The Reactive (11 page)

I ask him, why did you bring us here?

Why, he says, you provide a social service, do you not?

It's a scam, I say.

The man laughs. He does that for a while.

Now, now, he says, we both know that isn't true.

He lifts one leg off the other and straightens himself up on the couch. Then he slips his cigarette case inside his jacket and reaches for his feathered hat. He packs his device away and buttons his cufflinks.

I've kept you for far too long, he says. Let me know when you have the package.

He adjusts his hat and somehow, his mask is already strapped over his face.

I'll be in touch, he says.

Then he nods and walks away from the three of us. He tips his hat at Nolwazi and finds the door.

We sit back on the couch, and I guess that's all there is between us.

It's happened.

The three of us are left alone in the yellow light and the remaining ribbons of his cigarette smoke. Ruan, Cissie and I take a look around the empty bar. Then, with our beers turning to warm water between our knees, and almost at the same time, we whisper to each other, saying: what?

I get a delayed text message from my case manager, Sis' Thobeka. The three of us are back at Cissie's place, again, and Ruan's high on khat, playing an erratic set of drums on his kneecaps. We met a dealer in Rosebank who sold us twenty stems. He agreed to drop the price by a third.

At Cissie's place, we listen to Ruan as he drums. Pausing for a moment, he says we should just use the money and then kill ourselves.

That could be a life, he says.

Cissie and I agree. We share another stem and tell Ruan that this isn't a bad idea.

It's like that book, he says. There was a guy. He wrote a book and won a prize for it.

I open the text message and Sis' Thobeka says to me, Lindanathi, your CD4 count.

She writes: Lindanathi, you didn't fax us your CD4 sheet, I thought I told you yesterday to—

I delete her message.

Then Ruan says, I can't remember the guy who wrote that book. He tells us he's googling it and Cissie and I get up to watch. We lean over him, and, for the rest of the night, we keep stems between our teeth and chew until we can't feel our faces any more. Then we prod our fingers into each other's sides and laugh like well-fed children.

The following morning finds the three of us still awake. The sun rolls over Table Mountain just after six a.m. on Monday morning, and under it we lie sprawled across Cissie's leather sectional couch. It rained last night, and Cissie tells us there's a leak in the roof that's wet her cushion. She keeps extending a palm to pat the damp spot. Ruan and I lie still, watching her.

Guess what today is, she says.

What?

It's a holiday, Cissie sighs, but guess which one?

We can't, and when we don't answer her, she tells us it's Women's Day. I don't have to go in to work today and my aunt is still dead, she says. What now?

Ruan and I remain silent. Then Cissie falls back on the sectional couch and lies there, motionless.

Half an hour later, we shower and share what's left of the khat. Then we take the lift down to the ground floor and catch a taxi to the bottle store in Claremont, where we stock up on champagne and liqueurs and everything else we never drink. We walk out of the bottle store with a loaded shopping bag in each hand, skipping across the main road like the world might end tomorrow. Then I guess this is how we spend the rest of our Monday. We talk and sometimes the three of us shout, and then our vision grows sharp around four a.m. and we feel ourselves floating up to the ceiling, speaking many praises to each other's existence.

Sometime during the night, I think of my late brother. There were summers I'd take Luthando down the block in my old neighborhood, eMthatha, to a big white stippled house at the corner of Orchid and Aloe Streets, where an Afrikaans family from Bloemfontein had moved in. Their son, Werner, who was older than us by a few years, had taken control of his family's pool house; a flat at least twice the size of my room. Werner liked to make us watch him while he squeezed a tube of Dirkie condensed milk down his throat; and sometimes he'd command my brother and I to laugh with open mouths through his fart jokes, after which he'd collapse into a castle made from his bright plush toys. We always met Werner at the window of his room. He was an only child and coddled by both of his parents. Since moving into the neighborhood, his parents had banned him from leaving his yard; and LT and I had to jump their fence to register his presence. I suppose he was spoilt, in retrospect, almost to the point of seeming soft in the head. As a teen, his teeth had started to decay, turning brown in the center of his lower jaw, but he was also big-boned and well stocked, and would often bribe us over to his home with ice lollies and video games. I had my own video games by then, but not as many as Werner. My mother was still new at her government job and I couldn't show off in the way I wanted to about living in town. Lately, Luthando had started thinking he was better off than me. My brother had grown a patch of pubic hair the previous summer, and I wanted to remind him that he still ate sandwiches with pig fat at his house, and that one evening in Ngangelizwe, his mother had served us cups of samp water for supper.

