SHORT STORY

Superego Silencer

Crime patiently waited outside, on the balcony, sizing the streets bustling with desperate individuals; it was finalising its business plan to auction off yet another human soul. It had a wicked magnetism about it that good-hearted men failed to comprehend, and therefore easily fell prey to.

Once its glazing eyes were dead set on a personality, it made damn sure it was difficult to resist; and this Monday morning it had set them at Bonang, with a grim vision to abuse facts to persuade him to mock his breeding for good.

He was anxious…

At that, it wasted no time in sneaking its ominous weight through the adjure space of the door, grabbing hold of his wits and manipulating the scale of reason.

And then in no time it faxed his soul down the astral line that led straight to the headquarters of Hoboken, where many went and where none of them ever returned.

He picked up the phone, his conscience quaking in awe of his desperation. No man wanted to go down in history as a bad lover, it was a given fact; no, no man wanted to appear romantically impotent – one rather opted to go down as a bad man than a bad lover. Finding love was difficult enough, if not impossible, but containing it was a task of gods.
He wanted to contain his object of love.

Holding the phone close, he felt a slight hesitation shoot through him like a bad hunch, which was something great for one to have whenever one came at odds with one’s morality. Meanwhile, in his troubled head, he rehearsed Khuluma’s sermon about the do’s and don’ts of romantic engagement.

“Ntwana, your woman broke the phone on purpose, can’t you see that? That rag of hers had outlived its sell-by date,” Khuluma had spoken his rhetoric in Setswana, cigarette smoke clouding the room with nicotine and its disreputable free radicals.
“She definitely wants to see what kind of man you really are. What more could she do to mail the message through to your thick skull?”

Days before, Bonang’s live-in girlfriend had dropped her phone by accident; and the scrap it was, it went into ways of spilled milk, leaving her with a useless starter-pack; him with a juiceless indictment.

Without bothering himself to take his fumes out to the balcony, Khuluma had reminded him of the fact that her birthday was coming the next Monday. How dare he not see the connection? Couldn’t he read between the lines? Didn’t he know the rumour that women had a crush on the calendar? It attested that they knew all important dates by heart, watching out for those whose memories would make the slightest slip.
Birthdays, anniversaries (first date anniversary, first kiss anniversary, first night anniversary, engagement anniversary, wedding anniversary, moving-in anniversary and furniture anniversary), doctor’s appointments, scheduled visits, holidays, death dates, burial dates and cleansing dates.

That evening when they were having some beers in his flat, he’d freely given him the world-famous women-love-testing-their-mates’-loyalty speech.
Another rumour had it that women possessed an evil spirit that coerced them to pester their partners for no apparent reason.
Just when the man had concluded in his soul that she is the only love of his heart, deserving all fidelity and attention, she would begin to smell an imaginary rat. His sheer desire for silent relaxation in his woman’s presence would suddenly smirk of suspicion. And when the man became fed up with the makeshift lie-detector tests and weird questions he would be accused of ignoring problems and neglecting his lady.

If any grain of truth resided in this rumour, maybe this would explain why most men would flee their homes straight into the entrapping arms of silent sluts irking for a good time with someone else’s lover. Surely no sane person would mistakenly build a courthouse when he aimed to build a warm home for himself and the love of his heart; his oedipal anxiety was sure to be induced to the fore of behaviour.
“Baby, do you think I’m getting fat?”
“Baby, do you think Zodwa is hotter than me?”
“Baby, why are you so quiet, what’s on your mind?

Even today, the rumour was still raging on, such that if one was to loiter around the foyers of tomorrow’s time and space, one would definitely catch wind of it having made its transit onwards, just a few moments ago.
No wonder Khuluma’s whispers caused a slight anxiousness in Bonang’s mind. The speech would convict any man who had convinced himself that he was in love with his lady.

It had, but he was broke.

The good buddy he was, Khuluma had given him contacts for Zamukele, who was a sole trader of unpurchased goods – a ghetto Robin Hood, so he was called.

