DEMISSIE
Lately, I feel, I am more and more vile. Poisoned, perhaps. But not always. In a different life I have been, or was…pleasant, hard working. I owned a garage, I fixed the vehicles of all the diplomats in the city. Fifteen years of my life, and plans for more garages. Plans to become a ‘Business Man’. Three years ago, the Embassy announced that its work would be put out to tender, and they gave the contract to a foreign company. My tender was cheaper, but this company’s business was well known, they have their headquarters in the city, they own oil, and water, and other utilities over a huge region of the country.
[ALEX: Economics, / it’s…]
DEMISSIE: Yes. And I’m laughed at when I try to tell people that I can fix the cars as well as this company. Since when did they care about cars? I am a native of the city, and this company is foreign, coming and going as it pleases. But its garages are plush, they’re new. I approach people in the street who look important, and I try to persuade them to bring their cars to me. They ask for a card. I say I don’t have one. They ask for my website address, I say I don’t have one. But I understand that I need one, that to compete with this company I should buy my clothes from Paris, or my shoes from London, and I don’t have the money. All my life, money invades my dreams, hallucinates me, it takes away my reason because I know I will gladly kiss the feet of The Rich if it means I too can be like them. And now, just to survive, I realise I need more money than I ever could imagine. What has happened to Demissie? My wife is offered work at the Embassy; she works in the kitchens, what little she earns keeps us afloat, and I continue with my efforts to bring business back to my garage. I decide to buy new equipment, but the bank won’t give me money. By the end of the day, I understand that I am alone, and when you are alone, it is easier to act alone. Friends I talked to before, many had experiences like mine, they were angry, they talked of action. Listening to them, I was unsure. But now I borrow money from a back street loan agency, and I buy explosives and guns from the internet.
[ALEX: Why didn’t you use it to buy the new equipment you needed?
DEMISSIE stops, he smiles.]
DEMISSIE: I’m not sure what I will do with these new toys, but I feel a satisfaction in my belly, that I have done something. At the Embassy, my wife works on an important party, and at the end of the night she is stopped at the embassy gates as she leaves with a bag of food that was left uneaten. She explains that her supervisor said to take the food home, but the Embassy’s guards say she stole it.
[ALEX: Did she?]
DEMISSIE: Why would my wife steal?
[No answer.]
The guards laugh and they make her watch as they throw the food to their dogs. It was difficult to sleep. I was haunted by the truth of what it meant for us to have become so worthless, that the Embassy’s dogs were better fed than my family. One week after, the company who won the tender had too much work, and one of the diplomats for the Embassy came back to my garage. I put a bomb under his car, and one hour later it detonated and killed him.