The Reactive (15 page)

I took a breath. Then I dug out the envelope.

With the reference letter, there was a small note with an email address written on it. To supplement my severance pay, Le Roi suggested I try my hand at freelance writing. It was something I could do with my time, he advised, but a strange idea to push on a techie like me, I thought. He must've seen me sitting down with a book when I brought my sandwiches into the labs sometimes, or maybe reading on the terrace that faced the campus square, where we had the habit of taking our cigarettes in our white lab-coats, struggling to conceal our envy for the leisure of the first- and second-year students.

This was how I went to work. I had enough books to hide my face behind during shifts. My colleagues were much older and we had very little in common outside the job.

I was alone for most of the time: taking down a tube of Industrial each week and longing to control my student debt, which I monitored on my laptop each night. Some days, I couldn't put anything in order. Often, I went home with a bottle of wine and watched the sun sliding past the Earth's waist, sitting back on my plastic chair on the balcony. I'd wait for the sun to go down, and only go back inside when I was certain I was feeling cold.

I lived in a flat opposite a small bar in Mowbray, and each night I'd watch it open its doors to the street. Its patrons were mostly commuters, men in blue overalls and black petrol-logo caps, but it also drew in the local prostitutes and a handful of students, all of whom it would slosh between its wooden teeth and gums for hours on end, waiting for the first signs of morning before it allowed them to totter out of its warmth, jubilant or groaning.

My colleagues, on the other hand, had families. They had satellite TV and good skin that could flush red with gratitude. They were well adjusted and easy to admire. Even those who came from places redolent of defeat—District Six, Bo-Kaap or Bonteheuwel—were happy with what they had. I often felt scrutinized by them, and inadequate when we cornered each other in the hallways. Nothing was lost in the silence of our elevator rides. I'd greet my co-workers with a grin, feeling myself expand with the need to rush after them and apologize for something I hadn't done. Owing to this, I got my library card only a few months into the job.

In short, Le Roi had located something in me I couldn't deny.

The waitress arrived to tidy up my table. The rain had softened into a sparse tapping on the bonnets of the cars parked outside, and she asked me if I wanted more tea. I shook my head.

Outside, the cars weaved around the corners of the city grid. I felt wrapped in two skins as I pushed up against the wind.
The giving famishes the craving,
T.S. Eliot wrote. Now I stood on the corner of Long and Strand. I understand none of it, I thought, as I entered an empty taxi. I paid the
gaartjie
five rand and we headed down to Adderley Street, and when I looked up, storm clouds had started to wad themselves against the sun like gunpowder.

Then night time came.

Then daytime.

Then night time again.

Then daytime.

It went on like this for a while.

The first few days without work passed without ease. I cleaned and arranged the things I owned in my flat. I wound up taking an inventory of them from where I was lying on my bed, gauging the material rewards I'd accrued from my labor at the college. Then I used Handy Andy around my hotplate and mopped up the bathroom floor. I wiped off every insect I found on the window pane, and slowly began to adjust to not having a schedule. I decided to cut down on my use of Industrial, sticking to half a fingernail each day, which would thin my usage to only two-and-a-half tubes a month.

I waited one more week before I took out Le Roi's note. Then I sent off a copy of my CV to the email address he'd given me. I'd attached it to a cover letter with two paragraphs of tepid motivation. In under a week's time, I received my first response. I'd been solicited to write something right away. The company was a new website portal that catered to a wide variety of markets, ranging from celebrity gossip to women's health. It was part of the oldest media group in the country, not without its own checkered past, and, despite Le Roi's many apologies to Africa, his wife now owned a portion of it. My job was to write for the health segment of the portal. I had to use my knowledge of working in a sterile laboratory environment to give advice on avoiding germs in the workplace.

The company had been forward thinking. This was still a few years before the outbreak of SARS, the respiratory disease that would tide across the world's news portals from November 2002, when a furtive market was finally discovered among the hypochondriacs and health hobbyists. I had the prototype of this market as my readership.

