The Reactive (12 page)

 

Now here I am, sitting with luthando, my dead brother, and we're smoking cigarettes and drinking gin out of a tin can. The field in front of us keeps bursting into flames, but this is only happening inside my head, said our pastor, Mr. Pukwana, when my mother took me to him after service. When I blink, the fire disappears, and then Luthando says to me, Nathi, all you do is read books. I put the smoke out on the grass and say, my girlfriend said she hates violence. My brother ignores me. Her parents are rich, he says, why does she hate them so much? They aren't rich, I tell him. They just work for the homeland government. I tell Luthando I would hate them, too, if they were mine, and this makes him scoff. There's something wrong with you, Nathi, he says. I heard your mother say they're taking you to a doctor. I don't say anything back. The time right now is close to midnight, and we're at a park just a block from my house. Luthando takes out his
okapi
and, placing it flat against my neck, he says, let me kill you first. Then the world is black again, and my mind thrums like it does whenever I'm at my desk at school; whenever my eyes glide over the floor and I imagine meteoroids crashing through Mr. Peter's gabled roof. I breathe out smoke and cough until my eyes water. Then Luthando laughs and takes my notebook from me. I watch him running down the street. He shouts, why do you always make me so violent in your stories? Then he jumps into a cone of orange streetlight and, tapping his heels together like an actor from a musical, he says, I never killed anyone.

For a long time, I never thought about him, my dead brother. Luthando had passed away from us, had become another limb my family had to cut off and bury. I already knew how people could die. My grandmother's death had taught me that while I was still a junior in high school, and there'd also been the case of Bra Ishaak, just a few years before. We were only children when we first watched him fall on his face on a dry bed of paving gravel, his heels knocking together while he foamed a wild ribbon of saliva at the mouth. That was outside the Wendy flat at my grandmother's house, eQokolweni. He was an epileptic and the only Muslim in our family, an uncle I knew mostly from his ample and wet kisses, before my aunt—now also a skinless outline melting into the soil—found him hanging from the rafters of the chicken shed.

We wake up early and finish the rest of the champagne. Ruan prepares a tube of Industrial for us to use and we spend the next few hours weaving in and out of consciousness. It's a peaceful state: my thoughts meander over a dullness settled in my body. I can no longer tell what part of the day it is, or how long we've been sitting here at West Ridge Heights, waiting to hear from our client. Leaning back on the couch, I realize that my uncle has become a distant echo. I don't know where my cellphone is.

How many times do you think you've been inside a supermarket? Cissie says. I want you to answer me honestly. Think of this as your final Last Life question.

I don't know, I say. I used to have a job in one.

I remember this one afternoon when I still worked a till at the Spar in Rondebosch East. I'd taken a job there the previous summer, ringing up groceries and saving money for my first tubes of Industrial, and to supplement the rent for my new place in Obs. I only had three days a week, and nothing much had been happening that afternoon, a Thursday, except maybe for my walking away early from my shift.

We were in Ruan's living room, and Cissie was telling me that maybe he was right. This was the same Ruan who, with two cigarettes in his mouth, would tell you that every day the tobacco industry recruits three thousand new smokers to compensate for the ones it kills; the same Ruan who, without taking his eyes off his computer screen, would tell you that in some Asian country, seven hundred kids fell into a seizure after watching an animation program with bad lighting techniques.

He was now right.

Maybe my job is one of the most dangerous ones around, Cissie said, before sinking the bottleneck of beer between her lips.

The two of us were watching an old werewolf movie on mute. Cissie said she could stomach the gore, but it was really the screaming that got to her. Personally, I thought the silence was because she was trying to get closer to Zanele, her new deaf pupil at the daycare. Her job that she all of a sudden hated so much.

From somewhere upstairs, Ruan laughed. He was over downloading, he said, and had now taken to uploading parts of his soul to cyberspace.

In the lounge, Cissie took another sip.

