The Reactive (5 page)

Cissie touches my knee and shakes me awake. When I open my eyes, I find Neil talking to his feet. My mouth feels scorched and my hands are damp. I crane my neck to take a better look at him.

With Neil, I guess there isn't much to say. He's a former math teacher from a gated estate in Westlake. He's been divorced twice and has rails on both of his arms, the result of a heroin habit that followed from years of blow. He taught private school for thirteen years, he says, and maybe that's the reason no one likes him here. I've heard some of the older members say he won't make it through the year, and if you look at him, that isn't hard to believe. This comes from the old users, mostly. Guys from a clinic in Diep River, and one from Strand. They look at him and shake their heads.

Today, Neil's dressed in a short-sleeved flannel shirt tucked into a pair of pressed chinos. He's a thin guy, with a gnawed coat-hanger for a frame, and his hair is dark and matted, hanging low enough to touch his shoulders. He's wearing a crucifix around his neck, and above it a pair of broad-framed glasses, each lens flashing under the basement's new fluorescent lights.

Like most addicts, Neil has an excuse for each time he feels his life cracking open. Today, he wants a mass deportation of all the illegal immigrants in Cape Town. We should start off with the Nigerians, he tells us, and follow it up with the Somalis.

I look over and find Cissie rolling her eyes.

Out of the three of us, Cissie's the one Neil bores the most. I remember how she once asked us why he didn't just get HIV already. Maybe it was an awful thing to say, but Ruan and I laughed because it was true. Even though Neil's a serf in his community, he's a nobleman in ours. We could've pulled a lot of money out of him.

Neil has these long, bony hands that flop around him when he speaks, and today, he has one of them girded in a bright spotted bandage. He waves it and tells us he cut himself with a
lolly
—an old glass pipe he's never changed since buying his first straw—and that he passed out on his kitchen floor. Raising his other hand, he tells us he's managed to keep away from the ice this week.

Then Mary thanks him and the rest of us nod.

I guess this isn't really dramatic.

If anything, Neil's brought our drug talk forward by an hour and a half, and when Olive stands up to speak next, it seems this trend might persist for the rest of our session.

Olive suffers from an undiagnosed respiratory obstruction, and on occasion it clogs the walls of her larynx, causing her breath to make a racket on its way out. I can hear the air pushing out from her throat, a wheeze that reaches me from six members away. Maybe it's a song, a whistle of the damage she carries inside her, or maybe it's just human wear: the kind we all have, waiting to waylay us.

Like most places filled with the sick and the dying, there's always an opportunity to learn something about being a person here. Our parking lot turns into an academy at times, and we get educated on the survival of people like Leonardo and people like Linette, on people like Neil and people like Olive. Maybe it's best for me to forget my own troubles and grow a greater sympathy for others. Like Cecelia, this could be what Bhut' Vuyo wants from me.

During my time here, I've learned everything there is to know about Olive. Her last name is De Villiers, and she was born to pious Presbyterians, a young couple rooted in a community church in Maitland. Her family clipped its extensions to preserve its piety, and as an only child, Olive grew up with an urgent need to see other people. Her teenage years were split between Hanover and Grassy Park, and she says she watched her friends breathing out thick white plumes for years before she joined them at sixteen. She's a single mother now, headed towards the end of her thirties, and she has the kind of hard but pleasant face you often see in women from the Flats. She works as a soup-kitchen cook at a backyard orphanage in Lavender Hill, and when she stands up to talk, every story she tells us circles the same subject. It's about her struggle to form a relationship with Emile, her son and only child.

He's just a child, she says. I know, I know, but he's starting to make out that everything I do is a
gemors.
I can
sommer
hear it in the way the child speaks to me when I visit my parents and they have people over.

Olive's dressed in black today. She has on a ribbed polo-neck sweater and a sea-colored
doek
that holds her dreadlocks in a neat parting. Her hair's pushed back into two thick columns that fall away in rolling curves behind her ears, and her dreadlocks are tinted a color that, depending on the kind of day you're having, reminds you of either sunset or rust.