When crime visited Bonang, it came at the ripe time, finding him converted and believing the smoke that not buying her girlfriend a new phone when she needed one would look unromantic of him. But she knew he loved her!
Jabbing the stub on an uncanny saucer-turned ashtray, given the fact that you’d only catch Bonang smoking in hell, Khuluma had pointed out: “You are a romance par excellence!”
That got to his head in almost the same way the mysterious and formidable sniper had gotten to Kennedy’s a time ago. He was Bon Jovi according to his friends.
Since his teenage years, a little before working for the Hubert Optometrist as a clerk in the capital city of hustle, he had developed an undying craze for the foreign pop star, who at any given time would unleash love ballads that brought estranged lovers back together strapped by an asteroid-belt of passion.

Crime whispered the seductive logic into his inner ears and hit the homerun. It had a tendency of recruiting friends, turning good men into bad men, or simply exposing the badness in them.
It had friends in higher places, and it made acquaintances every now and then, boasting transoceanic ties across the world axis. It knew secrets of men and women; even those deliberately forgotten.

The stroke of its genius was in the bible of agitation.

Anxiety was by far the best cord it could play; mixed with a dose of stress, it never went wrong. Bon Jovi was finally playing to its tune.

He looked around the lounge and carefully dialled the numbers in his left hand while the earpiece was glued to his lobe ready to bring wickedness closer. Their lounge looked rather immaculate and up to standard for ghetto kids who finally caught a break in the city of diggers.
The coffee table would impress any visitor, since it couldn’t help but compliment the lounge suit and the home-theatre system whose surround speakers were emitting a courteous vibration in the background. The curtains she had bought a few months ago created a dark and sexy ambiance for the two love birds.

Punching the last digit he waited a split second before hearing the other end ringing with his breath almost escaping his lungs for good. Disquiet…

Surely Zamukele’s temperament never divorced any ties with felony; his voice suggested something unsettling about him, and it sent shivers down Bonang’s rigid spine, almost causing him to drop the phone. But the only thing he dropped on this Monday was his conscience, treading on it with grubby boots – bloody boots, mired with footprints of the bloody imp within.

“Who’s this?”
“Er… this is Bonang, from Melville. C-c-c, can I, can I please s… speak t-t-t- to Zam?”
“What do you want?”
“Er…, Khuluma gave me your number,” he stuttered, gaining his gravity.
“Khuluma Khumalo?”
“Ja, he said you could hook me up, you know, with a phone.”
“So, you are my man’s homeboy?”
“For sure, I live three blocks from his flat. So, can you help me?” he sounded desperate. Thugs loved desperate people; yet hated arrogant individuals like Lucifer hated salvation.
“So where can I find you?”
“But I haven’t told you what kind of phone I want, and how much I can get it for.”
“I know what you want. I know what everybody wants. You want the good shit don’t you?”
Bon responded on the positive.
“You’ll get the latest gadget, video-cameras, e-mail, internet, blue-tooth, true-tone; all the nyakanyaka. Just prepare 4 clipper saan,” he instructed.

Minutely they discussed meeting at a park in downtown in about five hours time, at 17h30. Crime had recruited its latest accomplice. His spongy conscience was busy trying to rub away the crumbs of guilt that dirtied the corners of his heart. But some crumbs were like an adhesive, registering deeper, leaving the sponge worn out at the end of the day.

All he had to do was think of his girlfriend’s happy face when she would unwrap her birthday present in the evening over an exotic dinner creamed with a bottle of cheap champagne. There was no doubt about all the carnal bonuses he was going to relish sub-duvet later in the grip of night. He smiled at the thought, his sponge sucking in the dire vapours of the ashes of convictions that were set ablaze, not to be fanned up, but to be destroyed. The anxiety went about as if subsiding.
*

At the other part of Mongane’s substantially saluted Joburg, Mbali and friends were celebrating their true friendship.
The salesman looked on excitedly, explaining the features of the handset they were sizing up.
“See, this one my sisters is the latest in smart phone technology, Multimedia Messaging-enabled and has capacity for the Uniform Resource Locator – that’s URL for you!” said the exuberant salesman, in iSiZulu.
Had he not been called over to the manager’s office, he would have drooled in their faces at the rate he was going.
They sure were a bouquet of beautiful ladies; how they smiled would light up any room in the world at anytime. It was a sight enough to turn a beholder into a believer. One would definitely conclude that the creator’s busy schedule was obviously not that tight when he fashioned them.
You could say they were custom-made; they were living masterpieces.