My articles were only three- to eight-hundred-word pieces, limited to basic hygiene principles and the prevention of infection, so they weren't taxing for me to write. My first batch was received so well I couldn't help but suspect that Le Roi, in his pity for me, had greased the commissioning editor.

Not that I would argue if he had.

I drafted an invoice, despite these thoughts, and got on with writing more pieces. Then, before I knew it, a few months had passed and I was invited to join the permanent staff. I moved into a new office in Green Point, and soon after that I received my first compensation pay from the technikon. I used it to find a medical-aid scheme for my illness. That was how I met Sis' Thobeka, my case manager, and started my anti-retroviral treatment.

In the end, however, I couldn't tell if my articles drew anyone to the website portal, or if they'd been helpful in any way to the people that read them. That same summer, just before the end of December, the company reported a drop in its turnover, they announced a need to restructure, and half of us were dismissed.

The cause, as explained to us by the editor, was anyone's guess. The directors led us in a brief discussion about the slow growth of the digital economy, explaining why redundancies were inevitable across the board. They played us a succession of PowerPoint slides, demonstrating the numbers, but most of us couldn't imagine the sums they mentioned.

In the dark, I began to feel as if this crisis meeting, in which my colleagues and I sat mostly silent, was something that had taken place before. This sense of déjà vu would only fade months later, when I saw that the restructure they'd had in mind included disposing of half the human staff, and that the content was now collected from different sources across the Net. I realized then that the feeling I'd had at the meeting had arisen from the fact that, even as we'd sat in the ninth-floor boardroom that day, we'd formed part of a historical moment that had receded. Much like light traveling from the sun, although it had seemed immediate, it had taken time to reach us: the event itself had already taken place. We were obsolete.

Margeaux, who'd been the head of our editorial team just a moment earlier, suggested we meet up afterwards, breaking the silence that had fallen over us in the workspace. We all agreed, and then we walked out and drank drafts of beer at a nearby sports pub.

Later, as I was returning from the bathroom, I found that the music, though still unobtrusive, had grown louder in the bar, and that the place had taken on a rudderless air, one that seemed to fit the mood of our sudden detachment. I felt a surge of grief as I stood on the threshold. There was something final in that red, ill-lit scene, and I could already imagine our future as strangers in the metropolis.

Walking home to my prostitutes in upper Mowbray, and thinking of Le Roi's wife and what she owned, I thought maybe it was all for the best. I flagged down a cab and fell asleep on the passenger seat, waking later with the cab driver pulling on my sleeve, his headlights piercing the wrought-iron gate of my complex.

Two weeks after my retrenchment, I spent a portion of my severance package renting out a Czech boy and girl I found on the internet. This was on a night I couldn't sleep, and just a few days after reading
Equinox,
a novel by Samuel R. Delany that I'd loaned out from the library, in which a sea captain enslaves a pair of blond, teenage twins. I'd sent the email in a moment of inattention, without really expecting a reply, but only minutes later my cellphone went off on my desk. The voice on the line sounded younger than me. We set up a time, and I transferred the money using an EFT.

When they arrived, I prodded Ivan and Lenka as they screwed on my sleeper couch. Later, I came on my fingers as I watched her reaching her climax. We ate leftover roast chicken with seeded rolls after that, and Lenka made us look up her blog, which was a collection of naked children wearing animal masks in a Scandinavian forest, all of them captured in high-resolution images and supported by macabre music: a trip-hop playlist, she later explained. I took an old Ativan in the bathroom, about half a milligram's worth, and burned hash oil in an incense burner. It took us five minutes to get high from the smoke, and then we each took turns in the shower before Lenka and I lay on our sides on the couch. I jabbed my tongue under the soft hood of her clit and she clamped her thighs around my neck, and then, for close to five minutes, we tongued circles around each other's assholes. She took me in her mouth after that, pushed down as far as she could take me, then drew back to pull the tip of my stick out of her lips with a pop. Dipping back down, she masturbated me, her wrist rising in speed, and when she leaned back to pop me out of her mouth again, patting her palm firmly against my balls, I ejaculated across her forehead. Recuperating, I instructed Ivan to go down on her while I watched. He did, and when he tired of it, he pushed himself into her anus. I fell half-asleep with him grunting before waking up in a daze a few minutes later. Then I walked over to them and lowered myself into her mouth again. Her lips clutched me like a fist, and my right thigh trembled before I shot into Ivan's hair. Later, when I entered Lenka, I felt her fingers pressing down on my skin, drawing circles on my sweat, each digit pushing me forward. She lay below me, feeling like a delicate wound around the head of my penis, and as I felt her flesh widening, I pounded deeper into her, imagining I could burrow us through to something vast and embracing.