Today, I can't help it.

I fill up with an image of bursting pipes.

Inside my pocket, I release my cellphone. Then I knead my knuckles and crack them. I decide to circle my thoughts around

Olive.

The worst day she ever had as a user, she's told us, began when she forgot her son's name. She tried to ask him for it, putting on a wide smile to throw him off guard, but she could tell he knew. Olive couldn't recall the three years in which she'd met Emile's father, in which Emile had been conceived, and in which she'd given birth to him. It had all disappeared, she said, and she'd had to watch her son growing up without her smell, knowing only the instruction of his grandparents.

Today, she shares her latest suspicions about Emile. Olive says her apologies have started to harden him, to make him believe she's a woman who deserves nothing better than scorn. Listening to her, the rest of us nod.

Olive's the one I've come to feel for the most in our meetings, but there's nothing I can do to help. She suffers from something I have no treatment for, and I can only watch her when she drops her head in shame. Often, I've had to avert my eyes when Olive starts to weep, but today my gaze remains passive and arrested on her frame. I realize that my feelings for her have been drained from me, and that I can no longer use her as a hiding place. The two of us sit apart, returned to the distance we once knew as strangers: two people walking into a basement parking-lot in the daytime, heads bowed and smiles coated with nicotine.

In most meetings, half the members don't make the move to draw close to one another. We enter each session prepared to deflect the counsel leader, whose job is to put whatever remains of us under glass. If you listen to counselors, they'll tell you they want full disclosure in meetings, but most of us know to hand the facts out in small doses only. Therapy won't walk you home after you pack up the chairs. Telling too much about yourself can leave you feeling broken into, as if your head were a conquered city offered to the circle for pillaging. This is how we know Olive won't finish Emile's story in front of us. I close my eyes again.

One week after I deregistered from university and my mother grew resolute in her decision to bar me from her home, I began to visit prostitutes in Mowbray, a block up from the bridge in Rosebank. I never slept with any of them, but one morning, returning late from having gone out for happy hour at a bar on lower Long, and after allowing another one to fondle my penis through my jeans next to the bath house on Orange Street, I bungled the directions to my flat and asked the taxi driver to pull over at the Engen garage. I wanted to buy a spinach-and-feta pie, a pack of Doritos and a bottle of water. That's when I saw them—across the main road, shivering. When our eyes met, they began to beckon to me all at once.

My first reaction was amusement. Then suddenly I felt wanted, in a way that surprised me with its strength. I walked towards them, crossing over a traffic island, and stood by while they took turns soliciting me for sex. In the end, I gave them the bag of chips and went back to the taxi.

In the weeks that followed, I passed by there often. I made a habit of talking to them, making bribes out of what I bought from the service station, and we'd stand in the cold together. I remember how shattered their faces looked, as if they were the survivors of a protracted battle. Yet I also recall the feeling of comfort they gave me, as if I could disappear in between them.

In the end it was this feeling, its ability to surprise and take hold of me, that redirected me from moroseness when the nights drew to a close, finding me once more on my own, standing in front of my kitchen counter, boiling curry noodles from a plastic packet or decanting leek soup into a saucepan. I suppose they saw that in me, and I located it in them, too, my need. Maybe I've been looking for that same thing in Olive, another woman who's put her battles before me, having ruined herself with straws of bitter crystals.

It always happens, Olive says, and my heart is like this. It's a paper in pieces.

I watch her as she wipes her tears. When Olive sits back down, a moment passes before the drug trend is broken. I guess this brings a little relief. This part of our talks, the HIV section, is usually when Ruan, Cissie and I start with our orders. We assign one person to take down notes, and whoever's chosen for the duty has to catalog the stage of the disease in each member. You note an infected spouse, distinguishing symptoms and patterns of remission. Then all three of us work out a treatment plan before we sell it to them.

Today, I signal to my friends that I'll volunteer for the job. It might take my thoughts off Bhut' Vuyo. Relieved, Ruan and Cissie nod and lean back in their chairs. Ta Lloyd takes up his turn to speak next.

