Dub Steps (15 page)

With every sunset another cry echoed out and new predators arrived: feathered, clawed, horned. We watched the world reshape itself. The free pigs prospered quietly, growing in numbers and confidence, their enormous forms staking out swathes of turf, concrete and grass, which they now called their own. The predators followed them, of course. We slept listening to lions cough and hyenas laugh. We woke to the call of raptors. Vultures circled, and sometimes – often, in fact – I had the feeling they were waiting right above our property. Above us.

I tied a small, ladies’ revolver in a holster to my ankle, safety firmly on, when I ran.

We did our chores.

We fed ourselves.

The canned food went bad.

The bottled water became sour.

We became truly lonely.

We became alone.

Teboho drank his piss regularly, the nanobots leaking out every time until he was scrabbling for five minutes, three minutes, one minute more.

He couldn’t let go of the idea of finding the door to our prison, nor of the hope that someone in a white coat watching over us in a location beyond our comprehension would take pity, let the bots in our system drain out and grant us exit. I would often catch him running for a corner. Ramming his shoulder hard into a wall, veering his car to the left or suddenly accelerating into a blind rise. When we were alone he would simply crash into objects and areas without pausing. One minute we were talking, the next he was thumping into a tree, a door, a piece of shrubbery.

Once he had revealed his secret to me, Tebza appeared to worry less about exposing his eccentricity to the others. ‘Sorry,’ he would say, mid-conversation. ‘I just, I just need to.’

He would target his spot, line it all up with eye and brain, lower his shoulder and bust into it. It was disturbing to me, who understood the rationale, but to the others it was plain crazy. Each attempt, each hard cement or brick encounter, doubled the confusion, which compounded again as the air was forced from his lungs and he groaned, sometimes falling to the ground, righted himself and then carried on, rubbing the shoulder, wincing abstractedly, adjusting his little white earphone as if the pause, the halt in the conversation or interaction, had simply been one of those things. As if he had merely been coughing, or wiping his nose.

When confronted he would duck, brazenly denying the reality just seen and experienced. ‘Thing I read,’ he would say, for example, deadpan. ‘The gym people reckoned you can harness the adrenalin of pain for muscle growth blah blah. Hurts like hell.’

His behaviour was so bizarre, so out of whack, they had little
choice but to let it go. To confront him would be to challenge his essential sanity. And we were all a little too unhinged in ourselves for that.

Tebza, Fats decided, simply had a problem in his head. No one, he said, could possibly rack up that many cuts and bruises without some serious wire-stripping going on inside.

My heart ached a little more with every bump and crash, every trickle of blood, every scab formed. I was the only one who had an idea of where his dreams actually lay and how hard he was striving to reach them. And yet even I found it impossible to wake Tebza from his snowballing internal reverie. He took to his computers for longer and longer stretches, days at a time sometimes, pausing for only the briefest periods to piss or to wander outside for a late-night joint.

Tebza was roaming across two frontiers. He was desperate for a gap, for that hole in the fabric to finally stick his finger through, but he was also clicking and pinging constantly in search of the cloud, waiting for that single, telling beep that would change everything.

But it never came.

I drank his piss a few weeks after the Patterson Park discovery and our walking tour of the city. I expected the atmosphere of androids. The taste of outer space. What I got was a clear, simple canvas. A park with trees, like a golf course but without the fairway up the middle. A set of birds chirping and swapping places on the oak trees. A dam in the distance which I walked up to and drank from and swam in. Grass between my toes, tickling slightly.

I lay around. I rolled in it. Took off my clothes (the same clothes I was wearing in the real world, a nifty hack-programming trick). I held my dick in my hand and jerked it a little until I had a free, natural hard-on. I did a cartwheel. I pinched myself and felt the pain. I contemplated breaking a bone – a toe maybe – to test the outer limits. I climbed a tree.

‘Going in,’ Tebza said, ‘don’t expect anything. There’s no software other than the basic OS, and it’s very basic.’ But our earlier conversations dominated my expectations, and I would be
lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed, given the barriers I’d had to hurdle to get there. Tebza’s piss tasted, well, like piss. It was tangy and urinary and all the things I expected. The taste lurked on my tongue for weeks after, a subtle yet compelling reminder of our hidden world.

