Triangulum Read online

  Praise for MASANDE NTSHANGA’S The Reactive

  “[The Reactive is] a searing, gorgeously written account of life, love, illness, and death in South Africa. With exquisite prose, formal innovation, and a masterful command of storytelling, Ntshanga illustrates how some young people navigated the dusk that followed the dawn of freedom in South Africa and humanizes the casualties of the Mbeki government’s fatal policies on HIV & AIDS.”

  —Naomi Jackson, Poets & Writers

  “Woozy, touching… a novel that delivers an unexpected love letter to Cape Town, painting it as a place of frustrated glory.”

  —Marian Ryan, Slate

  “With The Reactive, [Ntshanga] has created an immersive and powerful portrait of drug use, community, and health issues by exploring what it was like to be young, black, South African, and HIV positive in the early aughts.”

  —VICE

  “[The Reactive] is an affecting, slow-burning novel that gives a fantastic sense of a particular place and time, and of the haunted inner life of its protagonist.”

  —Tobias Carroll, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

  “The Reactive is not only a beautiful novel, as fierce and formally innovative as it is lyrical and moving, but also a call to inhabit as well as to critique the symbolic structures of our world that can both empower and betray us.”

  —Nathan Goldman, Full Stop

  “Ntshanga deftly illustrates the growing pains of a new country through three friends who seem intent on obliterating their minds, but who nevertheless cling to their dreams.”

  —Dmitry Samarov, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  “Gritty and revealing, Ntshanga’s debut novel offers a brazen portrait of present-day South Africa. This is an eye-opening, ambitious novel.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “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

  “Electrifying… [Ntshanga] succeeds at exploring major themes—illness, family, and, most effectively, class—while keeping readers in suspense. Ntshanga’s promising debut is both moving and satisfyingly complex.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

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  COPYRIGHT→ © 2019 BY MASANDE NTSHANGA

  ISBN→ 9781937512774

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  SOME RECOMMENDED LOCATIONS FOR READING TRIANGULUM: Pretty much anywhere because books are portable and the perfect technology!

  ANYTHING ELSE? Yes. Do not copy this book—with the exception of quotes used in critical essays and reviews—without the prior written permission from the copyright holder and publisher. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means.

  WE MUST ALSO POINT OUT THAT THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. 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.

  for my parents

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  1. Foreword

  2. Triangulum

  I.The Machine

  II.Five Weeks in the Plague

  Part A

  Part B

  III.Triangulum

  “Memory itself is an internal rumour.”

  —George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Human Understanding

  “The future is forever a projection of the present.”

  —Kōbō Abe, Inter Ice Age 4

  “some like to imagine

  a cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars”

  —Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars

  “To administer the laws of apartheid, the bureaucracy grew enormously. By 1977, about 540,000 Whites were employed in the public sector […] and Afrikaners occupied more than 90 percent of the top positions. The vast majority of the white bureaucrats were ardent supporters of apartheid. Most of the black bureaucrats, numbering around 820,000, were reliable servants of the regime on which they depended for their livelihood.”

  —Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa

  FOREWORD

  I am a woman acting of her own will and desire. Do not attempt to contact me after this communication. In all likelihood, I am no longer here.

  These lines mark the beginning of the note my colleague Dr Joseph Hessler presented me with three years ago, along with the other materials I was tasked to compile into a dossier meant to inform a State Defense Report. I didn’t. Instead, they became the following manuscript, which, with the now late Dr Hessler’s assistance, I have prepared for the public as TRIANGULUM.

  At the time of writing, the sender of these materials remains unknown. We have at our disposal the note, as well as a cover letter, detailing further instructions. Then the materials themselves: a written record in the form of a memoir, followed by what appears to be a work of autofiction, as well as a set of digital recordings.

  Under all circumstances, these testimonies are to be presented as a single communication. It is not possible to make sense of one without the others. This condition is non-negotiable. For the sake of truthfulness, as well as detail—and at personal risk—I have undergone hypnotic regression therapy in order to recall the information I wish to provide this office, but I am still human, or I was human, and to understand me one must understand the life I’ve lived, and I require that this be an accompaniment to the text.

  Herewith, then, in preparation for its tri-continental publication, is an accurate representation of the sender’s findings. It is a document announcing the end of our world in 2050.

  My name is Dr Naomi Buthelezi. The date is December 2, 2043. I am of sound mind and constitution and do not compose this account under duress. In a previous life, I worked as an author and writing instructor at the creative writing department of the University of Cape Town, where my career persisted on the strength of my having once been awarded both the Hugo and Nebula. I was a once-known/now-obscure science fiction writer, in other words, and assigned to this case through the office of Dr Hessler—an admirer I didn’t know I had.

