The Reactive Read online

  The cause, as explained to us by the editor, was anyone’s guess. The directors led us in a brief discussion about the slow growth of the digital economy, explaining why redundancies were inevitable across the board. They played us a succession of PowerPoint slides, demonstrating the numbers, but most of us couldn’t imagine the sums they mentioned.

  In the dark, I began to feel as if this crisis meeting, in which my colleagues and I sat mostly silent, was something that had taken place before. This sense of déjà vu would only fade months later, when I saw that the restructure they’d had in mind included disposing of half the human staff, and that the content was now collected from different sources across the Net. I realized then that the feeling I’d had at the meeting had arisen from the fact that, even as we’d sat in the ninth-floor boardroom that day, we’d formed part of a historical moment that had receded. Much like light traveling from the sun, although it had seemed immediate, it had taken time to reach us: the event itself had already taken place. We were obsolete.

  Margeaux, who’d been the head of our editorial team just a moment earlier, suggested we meet up afterwards, breaking the silence that had fallen over us in the workspace. We all agreed, and then we walked out and drank drafts of beer at a nearby sports pub.

  Later, as I was returning from the bathroom, I found that the music, though still unobtrusive, had grown louder in the bar, and that the place had taken on a rudderless air, one that seemed to fit the mood of our sudden detachment. I felt a surge of grief as I stood on the threshold. There was something final in that red, ill-lit scene, and I could already imagine our future as strangers in the metropolis.

  Walking home to my prostitutes in upper Mowbray, and thinking of Le Roi’s wife and what she owned, I thought maybe it was all for the best. I flagged down a cab and fell asleep on the passenger seat, waking later with the cab driver pulling on my sleeve, his headlights piercing the wrought-iron gate of my complex.

  Two weeks after my retrenchment, I spent a portion of my severance package renting out a Czech boy and girl I found on the internet. This was on a night I couldn’t sleep, and just a few days after reading Equinox, a novel by Samuel R. Delany that I’d loaned out from the library, in which a sea captain enslaves a pair of blond, teenage twins. I’d sent the email in a moment of inattention, without really expecting a reply, but only minutes later my cellphone went off on my desk. The voice on the line sounded younger than me. We set up a time, and I transferred the money using an EFT.

  When they arrived, I prodded Ivan and Lenka as they screwed on my sleeper couch. Later, I came on my fingers as I watched her reaching her climax. We ate leftover roast chicken with seeded rolls after that, and Lenka made us look up her blog, which was a collection of naked children wearing animal masks in a Scandinavian forest, all of them captured in high-resolution images and supported by macabre music: a trip-hop playlist, she later explained. I took an old Ativan in the bathroom, about half a milligram’s worth, and burned hash oil in an incense burner. It took us five minutes to get high from the smoke, and then we each took turns in the shower before Lenka and I lay on our sides on the couch. I jabbed my tongue under the soft hood of her clit and she clamped her thighs around my neck, and then, for close to five minutes, we tongued circles around each other’s assholes. She took me in her mouth after that, pushed down as far as she could take me, then drew back to pull the tip of my stick out of her lips with a pop. Dipping back down, she masturbated me, her wrist rising in speed, and when she leaned back to pop me out of her mouth again, patting her palm firmly against my balls, I ejaculated across her forehead. Recuperating, I instructed Ivan to go down on her while I watched. He did, and when he tired of it, he pushed himself into her anus. I fell half-asleep with him grunting before waking up in a daze a few minutes later. Then I walked over to them and lowered myself into her mouth again. Her lips clutched me like a fist, and my right thigh trembled before I shot into Ivan’s hair. Later, when I entered Lenka, I felt her fingers pressing down on my skin, drawing circles on my sweat, each digit pushing me forward. She lay below me, feeling like a delicate wound around the head of my penis, and as I felt her flesh widening, I pounded deeper into her, imagining I could burrow us through to something vast and embracing.

  The next morning, I awoke on the sleeper couch. Lenka and Ivan had left sometime during the night. The living-room window had been left open to release the hash smoke, and for a moment I couldn’t recall what month it was. I could hear the main road coming to life again, the taxis heading up to town with commuters and students, and, except for the dent the three of us had left on my single mattress, everything around me felt the same way it had the previous day.

