The Reactive Read online

  Me

  Cissie and I sometimes go to the cemetery, where we test the ground and tell each other to choose sites. My friend Cecelia, the smart one, the artist, she’s the reason for this, and she tells me we’re preparing ourselves for the end of the world. Today, she’s all orange flowing hair and marijuana. She squints at the sunset bleeding behind the hills and tells me, when it comes, it won’t be mass destruction; the end of the world is the destruction of the individual.

  Cissie says she was friends with a famous artist in high school. Myself, back then, I was anyone I could find.

  Exhaling, I say, subjectivity causes a switch between existence and the individual.

  Cissie looks at me and I knit my fingers, letting the sun’s blood seep in between. For a long time, I could never look at her. Cecelia, the agonizing artist; Cecelia, the cliché. I always looked at her when she wasn’t looking at me. That way, I wouldn’t fall for her for being beautiful and she wouldn’t pity me for being sick.

  We often choose the old cemetery in Rondebosch, opposite the mall and the restaurants.

  Cissie sinks her fingers into the soil and brings up blades of grass between black fingernails. Then she brings her other hand down and puts the joint out on the bare patch. Sorry, Mom, she says.

  Later, I can’t sleep and have to do the next best thing and pass out. We’ve cleaned out the liquor stash and the glue, so I head straight for the fridge and look for the champagne. I miss my grandmother in a way that makes me feel sick again, and I watch another movie that convinces me I have AIDS. There’s a quarter of the champagne left and the bubbles have gone flat. I only have HIV, I say, I don’t have AIDS, and when I take a swig from the bottle, the champagne tastes like lemonade inside my mouth.

  We wake up early the following morning, and it takes me a while to orientate myself, to remember that we’re still in Woodstock, divided by the narrow hallway. The electric buzz from the stereo system thrums hard against the walls, and I can feel it pushing a thick hum against the window panes. I sit up on the single mattress and notice the number 718 written in red marker across the wall. The springs creak beneath me. I don’t know what to make of it, so I get up and rub my palms against my eyes.

  Stepping out of my room, I find Cissie and Ruan doing the same across the hall. For a while, the three of us stand groggily at our thresholds. Then we shuffle together into the living room. On the coffee table, the laptop has disappeared. In its place, lying in front of the green vase, there’s an envelope addressed to the three of us.

  We take a seat on the sofa.

  Then Cissie opens the letter.

  Friends, it reads.

  It’s written in green ink, in neat block letters. Further down it says, before I thank you, please allow me to request your numbers from you.

  Ruan, Cissie, and I look up. Then we turn and walk to our bedrooms. Moving like automatons, the three of us come back to the living room and settle on the couch, each choosing the same cushion as before. Our forearms rub against each other’s, as cold as they were on Julian’s balcony. There’s a pen on the tabletop, and I use it to write down 718 in the space left open under the green script. Then Cissie writes down 817, and Ruan 178.

  We read on. The letter says, turn me around, and so we do that. We turn the page over. On the back there’s an explanation. It isn’t too long.

  The client says he didn’t use any drugs on us, just hypnosis. He says we looked like we needed the rest.

  Then he tells us about the numbers, how they’re a code to a safety deposit box. He’d like us to deliver the contents of the box to someone he can no longer visit.

  I look up and, sitting here in the client’s empty house in Woodstock, on the corner of Milner and Lawley Streets, and with the world outside muted as the morning light pushes itself against the panes, I wonder why he’d ask us to do this for him. Ruan, Cissie and me, with our pill operation and our need for money. Then it comes to me that this is what he wanted from us all along. Once this idea announces itself, it refuses to take leave of me.

  For a moment, the three of us are silent, and then we read on.

  I asked my daughter, the ugly man writes, who told me you were the only adults that she knew.

  I pause.

  Then I look up again, and that’s when I see it: lying flat on the table behind the vase is a photograph of Ethelia, now without her secret empires in West Ridge.

