The Reactive Read online

  Eventually, a girl with red-tinted hair, wearing a green gym tunic, takes the seat in front of me, filling up the passenger count. I hear the music thumping into her skull from her headphones, a kwaito artist, famous for being a minor and beating a drug case. We no longer sleep, he sings, as the taxi grumbles to life around us. We no longer sleep, he repeats, when we start out of the taxi rank. We pass the vendors with their Niknaks and Nollywood rugs, squeezing ourselves between more taxis streaming in from Victoria Road. Then I hear him for the last time. We no longer sleep, he sings, as we turn into Christiaan Barnard and the roof of the Good Hope Center reveals itself, rising like a dull and blind observatory on our right.

  In the end, I guess I was never cut out to be a journalist. During my second year at university, I took an assignment to interview a pop star for my final-term project. The man was part of what was being called a revival in indigenous Venda music, and I wanted to ask him about its representation in the papers. I found the coverage of the band exploitative, but my saying so didn’t go down well with the singer. We fumbled our way through my introduction of this angle, before he caught on that I wasn’t altogether worth his time. He looked at his wristwatch a few times and asked me for my age. It was clear that I had no inclination towards his music, he said, and perhaps no inclination towards music at all. No soul, he later improvised, when we were both loosened up by our first tray of gin. He fell silent and I followed his gaze out to the main road. It was a bright, sunlit Tuesday afternoon, and cars were driving past with their windows down, hurling snatches of summer anthems into the heat. We were sitting in a café in Rondebosch, full of North Americans, caffeine and the smell of chocolate brownies. He was struggling to log onto the network. Our second drinks had arrived and the alcohol was touching my head.

  I felt my interest piqued at the mention of metaphysics. I asked him if the soul was important to Venda culture, and if he knew anyone else like me who didn’t have one. He looked across the table at me with the combination of irritation and disgust I’d come to expect from older men in the field. I thought he would get up and walk out, but when I offered him another drink, he accepted. We had the third round in silence and later, outside the café, we shook hands and I gave him directions to the V&A Waterfront, where he wanted to buy clothes from a Gap and Fabiani sale. We parted after that, and I walked back to campus. Then I realized I hadn’t managed to switch my recorder on for the interview.

  In bed, later that week, I couldn’t recall any of his songs by name, and a day after that I decided to deregister from my degree. It wasn’t how I was meant to meet the world. On campus, the curriculum advisor, a loud, jovial American man who wore glasses and had a tight white ponytail, asked me to state my reasons. I told him I liked reading, but had no interest in writing. I wanted a career without people skills, I joked, but he didn’t laugh. He looked at a copy of my matric results, achieved at a stern boarding school in Natal where there had been nothing else to do but study, and he shouted: science.

  Our driver shifts his stick down and changes lanes towards Civic. We pass Old Marine Drive before we swerve into an Engen to fill up with gas. Two petrol attendants walk up to the driver and offer to shake his hand. Ta T-Man, both of them say, hoezit, groot-man? The driver nods, handing each a twenty-rand note with the shake. I sit and watch them as they talk. Then I get a text from Cissie telling me Ruan managed to avoid his uncle at the firm. The driver rolls up his window, after that, and we pull off again, on our way to Du Noon.

  What will I remember about my friends? The good times, I suppose, even though they didn’t always appear good at the time. I’ll remember West Ridge Heights. I’ll remember Ruan telling us that he’d made an evaluation of our personalities, and that he’d plotted them on a hundred-year time scale and concluded that, in the near future, it would become easier for the three of us to detect the defects carried by other people, their fears and deceits, and because of this, we would have a map to locate others like ourselves, who’d been marked in similar ways.

  I remember agreeing with him, that day, and maybe each of us had felt more hopeful than usual. Ruan, Cissie and I had been huffing paint thinner at Ruan’s place in Sea Point. Elaborating, Ruan said that after leaving school, he’d lost his natural ability to cultivate relationships with other human beings, but because of the two of us, he felt this being restored to him.

  I guess that was something I could understand.

  It was something the three of us shared.

  In Wynberg, when we came around to meeting each other for the first time, it was with a measure of caution, and the results surprised us. We’d each resigned ourselves to passing by, whenever we met other people, by then. Things had happened to each of us along the way, I suppose, and, as we stood and mumbled by the serving table that afternoon, watching as the rest of the members bonded over biscuits in Mary’s basement, there was no question of our getting romantically involved with each other. In that short time, we’d seemed to have agreed, with a quiet and complicit relief, that we were somehow too wrecked, and that we had met within obviously wrecked circumstances. Ruan, Cissie and I had never owned up to the things we’d had to do in order to keep seeing each other, in those first few weeks of friendship; never admitted to what it was, where it was, and who it was that we were detaching ourselves from. This secrecy hadn’t been incidental, I later felt, but was meant to maintain something unknowable in each of us: a corner we could keep divested of goodwill, without any breach in conscience, at the times we had to hurt each other to spare ourselves.

  Though that hardly ever happened.