  FOURTH PART

  We never hear from the ugly man again. I guess there isn’t much else to say about him. He’s just one of this city’s many ciphers, we decide, one of the strange things that happen in the alleyways of the Southern Peninsula. Ruan speculates that he’s a deposed president, and Cissie says he’s the advisor to one. In any case, the money is retracted from our account, laundered most likely, and he never comes back for the ARVs. We decide to call him Ambroise Paré, after the man he admires, and Cissie says we should make masks out of his face. To the three of us, our planned meeting with Ethelia takes on an inevitable air, although we don’t discuss it much. Cissie goes back to work; Ruan and I hang out.

  Ethelia shows up at Cissie’s place around a week later, on a Sunday afternoon. She knocks three times and finds the three of us sitting on the floor, each somehow sober. Cissie closes the door behind her. When she sees me, I wave at her and Ethelia smiles back.

  I’ve never seen her close up before. She’s dressed in a matching denim top and jeans. Cissie walks to the bedroom to get the package we retrieved for her from the safety deposit box. We had gone straight there—a private security company on Orange Street—after having left the house in Woodstock. We hadn’t really been surprised to discover that Ambroise had prepared the way for us. We only had to present them with the letter.

  Ruan’s reading an old comic book, an effort to calm his nerves. He’s had this issue since he was twelve, he says, and he’s let me have a look at it a few times. Half its pages are falling out, and it’s about the Silver Surfer. The superhero wakes up on an alien planet, stranded without his surfboard, the source of his energy. Close to the end, he tries to sell his memories for a way out, but gets cheated by an agency that converts them to video.

  I watch him from the couch. Ruan closes the comic book and places it carefully on the table. Cissie returns with the package and hands it to Ethelia, who receives it with both hands.

  What is it?

  Cissie turns to us. We don’t know, she says, but it’s yours.

  Is it from my father?

  Cissie doesn’t reply. Ruan and I don’t say anything, either. I realize I’ve never imagined Ethelia as having a voice.

  My aunt told me my father was an important man, she says. Then she shakes the parcel. Can I open it?

  It’s yours, Cissie says.

  Ethelia opens the package and money spills out, scattering on Cissie’s floor. It’s several wads of two-hundred-rand notes, followed by an ID and a passport.

  Ethelia bends over to pick up the money, and for a moment it’s as if she’s back with her concrete pieces again—arranging them into another secret empire. Ruan, Cissie and I lean down to help, and Ethelia laughs as she handles the money. She laughs at the images of herself in the passport and ID.

  So who knew? Cissie says. You’re a Canadian.

  I search the kitchen drawers and find rubber bands for the notes. Then I try to count the money, but it’s too much to guess at a glance. We pack it up in bundles.

  Ethelia stands with the package flat against her chest. My aunt will be happy, she says, before going quiet. Then she looks up again. You’ve seen my father, haven’t you?

  Yes.

  I guess all three of us say this at once.

  Then Ruan and Cissie look a
t me and I go on.

  We saw him, I say, and he wanted us to give you this.

  Ethelia nods. Did he say anything about coming to my aunt’s?

  I shake my head.

  Then Ethelia looks down and nods. She starts to turn.

  Wait, Cissie says, hold on. I have an idea.

  She leaves the room and returns with a piece of paper and a sharpened pencil. Taking Ethelia by the hand, she leads her to the coffee table, kicking away an empty water bottle we were using for huffing. Ruan and I lean closer.

  We watch them. Cissie asks Ethelia to draw a picture of the planet. It’s the lesson she’s used in her daycare class, the one her students couldn’t get right. Ethelia takes the pencil and touches it against the foolscap.

  Cissie says, imagine you’re away from your aunt, and imagine you’re away from West Ridge Heights. She places a hand on Ethelia’s shoulder. Imagine you’re away from your envelope, and away from the three of us, also.

  Then, when Ethelia starts to sketch an oval shape inside the page’s margins, Cissie says: imagine you’re drawing a map into all of us.