When they walked out of the shop, Mbali couldn’t wait to show Bonang the beautiful and thoughtful item her friends had decided to buy her for her birthday. They had had time to celebrate at the office, leaving traces of cake aroma roaming around for a bon vivant to salivate. Their boss at Firewall Investment Corporation (PTY) Ltd, where they worked as consultants, had been kind enough to let them take her out for a movie, after which they decided to get her a new phone to replace the defunct one.

It was lovely, the closest thing to a diamond: Attractive to the eye, gravitating to the soul.

When she decided to get a negligee for a cosy Jozi night in with Jovi, her friends went with her, to help pick what perhaps Eve would have worn on her first blessed night with Adam.

They entered the boutique with self-announcing zest. Girls will always be girls! They crazed around helping, or disturbing, her with fitting on everything that caught her eye – or theirs.
A generally delightful lady, she got along fine with the shop assistants as she did with everyone in life. She had never been one to spot an attitude about, neither did she harbour any grudge with the world. Thandi possessed the same composure about her.
“No, that one would be great for the night. Take it, girl!” Thandi recommended, excitedly.

As soon as they left the boutique, Mbali couldn’t wait to get home; to see her lover, the one she had lived all her childhood to meet.
He was the African boy who years ago took a broom of romance and swept her off her feet. That was in the heydays of ghetto fairy tale when the 2-for-love birds flew above them under the trees in a cloud of teenage romance.

Despite being told by the mobile phone-shop salesman to wait for full activation before she could put her little gadget to good use, she decided to dial her Bon. Her dear Bon: for whom she was born; the light of her life, the gravity of her divine human feelings.
It was a good fact for her to know she could imagine no other man in her life. Indeed it was no fiction that no one came close to convicting her heart the way he did with his kiss. Nothing, but being with him was important in her life.
Although she had turned 27 today, she nonetheless felt a teen arc triggering a rush of energy all within the cosmos of her soul, expelling away any trace of chaotic disharmony.

The phone started ringing, and she couldn’t be happier; all her life.
*

Bonang had made it to the ill-omened park with a hope to get everything over and done with. He was exactly on time according to his watch: 17h26 sharp. He had left his phone switched off back at the flat because you don’t walk around with your phone on Mongane’s shadow of death.

He walked on the greener grass with the bucks in his pocket. His whole integrity was being sustained by each single evil buck; the sprinting doe of the market and the silhouetted carnivorous lions hunting it down to the death, with jaws of fatality that daily licked the humans clean of their souls.

He headed for the green bench, raking his eyes through the anxious crowds going back and forth unconsciously searching for their maker. It was questionable whether had he been another person from among the crowd would he see himself. Would he? Was there, perhaps, a chance that he would look and fail to recognise his own disposition?

These were questionable goods he was going to buy. Perhaps he should have consulted with his conscience rather than with his desperation and his friend’s intimidating whispers about losing love over lacking commodities. Whatever happened to the superego – the inner voice that rebuked men and women whenever they wanted to surf the waters of error? In whose hands was the blood of the superego? Who was responsible for its significance waning under pressure, turning everyone into a selfish hog that put its filthy mouth on whatever it perceived edible?

Had Bon Jovi become a hog? Was he doing this to please his girlfriend, or to make himself pleased with himself, for pleasing his girlfriend? Perhaps the hog in him couldn’t live with itself in a dry field of love starvation.

While his thoughts roamed around, they fished out the unnerving sight of a stereotypically rogue-like looking young man. His appearance would plunder any beholder’s piece of mind. It was nothing historical that Jovi’s was plundered.
Looking at the approaching figure, he quickly figured this to be Zamukele – his name was an iSiZulu verb for “accept yourself” or noun for “the one who has accepted himself.” Jovi almost thought he felt his superego frown at the demands of his ego – a heavy frown whose weight felt like a death penalty.

