About a year after the asteroid hit, something happened to Moses. There did not seem to be a single incident that triggered it; but the sum total of all that he was going through reached a point which finally overcame his almost superhuman ability to shut out the negatives. On his run from Shinyalu to Kakamega, he had always made a point of avoiding the soccer field where the guillotine entertained the masses in the larger city. After the horror Jiddy related about Dinah, he never returned to the theaters in the village, and he took a loss in revenue by paying another driver to do the Friday night run, so that he could avoided the markets entirely during the sacrifices. He rarely even talked to Jiddy now, and he had withdrawn into himself, even when around his customers.
Perhaps that was it. Perhaps it had been his ability to maintain positive relationships with others, most notably Jiddy, that had kept him positive about so much in the past. He certainly was finding less and less reason to be positive now, and his feelings toward himself as well as his fellow citizens was one of growing revulsion.
In relation to those around him, Moses was reasonably successful.
Corruption had returned with a vengeance, and the police were back extorting money from matatu drivers, but Moses was still able to use his fame as the ID Mark poster boy to call the bluff of those who tried to extort from him. It is doubtful that he really had much pull with those in power, but corrupt constables were not prepared to take such a risk when they had so many other easy pickings from which to choose.
Nevertheless, the despair and horror continued to build up inside of Moses until he had to act on thoughts which had been wafting through his mind for several weeks. It was on a Tuesday afternoon, when he knew Mr. Barasa would be busy at the bank. Moses dropped his last passengers off in Kakamega, and then drove over to Barasa's house. He walked straight around to the back porch, and lifted a long crate off the single barrelled shotgun that he knew was hidden there.
Tying a knot of any sort with just one hand and a stump was a difficult feat, but Moses had prepared the string at home, when he had time to labour over it.
(He did not want to lose time now, and risk being discovered.) There was a loop on one end, which he placed over the trigger and then pulled it tight. He propped the butt of the gun on the soft earth close to the edge of the porch, and sat in front of it, with the gun aimed toward his head.
He looped the string around his big toe and held the loose end in his left hand.
There was no one to write a note to. The only people who mattered, Rosy and Amy, had been taken away from him by Josephat. But he allowed himself a few brief moments to reflect on his own life before pulling the trigger. Even in the depths of despar there was a touch of positive thinking in this young man. It had not been a totally bad life, he thought. He had gone through things that others in Kenya could hardly imagine. He had lived a full life, experienced success when others were struggling just to stay alive. The tragedy was just that he had never understood where it was all leading.
The present state of the world suggested that maybe Amy was right about a curse being on all those who had followed his lead in support of the banks, the government, and the whole greedy rat race. If it was true that God was going to destroy those who had destroyed the earth, then he too deserved to be destroyed. He had continued to ignore the waste that went on during those glorious days of decadent debauchery, and when the dream had ended, he was amongst those who continued to waste far more than his share of the resources, in order to look out for himself... number one, as he used to say it. Surely, what had once been seen as only an American sin was now present in his own heart and in the hearts of others in his village.
Death by shotgun blast to the head was almost too good an end to a life that had only taken from others and rarely given anything in return. Others might not have been so harsh in their thoughts about him; Moses knew that many people liked him. Nevertheless, in his heart he knew that even his good nature was always careful y calculated to secure favours for himself... never too obvious in his manipulations of others, always maintaining that air of humility and good nature that worked so well to win friends and influence people.
He remembered a night when he had told Rosy that being nice to people was a way to get others to be nice to you. In her innocence, she had asked, "But what about God? Don't you try to be nice to people for him?"
How can I do something for someone I've never met?
Moses thought once again, as tears of self-pity flowed.
With that final thought in mind, he pushed his left big toe slowly away from his body. As he did, the string on the trigger moved, ever so slowly, sliding down toward the end of the curved trigger. Just as the gun erupted, he had seen it slip entirely off the trigger. A sudden movement to stop it from slipping was too late; but the gun exploded anyway, not hitting him full in the face as he had intended, but taking off the top of his head nevertheless.
Everything turned black, and stayed that way for a very long time. He was conscious of the blackness, but that was all. He was falling through it, bracing for an impact that never came. There was no way of telling how long the falling sensation lasted, or what brought it to an end, but at some stage, he found himself walking through a blackened, burned out forest, overwhelmed with a feeling of hopelessness. All around him was a sense of death, like he was surrounded by the spirits of others who had, like him, died without hope, in the depths of despair.
Out of the smoke that hovered over the scene came an image of a face so ugly, and so evil that it sent shivers down his spine. If this was death, then death had definitely not proven to be the escape that he had longed for. He felt trapped in an eternity of hopeless depression, so intense that he could only groan pitiful y.
His groan was met by the groans of others out there in the darkness of the forest, others who appeared to also be trapped in this same horrible place.
His groans turned into a prayer, as he begged for release. He hated himself for never having broken down like this while still alive. He had never been desperate enough to even try talking to the God he did not know. It had been too easy to just brush such thoughts aside. And now it was too late. Surely, this was hell, and he was going to be trapped here forever, regretting the spiritual indifference that had characterised so much of the life he had once known.
But then Moses heard other voices. The voices of people talking to one another. He was in the air now, looking down on a group of people in green robes gathered around a table. The darkness receded, and he was able to see clearly the features of someone lying face-up on the table. It was himself. These were doctors, and they were fitting a metal plate to his head. There was a gaping hole where his forehead should have been. The front of his brain was missing.
The metal plate was being riveted to those edges of his skull that had survived the shotgun blast.
He prayed more fervently than ever now, begging God to give him another chance, to let him live, to show him what he must do, to make his life count for something more than selfish success.
And then all was darkness once again.