The Reactive

  ◉ Etisalat Prize for Literature Longlist ◉

  ◉ Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize Finalist ◉

  One of the Best Books of the Year

  —City Press, The Sunday Times, The Star, This is Africa,

  Africa’s a Country, Sunday World

  “Ntshanga offers a devastating story yet tells it with noteworthy glow and flow that keeps pages turning until the glimmer-of-hope ending.”

  —LIBRARY JOURNAL

  “With a fine lyricism of style Ntshanga weaves a story both filled with ennui and weird purpose. And if that sounds unlikely, it is a feat he pulls off with brilliance. The shining point of this novel is the author’s ability to create the confusion and changes young South Africans have to deal with. In a modern state there are calls and cries from the past that still make claims on them. Never preachy or pretentious, this book is a breath of fresh air in an often fetid landscape. Read it, savor the beauty of the writing, and you will find yourself drawn into a dreamscape you may recognize.”

  —THE NEW AGE

  “From time to time a novel comes along that is so strange, yet so utterly fresh and compelling, that it feels tuned into a reality with which you are not yet familiar.”

  —AERODROME

  “One of [Ntshanga’s] best qualities as a writer is to defamiliarize aspects of South African existence, which through our habits of speaking and writing, have boiled down to bland indifference… The Reactive will probably remain, along with Imraan Coovadia’s High Low In-between and Jonny Steinberg’s Three Letter Plague, as a seminal work confronting [a] period in our country’s history.”

  —THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

  “Elegiac… an astoundingly brilliant novel, radiating with understanding and compassion. It fulfills William Faulkner’s injunction that ‘the poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man; it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.’”

  —CITY PRESS

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  The Reactive by Masande Ntshanga was published in slightly different form

  in 2014 in South Africa by Penguin Random House South Africa’s Umuzi imprint.

  Copyright © 2016 by Masande Ntshanga

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-937512-43-9

  Library of Congress Control Number available upon request.

  Author photograph: Simiato

  Cover Illustrations: Pola Maneli

  Design and layout: Two Dollar Radio

  No portion of this book may be copied or reproduced, with the exception of quotes used in critical essays and reviews, without the written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s lively imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  “We need to look at the question that is posed, understandably I suppose: does HIV cause AIDS?”

  —THABO MBEKI, FORMER PRESIDENT OF SOUTH AFRICA

  “We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods.”

  —FRANZ KAFKA

  Ten years ago, I helped a handful of men take my little brother’s life. I wasn’t there when it happened, but I told Luthando where to find them. Earlier that year, my brother and I had made a pact to combine our initiation ceremonies.

  This was back in 1993.

  LT was only seventeen then. He was broad of shoulder, but known as a wimp at Ngangelizwe High. My brother was good-looking in a funny way that never helped him any, and, like me, he was often called ibhari, or useless, by the older guys in the neighborhood. LT was bad with girls, too; most of them had decided against us pretty early. I don’t know; maybe it’s strange that I remember that about him most of all. I suppose my brother was handed the lousy luck of every guy in our family except our dad, who’d thrown us into different wombs one year after the other. We had cousins like that, too, all of them dealt a similar hand. In the end, it was winter when Luthando went to the hills to set things straight for himself. He went up thinking I would follow behind him.

  It was raining when the bakkie took him on its back and drove him up the dirt trail. Inside the camp, they put him in line with a set of boys he shared a classroom with. Then they took out their blades. Afterwards, they nursed him for a week, and he kicked and swore at them for another two. They called him The Screamer, they told us later, when we gathered to put him inside the earth. Maybe it was meant with tenderness, I thought, the kind of tenderness men could keep between themselves in the hills.

  One morning, they said, my brother had failed to make the sounds they’d come to know him for. Luthando wasn’t due out for another two days. The sky had been an empty blue expanse, easy on their duties around eziko, and they’d missed his peculiar fussiness. When they walked into his hut, one after the other, they found a memory instead of the man they were out to make. That was my little brother, LT, dead at seventeen, and I’ve never forgotten it was me who put him there.

  I never went back home after we buried him. This isn’t a story about me and my brother from the Transkei, about the Mda boys from eMthatha or the village of Qokolweni, where my grandmother’s bones lie polished and buried next to her Ma’s. Instead, I want to tell you about what happened to me in Cape Town after Luthando had taken his death. It’s where I went to school and tried to make something of myself. It’s also where I began to reconsider what my hands had made, and my telling of how it broke won’t take us very long.

  I went to college two times in my life. I might as well begin with how things went for me there. I first attended the university in Rondebosch, just up the road from the main strip, and when I’d dropped out of my journalism degree I enrolled at the technikon in town, where I got my science diploma and my sickness. I had an equity scholarship—there had been plenty of those to go around for whoever looked the way I did, back then. I got through on mostly average grades, too, like most of the guys in my class. When the year came to an end, there was a bunch of us who’d file into the Fees Office again to fill out all the forms required of boys who shared my skin tone. It didn’t take much to go to school for free, in those days, or rather to trade on the pigment we were given to carry. I think I did all right, if you consider everything else, and I graduated with an upper-second-class pass in the end. I still have that diploma sitting somewhere in my flat in Observatory.