  The two of us met at the beginning of 2040, at a quiet soiree on campus. The astronomers in the department next to ours had installed a new 16-inch telescope in the observatory north of the grounds, and a few of us in English had been invited to celebrate with them before their doors opened.

  Dr Hessler, or Joseph, as I came to know him, was the night’s guest of honor. He served as the chair and director of the South African National Space Agency, and had been asked to prepare a page for the evening’s opening remarks. He was well known. Having cont
ributed to our space project for a decade and a half with committed service, he’d earned a place among the nation’s leaders in the field.

  The gathering was modest, owing to the closed invitation. As the night wore on, I drank champagne out of a flute fashioned from a test tube and listened to my colleagues complain about ceaseless departmental meetings. I felt the same, but that didn’t make it less dull. My daughter was spending the weekend at a friend’s and I had a husband who was out of town for work—our relationship now openly at an impasse.

  The speech was brief. After a second round of applause, I turned from my colleagues and found him smiling over the stage lights. His photograph was projected onto the walls. Then his hand was shuffled from the Head of Department’s to the Dean’s.

  As he dismounted the podium, I realized I hadn’t heard a word the man had said—which made it all the stranger when he tapped me on the shoulder and told me he was an admirer.

  “It’s a remarkable oeuvre,” he said, refreshing my test tube.

  He asked me join him at his table. Sitting across from him, I took slow sips of champagne and tried to tell him what he wanted to know about the profession—about the novels I’d published and the ones I’d abandoned. The latter seemed to surprise him. The more we spoke, the more I understood that he viewed writers as both admirable and pitiful mammals—cubs that had been separated from the pack too soon and were now frail and prone to neurasthenia; feckless neurotics, to be blunt, ruined for a life among other people, but also, because of their wandering, gifted with more sights and smells and insights than was average.

  Not that he was average. From the beginning, Hessler insisted on presenting himself as a sensitive, strong man—an adventurer, able to explore those same sights and smells and insights without the writer’s requisite softness; indeed, with hard science.

  He told me he had one last question. “No, this one isn’t about writing,” he smiled. “It’s simpler. I want to know if life exists in other galaxies.”

  I was caught off guard by the question and told him as much.

  “I suppose that’s fair,” he sighed. He allowed a moment to pass. Then he said, “Two months ago, at our office in Hermanus, we received an unmarked package at our front desk. It was delivered by an anonymous courier, and inside, there was a locked drive containing audio recordings and printed manuscripts.”

  “Manuscripts?”

  Hessler nodded. “Two of them. In the beginning, we tried to dismiss it, of course. There’s nothing unusual about finding an eccentric in our mail haul. But from the beginning, this felt different. For one, an enormous amount of effort had gone into the materials. That much was clear. That’s why I didn’t mind them making the rounds in our office. Each of us engaged with them at one point or another, swapping the pages for the recordings and vice versa. I indulged it—a harmless morale booster, I thought.

  “Then a narrative began to emerge and I paid closer attention. Right from the start, I’d been fascinated with how it presented itself as fact even as it veered into the fantastic.” Hessler paused to drain his test tube. “Until last week, that is, which is when it stopped being an entertainment.”

  The room had grown louder. I leaned in. “What happened?”

  “It predicted the present,” he said. “Now it might be a threat.”

  I asked him what it had predicted and he took a moment to answer. “Last week’s bombing.”

  I knew what he meant. An explosion had gone off on the face of Table Mountain, above the city bowl—that wide semi-oval that spread itself between Bo-Kaap and Devil’s Peak. The explosion had set off a minor two-day dust storm, powdering the streets in Tamboerskloof and Gardens below. So far, the authorities had no leads.

  I decided to indulge him, and asked him to explain.

  Hessler reached into his jacket pocket for his cell phone and showed me an image of the explosion site—four gouges in the cliff face. “This is a pattern. The explosions were detonated to form an insignia that’s referred to in the text.”

  I studied the photograph. “It could be a coincidence.”

  “I know, but it goes one better. It describes when and where the explosives were planted.”

  I searched his face and he didn’t falter. Which is how I got involved.

  Joseph confessed to having insisted on my invitation to the telescope opening, having planned on the two of us meeting. More details followed.

  I waited a week as he gathered the pages and the recordings. When he drove up to campus to deliver them to me in person, he looked older, I thought, and more stooped under the merciless sunlight on Jammie Plaza. He declined an offer to cool down in the Arts Block, citing exhaustion, which from the look of him I couldn’t argue with. I took the materials and drove home.