Still, we hid together that day.

Like always, Werner told us his parents didn't allow Africans into their house. He called us blacks, to which we nodded, and then he threw the controllers through his burglar bars like bones on a leash. My brother and I scuttled after them on our bare and calloused feet. If Werner didn't win a game, he'd switch the console off and turn into an image of his father, barking us back onto the tar like a disgruntled
meneer
at the store, his face twisting as fierce as a boar's, fanning out a spray of saliva. When he did win, when Werner felt he'd won enough, he'd say his parents were due home in the next few minutes. Then he'd hoist the controllers back up and wipe them down with a wad of toilet paper. It was the same toilet paper he used to wipe semen off his plush toys, Luthando would later say to me.

He's a pig, your
bhulu
friend, he'd say, I've seen tissues of it all over his bedspread.

That day, Werner's parents came home early for a long weekend and he hid us behind a sparse rosebush growing against their newly built fence. The day was gray, like most of them that summer, but the bricks in the wall were still warm. My brother and I were caught not thirty seconds later. Maybe Werner wanted us to be caught. The maid watched us with a blank mask from the kitchen sink while Werner's mother lost the blood in her face and his father, a large, balding architect with sleek black hair around a hard, shimmering pate, came after us with a roar, waving his belt over his head and shouting,
Uit! Uit! Uit!

We were only twelve years old, so we ran.

Later, back home, Luthando found me in the kitchen and squeezed my nose between his thumbs from behind. We hadn't spoken since our escape from Werner's house, and I'd been making us coffee, watching as two of the neighborhood mutts mated lazily in the yard across from ours. My brother led me to a mirror and mashed my face into the cold pane. Luthando was in a rage, and he asked me if I liked looking that way—with my nose pinched—and nearly broke the glass with my forehead. I struggled and elbowed him and we both fell to the floor and fought. When he tired of pressing my face against the bathroom tile, and with my saliva pooling against my cheek on the floor, I asked him why he was hurting me, even though I knew the reason. Luthando said everything else about me was white, so why would I mind having a pinched nose on my face. Then he heeled my cheek again, and I thought it was to spite him that I smiled at what he'd said, but I knew even then a part of me was charmed by it. Eventually, when he got up and started to walk away, I tried to spit on his heels, and then I called him poor for the first time in our lives. This was me and my brother Luthando.

Masks, Ruan announces to us, dragging the word in a drawl through each syllable. Cissie and I watch him from the other side of her coffee table. We're inside the following day, just a minute after noon, and Ruan's voice sounds weak but determined.

Just because some people wear a mask, he says, that doesn't mean they've done something wrong.

Cissie and I nod.

Ruan sits across from us, printing out three paper masks for us to use.

It's been about forty-eight hours since we took the client's money, and now we're back at West Ridge Heights, again, watching as the sun slides itself past Cissie's living-room windows, throwing its rays across Cape Town's countless bricks and bonnets. With the weary ghosts of Newlands still keeping vigil in their comatose gardens—only now, according to Cissie, beginning to smell our wealth inside her cream-colored building— we pass around her kitchen scissors and knit together links of rubber bands, and then we pull our paper sheets over our faces and turn into people more important than we are. I guess this is what we're doing instead of discussing the client, and instead of discussing Sylvia, Cissie's aunt, whose body gets flown out in a pine box to Joburg today.

Cissie opens the biggest window in her living room and sighs. It's hot all over Cape Town today, she says.

