The Reactive (6 page)

Her cheeks draw in as she pushes herself up from her chair. It doesn't happen a lot, but it's easy to tell when she's upset.

I mean, if money's the problem here, she says, then why don't you just come upstairs with me after the session? We can easily look up a treatment plan for Nandipha. Of course, she should be present, but time and time again you've refused to bring her to our meetings, haven't you? You think it's good that she hides her status from medical professionals.

Ta Lloyd starts to nod.

For Pete's sake, Mary says, don't just agree with me. You need to stop spreading this nonsense and putting your family in danger. There's no cure for HIV, but as you can see for yourself, it's a condition anyone can live with.

She turns around to confirm this with the rest of us, and we nod, doing our part like we're meant to. When I look over, I find Ta Lloyd doing the same.

Yes, Mary, he says.

Right, that's enough then, she says. You can sit back down now. She starts scanning the room for the next volunteer.

Please remember, the rest of you, she tells us, we're here to help each other heal.

When no one volunteers, Mary starts flipping through the attendance roster, ticking off our names.

Let's have one more speaker, shall we? Then we can break for coffee and biscuits.

Relieved, we do as we're told. Ta Lloyd sits back down and I watch his face going slack from his forehead down to his jaw. When the fluorescents flicker twice over our circle, I look up. Then I wonder about all the other people mending their lives on the floors above us. I remember once seeing a woman there who had what I have, compounded with acute tuberculosis. Her salivary glands had blown out as wide as the cheeks of a Bubble Eye goldfish, and she was there to dispute the window-period of her illness, a complication which had rendered her results indeterminate. When the nurses ignored her complaints, she turned around and laughed at them with such exuberant bitterness, the rest of us couldn't help but look up from our laps. Swiveling on her heel, the woman hurled her objections at the waiting room, next, condemning each of us for our silence.

This is what I think of now as we sit in our circle. Cissie places her hand on my knee again, and when she does it this time, the table holding our coffee begins to tremble.

I guess I don't know where to lead us next. My uncle is a man set on changing the nature of everything I've known here, and I don't know where to walk to that's flung far enough from his reach. Maybe I should accept this and no longer go on fighting him.

Done with the session, Ruan, Cissie and I decide to go for a pizza. We take a taxi back to Claremont and walk into Café D'Capo on Main Road. They have this special there we can afford, and so we order two bottles of wine and polish them off over a large margherita.

Then we order another bottle.

During intervals, I look across the road to where I could buy airtime. Ruan says he knows a guy who lives in a flat in the same building as the café; that he can pat him down for a
bankie,
about three grams of cheese.

We take the lift up. The guy holding the
bankie's
called Arnold. He comes out in silk boxers, with tousled hair, a boom of down-tempo beats pounding out of his living room. Ruan hands him three five-tigers for the weed, and calls him an overpriced but reliable asshole. They share a forced, stilted laugh, and then we take the lift back down.

We walk past Café D'Capo, waving guiltily at the waitress clearing our table. She looks twice our age, and has our soiled serviettes bunched in her hands. We cross the road and wait for a taxi at the corner of Cavendish Square, just across the road from the Nando's. I decide against walking into the mall for airtime. I can get it later, I decide, maybe further along the way.

What? Ruan says to us, after a while.

We've been staring at him since we bought the weed from Arnold.

Dude, I know him from a guy at work, he says.

We grin. Cissie and I don't say anything. We nod and look across the road.

Then Cissie says, what do you think of guys like that, anyway? He probably has parents who own half of Cape Town.

I shrug. Maybe I should send him my CV, I say.

Then our taxi arrives. The
gaartjie
leaps out, hefting stacks of coins in a canvas sack, a white Sanlam moneybag that's gone brown around the bottom stitching. He points us towards the taxi and we pile in before the door slides shut on its own.

Inside the Hi-Ace, I take Ruan's cellphone and SMS
Yes
in response to my uncle Vuyo's message. Then, to sign it, I write Lindanathi and attach my number for him to reply to. I resist an urge to turn my phone off. If this is what he wants, then this is what he wants, I decide. I hand the phone back to Ruan.

The three of us spend the next hour putting up posters along the main road, from Claremont to Salt River, all of them telling people how to buy my ARVs from me. Then we carry glue in Tupperware containers from Cissie's fridge, jump the Mowbray train to the city and take a bus out to the West Coast. I take a look at the time on my phone and it's only mid-afternoon. I guess this is what they mean when they call Cape Town the city of slumber. Time seems to speed up here, and then it stalls, and then it seems to speed up again before it stalls.