He knew a rogue when he saw one. It was Zamukele!
Apparently, the beast also smelled the stench of nervousness that hung around the park like dirty underwear hanging for the mocking public to see; exposing the poor human.
“Are you Bonang?” he demanded, in iSiZulu, without being frivolous with his squandered pleasantries.
As soon as Jovi nodded, Zam asked, “Where’s my money?”
Almost shaking, feeling sucked in by the pasturage of the park, which no one dared cross at night, he responded, not in Setswana, his father’s language, but in his girlfriend’s language.
“Yes, 4 clips, but where’s the phone?”
“I ask the questions, show me the money first, and you’ll get your stupid phone,” said Zamukele, showing him a pistol muzzled with a silencer. Bonang knew nothing about guns, but he knew this one was real, and swiftly comprehended the implications of its reality. A streak of fear…
He reluctantly pulled his wallet out of his rear pocket, thinking that perhaps it was a silly sign of one’s stupidity showing one’s wallet to a damn thug. Anxiety crept in the interior sacred places of him the same way crime had done earlier today.
“Here, so, where’s the phone?” he asked, right after handing the money over to the maiming hands of the thug.
Zam smiled and removed a little package from inside his jacket. At first it seemed as if he was going for the gun again. But by the looks of it he wouldn’t really need a gun to rip Jovi to shreds. Just a good jab would punch all the melodies out of his head in a jiffy.

Tremulous, Bonang grabbed the package, opened it and scanned the goods. These were the goods. Finally! All he had to do now was get the hell out of this ominous situation. But as soon as he tried to mutter his goodbyes like a cog with a goblin and hit the road, Zam grabbed hold of his arm.
“So, you now know I can deliver, right?” it wasn’t a question. “It means, anytime you need anything, you call my number, and then we do business.”
“I don’t think so you greedy asshole,” he thought, and he was glad it wasn’t audible when he heard himself say, “For sure.”
He was glad when the rogue let him go and started across the park, leaving him with an icy feeling he would hate to experience all over again. He was relieved that the lover-testing machine would finally find him not guilty when his sweetheart returned to be surprised with the gift, for which he had just pawned his soul for.
*
Later in the evening crime had scored yet another goal against mankind. Bonang was beginning to be worried, the weight of discomfort pulling him down into a quasi-depression. Indeed depression, because by now, 18h30, his beautiful lady-amongst-ladies should have been in his arms. They should have been together celebrating the reason she was born; to be with him, to please him, and for her to be pleased by him.

She should have been here marvelling at the candle-lit dinner he had prepared, and the beautifully wrapped gadget he had hustled to get her. She should have been here to reward his efforts with those mouth-watering lips of hers. But she wasn’t, was she?

Or was she with another man because Jovi had ignored the plight of her broken phone? Had she decided to mark her 27th birthday by growing out of a relationship so leaking of negligence? Perhaps he should have acted on Khuluma’s advice immediately. Was it too late to please his Flower, to water it and adore the beauty of its petals and to savour its rosy smell?
He should have heeded the rumour, he thought. The breaking of the phone probably symbolised their sudden break-up. However, he wasn’t a relationship climatologist; he couldn’t read the signs.
What rational thing could he do next? He would call her, but she had no phone, at least not yet. If only she could walk through the door, he would forgive her for her anger, infidelity perhaps. He just wanted to see her…
An icy feeling grabbed hold of his nerve centre.

Then suddenly, he thought of opening his phone. Maybe she had called to say she was at Thandi’s, finishing up some consultancy overtime from the lubricated prophylactics supply company like they usually did on some overloaded Mondays.
He put pressure on the button and the phone was on. Without wasting time he quickly punched in his security codes. After impatiently waiting 30 seconds for his phone memory to clear, he received a message. It said, “You have 4 voice messages. To access your voice messages dial 100. This is a free call,” said the raspy voice that sounded as if it was being cut and pasted.

He listened intently, and the first voicemail was Mbali’s voice. She said in iSiZulu, “Bonang, uh, why have you switched your phone off?
“Okay Baby, I will see you in the evening, I have a surprise for you. I love you, bye!”

He punched for the second message. It was Thandi, choking English, “Bonang, Bonang,” she was crying. “It’s Mbali. We can’t find her. She was kidnapped in the parking lot today. Please call me when you get this message.”

