The Reactive Read online

  Maybe I didn’t wash my hands free of my little brother at that gate. I can’t remember if I knelt for him or not.

  Over the line, before receiving his first order, our client places another. Then he slots in a meeting with us on the following Sunday. Through the speaker, his voice has a lot of verve, and his tone is louder than it sounded in the bar. Ruan, Cissie and I listen to his terms. Intimidated, we agree to sell him everything he wants. From the beginning, he expresses an interest in our next two packages.

  When he puts the phone down, we sit and try to think of something else, but nothing comes. Instead, we take more khat and watch the rest of the week passing over us, most of it feeling like a single day. Later, when I ask Cissie and Ruan about this, the two of them confess to having felt the same way.

  On Sunday, we take the train out to see him.

  We’ve run out of painkillers, Ruan says, sounding mournful as we get our tickets stubbed at the platform in Obs. We still have our money, but we’ve grown hesitant about spending more of it. We haven’t delivered the ARVs to the client yet, and the deposit still belongs on his side of the transaction.

  I get paid soon, Cissie offers, and we decide to leave it at that. Then the train moves on, grinding down on its rails, and we carry our comedowns with us across Salt River.

  We get off in Woodstock on an empty platform and find our way out of the station. The client’s given us directions, instructing us to climb up Mountain Road and then take the second turn on the right; and so we do that. As we walk up, the sun bears down through the clear sky, and the city feels half asleep once more, with only two taxis moving along the unending stretch of the main road.

  The following morning, at the supermarket, and on a Friday in which nothing much happened, except maybe for my being early for my shift, a woman with dark hair and a red face approached my till, slammed a serrated knife on my counter and began to shout. She showed me how the wooden handle was missing screws and some of her saliva sprayed on my face as she asked me what type of place I was running there. I’d never run anything in my life, I thought, but I took the knife anyway.

  Please ma’am, I said, let me go fetch you another utensil. I’ll take this up with the manager, I offered, which only made her look away in disgust.

  I took the knife, closed my eyes, opened them and started walking. I walked past her and into the full light of the fluorescents. I walked towards the aisle where the knives were. I walked past it, and then I walked past the manager’s office, too. The knife’s packaging, which was hard plastic, was sticking to my palm. When I placed my free hand on the door handle of the rest room, Jill, a fellow employee, called out to me. She asked me what I was up to, so I told her I was pleasing a customer. Then I smiled.

  I swear, Jill said, the way these people are so inconsiderate, they could drive someone to suicide. Jill had green eyes and a long fringe she liked to blow off her face. She always stood with one hand on her waist—either at the parcel check or the kiosk— her paunch pushed forward at an angle from her small frame.

  I nodded. Then I stepped into the rest room, but, before I closed the door I turned to face her, and when the frame broke the fluorescent light into dark drawn-out shadows on my face, like I’d seen it do with any number of us when we stood there, my smile widened and I said to her, tell me about it. Then I sat there for a long time before I took the knife back to the storeroom.

  We arrive at a small house on the corner of Milner and Lawley Streets. The door’s blue, and it hangs in front of us, under a dimpled pane. Its peeling panels look close to ruin, and it stands just a meter behind a white fence. When I knock, there’s no answer, and Cissie asks me if we’ve arrived at the right place. She edges up towards me and I knock again, but still no one replies.

  Eventually, I turn around and look up the road. On the opposite side, I see two teenage girls lounging on the back seat of a gold Cressida, their legs hanging out of the windows. In the sunlight, their thighs look as thin as arms, and I can hear the murmur of their voices hissing under the silence. A man with short dreadlocks, wearing a navy soccer shirt, pushes a trolley down the road towards us. He has his boots hanging around his neck by thick red laces, and he stumbles as he steers the trolley over the pavement. Occasionally, he shakes his head and shouts into the cage. When at last he pushes past the three of us, I turn to Cissie and Ruan and tell them I have a feeling we’ve arrived at the right place.

  You sure?

  I’m not.

  I guess none of us are, Cissie says, and puts out her cigarette.

  I turn back to the door and push it as hard as I can, and it clicks open when I give it a third shove. Ruan, Cissie and I file in, making our way into a small foyer.

  Inside, the building feels cramped, despite its emptiness, and smells coated with an old layer of dust. We take measured steps, our feet falling in a soft pattern over the carpet. The client isn’t anywhere in sight, but his voice seems to carry from every room in the house. Maybe it’s in my head, but I can feel it shaking the walls. Then the front door slams closed behind us and we stop moving. His voice beckons us closer. Then he starts laughing. Ruan, Cissie and I walk towards him, one after the other.

  We don’t find him waiting in the living room, and we don’t find him waiting in the kitchen, either, or even in the bathroom. Instead, we find his voice speaking to us without the presence of his body. There’s a laptop, with a camera fitted over the screen, balanced against a green vase on a coffee table. The three of us take our seats on a sofa in front of it. The man’s silhouette is spread out on the display. The audio jack’s connected to a stereo system set up on the tiled floor in the corner, and it pushes his voice into the house. Ruan, Cissie and I sit in silence.