  In the morning, around seven, I email my landlord and tell him I want out of my twelve-month lease. I’ve come to accept that this has to be done. François replies that it’s fine, it won’t cause much hassle, he’ll start showing the place to people right away. I type back, great, and leave West Ridge with Ruan and Cissie still asleep.

  Down at the parking-lot gate, I wait for a car taking someone to work or school, and trail after its brake lights. Then I take a taxi along Main Road to Obs.

  There was another hospital strike, our driver says when we reach the first stop in Mowbray. The passengers are packed on the seats behind him: twenty-two of us crammed in a fog of mixed perfume. The driver describes the passing of his mother-in-law, whose lungs collapsed in a Golden Arrow bus the previous morning.

  That’s life, the driver says, before rolling down his window.

  From my seat I look out at the racing tar, at the undulating roofs of the brazen storefronts, and I remember how, in my fourth year of high school, my biology teacher took a flying class on the coast of Natal, and discovered a lesson for us in the air above Richards Bay. Her name was Mrs. Mathers, and when she returned to our class the following week, she told us how the Earth was gutted open with so many new graves for paupers, that when the clouds parted, they revealed a view from the sky that looked like a giant honeycomb. Then she watched everyone’s expression. Mrs. Mathers was a part-time student of our emotional development. My classmates and I were known as the Math One class, relied upon for acuity but not much else, and we were only eighteen in number. Our teacher told us each grave was meant to contain the bodies of twenty adults.

  She said to us, that is HIV.

  I get off at Anzio and walk down past Lower Main. I use a round black tag to get inside my building, walk up two flights of stairs and let myself into my flat. The place feels like a storage room. It’s dead still and airless. I open a window and drop myself on the bed.

  Then I try to doze off and fail.

  I peel my phone from my pocket and hold it in my palm. It’s open on the text messenger. I remember Bhut’ Vuyo’s first message to me.

  Lindanathi, you’ve come of age, it said.

  It’s been almost ten years. That’s how long Luthando’s been turning into powder inside the Earth. I rub my hand over my face and spend another minute looking at my cellphone. Then I close my eyes and try for sleep again, but nothing comes.

  Later, when I try to use the toilet, I get the same feeling. Nothing makes its way out of me as I squat over the porcelain, and I feel time slowing down again. I lift the cistern lid and pull on the lever to flush. Then I walk back to the kitchen and drink a glass of water with ice. In the end, I manage to get two hours of sleep.

  Waking up again, I text Cecelia, asking her if she wants anything. I’ve accepted I’ll have to give most of my belongings away.

  I wait, but there’s no reply, so I turn my computer on. Then I get up from my desk and walk over to the lav again to take a leak. You’ve never been happy here, I say, observing myself in the speckled mirror. Then I light a cigarette and try to do the dishes, but my hands start trembling. I drain the water and make a cup of tea instead.

  Sitting back at my desk, I click on a button that sends the browser to my blog. There’s a draft of a post I wrote more than a week ago. I read through it again from the top. This is how it goes:

  Last night I projected myself out of my body, going through more loops than is usual for me. I’ve forgotten the first loop, which is common. The second one took place at a party somewhere. No one seemed impressed by my ability to fly for short amounts of time, or to jump really high above the ground. Flying feels like trying to stay awake when you’re extremely tired and half-asleep. I discovered fear is what inhibits flight. I was an artist in the second loop and met another artist. He held my face and looked into my eyes and said, yes, it’s true, you’re dreaming. He was impressed. He talked about it at length. This made me too aware of being in a loop, however, and the loop disintegrated and I found myself at my father’s house. There was a man pacing in the backyard; when I followed him, he dug a hole in the ground and disappeared. I became aware of dreaming again, and feeling exhausted. I tested myself by jumping over a heap of sharp rocks. Then I tried to pull a spider towards me with my mind. It moved, but it could’ve been the wind. Eventually, I heard a voice telling me it was fine, that I could still do it. I felt relief, but at the same time fear because I wouldn’t be able to do it again. I was struck by the idea of being in what you know is a dream, but without capabilities, with a fragmented memory and an unstable reality. I thought maybe this is what schizophrenia is. I didn’t remember having taken off my shirt, but I was topless. I’d had enough, but I couldn’t will myself to wake up and this made me panic. Then I found the shirt in front of the house, and as I picked it up and turned around, that’s when I woke up to now, in bed, my heart beating fast. I recognized this as reality because of the new weight I felt coursing through me, my body recognizing the Earth’s gravitational field. Then I opened my eyes to find everything in place.

