The View of a Nameless Man

A Nameless Man is at the restaurant again, his favorite spot whenever he wishes to satisfy the demand of human nature: to vanish into the white plates and let their aromatic contents take him to worlds unmapped. The place is usually bubbling, almost as though the one ticket to gain entrance is happiness. The TV is set on a music channel, where the sound from the shuffling videos is half-drowned by the clinking of spoons on plates and the unending beckons on servers.

It is there he notices him, a young man, nearing his thirties by normal standard and late twenties by football standard. Willowy. His shirt is a beige-colored button-up, tucked into a pair of black pants. His left hand holds and scrolls through his phone like someone searching a gallery of images for a particular picture from a random day in 2022. A corporate guy, he suspects, freshly returned from the day’s work, without a woman waiting at home, in need of something, anything, to quench hunger.

His friends sit beside him. Their vibe is strong. There are no green bottles in sight, so you really cannot tell where the exuberance comes from. Their camaraderie is boisterous; their laughter fills the dining hall, the kind that insists on being heard, the kind that makes strangers envy the bond of brotherhood. When the Holy Book speaks of “a friend that sticks closer than a brother,” they appear to be the true representation of those words, at face value at least.

Then he stands up, the same young man A Nameless Man has been watching, retreating slowly, as though he needs space to make a phone call. A Nameless Man expects him to abandon his plate of food, as most of us would. But no, he lifts his plate as though it were a treasure he cannot leave behind. With the plate in hand and his phone tucked underneath his armpit, he heads straight for the toilet.

He stays a couple of minutes. Out again, still with the plate in hand, a tiny drop of pee on his trousers, the result of hands too busy to tidy up properly.

He returns to take his seat. His friends hail him loudly, cheering him with their thunderous voices. Apparently, a group of macho men don’t need to raise their voices to give off a thunderous tone. On the table are empty plates, used-up tissues littering them. The happiness is magnetic. Yet beneath the laughter, A Nameless Man cannot shake the unease that clings to the scene.

For if these guys are truly brothers, why must he guard his food from them? What brotherhood demands that you carry your calabash into the bush when you rise to ease yourself? What friendship requires that you keep your food away from your friends when you turn your back? Where is the trust, the safety, the quiet assurance that true friendship ought to provide?

A Nameless Man thinks of himself in the company of his own friends, how safe it feels to eat from the same plate with them. He knows that if he is eating or drinking with them, he can rise, leave his bottle or plate of food, and go to ease himself. He knows they will guard it just as he would guard theirs. He knows without a shred of doubt that his life is safe in their hands, just as theirs is in his. The cord that binds them is trust, credence, oneness, naked, uncalculated.

Perhaps that is where A Nameless Man made the mistake: assuming that the men at that table were his friends at all, equating laughing together with true friendship, believing that public camaraderie translates to real bond and trust.

Or perhaps that young man had once trusted too much and been stabbed in the back. Perhaps he had once left his food unguarded and learned, in the most painful way, that betrayal sometimes wears the face of laughter.

Now, a man has to watch his back even as he laughs with his friends.

It raises a question: how did we arrive here, at this place where the same plate of food that binds men together now breeds suspicion? Where brotherhood has become so fragile that even in laughter, we carry our plates into the toilet? Where all eggs no longer fit into the basket of communion? Where keeping an eye out is necessary for survival?

This is the strange cruelty of life: betrayal, and sometimes just the suspicion of it, reshapes a man into what he never wanted to become. It was never part of the plan to be this careful among friends. Shielding your cup from your kinsman was not in the script from the onset. There used to be a time when drink was communion. Today, it is calculation.

In the midst of this decline, should you be fortunate enough to find men, brothers, sisters, or friends you don’t have to be too careful around, keep them. For they are the ones worth keeping.

Life can indeed bless you with such good people. People who will protect you without your knowledge. Men who harbor your best interest at heart. People who can do to you as you do to them. Take caution not to replace them with the ones who can merely laugh with you. Don’t mistake thunderous laughter for love.

This, my friends, is life.
A shameful life, perhaps, but life nonetheless.

And perhaps this is also the tragedy of our age, not that men gather to eat, but that even in sharing meals, they no longer trust one another.