Blank as the experience was, however, technically there was no questioning the hack accomplishment.

At Mlungu’s you always knew you were in an interface. The ground was blurry, the walls were blurry, everything was blurry, thanks to compression needed to keep the stream moving. The trick was never to focus too much, to keep your eyes in the middle distance, the range at which the imagery held best. You needed to keep moving too. If Lady Di approached you seductively, for example, peeling off a layer here, a bra strap there, reaching in your direction, there was an art to making the most of her invitation. The first trick was to get your dick out of your pants and into an orifice as soon as possible. The mixed rush of dopamine, serotonin and adrenalin would override your brain’s questioning of the JPEG stitching and enforce a kind of physiological suspension of disbelief. VR sex took off the way it did not only because everyone wanted to fuck, but because sex was the best way to enjoy the nascent VR experience. The sexual fizz provided the cognitive compression necessary to make the sketchy technology behind the whole thing work. As long as you were in a semi- or fully erect state, it was compelling. The final trick was to wet your nap – to use the popular phrase of the time – only when you were ready to leave. The vasopressin released by the brain during orgasm was short-lived, and after it had drained off you were left with the blurry JPEGs Mongezi had detested so. His innovation had vastly improved the paradigm, granted, but the basic limitations still dominated. Only the teenagers and the perverts were willing, or able, to keep going and going.

Hack was fundamentally different. I spent the duration of my time marvelling over the seamlessness of the thing, once I had resigned myself to the awful influence of the music. (I had been intent on taking my own music with me, but there was no way to
integrate an external feed and the bots without exactly the right kind of high-end wireless router.) I was stuck with four preselected back tracks – a problem Tebza had circumvented much earlier in his life. While prepping me, he confessed that his little white dangling earpiece was a fake – a prop to support his real, physiological audio system. Encouraged by Joy, Tebza had gone deep, implanting an audio chip onto both eardrums, effectively internalising his home entertainment system. He kept the white earphones in his ear and dangling over his chest to cover for the fact that often he was listening to his own internal music or, in the days before the disappearance, to his operating system.

Lacking his internal magic, I was bolted to the four provided tracks for the duration, dire generic downbeat things. Perversely, I was unable to turn the sound off, or even down. The default system settings could be modified only through the software running off the router – which we didn’t have.

At the high end of the park, up past the dam, there was a gate. An old, Boer-style farm gate. I walked around the dam to the gate, opened it, stepped through and emerged where I had started, at the bottom of the park. A virtual loop.

I ran to the left, straight at the far row of pine trees marking off the park’s boundary. I got to about three metres from the trees and then was caught treading water, the pines stubbornly out of reach. Unlike my walk to the gate, there was no progression, no sense of movement or change – this was a holding pattern, an edge that refused to come any closer. But even under this system stress, the visual seam held firm – again in complete contrast to Mlungu’s, where the walls crumbled at the slightest pressure.

And that was it.

A park.

A pretty, green park.

I lay in the middle of grass and let the birds sing to me until, without warning, the sky dissolved, clouds puffy then white then strands then gone, and I was back in my bedroom, dislocated and regretting I hadn’t explored one of the other three interfaces.

I returned the full Energade bottle to Tebza the next morning. Aside from the bummer of the comedown, my mind was consumed by the potential of thing.

‘So?’ he asked.

‘Eish … so much …’ I struggled for the words. ‘The possibilities.’

‘Ja, I knew my life had changed when I first took it.’ He shook his head. ‘Who can ever guess, eh? What happens, happens. We are just spectators.’

I was tempted to go back to it, but I was also wary of becoming as attached to the calm and otherness of the park as Tebza was to the escape. Or the nightclub. His lure was the spacey, empty floor and the mirrorball. Also, I presumed, the lingering, almost tangible hope of more punters arriving. I guessed ultimately I would have taken the park pretty much every time, but the detachment of the experience was too much, the return to life too edgy and jagged.

