Conductor, give me my change!

He invented a face for himself.

                                                Behind it,

He lived, died, and resurrected,

        Many times.

                                    His face today

        Has the wrinkles of that face.     

        His wrinkles have no face.

–Octavio Paz

The bus: more than forty years old: tired but still moving: moving but not reaching: reaching but not knowing: knowing but not reaching. The bus’ face has been drenched by the sun and dried by the rain. No colour.

Some years ago, bus was released from a white garage. The owner, who was not the owner, bought many spare parts from Ladipo Market, to make the bus complete. Bus was not complete but owner put it on the road. Owner employed his own driver but didn’t give the driver any destination. Driver jumped into the bus, started the engine, drove off and is still driving now.

Driver employed a conductor. Conductor screamed. Passengers boarded bus.

The eighteen-seater bus accommodated a thousand people. Men, women, children, broke in, unstoppable. Thousands and more thousands. Already beating a retreat, driver sets fire to a part of the bus. The passengers won’t take it; no, some took it. They fall on the wayside. The City of Us, cradle and throne of passengers, became a giant bonfire among three sets of volcanic passengers.

The owner, who has never been wounded in the back, turns away from the soaring flames. There are tears in his eyes, from the smoke, but he smiles.

Fate awarded the bus another Driver who drove the bus to a land where gold and silver abound. Gold and silver flowed up to the heavens and the Driver locked the passengers in the bus and called the owner. The owner called his friends and they flew into the area. Here, where the river gets mad and boils up in eddies and whirlpools, the owner brought in another strategy to keep the bus moving while he galloped back and forth bringing advice for the Driver and his passengers.

            The conductor screamed. Destination: it has always been the same. The passengers multiplied and their language died. The conductor began to collect the fare.

            The passengers, as soon as they saw the conductor asking for more money, sat up, waved their hands to the conductor and started making something like a speech on materialism. The conductor sat stupefied, and scarcely had the heart not to ask for his money. Some passengers paid and others paid with noise.

            The uproar morphed into a monster. The conductor brought out his Peacemaker and shot one passenger in the head and another in the chest. The driver laughed at how his conductor handled passengers. Driver stopped, conductor dropped the passengers and commanded the driver to move on.

            Driver refused. Conductor shot driver. Conductor became driver.

            Passengers opened their mouth. Now, they realised that they’ve been caught in the hunter’s nets and are marching to a place, tied to each other at the neck, as the roads sing into their ears.

            Conductor used to be many things. Backstory: conductor, it was rumoured, used to be a snake, then turned into a bat, then turned into a tortoise. It was while he was a tortoise that he learnt how to be a human being. When he became a human being, he decided to drive the bus.

            Now, he is a driver and a conductor: driving and asking for his fare. He removed the rear-view mirror because he didn’t want to see what was happening in the back. He was looking forward. He kept asking for his money and kept receiving it.

            One of the passengers produced a type of money that has not been spent before. It was bigger than what other passengers had been paying. When he passed it to the front, the driver cum conductor looked at the money and put it in his regalia. The driver, formerly a conductor, sped up, as if the new currency would lead him to the destination that was not a destination. Distraction flowed into his head when the passenger said: “Conductor, give me my change!”

            In the centre of the road, the driver stopped the bus, watched his left and right then crossed to other side. The passengers watched. The new driver, suffocated by those heavy words, ran away. He never returned.

            A child climbed unto the driver seat, started the bus, and began to drive.

Michael Irene

@moshoke

moshoke@yahoo.com