  When I got stabbed in Obs, I was told to wait before the ambulance arrived, and I waited. Then I heard my blood filling up in my ears and I began to walk. They found me on Station Road, my blood leaking off a light pole. It was an important occasion, I thought, when the paramedics finally arrived. They got away with all my belongings, I told them, watching as the medics crouched to pull me up by my armpits. I had a cellphone and a bank card, I explained, and the two of them nodded, but didn’t speak to me.

  Luthando also saved my life, once.

  My brother and I were visiting at our cousins’ house that summer, and one Saturday we made a go-kart. When I took it for a test run, with Luthando running beside me, I jerked the steering wheel, but the wheels wouldn’t turn. Before I slid into the traffic, Luthando clutched my wrist and pulled me off the wood. The go-kart flipped over on its side, and from between my knees I watched as the cars missed my feet by a few inches. The axle wasn’t working, we figured. Then Luthando and I pulled the kart back up and dragged it home. It’s rotten, he said, breaking its wheels in the silence that followed. Then we ran to the playing fields that blocked off Bisho Park—which lay to the north of our grand-aunt’s house; an unsafe area, my mother had told me—where we stalked merry-go-rounds and chafed big blisters on our thighs by going on the metal slide in shorts. On Saturdays, after bowls of porridge we soured with vinegar—or thickened with scoops of peanut butter or margarine—Luthando and I flipped a fifty-cent coin to decide who would push and who would ride; and then we’d pump our calves stiff on the creaking swings at the park, pulling their chains taut as we swung for reputation and bragging rights against the neighborhood kids.

  The paramedics got me up and strapped me to a gurney. That’s when I thought of that go-kart we’d had.

  The three of us drove in silence through the suburb where my pockets had been emptied. We went over the bridge, across Lower Main Road and up to Groote Schuur Hospital, where I felt the air change. The paramedics gave me a bandage to press on my wound and I was told to wait until I received assistance. Then a nurse arrived and took me to a bright room where there were more of us in the middle of dying. I was given a seat next to a large-eared man who sat reading the paper. My neighbor glanced at me for a moment before he leaned his head back to sleep. I watched him press the loose pages of the Cape Times into a tent over his face. The wheels of another gurney creaked behind us. This one carried a teenager—a boy from Beacon Valley, the medics said—who’d been shot in both legs. He was around sixteen, and was wheeled into the ward unconscious. The bandages around his thighs were dark with blood, the cloth rough from the bone splintered beneath.

  I began to lose consciousness in my seat. Then I heard them call my name. Two more nurses arrived to help me up and I was passed through a door and sat in front of a doctor. The doctor was a balding, middle-aged man with spectacles pushed up his forehead. He instructed me from behind his desk, and I peeled off my clothes and showed him my injuries. He used a needle to anesthetize the nerve endings around the wound, and then he used another with a thread to sew it shut. I felt a hot flush before my skin receded back into numbness. Then I was led out and given a bed by a window. They discharged me the following day, on a Sunday morning, and I received my bill a month later.

  On the eighth of August, two and a half months after I was stabbed and robbed in Observatory, I resigned from my lab-assistant post in the molecular biology department. My job had been to test samples for HIV antibodies. Those that came out reactive—testing positive for the virus—we divided into HIV-1 and HIV-2. The samples that came back negati
ve we sent for further tests, hoping to detect a genetic mutation that gave a small percentage of the population immunity. Towards the conclusion of this project, which had lasted three years, I scheduled a meeting with the director to finalize the terms of my resignation: the size of my severance pay and the retirement fund I’d take home.

  My boss at Peninsula Tech was a Frenchman. We all liked to refer to him as Le Roi, to tease him for his noblesse oblige. His real name was André. In his own eyes, philanthropy was the foremost principle of his work as a scientist, and one he encouraged in all the projects we saw coming in and out of the department. Often, Le Roi lightheartedly mocked himself for living a life without trouble in Africa, a continent he characterized by its health and economic crises; and even though I laughed along to his particular brand of wit, which I found quick, it wasn’t unreasonable to assume that he felt just as sorry for me—that I was, after all, just another of his Africans.