The next morning, I awoke on the sleeper couch. Lenka and Ivan had left sometime during the night. The living-room window had been left open to release the hash smoke, and for a moment I couldn't recall what month it was. I could hear the main road coming to life again, the taxis heading up to town with commuters and students, and, except for the dent the three of us had left on my single mattress, everything around me felt the same way it had the previous day.

 

We never hear from the ugly man again. I guess there isn't much else to say about him. He's just one of this city's many ciphers, we decide, one of the strange things that happen in the alleyways of the Southern Peninsula. Ruan speculates that he's a deposed president, and Cissie says he's the advisor to one. In any case, the money is retracted from our account, laundered most likely, and he never comes back for the ARVs. We decide to call him Ambroise Paré, after the man he admires, and Cissie says we should make masks out of his face. To the three of us, our planned meeting with Ethelia takes on an inevitable air, although we don't discuss it much. Cissie goes back to work; Ruan and I hang out.

Ethelia shows up at Cissie's place around a week later, on a Sunday afternoon. She knocks three times and finds the three of us sitting on the floor, each somehow sober. Cissie closes the door behind her. When she sees me, I wave at her and Ethelia smiles back.

I've never seen her close up before. She's dressed in a matching denim top and jeans. Cissie walks to the bedroom to get the package we retrieved for her from the safety deposit box. We had gone straight there—a private security company on Orange Street—after having left the house in Woodstock. We hadn't really been surprised to discover that Ambroise had prepared the way for us. We only had to present them with the letter.

Ruan's reading an old comic book, an effort to calm his nerves. He's had this issue since he was twelve, he says, and he's let me have a look at it a few times. Half its pages are falling out, and it's about the Silver Surfer. The superhero wakes up on an alien planet, stranded without his surfboard, the source of his energy. Close to the end, he tries to sell his memories for a way out, but gets cheated by an agency that converts them to video.

I watch him from the couch. Ruan closes the comic book and places it carefully on the table. Cissie returns with the package and hands it to Ethelia, who receives it with both hands.

What is it?

Cissie turns to us. We don't know, she says, but it's yours.

Is it from my father?

Cissie doesn't reply. Ruan and I don't say anything, either. I realize I've never imagined Ethelia as having a voice.

My aunt told me my father was an important man, she says. Then she shakes the parcel. Can I open it?

It's yours, Cissie says.

Ethelia opens the package and money spills out, scattering on Cissie's floor. It's several wads of two-hundred-rand notes, followed by an ID and a passport.

Ethelia bends over to pick up the money, and for a moment it's as if she's back with her concrete pieces again—arranging them into another secret empire. Ruan, Cissie and I lean down to help, and Ethelia laughs as she handles the money. She laughs at the images of herself in the passport and ID.

So who knew? Cissie says. You're a Canadian.

I search the kitchen drawers and find rubber bands for the notes. Then I try to count the money, but it's too much to guess at a glance. We pack it up in bundles.

Ethelia stands with the package flat against her chest. My aunt will be happy, she says, before going quiet. Then she looks up again. You've seen my father, haven't you?

Yes.

I guess all three of us say this at once.