That, and the taste of piss, which was just hard to stomach.

I discovered around this time that my father was an authentic beat master. It’s a simple fact, but it had eluded me.

I had always fallen into the trap – understandable enough, I suppose, considering the circumstances of our lives – of judging him by the primary layer: according to the visible evidence. I failed to look seriously beneath the business end of his suitcase, and so I missed the cluster of hard drives that captured the true scope of his musical interest, and, yes, I’ll admit it now, his talent. Buried beneath the stupid trance and the club mixes and remixes, underneath the devices that stored his ability to make money, and a career, was jazz and breakbeat. Hip hop and jungle, drum and bass and old-school crooners, dub (reggae, dubstep, German ambient, etc.), classical by the bucketload, the full range of singer-songwriters, rock, and a staggering, confusing depth of pop.

It was an accidental discovery. I was rooting through the case looking for a particular Thievery Corp mix that Tebza and I had been discussing and that I knew lay within, when, on a whim, I decided to plug one of the anonymous hard drives into my machine. And there, folder after folder after folder. A cornucopia. A lifetime.

The depth of the collection – its whimsical range, its sheer adventurousness – sent me into an extended spiral of reflection. From the perspective of my grey hair and formally declared alcoholism, from the view of a lost man with a jagged tooth and few prospects – spiritual, physical or otherwise – my father now cut an entirely different figure. A figure of loss and pathos. A figure of farce, of course, but also of hidden dignity.

I had never allowed myself to consider what it must have felt like to travel the strange and distorted road he had. Now, I thought seriously of cricket. Of the smell of the game that occupied so much of his life and his consciousness. How the Velcro of the pads must
have felt when he pulled the straps tight. The insane nerves and stomach-rumbling that would have overtaken him as he sat waiting in the hut, heel slamming against the floor. The ball in his hand. How it would have fit so neatly. The roll of his fingers over the seam, the vision of it twirling in flight, alternately shiny red and broken-skinned. All these things, so alien to me, would have been threaded into him and the way he understood and interpreted the world.

I remembered something long-forgotten, or buried, or whatever. The whole Fotheringham hot-spot thing. My father had, for some unknown, unidentifiable reason, cut a very striking figure in the negative TV-replay view. There was something about the sharpness and angularity of his jawline, in combination with his subtle retro sunglasses, that made his X-ray hot-spot profile incredibly dashing and attractive – far more so than that of any of his peers.
You
magazine actually ran a double-page photo feature of Russle Fotheringham in a series of hot-spot frames titled ‘The Sexiest Sportsman in SA?’

He didn’t like it at all. On the few occasions it was mentioned, he referred to the tyranny of the negative. Of the black-and-white cut-out. He had this idea of himself, post-cricket fame, as only ever successful in the negative sense, when viewed in the simplest terms of black and white. He disliked the metaphor, but he latched onto it well past his cricket days. Maybe – and who can ever truly know these things now that they are gone? – it was this idea that pushed him to let it all go.

He moved from the smell and the texture of fresh-cut grass to the smoke and grime of the clubs. It must have been, I always assumed, a deep and hard fall indeed. And yet, I had never properly considered the possibility that the choice took him by the neck. Trawling through his folders (Amy Winehouse, Josh Rouse, Cassandra Wilson, Taj Mahal, Stimela, Tananas, Gito Baloi, Mad Professor, Brad Mehldau, new jazz, old jazz, country, Jim White, TKZee, Mapaputsi, Neko Case, Professor, BOP, the folders just ran on and on and on), I broached the idea that trance and house weren’t so much his new love as his recalibrated and recalculated hope – that he didn’t run to the clubs in a misguided high passion,
but in search of a viable way out of the rabbit warren. His star had risen and fallen, and having brushed the outer heights it simply wasn’t possible for him – for his heart, for his buzzing, intense head – to spend a decade or two foraging on the commons. He needed something new, and dance and trance offered it. Did that make him a dance-and-trance guy? Possibly not. Based on the evidence of the suitcase, probably not. Now he started to make a kind of sense. He became stark, a man forced by circumstance and unfortunate choices into the simple negative. A man forced to dance. A man tapping incessantly on the walls, hoping for return sound.