I don't really know what to say about Ta Lloyd, either. I've heard members say he's the oldest guy in our group, but no one knows that for sure. We've all had trouble believing him. When I first joined here at Wynberg, Linette told me his story was make-believe. Ta Lloyd told them he got sick on the job as a paramedic. This was in the mid-nineties. He says they gave him an emergency van to pay him off. Today, he's seated just two chairs from me. When he gets up, he says there's a man who's giving his wife a cure. I turn around and catch Ruan looking up from his cellphone. Paying the two of us no mind, Ta Lloyd continues with his story.

This cure, he says, it's a reality.

That's the word he uses.

We listen to him like we're supposed to, and on her side of the circle, Mary starts to furrow her brow. In her role as our counsel leader, Mary's duties include making sure all our meetings remain civil and well informed. Sometimes she'll intervene when the misinformation piles too high. In this way, you could say she takes the role of rearranging our history. Playing the part of proofreader, Mary fixes us wherever she finds us mistaken, adding her own revisions to the stories we use to explain ourselves to the world. Today, she chooses to remain quiet, however, and like the rest of us, she waits for Ta Lloyd to finish telling us his part.

I reach into my pocket for my phone. Then I start taking down my notes.

It's strange, I know, he says, but look, I swear to you. This man came to Site C not two months ago. He's a medical doctor.

He pauses for a moment before pointing a finger at Neil.

He's a white man, too, Neil, just like you.

On either side of him, some of the members bow their heads and stifle their laughter. Then Ta Lloyd widens his grin, but the math teacher swats him away.

Jesus, Lloyd, Neil says, would you get on with it?

Our oldest member does.

I guess I thought I saw my father the first time I saw Ta Lloyd. Imagine a squat guy who's just crested his mid-fifties. He has a receding hairline, a salt-and-pepper beard, and he stays in good shape for his age and for the type of place we're in. He's sturdy from what the hospital pays for him to take down his throat each morning, and he drives a Ford Transit with a cracked ceiling, hauling kids to school and back in Site C. His wife, whose positive status they've decided to keep a secret, concealed from both her family and her colleagues, works a till at the Pick n Pay in St George's Mall. She rings up groceries, like I once had to do myself.

Ta Lloyd continues to describe his new doctor. He's opened up a hostel at Site C, he says. It's a place with board and decent facilities.

That's where we've sent Nandipha, he says. That doctor? He told my wife to stop working one week ago. Remember when I told you last month that Nandi had another fainting spell? Well, it happened again.

Ta Lloyd rubs a palm over his mouth, and on my left, Cissie inches her chair forward, and so do Ruan and I. The thing about these fainting spells is that they've come up before. The three of us, exchanging glances like we're doing now? That's from the time I fell on my face from one. We listen as Ta Lloyd explains.

It's not easy, I know, he says. It's not an easy thing to believe. Even in Khayelitsha, not many of us believe.

The rest of us nod.

This doctor, Ta Lloyd says. He told me I shouldn't give Nandi any more ARVs. I swear. He said if I stopped giving Nandipha my pills, he would help us.

I look up and find Mary glowering at him. Like most professionals, she doesn't believe Ta Lloyd should be sharing his prescription with his wife—it's the way most professionals think about the pills. Still, the way Ta Lloyd's story unfolds, the hospital's penance didn't extend to cover his wife's illness. Mary continues to stare at him while he speaks. The rest of us know where this is headed.

I close my eyes and wait for my blood to drum my pulse into my ears, a sound I've always found reassuring. Sometimes, I like to imagine I can hear my illness spinning inside my arteries, that it's rinsing itself and thinning out.

I hear Mary's voice again.

Lloyd, she says, I think that's enough, don't you? We've had our fill.

It doesn't usually take her this long.

I want you to stop this, she says, and listen to me carefully, okay? What we're here for is to lighten each other's burdens, not to spread lies from crackpots. I hope you take Nandipha out of that hostel, too. You're putting your wife at a very big risk with this nonsense.