CHAPTER IV

Slade was not really in a hurry to get to his destination. It was a Saturday, and he was going to his university for a new session. He shared a room in the school hostel with a roommate.

He would have liked to be in school before four o'clock that afternoon so he could attend a programme he looked forward to, but he soon realised that he would never make it to the program. He was right in more ways than he imagined. The time was four-thirty in the afternoon. He was two hours and thirty minutes into a journey that should take a maximum of three hours, but he still was several kilometres away from his destination.

He reached for his bag and took out a book he had been reading for some time. The book was titled: ‘Great Ideas' Engendering Unfortunate Events. It was about people who thought they found brilliant solutions to their problems, but things didn't work out as well as they thought. Stone Clarke wrote the book.

The first story in the book was about a man named Totem. Totem was a truck driver who earned twenty thousand drachmas per month. Even though Totem had a wife and two kids, he didn't think he had anything to live for and got tired of his living predicament. He felt stuck whenever he went home after the day’s work and wondered how he ended up with the woman he called his wife. “Of all the women on this planet!” he sometimes said to himself. His monthly salary was barely enough to care for his wife and kids. They were living hand-to-mouth, and his wife’s disposition towards him did not make things easy for him.

Totem moved goods as usual from a manufacturing plant to retail centres. He thought about creative ways to improve his life-the only thing he ever thought about whenever he was on the job-when a particular idea struck him. He decided he finally found a way to be free of his wife, kids, and job and still live a pretty good life! He thought it was the best idea he had ever conceived.

About two minutes after he conceived the idea, Totem hit five vehicles on the highway with his truck, causing injuries to several people in those vehicles and death to one of them. He was imprisoned two weeks after the judge pronounced a ten-year sentence on him. He pleaded guilty to every charge that was levelled against him. His sentence could have been worse-he was disappointed he did get more-but because he had no previous criminal record, it was reduced.

Immediately after the sentence was passed on to Totem, he said to himself, “Mission accomplished”. He thought it was the best thing that had happened to him in his 40 years living career on planet Terra. He couldn't have been more wrong.

Life was good in prison. He ate good food twice daily, watched TV at a specified time, and even went to the gym for a limited time.

Slade then understood why someone would think going to prison would end their troubles. Slade began to consider the idea wasn't such a bad one except that its execution could have been better such that he didn’t put people’s lives in danger.

Listen, prisons in Nonce could be compared to a death sentence. They were terrible. This interested Slade in the type of prison he read about in the book. He had never heard of such prisons. Prisons like that had better living conditions than that which the average person in his country experienced! That was how bad Slade thought Nonce was.

It wasn’t that bad but they were getting there.

Two months into his prison sentence, Totem was having a warm bath. He wondered why he didn’t think of his great idea earlier. He was humming a song to himself when he felt the presence of someone in the shower with him. He turned to find a tall and lanky man standing right before him.

“What do you want?” Totem asked him.

The Man laughed.

“What do I want?” he replied, feigning surprise as though Totem should have an idea.

“Here is what I want; I want to kill you.”

Totem was not entirely certain he heard him right.

“What? What have I done?” Totem asked nervously.

“You were meant to die by my hands,” the man began to say. “Of all the prisons you could have been locked in, you ended up in one with the man whose mother you killed.”

Totem saw the man's face become deadly serious.

“I’ve been watching you for some time now, and I have to say, you seem to be enjoying yourself here. I’m tired of seeing you every day, knowing you killed my mum even though I never really liked her. You know, she was a pain in my ass, but still, she was my mother, and I think it was time you joined her.”

Totem, at that point, felt cold. There was no one else in the bathroom. He tried to scream to call the attention of the correctional officers, but he didn’t have time to do that. A quick slash at his throat, and he couldn’t speak anymore. He had no time to think before he died, and the last thing he heard was, “Say hello to her for me.”

If Totem did have time to think, he would have realised, just like Slade, that his idea wasn’t great, at all. The unexpected could happen even in “good prisons,” but Totem didn’t account for that.