He was taken aback. No, he was taken deep; deep into a dungeon of fear, forces unbeknownst to him grabbing him into the malevolent soul of the earth. But this was no time to identify exogenous feelings; he had two more messages waiting with bated unbearable news. Maybe it was Mbali. Maybe it was the damn bastards who kidnapped her; maybe they had called to demand ransom. Too many maybes!

He listened; panic befriending him in a hostile jeer. It was Thandi again. This time she said nothing. She sounded as if she was being strangled. The last message was someone called sergeant Dikoti, speaking English, in an African accent: “…Mr Phage, please open your phone, and please be at your flat, we are on our way there right now.”
“End of messages.”

Bonang Phage immediately darted to the decked coffee table, abruptly grabbing the gift and peeling its wrapper in a fit of multi-layered frustration. Just when he wanted to prove himself this had to happen! Khuluma had told him that people in the world were only in love with facts. All he wanted was to stay true to the fact that he was a considerate man, worthy to be a good husband one day.

“Man look, she loves you because there are certain things you do for her; isn’t that a fact?” he had asked. Without waiting for Bonang to agree he had chipped in again.

“So that’s the fact she loves about you. If you ever removed the fact, by failing to buy her a phone you know she needs, what else is there to love about you?

“Poor Mbali will only be left with the fact that you don’t care ntwana!

“Look, you too are also in love with some valid facts about her. You love the fact that she is beautiful, don’t you? And you also love the fact that she loves you back, don’t you?

“It’s nothing to run crazy about; it’s a fact of life! The whole wide world is in love with facts. Unconditional love is one hell of a myth. Every fact is conditional, if it changes, definitely love dies.

“Do you think you love your family out of the goodness of your heart? No, no, no, ntwana; you are in love with the fact that they are your family.

“It’s a fact that you need to do what is right to maintain to Mbali the kind of man she knows you to be,” he had driven his point home with an ingenuous thud.

Panic grabbed hold of him when Bonang fixed his eyes on the beautiful phone in his hands.
It was lovely, the closest thing to a diamond: Attractive to the eye, gravitating to the soul.
In a blur of frustration he was crying without realising it. Why, oh why?

As soon as he unconsciously dropped the exquisite phone on the floor, gravity welcomed it with a crash, sending it the way of spilled milk; and then there was a knock on the door.

When he opened his door the menacing air ushered in the sight of a fully uniformed sergeant standing on his balcony; he figured the man looked like a bad oracle, and beside him he vaguely judged the vision of a shattered-looking Thandi.

“Where is Mbali?” he couldn’t find words, his head was spinning. All he wanted to find was his beloved Mbali and her comforting smile. Sadly, it was clear on the faces of both Dikoti and Thandi that he would never see her – at least not in the condition he wished to.
“I am afraid I have bad news son,” said Dikoti, who looked nothing short of 50, beating Bonang with a gap of 20 years, which he had spent doing the kind of work he was doing here tonight.

He sobbed through the detective’s narration of how Thandi and friends, not excluding Mbali, were hijacked at gunpoint after doing their shopping in town. Unfortunately, Mbali had tried to refuse to give up her cellphone because it was still new. The rogues that were robbing them had turned angry, knocking her out and locking her in the boot of the City Golf they were driving while Thandi and friends screamed helplessly.

He passed out cold when Dikoti told him that the body of a woman matching Mbali’s description had later been found outside Soweto. She had been sodomised and raped, then killed by strangulation, and what appeared to be an unnecessary gunshot to her bosom.

No one was as shocked as Thandi when she saw a wrecked cellphone on the floor; there was something disconcerting about its tattered features. Its cover was very similar to the one they had bought Mbali earlier that day at the mobile phone outlet; she could swear that although wrecked, it resembled something lovely, the closest thing to a diamond: Attractive to the eye, gravitating to the soul.

Without saying a word she let out a sigh, caving, giving in to the pull that called her silent physical burden to the floor.
*
At that cruel time in the tragic history of a couple of families and their relatives and friends, crime stood outside, smiling, thinking of its next quarry; the next anxious moral breed whose conscience it needed to silence.