Coyotito Ruto wakes up startled as if suddenly roused from the grips of a death-like slumber. He opens his eyes slowly as if he is out of coma and unsure whether he was back to the real world or he is in the other world where dead loved ones are presumed to go. Or be. He sees familiar things. He can even touch them. And he reaches for the very first thing everyone these days reaches when they wake up – his phone. There are seventeen missed calls. All from one person. Coyotito knows that once a caller reaches the two-digit zone, it becomes an emergency – an emergency where the caller’s head needs to be examined.
It becomes clear to Coyotito that one does not need an empirical research to figure out that love is the principal cause of retardation in people. They can do crazy things. They can do unexplainably ridiculous things such as getting married Backman (n.d.) or leaving seventeen missed calls. Coyotito has always had an inkling that Glenda’s brain is ‘not full.’ He does not remember saying anything remarkably special to her for her to fall head over heels for him in such a devastating way that she completely lost her faculties.
Coyotito traces his steps before he fell asleep. It has been barely two hours. And how he slept like he felt asleep. And in that period of being blissfully unaware of his existence, someone managed to call him seventeen times. That number exceeds by a scale of 4.7 the limit where extreme or irrevocable retardation begins.
According to a research done by the University of Buruwein (motto: ndo manake), each number of missed calls denotes the mental state of an individual. The maximum allowable limit of missed calls left by a single individual should be one or less. The research took into consideration the simple truth that there is a 90% probability that someone is purposefully ignoring your phone call. Pretty much everyone is a retard, or has been a retard at some point in their lives, presumably before they lost their phones. Coyotito knows without a shred of doubt that some people are quite challenged at being retards for the sole reason that there is no manual just like everything else.
Speaking of manuals, Coyotito (or Coyo as his girlfriend loves to call him when she is angry) would have loved Glenda to have a manual. She can be mad at Coyotito for paying the bills or not depending the mood. She can be mad at him for not having money and not want him to leave for work at the same time. He has the manual for this – leave her. But he dares not. He just wants a manual to cope with her retardation. And that’s not too much to ask.
Most resolute and unshakeable vows are rarely made at the altar. The sacred ones are the ones said in secret or never uttered at all. Coyo knows that. Glenda knows that. For that matter, they know that they will get stuck in their chaos, revel in the labyrinthine maze of their lives, laugh and love hard and probably threaten each other’s lives when it is absolutely necessary. And one ceases to exist, the remaining one will figure out how to get on with life probably in a maximum-security prison.
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