  My blog has no audience and I’ve never shared a link for the purpose of gaining one. I scroll back up and click on the publish button.

  Then my intercom goes off. I can’t stand the sound it makes, so I rush over to it whenever it clangs. I stub my toe on the way to the door.

  It’s a guy from the courier: I have your delivery, he says.

  I put on a pair of slops and walk out of the door, and, as I’m turning the key, I get a text from Cissie saying they just got up half-an-hour ago: they’re waiting for a taxi along Main Road. Ruan’s walking her to work. I text back saying, all right, and that I’ve just received the pill package. Cissie says to meet them in Mowbray with the box.

  I won’t go in today, she says. I’ll just tell Lauren I’m taking my leave.

  I meet the delivery man downstairs. He’s this older guy, a Shona man, he tells me, and I nod. He’s Zimbabwean the way Ruan’s grandparents used to be Rhodesian, I think. He gives me a pen and I scrawl my name across his clipboard.

  Then I take the box back upstairs, drop it on my bed and take off my clothes. I try to do push-ups on the concrete floor, but stop when I reach eleven, feeling my heart race and my muscles wither from my skeleton.

  In the shower, the water comes out warm, and more than once I hear the copper pipes groaning like they’re being pulled apart from opposite ends. Then I close my eyes and listen to the water smacking the tiles between my feet. I try to disappear into the patter until the water runs cold on my skin. This will be my last shower here.

  Twenty minutes later, I meet Cissie and Ruan outside Cissie’s place of work, her daycare center in Mowbray. Cissie says she’s collected two weeks of holiday; that they have a new girl to make up the gap. I tell them I have the pills inside my bag. We buy bottled water at the nearby KFC and break a stem of khat at a roun
ded corner table. Then the three of us take one of the taxis heading from Wynberg to town.

  In half an hour, we reach the taxi rank. Our driver backs into the bay marked for Wynberg and we get out and walk past a row of Cell C containers into Cape Town Station. I tell Ruan and Cecelia about my uncle Bhut’ Vuyo, and how he’s hatched a harebrained plan to see me today. I say this slowly, to make the two of them laugh, and then I shrug. I tell them I won’t be long. I don’t mention I’ve made no plans to return to the city.

  We find the new public rest rooms, smelling like a heap of feces coated in disinfectant, and Cissie waits outside while Ruan and I take the last stall in the men’s.

  We’ve always broken the seals on these boxes together. Today will mark the last occasion. Ruan and I split the package of ARVs between us and then flush the toilet. The boom of the train announcer wraps around my head as we walk out, and for a moment, everyone on the buffed floor seems to stop and glance up at us. I pause, but then decide it doesn’t matter either way.

  We say goodbye on Adderley Street. Ruan and Cissie want to get Ruan’s things from his uncle’s firm, so they cross over to the Absa ATM while I walk up towards the Grand Parade. The sun feels noncommittal in its bond to our planet today, spilling out light as gray as bath water. On Strand, I cut through the bus depot, skipping in front of a Golden Arrow bus grunting towards Atlantis. Further down, I walk past a vegetable stall, a hairdresser’s tent, and a medicine stand displaying a large plant bulb and bottles of herbal tonic. I climb up the steel staircase that leads back to the taxi rank. It’s the longer route, which allows me to take down a smoke on the way. I buy my third cigarette on the platform, a Stuyvesant red, from a wrinkled woman wearing a blue doek. She sells Cadbury éclairs and flavored water. Next to her, a muscular man in shades and a pea coat leans up against a sooty column, holding a hot Sony Ericsson phone. It’s still on and he’s hawking it for a grand, he says. I pay the woman and walk past them, looking for a taxi headed up the West Coast. Eventually, I find one headed for Parklands, which goes past Table View. It’s a red Caravelle, and I settle myself in the back seat, my head leaning up against the window. I take out my cellphone and wait for the taxi to fill up. Usually they take a while.