  Still, I didn’t make too much of it.

  Look, I’m very sorry to lose you, André told me after he summoned me into his office, but why not take some time off? You’ve had an ordeal, you need some rest, he said.

  He struggled to keep his eyes on me as he spoke.

  Le Roi told me I could sit on my arse at home if I wanted to.

  For a while, at least. I mean, come on, he said, you deserve it.

  I understood his method. It was important for people in our profession to maintain a casualness around the virus. Even back then, we had to apply reins on how we expressed ourselves on the issue. There was the stigma to bargain with. Even in the most controlled cases, when mishandled, empathy could register as a cause for despair in a patient.

  I watched Le Roi settle his eyes on his hands. The two of us fell silent for a while.

  It’s not the department’s fault, I told him.

  He nodded. I could tell he was pensive, but receptive.

  If anyone’s, I continued, it’s my own.

  Le Roi shook his head. Then he threw his hands up and said, who bloody well cares? Look, you’re still a boy. You’re a baby. You have a long life ahead of you.

  I nodded.

  I thought, what else can I do?

  Then Le Roi clicked his fingers. The two of us were seated on his leather swivel chairs. He spun his eyes around in his head and grinned over the feel of his new leather blotter. It was engraved with his initials, he told me, before pointing out each letter. He’d had it shipped in that morning, and as he caressed it with his palms, he said something about his wife and a connection. Leaning across his desk, he gave me a reference letter in an envelope.

  Of course, everything else will be taken care of, he said.

  I nodded.

  Then my boss sat on his side of the table and looked down at his blotter. I imagined Le Roi thinking of my accident as much as I was. I couldn’t think of anything else we could have in common. Then I got up and left his office with my envelope.

  It was gray and anemic outside. I found a sandwich bar on a corner of Long Street, where a customer had abandoned a book of T.S. Eliot poems on a low table. Sitting with the envelope still unopened in my jacket, I looked at the many lines the poet had hunched over between 1909 and 1962, and then at the coffee table itself, where my tumbler and tea pot sat empty. For a while, I listened to the rain clattering against the roofs of the cars parked outside. Then I put the book down and rubbed the motes out of my eyes. The couch beneath me was made of leather and was comfortable, and I craned my neck to see how the weather had turned outside. The rain had thickened and was bulleting down between the buildings of the City Bowl, punishing the bonnets of German sports cars and the canopies of pita-delivery vans. In the gutter, it raised a soft mist that curled like theatrical fog above the tar, and I saw couples rushing hand in hand to crowd together under the canvas awnings of the bars and the cafés, the teenagers in their school uniforms, the university students with their shopping bags lifted high over their heads. In the sky above them stood the city’s many scaffolds, each rising like the skeleton of a grand and incomplete beast, abandoned by the calloused hands which were meant to bring it into existence.

  I took a breath. Then I dug out the envelope.

  With the reference letter, there was a small note with an email address written on it. To supplement my severance pay, Le Roi suggested I try my hand at freelance writing. It was something I could do with my time, he advised, but a strange idea to push on a techie like me, I thought. He must’ve seen me sitting down with a book when I brought my sandwiches into the labs sometimes, or maybe reading on the terrace that faced the campus square, where we had the habit of taking our cigarettes in our white lab-coats, struggling to conceal our envy for the leisure of the first- and second-year students.

  This was how I went to work. I had enough books to hide my face behind during shifts. My colleagues were much older and we had very little in common outside the job.

  I was alone for most of the time: taking down a tube of Industrial each week and longing to control my student debt, which I monitored on my laptop each night. Some days, I couldn’t put anything in order. Often, I went home with a bottle of wine and watched the sun sliding past the Earth’s waist, sitting back on my plastic chair on the balcony. I’d wait for the sun to go down, and only go back inside when I was certain I was feeling cold.

