. Inside me was a storm. A clashing of tidal forces rooted deep within me, and from which came the constant eruption of voices scheming, nudging, jeering, until, either as a natural conclusion to all the noise, or perhaps merely as an extension of it, the question came to me, for the first time: What is the purpose of death?”

And as the man wondered about this question, from the distance came the sound of an ice-cream van.

The drunk man, briefly snapping to a wake, looked up to find the boy before him, and as if having consented to his fate, shot close his weak eyes in sleep.

The old man, then in his youth, for the first time with so much power over another man’s life, understood that right there in front of him, was a man whose life, as he imagined, was plagued by guilt and meaninglessness. That if he had struck that man at that instant, the world would go on spinning and that no one at all would mind. The street was still awash with the slush of motorists, drunkards and prostitutes — all of them clinging onto the night for their own reasons. The thought of being seen or caught did not occur to him, or, as he put, it was a thought he was not willing to pay attention to that night.
But the longer he stood over the drunk driver, the more he began to see something familiar in the sleeping man’s demeanour. Just as an image becomes clearer under sharper focus, so too did the more subtle details of his life begin to come to him.

In the drunk driver the man saw his father, as helpless as he was several years ago. A victim of a chain of unforeseen events. And in his father, he saw himself. Again he was that boy of twelve. A boy alone and unsure of his place in a world where fate sneaks between the elements to chart one’s life anew. He understood then that he, and not the drunk man, was on trial, and that perhaps regret was like a crooked ball which, even while spinning, was forever bound to dip in the direction of guilt.

“I still shudder at the thought of what could have happened if I’d met the drunk man on a different day.” The man paused for a moment, then went on. “The way I see it, on a night different from that fateful one, I could’ve struck him. But that night was different. Special.”

“Special?”

The old man nodded.

That night, he remained standing over the inebriated man, until at the last moments before the final notes from the singing truck disappeared, he put the weapon down and, with an inexplicable happiness stirring inside him, chased after the ice-cream van.
*

Long after the man had concluded his story, and the last embers of our conversation had burnt their final sparks, a shared silence emerged between the two of us. The train sped past more greenery and fallow land, made a few stops at various stations.

The silence between us remained, just as something stays unaltered because everyone has agreed to its usefulness. Even when, an hour later the old man and I bid each other farewell as he alighted, that urge to speak still wasn’t there. He got up as mechanically as he’d been sitting, waved at me and proceeded to the exit with the same deft movement.

I never saw him again. For a long time I thought about our conversation. I never stopped wondering about that fateful night. I believe that that night, the man, haven finally met with the object of his long-laden rage, and haven long come to terms with the consequence of his intention, was fortunate. He’d come face to face with his own abyss, and somewhere in the depths of the shadows, he’d found salvation.

No wonder he was happy.

*
Thanks for reading. The link below leads to more stories.
https://medium.com/@markshocker99[b][/b]