I filled up with regret. I lashed myself with it. If I had been paying more attention, if I had been less obsessed and internally riveted by my own life, I might have seen more of this man. I might have recognised and realised.

I started refiling and recategorising his collections on my machine. I set up the biggest speakers I could find and played his music in huge, thumping beats that shook the house. I lay back on my bed and thought of spinning cricket balls, recalling the smell of leather, sweat and linseed oil that always somehow lingered in our house, over and above – through even – the cigarettes and club sweat.

I also allowed myself to imagine my mother. Young and rosy-cheeked, eyes ablaze, heart ripping through her ribcage as this man – all muscles and smiles and fame and magnetic, hypnotic charm – pulled beats from the sky and fed them to her. I drew sketches in my mind. I watched two young beautiful fools fall into each other’s arms and, for the first time in my life, I allowed my heart to beat in time to theirs.

Fats’s obsession with locking us into a secure complex evolved along with our situation. Now the focus was less on the idea of defying raiding hordes and more on keeping out the animals, specifically the pigs, who effectively surrounded our world. So much had been made
of them in the newspapers that we were all a little in awe of their intelligence, their steroid-enhanced raw power and their emotional drive. Free pigs wanted to escape. They wanted to be free. And they had the brains and muscle to make it happen. That single fact made them different from any other animals – ourselves included.

I had always considered the free-pig hype to be, well, hype. The kind of stuff journos can’t help but crank up. Yes, their snouts extended and straightened the longer they were free, a freaky instance of instant evolution. Yes, they seemed to grow bigger and more powerful the longer they were out. They swelled, by all accounts, with a kind of atavistic juice of the jungle. But I was always sceptical. Now, having come to face to face with so many of them, having shared post-apocalyptic space with them, I finally understood that, if anything, their immensity had been downplayed. When you stare a quarter-tonne monster right in the eye, like we began doing on a regular basis, when you speak in tones they understood and work with – well, you realise how quickly hierarchies can be restructured.

So we all kept our respective distances. The pigs didn’t need us in any specific way. I think maybe they hung around us for the company as much as anything else. They were passive and distant during the day, but at night, while the meat eaters roamed, they were quicker to move, more likely to rush and charge. We took a group decision that anything weighing over three hundred kilograms and possessing tusks and/or wire-brush hair should be kept out.

Fats had, thankfully, begun to slowly let go of his ideas of himself as a leader of men. I suspect Babalwa had a direct as well as circumstantial role in the change, but of course we’ll never know for sure. Pillow talk dries on the pillow.

His control centre grew stale. The red polka-dot maps of Gauteng, the complex electricity-enhancement diagrams and schematics, the grand plans of extension and establishment were allowed to yellow and age. He would bring them out when asked or when necessary, but he was no longer frogmarching pieces across the board. Something soft had crept into his demeanour now that Babalwa’s fingers curled through his hand. They were expecting.
One day she ran her hand over her stomach and smiled silently. Javas caught my eye, and winked.

I laced up my stinking yellow Nikes and hit the road.

I exited our compound down Munro Drive, a thirty-degree slope about half a kilometre long. The trip down Munro was jarring, and the return run a complete, recurring punishment. Together the two halves tore at my calves and my thighs. I imagined myself as one of those masochistic emo teens nipping away at their wrists with a blade, desperately needing to finally feel something, anything. I tore my muscles apart one by one, until one day I realised that I felt most alive, most ready for the world, on that upward crawl past the stone walls of Munro Drive.

I had become a jogger.

Lillian sketched things on pieces of paper. She listed possible pilots and calculated flight durations, petrol requirements and flight paths. Her dream continued to take shape, at least in her own mind. She conducted excursions across the province, to the Lanseria airport, then out to the fringes, Germiston and Benoni and beyond. Gerald, who, I believed, was suffering as badly as I was in the stultifying atmosphere of survival, allowed himself to be pulled along, as did Javas, as did Andile, as did I. We took turns really. None of us admitting to believing, but none brave enough to stop.