  I lived in a flat opposite a small bar in Mowbray, and each night I’d watch it open its doors to the street. Its patrons were mostly commuters, men in blue overalls and black petrol-logo caps, but it also drew in the local prostitutes and a handful of students, all of whom it would slosh between its wooden teeth and gums for hours on end, waiting for the first signs of morning before it allowed them to totter out of its warmth, jubilant or groaning.

  My colleagues, on the other hand, had families. They had satellite TV and good skin that could flush red with gratitude. They were well adjusted and easy to admire. Even those who came from places redolent of defeat—District Six, Bo-Kaap or Bonteheuwel—were happy with what they had. I often felt scrutinized by them, and inadequate when we cornered each other in the hallways. Nothing was lost in the silence of our elevator rides. I’d greet my co-workers with a grin, feeling myself expand with the need to rush after them and apologize for something I hadn’t done. Owing to this, I got my library card only a few months into the job.

  In short, Le Roi had located something in me I couldn’t deny.

  The waitress arrived to tidy up my table. The rain had softened into a sparse tapping on the bonnets of the cars parked outside, and she asked me if I wanted more tea. I shook my head.

  Outside, the cars weaved around the corners of the city grid. I felt wrapped in two skins as I pushed up against the wind. The giving famishes the craving, T.S. Eliot wrote. Now I stood on the corner of Long and Strand. I understand none of it, I thought, as I entered an empty taxi. I paid the gaartjie five rand and we headed down to Adderley Street, and when I looked up, storm clouds had started to wad themselves against the sun like gunpowder.

  Then night time came.

  Then daytime.

  Then night time again.

  Then daytime.

  It went on like this for a while.

  The first few days without work passed without ease. I cleaned and arranged the things I owned in my flat. I wound up taking an inventory of them from where I was lying on my bed, gauging the material rewards I’d accrued from my labor at the college. Then I used Handy Andy around my hotplate and mopped up the bathroom floor. I wiped off every insect I found on the window pane, and slowly began to adjust to not having a schedule. I decided to cut down on my use of Industrial, sticking to half a fingernail each day, which would thin my usage to only two-and-a-half tubes a month.

  I waited one more week before I took out Le Roi’s note. Then I sent off a copy of my CV to the email address he’d given me. I’d attached it to a cover letter with two paragraphs of tepid motivation. In under a week’s time, I received my first response. I’d been solici
ted to write something right away. The company was a new website portal that catered to a wide variety of markets, ranging from celebrity gossip to women’s health. It was part of the oldest media group in the country, not without its own checkered past, and, despite Le Roi’s many apologies to Africa, his wife now owned a portion of it. My job was to write for the health segment of the portal. I had to use my knowledge of working in a sterile laboratory environment to give advice on avoiding germs in the workplace.

  The company had been forward thinking. This was still a few years before the outbreak of SARS, the respiratory disease that would tide across the world’s news portals from November 2002, when a furtive market was finally discovered among the hypochondriacs and health hobbyists. I had the prototype of this market as my readership.

  My articles were only three- to eight-hundred-word pieces, limited to basic hygiene principles and the prevention of infection, so they weren’t taxing for me to write. My first batch was received so well I couldn’t help but suspect that Le Roi, in his pity for me, had greased the commissioning editor.

  Not that I would argue if he had.

  I drafted an invoice, despite these thoughts, and got on with writing more pieces. Then, before I knew it, a few months had passed and I was invited to join the permanent staff. I moved into a new office in Green Point, and soon after that I received my first compensation pay from the technikon. I used it to find a medical-aid scheme for my illness. That was how I met Sis’ Thobeka, my case manager, and started my anti-retroviral treatment.

  In the end, however, I couldn’t tell if my articles drew anyone to the website portal, or if they’d been helpful in any way to the people that read them. That same summer, just before the end of December, the company reported a drop in its turnover, they announced a need to restructure, and half of us were dismissed.