We pass Paarden Eiland just as the sun begins to burn itself through the clouds. It throws down a harsh beam that bisects the bus and Cissie taps my shoulder and says I should turn around. She tells me to look at how we're sitting on the right side of the light.

Then we pass Milnerton, the ocean sparkling and still, covered in white spots flecked across its vast surface. It looks as if all the salt has been sucked up to the lid of the Atlantic. After that Blouberg, the destination we've chosen for our excursion today, lists into our bus-driver's wind-screen.

I open the notebook program on my cellphone. I have orders for Ronny, Lenard and Leonardo. I've got one for Millicent. I write down Ta Lloyd and add a question mark after his name. Then, after a moment, I also add Nandipha, his wife. This makes up the list of reactives we could still sell our pills to at Wynberg. Two previous clients, Gerald and Melanie, haven't come to meetings for a year.

In Blouberg, we stalk into an internet café, this gamer-powered cavern complete with a coffee plunger and blue carpet tiles. The computers are sectioned into black cubicles with little hooks that hold up oversized headphones.

It's one of those LAN gamer killing pens, I say to Cissie. The first-person-shooter covens that seem to grow in popularity each year.

Cissie nods, somewhat slackened by the place's distractions. I fax my attendance slip to Sis' Thobeka at the front counter. There's a sign here that says they sell R29 airtime vouchers.

I catch Ruan looking around with this grim, beaten-up expression on his face.

He approaches the counter. I was such a frightened little shit when I was in high school, he says, shaking his head.

The voice he uses doesn't sound like him. It sounds as if it's only meant for his ears, not all six of ours, and when he's done, he looks up at us with a wan smile. Ruan doesn't like the year we've stepped into, and behind him Cissie takes note of this and raises her eyebrows. Not every story begs to be told, she seems to say.

I get the airtime and we walk out.

This is beach weather, almost, Cissie says, when we step outside. She stretches her arms out in front of her to feel the rays for evidence, but the solar system contradicts her. She drops her arms back down.

Well, half of almost, she says, correcting herself.

Ruan and I nod. It's a fitting description. Cissie has a way of sounding concise in the face of disapproval, and as if to defy the weather's indifference to her will, the three of us trudge into the Milky Lane up the road, next to the Total garage that ends the strip. We buy a vanilla milkshake and a pair of peanut-butter waffles and cross the road to Blouberg beach, stepping over the wooden railing and walking down a short pier to a grassy knot on the sand, not far from the polluted dunes. A large crane ship slowly drifts past the vista of Table Mountain, while above us, the sky clears up in a rounded blue column, spilling down enough light to make the ocean water blinding.

Ruan opens up our boxed packages. He uses a plastic knife to cut up the waffles while Cissie rolls a joint from the section Arnold sold us. She licks it from the tip to the gerrick and lights it with a copper Zippo from her shirt pocket. She holds in a drag, sipping the air in tiny increments, and then passes the joint on to me as she exhales.

Taking it from her, I lean back. The air feels cool but pleasant on my skin, and when I look out at the water, it seems to ripple in slow undulations, each one extending to the farthest reaches of the world.

I close my eyes and take a drag.

I try to savor the smoke's effect on my nervous system.

You know, Ruan says, his voice reaching me from behind my closed eyelids, Napoleon sent some of his troops to fight against a British fleet here. It happened in the nineteenth century, I think. More than five hundred people died.

I open my eyes. Ruan sits facing out to sea. He scratches his neck, takes a bite from his waffle, and leans back on his elbows. I pass him the joint.

Imagine, he says.

Imagine what?

Like, where we're sitting now could be the exact place some British or French assholes drove bayonets into each other. Isn't that weird?

I guess. That's probably this entire country, I say.

No, really, he says. Imagine. One guy could be standing with his boot on another's face, just over here, pushing the barrel of his musket down his throat and shouting, hey! We found the natives first! Then the other would be over there, going,
non! Niquer ta mère!

Ruan does the accent well and Cissie and I laugh.

Hey, she says. I didn't know about that Blouberg and Napoleon thing. Do you think I could talk about it with the kids?

Sure, Ruan says. Make it a musket adventure.

He peels off a slice from the waffle and bites into it, sloppily. Then he grunts at us through the batter like a Disney pirate.

Cissie laughs.