  Now what else? In between university and Tech, I spent close to half a year at Bhut’ Vuyo’s place. Two weeks after dropping out of the university, I tried to go home, but I couldn’t set foot inside my mother’s house. The home I’d known since I was a child was barred to me. There could’ve been a tapestry of fire that flowed over each of our walls that day. In fact, thinking about it now, even that feels like an understatement.

  My mother felt disgraced by my decision to leave the university and my bachelor’s degree behind me in Rondebosch. It was too soon, she complained, first over the phone and then again in person. For a few moments, she even refused to turn her face up towards me. Instead, Ma arranged for me to enter the home of a relative.

  Bhut’ Vuyo was known as a great mechanic, a recovering alcoholic, and someone who’d been a doting stepfather to the little brother I’d helped to kill. He’d met my aunt, Sis’ Funeka, when Luthando was only ten years old, and before then, sticking his han
ds into rusting bonnets had taken Bhut’ Vuyo to Okinawa as a man of barely twenty. Pushed forward by the locomotive of a lucrative Toyota scholarship, he’d gone to the city of Kyoto at the age of twenty-four, before coming back and accepting too many drinks on the house in a tavern called Silver’s. That was in Bisho, during the decline of the homeland years, and they’d served him on a cloth-covered tray every morning after he’d taken his table. It was no more than a month, people said, before my uncle was undone. There were decades that would nearly fell him after that: Bhut’ Vuyo barely standing on his two feet around the neighborhood, and Bhut’ Vuyo tottering on street corners next to the highway in Mdantsane. He was often seen with his toes busting out through the smiles on his black-and-blue gumboots, his head lolling as wispy as an old hornet’s nest over his shoulders.

  Now, my mother told me, having wrung himself dry, and maybe for good this time, Bhut’ Vuyo lived with his second wife in Du Noon. They had two small children and her older son from a previous marriage, all of them born with bright eyes and strong teeth and each glowing with the promise of long-lasting health. For her part, my aunt had passed away shortly after we’d buried her son. Sis’ Funeka had had a cancer eating away at her throat, and I suppose it had grown too impatient with the rigorous hold of her grief.

  In the end, it had been a punishment for me to be sent to Du Noon, I had known that even then, but thinking of my little brother, of Luthando, I’d made myself accept the idea. And so I went to Du Noon like my mother wanted me to and ended up staying there for six months. I suppose some things happened when I was out there, too, and I drew close to those folks who’d taken me in. The subject of Luthando came up, as I thought it would, and in my gratitude to them, I made a promise to Bhut’ Vuyo and his household.

  Now, close to eight years later, I receive a text message from my uncle that reminds me of the words we shared back then, and of the promise I made, on a night so long ago I can hardly put it together from memory.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  FIRST PART

  SECOND PART

  THIRD PART

  FOURTH PART

  FIFTH PART

  FIRST PART

  This morning, when I opened my eyes, I found another warm Saturday wrapping itself around the peninsula. Someone had left Cissie’s living-room window open again, the one on the east-facing wall, above the copy of Rothko’s No. 4 that she’d painted for the three of us last week. Standing there in front of the glass, I couldn’t tell you which one of us had left the window open, only that when I heard the wind blowing under the wooden sash again, I felt I was on my own here. There was a blanket of smog stretching itself thick over the rim of the metropolis, and everything looked inflated and exhausted all at once. I remembered all the different things inside this city, and how they changed the moment you got used to them. Then I remembered myself, too.

  I closed the window after that, and soon my eyes followed.

  Now it’s a little later. Outside, the sky seems geared up for another humid weekend over the city, another three days of trees at war with their roots, and of dirty window panes getting stripped clean by the late winter rain.

  I take a shallow breath.

  Then cough.

  Where I am right now is Newlands. I’m over at Cecelia’s place, and I suppose the situation is easy enough to explain. It’s still a long stretch of time before I die, but only three short hours since I received the message from my uncle, and everything’s happening the way it usually does between me and my friends. Like always, the three of us—that’s me, Ruan and Cecelia— we wake up some time before noon and take two Ibuprofens each. Then we go back to sleep, wake up an hour later, and take another two from the 800-milligram pack. Then Cissie turns on the stove to cook up a batch of glue, and the three of us wander around mutely after that, digging the sleep out of our eyes and caroming off each other’s limbs. We drift through whatever passes for early afternoon here at Cissie’s place.

  This morning, I find my skin mottled with goose-flesh. I’m standing with one foot on cold chipped tile and the other on wet concrete. I’m yawning, still wiping stray motes from my eyes, and in a way, I guess these motes might be tears, but that’s also me having my eyelids closed against that idea. That’s also me not wanting to find out.

  Now I open them again.