Something else about her back then was that she always wore long-sleeved sweaters. Cissie had these bad rashes, and her arms gave her away as a human zebra with all that scar tissue. When she lifted her bottle, one of these scars looked at me, and she said, today, one of my kids swallowed a cup of detergent. Can you believe that? It had to be Zanele, of course. Joy and I had to call an ambulance out to Mowbray for her.

Then Cissie told me that Zanele's name meant that her parents had had enough girls.

Can you imagine that? she said.

I could, but the two of us didn't say much afterwards. We sat side by side for the rest of the afternoon, watching werewolves leap across courtyards in a foreign city. Later, when Ruan came downstairs, he was dressed in his boxers, a shirt and his ugly, badly made tie. He had his computer under one arm, its cords leading all the way to the room upstairs; and standing at the foot of the staircase, he told us, salvation.

Cissie drank her beer and Ruan asked me to imagine my entire being reduced to the size of an electron, living free in the vastness of cyberspace.

I decided to let my friends in on a bit more detail about myself. I told them that, apart from being numbed daily from the waist down by spending eight hours packing people's groceries, I also committed genocidal murder. I told them it didn't matter what they looked like or who they were, whether they greeted or not. I killed them without accounting for difference.

Cissie remained silent. Ruan typed on his computer and swiveled the screen so I could read it. It said, make the choice to transmute: discard all desire for a better prison.

Then Cissie finished her beer and reached for mine on the coffee table. She nodded and told me to go on.

I did. I told them that once, this lady had forgotten that I'd given her her change. She'd had an outburst at my station, and in response I'd stuffed her baby's leg down her throat. This was my third hour at work, I said, and I had twenty-five casualties and counting.

On the TV screen the credits for the werewolf movie rolled, revealing true identities as they emerged from the horizon of a nightmare, and Ruan typed on his computer again. He swivelled the screen and this time it said, forgo the desire for permanence: locate the ending in all experience.

For a while, Cissie and I listened to the patter of his keyboard. Then I told them I couldn't live like that anymore. I told them there was only one way to end it and Cissie looked at me through an empty beer bottle and asked me how; and that's when I told her I was the next casualty.

Once, Ruan says to us now, in Cissie's living room, and Cissie and I both nod. It's a good answer, I tell him, and he grins before he starts to yawn.

Once, he says, because he hasn't found an exit, yet.

Cissie and I agree.

Maybe we were never meant to, Cissie says.

In response, Ruan shrugs. Then Cissie gets up to switch on her TV. It's this old black and white unit, and Ruan and I sit back, watching her as she flips through its channels.

Part of the appeal of television, Ruan says, is that it arrived to our marketplace with a limited range for choice. It was possible to feel absolved in taking in its misinformation, he says, because the communication was always one-sided.

On the TV screen now, advertisements roll out the reverse images of people who smile back at us, while exploding angelic-chorus slogans narrate their thirty-second lives into acne cream, nationalism, and McDonald's.

In between, Cissie changes the channel and it's the parliament broadcast.

In between, Cissie changes the channel and it's the Christian network.

I rub my eyes and lean back.

I believe insanity is a different way of thinking caused by exposure to pollution as a child, Ruan says. Then he looks up at the TV and back at me.

He says, I know what you're thinking.

What?

That the Americans didn't land on the moon. That the “Star-Spangled Banner” is stuck atop the tower of Babel.

I don't say anything to him. I lay my head on the sofa and close my eyes.

In the spring of 1979, Ruan says, an Israeli atomic bomb was detonated a thousand kilometers off the coast of Cape Town, and not long after that, a satellite detected the double flash between the Prince Edward and Crozet Islands. Later, the Israeli government denied the existence of the explosion and attributed the flash to a fault in the satellite's mapping system, and maybe, Ruan says to us, this means we've all lived through a nuclear apocalypse.

Listening to him, I think of the ocean, again. The first time I heard of the open sea was when my uncle squeezed my head between his palms and lifted me up to get a view of the shoreline from my grandmother's village, which I never saw, but succeeded in instilling in me the idea that the natural world was without borders.