I nod. You can feel the heat bouncing off the walls and sinking into the sectional couch, and when we get up and walk around the flat, we have everything off but our underwear. The way we drink, also, is by putting everything into Cissie's freezer: as soon as we've finished one bottle, we replace it with a full bottle of something else. We've left multicolored stains all over the kitchen floor.

In the living room, Ruan passes me another bottle of champagne and I take a deep swig. Then he stands up to tell us who he is today.

I guess this is how it sometimes starts with us. We have these games we waste our lives on just like everyone else, and today, Ruan's up first and he tells us we should call him the country of Zimbabwe. The way he's standing in front of me and Cecelia, we're both sitting still on the leather sectional, and we're looking at the Robert Mugabe scowl pressed against his face. The gray printout hangs over his Adam's apple, a contrast to his wide, pale shoulders, and the way it's pulled back against his face, it looks like the beginning of a grimace, or like someone about to laugh. Then Ruan tells us he has thirteen million people inside of him, and lying down he's four hundred thousand square kilometers wide, and the way his pockets are set up, only seventy percent of his people live under the breadline.

In response, Cissie and I clap for him.

Then Cissie hands me the bottle of champagne and gets up from the couch in a white bra and boy shorts. She fixes Charles Taylor with rubber bands around her face, and tells us she's a hundred thousand square kilometers in size. Then she says she only has three million people living inside of her, and that the way her pockets are set up, only eighty percent of them live under the breadline. When Cissie's done, she drops herself next to me on the sectional couch, and I hand her the bottle of champagne.

Then I get up in front of them for my turn at the game.

I'm in my boxers, with a picture of Joseph Kabila on my face, and what I tell my friends is that overall, I'm two million square kilometers in size. I tell them that I've got sixty million people living inside of me, and the way my pockets are set up, only seventy percent of them live under my breadline. Then Cissie reaches over and I take the champagne from her and sit back down.

The three of us lie on the sofa and drink a while.

What if we had more money than any of the people in those countries? Cissie says. Or more money than their presidents.

Ruan lights a filter and shakes his head. I don't know about the presidents, he says.

Definitely not the presidents, I say. I get up for another bottle of champagne.

Then Cissie says, what if? She says, you know when people say the people? I always think presidents are what they mean when they say the people.

Explain, Ruan says.

I hand Cissie the bottle and she says, well, think about this. You remember about South Africa's first decade, right, from 1990? For years, South Africa was basically this one man. People used to call him
uTata we Sizwe,
the father of the nation.

I tell Cissie, sure. I remember this.

Then she says, that's around the same time we were born, right, as citizens? She says, so we all shared a father in that sense, didn't we?

Shared, Ruan says. What do you mean?

Cissie laughs. Okay, she says. I mean, sure, it's easy to dismiss the whole thing as some bullshit nationalism thing, isn't it? I get it, but that isn't my point. I think my point is more like, on a physical and cultural basis, we were all him, you know, we were all this one man from the island. Cissie asks if we understand her.

I tell her that I think I do. Or sometimes I think I do. Then I close my eyes and see myself back at the beach in Blouberg again. Falling back on the sectional couch, I watch as the ocean laps the quartz in the sand, the water rushing into Cissie's living room from every angle. From his side of the table, Ruan leans over his computer and his body divides into three bloodless sections. The light begins to intensify inside the living room, the Industrial flushing its final hum through my blood vessels, and I watch Cissie for a long time as she nods. Then I get up to get more champagne for the three of us, and when I return, Cissie says we should all get one big house. Sitting on the sectional couch, and with her head glowing like a child's crude drawing of the sun, with each light ray pushing out of her head in a thick, flat vector, she says to me, let's grow to be more than two million square kilometers in size. I nod and close my eyes against the glare, and for a long time, as I hear Cissie's voice expanding inside my head, the feeling I get, sitting here on her living-room floor, isn't about my uncle or Du Noon, it isn't about my sickness or my job. Instead, it's about the three of us sitting together in her flat in Newlands, the three of us knitting our fingers together, me, Ruan and Cecelia, closing our eyes and becoming one big house.