  We wait for the man to start. I look through the curtain lace and notice the glimmer of the gold Cressida again. It makes its way down Lawley Street, the legs of the girls still hanging out of its back-seat windows.

  Then the man shuffles to life inside the screen’s frame. His silhouette moves, and he tells us that he’s prepared a game for us to play.

  We listen.

  It will be my very last game, he says.

  We watch him light a cigarette. He takes a slow drag through the tube in his neck, then lets the smoke funnel back out in a thin plume. It curls at the top of his screen, crowning him with a small firmament. Then he starts to whistle, and in the middle of the frame, his face takes on the form of a dark landscape, rolling unevenly below a blue mist.

  Once, he says to us—and Ruan, Cissie, and I draw in, pitching our heads forward to listen—there was a small and hidden village. It wasn’t very far from this city where the four of us now take our seats, holding our palaver across this wire. It was small, and known only to its inhabitants. They had no ruler, and had seen it fit to name their village after the harvest bounty, a word in a dialect now disappeared from this world. One year, the rains held off, and in the following seasons, the land was struck by a heat wave—the beginning of blight and famine. Then one day, the elders instructed the children in the village to go searching for quarry and crops, and when they returned, sorrowful and without reward, they all fell into a deep sleep. The following morning, the children began to grow roots on their scalps, and within a fortnight they had banana saplings growing out of their heads. The elders, famished, took only a day to deliberate. Then they decided to dig early graves for the children so the saplings might grow into trees. There would be more children, they reasoned. Then they buried them. They watered the graves with their tears and the saplings grew into trees and they feasted. However, soon after the elders had taken their fill, they fell into a deep slumber and awoke to find roots growing out of their own heads. The bark from the saplings thickened and pushed down on their weak joints, and within a day they were buried below the earth. Later that same evening, the sky opened itself with a thunderclap, and now a grove of banana trees stands where those villagers once lived. Do you understand me?

  I do.

  T
his comes from Cecelia. She says it without hesitation and lifts herself up from the couch. Surprised, Ruan and I turn to face her.

  Good, the man replies. He lights another cigarette and draws the smoke slowly through the tube. Then he motions his hand towards a door on the left side of the hallway. The three of us follow his gesture with our eyes. You’ll find more inside, he says, and Cissie nods.

  In silence, she walks across the hallway and enters the room to the left. The door closes behind her and the ugly man continues.

  Once, he says again, there was a man who was a carpenter and a spirit man.

  The man exhales the smoke through his nose and continues.

  Since the carpenter was blessed with both craftiness and piety, he says, with firm fingers that carried the land’s wisdoms as well as a porous spirit, he was valued widely across the region. However, he had been born with a nose that was moved too far to the left of his face, and a cleft palate, disfigurements which delivered him daily into the clutches of shame. He was unable to bear the company of his neighbors, and, as a result, lived the life of a fugitive. In each village he passed, he was seen only as a faint figure on the hills, where he would set up his hut far from the eyes of the villagers below. One night, alone in such a hut, his ears growing heavy with the cheers of a harvest festival below, a notion came to him. He would fashion a wooden sculpture in his own image, only amending it where the disfigurements had struck his face. He labored for two days without rest, and was done as the third day dawned, upon which he beheld his work. The following day, he smuggled the sculpture to the village below, where it was received with praise and admiration. However, when he descended from his mountain to meet the villagers and reveal himself as its creator, no one recognized him. Instead, he was captured and then banished for vagrancy. Do you understand me?

  I watch Ruan as he raises his head and looks at the screen. He nods.

  The man tells him to look to the door on the right. He motions with his hand and tells him to go inside.

  Ruan sighs. Then he lifts himself off the sofa and disappears into the right wall.

  I wait.

  Inside the computer, the man allows the smoke to seep out through his nostrils. This is for you, Lindanathi, he says, and I listen.

  Once, a canopy of plants grew to cover the sky over a great city. For as far as one could see, the land had grown into a rainforest, a second set of lungs for planet Earth. Rejoicing, the people took cover under its shade, surrounding themselves with the plenitude of its fruit. For years, the people fed and took shelter under the canopy. Then there was something else. The forest demanded more room. The middle classes were hung up by their ankles from the high weave of branches. Then the prison warders, together with police captains and constables, uncaged members of the prison gangs, spilling armies of these men into the city’s streets. In the end, the authorities pitted the gangsters against each other in circle fights, while members of the middle class, in the fashion of rotted plantains, snapped off the branches and dropped into the center of the maul. Do you understand?

  I nod.

  I don’t recall getting to my feet, but I find myself standing.

  In front of me, the screen begins to blink.

  Then the man’s voice booms out from the walls again, and he tells me to walk towards the room at the end of the hallway.

  I walk.

  Inside the room, there’s no light, but I can make out a bed. Feeling dizzy, I grope for it in the dark.

  Then I lie down on the single mattress, thinking of Ruan and Cecelia. My eyelids start to weigh down on my eyes, and my breath leaves me as if for the final time.

  Cecelia

  The first time I thought about dying—thought about it at length, the way I do now—goes so far back I get a headache whenever Ruan and Nathi ask me about it. The two of them know it’s an old story, but they still bother me about what happened that night.