Later, after a day of stoning crabs and using the clay on the river bank to mold sculptures of my grandmother's cattle, Bra Ishaak cautioned us against killing living creatures for sport, warning us that at night we would be visited by the forebears of these crabs, who would knock on our doors with bodies as tall as men.

Maybe they were Ruan's survivors, too.

Lying on the sofa, I open my eyes again and wait for them to regain their focus.

Then Cissie turns off the TV.

The three of us take more khat. The hours start slipping over and through us again, and two days later, when a humid Thursday settles over Newlands, we receive a phone call from our client. He tells Ruan to put his voice on the loud speaker.

Cissie fills a milk jug with ginger-flavored ice blocks and places it on the table top. Then the three of us edge in closer to listen.

When Bra Ishaak hung himself, it was also a Thursday morning, back east in Uitenhage; he wore a sailor's hat on the day he finally chose to leave us, his family, behind. People died, I decided then. I said it again years later at LT's funeral, when the rain clouds dropped and smoked up the hillside that nursed his grave like an open wound, the mist moistening our necks and beading our sunglasses under the gray light. I said that people die. Then I cupped dirt over his door-shaped hole and picked up the shovel they gave us to bury him.

The old-timers were the first to thread away from us, most of them silenced altogether by the business of Luthando's death. LT was one of three recent casualties in our village, and our elders had grown concerned over this peak in numbers. Death wasn't new to the camps, but this was still a decade before as many as thirty boys could fall in a season. They knew that Luthando had stolen into a neighbor's ceremony, and that he hadn't been assigned a surgeon of his own, but that there were many boys who'd won the community's admiration for stealing into camps. It was a sport for many. Even before the legislature had reached into our village, our surgeons had seldom shared their blades between initiates. There was the mixing of blood to contend with, but it was also a point of pride for a family to hire a man with a name. No anesthetic was used on the wound, and the blood had to be stopped by palming a clutch of herbs on the cut. It needed someone quick with their hands, and with his mind set on the work, before
ukhanki,
the healer, would walk into a hut with less care and less pay. Our elders had always been wary of giving too much room to questions posed against their customs, but now, sitting in silence as Sis' Funeka spoke of my brother from a raised platform, having to be helped back to her feet when she collapsed towards the end, they knew they'd have to reconsider their stance. That day, they folded their hats throughout the sermon, and pressed snuff up their noses on their way out after bending over to wash their hands free of Luthando's spirit,
emadlakeni,
in a cracked white bucket.

Maybe I didn't wash my hands free of my little brother at that gate. I can't remember if I knelt for him or not.

Over the line, before receiving his first order, our client places another. Then he slots in a meeting with us on the following Sunday. Through the speaker, his voice has a lot of verve, and his tone is louder than it sounded in the bar. Ruan, Cissie and I listen to his terms. Intimidated, we agree to sell him everything he wants. From the beginning, he expresses an interest in our next two packages.

When he puts the phone down, we sit and try to think of something else, but nothing comes. Instead, we take more khat and watch the rest of the week passing over us, most of it feeling like a single day. Later, when I ask Cissie and Ruan about this, the two of them confess to having felt the same way.

On Sunday, we take the train out to see him.

We've run out of painkillers, Ruan says, sounding mournful as we get our tickets stubbed at the platform in Obs. We still have our money, but we've grown hesitant about spending more of it. We haven't delivered the ARVs to the client yet, and the deposit still belongs on his side of the transaction.

I get paid soon, Cissie offers, and we decide to leave it at that. Then the train moves on, grinding down on its rails, and we carry our comedowns with us across Salt River.

We get off in Woodstock on an empty platform and find our way out of the station. The client's given us directions, instructing us to climb up Mountain Road and then take the second turn on the right; and so we do that. As we walk up, the sun bears down through the clear sky, and the city feels half asleep once more, with only two taxis moving along the unending stretch of the main road.