Wait, she says. I didn't tell you guys about what happened to me last week, did I? Well, I made my kids draw me a picture of the Earth. Or I asked them to, anyway. Can you believe it? None of them knows what their planet looks like.

This isn't new. Cissie likes to think everyone has an opinion on outer space.

It doesn't take her long before she starts telling us about Cape Canaveral again.

If you know anything at all about Cecelia, then you'll know this isn't her first time on the subject. The three of us stretch out on the polluted sand, our fingers digging shallow troughs in Blouberg's white, heated dunes, and Cissie tells us about the headland on the Space Coast, the Cape in Florida, where the United States launches more than half of its space missions into orbit. Then she moves on to the Kennedy Space Center and tells us about the collective unconscious, the embedded memory all of us humans share with our planet. She tells us how she feels like she's been there at some point in her life, crossing an empty parking lot in Jetty Park, or lying under a clear sky and drinking a molten smoothie, or kicking around a bottle cap, or standing within touching distance of the station and staring out at the launch sites. The details don't matter, she says. The way Cissie thinks about her kinship with the headland, she tells us, isn't because she visited a family friend on the Florida coast when she was twelve, it's because everyone on our planet has a story to share about space. It's the only thing she's certain of, she says. That everyone has an idea about what the sky turns into at night.

Listening to her, I feel as I always do: uncertain. I have a feeling it might be true, but Ruan, on the other hand, is adamant he doesn't have a story about space.

I watch him pull on what's left of the roach and bury the ember in the sand. Cissie tears off a corner from a waffle and pushes it into her mouth, chewing on it for a long time before sucking the syrup off her fingers. We don't eat the banana slices. I watch them pile up in the red boxes for later.

I roll another joint. When I look up to lick it, a container ship makes its way into our view from the horizon. Then Cissie asks me to tell her a space story.

I don't have one, I say.

Unfazed, she leans over and hands me her lighter. Then she draws back and says, of course you do. Everyone does.

I look ahead. I can feel my elbows digging holes in the sand. I flip the copper lid of the lighter and torch the joint at its pointed end. It burns slowly and I take a long drag before I let the smoke out through my nostrils in thick white plumes.

I'll work on it, I say.

Then the three of us go quiet for a while.

The sand under my feet feels packed. Closer now, the container ship sounds its horn, its bilge cleaving the water like a scalpel through skin. I watch as a handful of ships melt into the horizon, each one swaying before tipping over the edge of the world.

It's better outside those killing pens, Ruan says after a while, and I remember how his face looked inside the internet café.

Cissie and I don't answer him.

I lie back and watch my blood turn orange behind my eyelids. The grass spikes me between my ears and my neck, and the heave of the ocean, when it reaches us, sounds like the breathing of an asthmatic animal. We remain quiet a while longer, and I suppose it's now, with the column of blue finally closing up above us, and the water losing its shimmer and ability to gouge, that my eyelids turn from orange to red and then to black again, and Bhut' Vuyo, my uncle from Du Noon, sends me another text message, and this time around, he tells me in clear terms to come home to them.

When I kill the first kid on the rugby field, the first thought that goes through my head, besides having to release the trigger, is that somehow this isn't so bad. I mean, it's awful how the bullet—we're using a clip of half-jacketed hollow points—shatters his skull just above the ear and he falls down, blood splashing and hair fluttering, and I think to myself, after all, Harriet Tubman is also dead. Then Ruan peers over my shoulder, looking down at the blood sinking into the ant-filled grass. Nice headshot, he says to me. Then Cissie takes the gun from my hands and carelessly shoots another kid in the throat. I guess this one would've been the lock in the team: that's how high he jumps. His throat explodes into winglets of flesh and all three of us have to shut our eyes against the blood. I step forward and say to my friends, I don't know. I say, do you think this will work? Cissie hands me the gun and takes her shoes off. When the green grass spikes between her toes, she smiles, and I guess this is what killing for the government is like. The gun is slicked all over with sweat, and every time I blink, I see the world through a prism of blood. Then another kid falls and Ruan bends over his bleeding head and asks, why us though? If they're so good at killing, he says, then why don't they do it themselves? I tell him this isn't so much killing as it is cleaning up a mess. These kids, all of them, they're already dead. Cissie says it's eerie and we both ask her, what is? She says, gunshots with no sirens. Then Ruan and I look up at her through the sound of the day's rising traffic. Cissie opens her mouth again, as if to say something further, but when her lips close in silence, I wake up in the bathroom at work.