  Well, it started with me and my friend Claire.

  I’d got to know Claire over the internet the previous summer. We’d met by chance, in a chat room about Rothko, an artist we were both trying to emulate at the time. I knew from the beginning that Claire was an exceptional painter, the kind of artist a Pretoria high school student wouldn’t usually get to know. I considered myself lucky. Claire wasn’t a famous artist; she wasn’t in coffee-table books or hung at the Fried Contemporary, but she was timely and transparent. Or at least she was those things to me. I was sixteen. It had been four years since my mother died and I was living with my aunt, Sylvia, in a townhouse in Mooikloof. Claire had just turned twenty-eight.

  We’d chat for hours, most days, until late in the evening. Everyone thought Claire should be in a hospital, she told me, and sometimes she’d say she was texting me from one, a psychiatric clinic in Grahamstown or in Randburg, but I wasn’t always sure I believed her. Later, I decided there was a lot my friend was putting on for me—that Claire could be more than a little pretentious—but I also knew that I liked that about her. I wanted us to keep in touch, so I sent her emails and jokes whenever she told me she’d been admitted.

  We talked about the death thing a few months in. One night, in a long email, Claire told me about her mother. She said that once, when nobody was looking and everyone was thinking Claire was so brave for not crying, she tried to pull her mother off a life-support machine. She told me how she didn’t think, how she just reached for the plug and pulled. On the hospital bed, with all those tubes and needles and vials, her mother kept her eyes closed and hid a smile underneath her oxygen mask.

  Claire told me that her mother, a self-taught water-color artist and an anthropologist at Rhodes, really liked to suffer, and that she pulled this guilt-trip shit on everyone she met. Claire told me to imagine being like that—hurting myself so I could suffer with the rest of the planet. It’s all very artistic and exhausting, she said.

  Then she asked me about what happened with my mother, and I told her. I said I did what she’d tried to do. I pulled my mother off life-support. Only I didn’t use a plug. It was me that I removed from the side of her bed: when my mother’s stomach cancer got serious, I began to keep away from the hospital. When she requested to see me, I pretended to agree, but never showed up at the ward. Maybe I wanted to preserve her, I said to Claire. This was how my mother had stayed alive in my head for so long after she was gone.

  Ruan

  The last job I had, before my uncle took me in, was a post as a high school sport medic. I was twenty-two, and, for a while, I made enough to get by. Most days, I’d be at some high school holding an ice pack to a kid’s nose. There’d be blood flowing down the length of my arm and this kid, he’d say I’m wasting his time. He’d tell me to let him go. He’d tell me, I’m fine, I’m fine, Jesus. It’s not like I’ve never had a nosebleed before.

  Those days, a guy called Ralph used to supervise me. From the side of the field, he’d motion with his arms and tell me what to do.

  Usually: Ruan, what the fuck are you doing?

  Usually: Let the kid play, for Christ’s sake.

  On most days, before he became my supervisor, Ralph was a gambler. He liked to tell me I was losing him money when I did my job. We had a lot of guys like that. Guys who believed the AIDS-infected should be put on one island and left to fend for themselves; guys who laughed and joked about how every chip you ate was another Ethiopian family dead.

  I often saw myself back at my flat. Inside my shower, I would add more grime to the grout between the tiles. I would wash what was left of the blood from my armpits.

  Sometimes I asked myself, you eat with these same hands?

  I asked myself, what are you doing here?

  Then I met Part.

  When the two of us got together, I told her it’s funny about my being ugly, because when God was making faces, I wasn’t by his side telling him to give me eyes like a movie star.

  We were inside my van, where it felt like we were inside a womb, incubating. The noise outside was a hum while
Part, with her short skirt and hands on her knees, asked me how bad the bleeding got from an overdose of pethidine.

  Her question didn’t surprise me. Teenage girls tried to score drugs from me all the time, and some people thought that was my job. The truth was, our strongest drugs were headache tablets, and mostly we just reserved gauze swabs and vials of iodine.

  Still, I smiled at her, in that funny way I have.

  I told her the uglier I look on the outside, the more of the opposite I am on the inside.

  I’m not really hurt, she said, before shooting up with an imaginary needle. Something I’d noticed about her was that her hair was symmetrical. When she raised her arm to shoot up again, her legs parted a bit wider, and her panties reflected on the stretcher’s silver bar.

  You know, she said, my father works for the police, and he says the first thing you do when you question someone is to look at their facial bone structure.

  I nodded.

  She told me that if you’re self-conscious, you don’t believe in yourself, let alone your lies, and that in history, the saints were just people who got through their self-loathing by praising someone else.

  I nodded again, and this made her draw closer.

  Part told me she was eighteen. She was the only person I’d get to know before I met Nathi and Cecelia.

  That day, her panties slid down her waist while her skirt hitched upwards. Inside my van, I imagined that the time I could spend in jail for being together with her was the time it had taken me to accept that these afternoons on the fields were adding up to my life. The way Part and I came together; that afternoon, in between kisses, she told me repeatedly how fucked I was, she told me repeatedly how my face meant I would never be able to lie.