  Here, I want to be clear. Joseph was not an unstable man. He was fastidious, almost to a fault. From the beginning, he exercised an extreme amount of caution in dealing with what he knew. In fact, he was still wary, all of eight months later. Despite the mounting evidence on our side, he held off on committing to belief. In his emails to me, he insisted that we still had too much room for error. That was wise, given the implications of the text; if we were right, then the threat was far greater than terrorism—and its reach wider than our continent. We only had one chance to convince the State Security Agency; if our dossier wasn’t foolproof, it would fall into a bureaucratic loop that would block all further inquiries.

  My task, then, was to investigate the veracity of the materials in your hands, reader—to extricate narrative allusions that might speak to a fictional grounding in the science fiction genre. In other words, I had to be as skeptical as I could bear to be as a fiction writer—which is a significant amount, most authors will attest. I took the task on, in other words, not knowing that I was hoping against hope.

  The two of us worked well together. Even as Joseph’s health began to decline, we never lost our temper with each other—which is rare for me. In our email correspondence, our insights often overlapped, and when his pancreas condition worsened, two years into our work, I visited him in the hospital. After we’d greeted, he’d tell me to pull up a chair and update him on our progress.

  It was becoming clear to both of us that we’d have to reconsider what to do with the material. We spent weeks in discussion, before deciding that our reach would have to stretch further than the government. It took another week before we decided to release this book, which I now dedicate to the sender of these materials, in gratitude for her service to humankind.

  I also want to confess that I felt a sense of loss as I approached the end of this project. Not because I went home to a vacant house (my husband and I had separated by then; my daughter was at boarding school); not even because I’d lost a friend who was dear to me. It was a different sensation from mourning in that I no longer knew who or what I was. I told Joseph this one afternoon, two days before he died, and I still do not know. Not after what I have read in these pages. Except, perhaps, I know I was never qualified to handle an assignment of this nature and magnitude. This despite its modest beginnings at the SANSA office in Hermanus, where the materials were first dispatched, out of naïveté or shrewdness, I cannot tell.

  Now I’m here, with half a decade of my life given to it, and with no regrets nor doubts.

  There are three things I should mention before we begin. The first is that I have left the material intact, with most of my input restricted to formatting the testimonies as per the sender’s instructions. I have indicated where the written record and the recordings diverge; the section titles are also mine.

  It’s also worth noting that the middle of the book operates in a manner that is distinct from the rest. Though our research has led us to believe that this section, titled “Five Weeks in the Plague,” is indeed a work of autofiction, it lacks the form’s traditional transparency. It is coded more than usual, no doubt for protection. For example, while we were able to discover that an eco-terrorist group did indeed plant the fo
ur explosives on the face of Table Mountain in 2026—timed to detonate only two decades later—the connection to the arts and the artists mentioned was never unearthed. Nor did we confirm the existence of a publication titled Obelisk. Furthermore, while no evidence exists of the alien sightings alluded to throughout the text, the Department of Social Development’s collusion with Cash Paymaster Services against their grantees has been well documented; and, the kidnapping of three teenage girls in King William’s Town gained national coverage in 2002.

  Perhaps our most significant discovery, then, has been identifying and locating the records of the late Dr Marianne Dixon, who appears as herself in the text. Dixon earned her doctorate in cognitive neuroscience from Vassar in 1998. Her dissertation was on the topic of Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development as applied to the education models of apartheid South Africa. Dixon was unmarried and childless, which left us no descendants to contact for testimonies, and along with her colleagues in the field (now also deceased), she maintained a low profile. There are records, however, of her attempts to publish her findings in various journals over the years, and of her applying to secure audiences at conferences in Johannesburg, New Delhi, and New York—all of which were met with rejections. Unable to prove their claims, including the existence of extraterrestrial life, which would have required them to reveal their sources, Dixon and her colleagues were excommunicated from the field. This was on the heels of a scandal—enough to cement the damage—that alleged the researchers had misused a public grant to conduct unauthorized experiments on minors.

  Dismissed by their peers, Dixon and her team continued as independent researchers. Their findings, disregarded by all established cognitive neuroscience journals, can now be found collated on their website, http://www.triangulum-earth.com, whose hosting has been paid up1, despite it not being updated in a decade. The text also explores the origins of the zones, or Delta Labor Camps as most of us know them, which are proliferating in every province—and which remain the nation’s most divisive issue, bringing me to my second point, which is the setting of the manuscript.