Slade flipped the pages of his book to page twenty-nine, where he stopped the last time he read the book.

The story was about a twenty-three-year-old guy named Flame. Here was the solution to Flame’s problem in his own words: “All the fun and no stress.”

Now, Flame was a guy who loved women and sex but wanted no kids. He once told his friend, “I don't need that shit in my life.”

“Shit” here describes something unwanted regardless of how good it might be; in his case, it was a child.

He also hated using contraceptives during sex; he claimed it reduced the pleasure he was supposed to feel. But not using contraceptives would make him very conscious during sex since he had to avoid ejaculating into the woman if he wanted to prevent any chance of him being a father.

His pull-out game wasn’t that great, and even though he had successfully gotten some women to abort their pregnancies for him, he wondered how long he could keep that up.

He was sitting at his desk at work with a computer in front of him, absent-minded and oblivious to what was happening around him, when an idea popped into his head. “Pregnant women!” he said out loud.,

His co-worker, sitting beside him, with a look of surprise, said to Flame, “Pregnant women?”

Realising what he had said out loud, he replied with a look of innocence, “Nothing, I just had a great idea.”

Here was Flame’s thought process: having sex with pregnant women who also wanted sex would mean he would not have to use contraceptives during sex and thus avoid being a father altogether. He had just cracked the puzzle!

He found an online platform where he could meet women who wanted to have sex with other men, mostly because their husbands would not, in order not to endanger their babies.

Thirteen months after Flame began put his idea into practice, one of the women he had slept with and was three weeks pregnant told him that she had given birth to his son. Flame, thinking it was a joke, laughed it off. He thought it was funny until the woman explained what had happened.

Pregnancy scans had shown that she had two foetuses in her womb.

The simple explanation was that the foetuses were a twin, right?

Well, after delivery, her husband wanted to be sure the kids were his, so a DNA test was conducted. Both kids were not his; only one was. The test was repeated, but the result was the same. The doctor decided the result didn’t make sense except…

The doctor then explained a phenomenon to them: “Normally, a pregnant woman’s ovaries temporarily stop releasing eggs. But in a rare phenomenon called superfetation, another egg is released, fertilises with sperm, and attaches to the uterine wall, resulting in two babies.”

Here is a quick summary: since one of the babies was not the husband's, it must belong to someone else…

The only other person the woman, had sex with during that period was Flame, which was why she came to him. A DNA test was performed, and it showed that Flame was the father.

The woman’s husband told Flame he would sue him when he came up with a reason. And there we have it. Flame was going to become a dad and battle the husband of the mother of his child in court! He was in deep shit-trouble. It was not how he thought his plan would unravel.

Events such as a pregnant woman conceiving another child were rare, but they did happen, and Flame found himself on the very wrong end of this.

“Unlucky!” Slade said out loud. Several people in the vehicle stared at him for some time, but no one cared enough to ask him what he meant by that.

Slade was now thinking about the only girlfriend he ever had. He realised he had not bothered about the things Flame was concerned about. He was in the seventh month of the relationship with his girlfriend when they broke up.

He remembered he met her at a restaurant at his university. He was a new student at the time, and it was his third time at the restaurant. She was also a new student.

She was ahead of him in the queue and had gotten the food she wanted, but her debit card did not register on the POS machine, so she could not pay. Slade offered to pay, and she accepted. Slade got his food and was going to pick a corner of the restaurant to sit and eat when someone caught his attention. It was the girl he paid for her food. She signalled for Slade to come and sit with her.

They went on to have a good relationship, and it was one of the best things that happened to him at the university, but all good things, they say, must end. Slade wished that wasn't the case.

He was so devastated after the event that he wrote a poem during one of his despondent moments. He had never written any such thing before. The poem was this:

He still didn’t understand how a person could stop loving someone they once loved, much more letting them go. Even after all that had happened, he never stopped loving her. He decided he would not get into any relationship for a long time. He had no idea how right he was and how long it would be.

He closed the novel, put it back into his bag, and zipped it up. He was hungry and was going to get something to eat.