  I’m always the last to walk out of Cissie’s bathroom. Today, since the pedal on her flapper bin’s broken, I leave a string of dental floss floating inside the toilet bowl. I find Ruan watching her from the other end of the kitchen, lighting up incense sticks and placing them flat on the kitchen counter. He’s trying to cover up the smell of glue wafting from the oven.

  Most of the walls are stained here, by the way, and the floors are cracked, too. This isn’t Cissie’s doing, only the nature of her building. It’s what makes it affordable for her to rent a flat in this area. Once, when I was sitting on my own on her couch, sober but I guess still half-asleep, I’d tried to count the cracks I could find in her floor-boards. They reminded me then of Sis’ Funeka’s smile in the days before we’d buried her, and, in a way, I guess they still do. My aunt refused to look at me after Luthando was gone, and though I never attended her funeral, I was told she mistook me for him on her hospital bed. I thought I was lucky, back then, to have escaped the insight of her dementia. Maybe she would’ve pointed me out as the one who’d killed him. Instead, I’m here.

  Hung over in Newlands, six foot two, bone-thin, soaked through and dripping pipe-rusted water all over Cissie’s threshold. In the kitchen, Cissie has the only dry towel in the flat wrapped around her waist. I look in from the door. Then cough loud enough to annoy her.

  Really, I say, Cecelia, tell me this isn’t typical.

  Standing by the stove, Cissie doesn’t answer me. Instead, she starts laughing. Or she scoffs, rather. Which is what Cecelia does these days. She scoffs.

  I watch her take her time as she turns around, and when she’s done with that, with giving me and Ruan her performance, she throws me a tattered dishcloth to dry myself off with. Even though it’s stupid of me to catch it, that’s what I do, and before I can say anything in protest, she tells me to look at what she’s busy doing. I look up and Cecelia waves at me.

  Dude, she says, can’t you see I’m being a breadwinner here? I’m the only one who pays the rent on time on the fourth floor of this damn building. Can’t you see that?

  In response, I sigh. Then, since she’s right, I nod.

  I dry my neck and behind my ears. In the bathroom again, I pull on a pair of shorts and find a dry shirt in the hamper. It belongs to her, but it used to be mine, so I put it on. I pat my hair with the dishcloth and hang it on the shower rail to dry. Then I walk around her and open the kitchen windows for air. I’m sure we all need that by now.

  I unbolt each latch on the front door and step out onto the balcony. Leaning back against the railing, I breathe out and watch Cissie wiping her brow with a sigh. She gathers the brown goo in the pot with a small wooden spoon and lets it drip slowly into the pit of a yellow bowl. I stand there and she stands there. We stare at each other for a while.

  I guess this is how everything moves today. It’s like riding on the back of a large, dying mammal. It matches the tepid warmth, and I close my eyes against it. I try not to think about Bhut’ Vuyo’s message. I try not to think about everything I’ve had to put away about Luthando, my dead brother, in the days that have grown out into years between us. Instead, I think about how it’s the weekend, again. It’s the weekend, and this is what the three of us do on days like today.

  Sitting cross-legged in the living room, Ruan opens his laptop and starts up the printer on Cissie’s coffee table. He feeds paper into the machine and watches as the computer boots up with its usual noise. I suppose you could call this our operation, our way of making a little extra in this place, here in Cape Town, where we are.

  To understand it better, you’d have to meet Cecelia.

  Cissie’s our residen
t chemist here at West Ridge. She’s in charge of cooking the glue we use to hang up our posters; and in order to make it the way Cissie does, you need flour, brown sugar and a small amount of vinegar. You need to pour these into a bowl, add a cup of water and mix thoroughly, making sure to squash out all the lumps from the flour. Have the oven preheated at 180°, bring the bowl to a boil, keep stirring and build up the texture. During this entire process, what helps is to be as patient and attentive as Cecelia when she’s cooking a batch. Failing that, you can at least try to be halfway as demanding as she is, and halfway for Cissie, of course, means all the way for the rest of us.

  I remember how I’d been out of a job for seven months, once. I was living off the last of my severance pay when Cecelia, who’d just showered and burnt her hand on her new but broken sandwich grill, came to sit next to me on her bed and asked me if I ever considered what would really happen to me the moment I died. That’s how things were back then, about two years ago, and I suppose they aren’t that different now. It was a warm night in October. The South-Easter had descended on Cape Town to dry-clean our skins, and Cecelia, with her hair dripping and the smell of Pick n Pay conditioner fuming off her scalp, left dark spots of moisture scattered across my Jobmail paper.

  I told her then how I never thought about that, how thoughts like that wouldn’t have allowed me to do what I had done.

  Cissie listened with her head tilted, and took a long time before she answered me and said okay. Then she leaned into my chest and closed her eyes to fall asleep, and with everything silent and her flat feeling like an old tomb around us, I bent down to touch her on the part of her finger that was dying. With her eyes still closed, Cissie raised her hand and stuck the burnt finger inside my mouth, and sliding it slowly over my tongue, told me to suck on the skin until it came back to life.

  So I did that.