  Which is what I’ll remember, too.

  I’ll remember how, two years ago, Ruan began to vomit and wouldn’t stop even after an hour of heaving on his bathroom floor. He’d had another threat from his uncle and another letter from the bank, and he’d been drinking Gin Rickeys at a bar down the road from his flat. Cissie and I tried to catch up with him when we arrived; we each ordered two drinks at a time, but soon we ran out of money.

  Outside the bar, Ruan began to laugh as he lit up a filter. He waved his hand across the panorama of the beach, and then inwards across the promenade and the traffic. It was in the early evening and the sky was tinted a burning pink, with a streak of orange cirrus hanging over the horizon. The streetlights were beginning to flicker on intermittently, as if roused from a deep sleep by our footsteps. Ruan hadn’t talked about his uncle that day, and Cissie and I knew he wouldn’t. The three of us were quiet as the cars raced past, a play of light obscuring the faces of the drivers. I imagined them to be headed to Camps Bay for sundowners, or to dinner reservations in the center of town.

  We stumbled together. Cissie and I kept Ruan propped up between us. We passed our first cigarette quickly and lit up another one. Then Ruan pointed us towards his flat: he said he wanted to crash.

  There were windows on two of the walls in Ruan’s living room and they both looked out over the vista of the Atlantic. Most of them were opened wide, pushed out to the hilt of the hinges, and Ruan had given us specific instructions to leave them that way. He said that sometimes the windows, left ajar, could make the flat seem like a moving structure, as if, sitting alone in his living room at the helm of his glass-topped coffee table, he was in control of something large and industrial, and that, by his efforts alone, he could lift it up and maneuver it out to sea.

  When I sat down on his bean-bag that night, the walls seemed to stand up in my stead, the windows sliding hazily down off the bricks. The sounds of the traffic, the promenade and the ocean all reached into the living room and mingled with the noises of Ruan and Cissie looking for thinners in the cabinets. Then the windows slowly readjusted themselves on the walls. When I blinked again, closing my eyes for longer intervals, my head had the feeling of being steered in small, concentric circles. I laid it back on the bean-bag and watched Ruan and Cissie from an inverted perspective, their frames slightly elongated, their feet standing where their chins should’ve hung. Ruan’s h
ands shot down to his mouth and he pushed himself back from the counter, and for a moment Cissie and I stared at each other through his absence. Then we followed him to the bathroom, and there we found his fig trees inside the bath tub. He had a collection of small potted plants he’d splattered with his own blood, the aim being to spread himself to the world through the different birds that ate them.

  I won’t forget that.

  The first time LT and I saw people having sex was through my neighbors’ bedroom window. This was back home, at my mother’s house in eMthatha, and we’d giggled so loudly that the guy, blond and stocky—with his face flushed red—had banged on the window and screamed, telling us to fuck off. We’d both had our turn with girls after that and I guess I had a few more than LT did before he turned to a boy in his neighborhood. He would remember it better than I would, although I doubt by a very wide margin.

  I remember our uncles, with their gold teeth and beer breath, and how they’d find the two of us at every family gathering, hoist us on their knees, and goad us about becoming men. I’d smile at them while my stomach sank. I’d learned early to be deceitful with older drunks. They got on the bottle and treated you like anyone else—not a Model C who didn’t know his clan name from his asshole.

  I was scared to go home for circumcision. Most of us were. We’d grown up hearing stories about what could go wrong. There was the initiate who’d had the head fall off his shaft while he swam upstream in the Mthatha River, and the one who had to be rushed to hospital because his wound wasn’t properly dressed. Each winter, the Dispatch reported on guys like us dropping in droves. It wasn’t the pain: we knew that would pass. I’d just never pictured myself as one of the guys who’d come out the other side—someone who could get along up there.

  I also knew that, really, I was scared of being close to LT. The rumors about him had spread and he’d been set apart. I didn’t want people to mix us up, to look at me the same way they did him. When the Mda house came under pressure to make a man out of its sissy son, I kept away—I crossed my arms in Cape Town.

  LT was younger than me, and he didn’t believe in what they said—what you had to become to be a man—but he still called to ask me for my help. I told him to go in June, and that I would follow as soon as I handed in my assignments. Well, I never went back. I switched off my phone a week later and abandoned him up there. Later, they said LT fought them and that’s what killed him.

  Often, I’ve thought about how I wouldn’t know if that was true; about how I was absent during his last hours, and about how, when he died, my arms were still crossed in Cape Town.

  + + +

  One year after I graduated from Tech, and a week before the sixth anniversary of LT’s death, I infected myself with HIV in the laboratories. That’s how I became a reactive. I never had the reactions I needed for myself, and I couldn’t react when LT called to me for help, so I gave my own body something it couldn’t flee from. Now here’s your older brother and murderer, Luthando. His name is Lindanathi and his parents got it from a girl.

  FIFTH PART

  It takes the taxi less than an hour to reach Du Noon. Even with three children, Bhut’ Vuyo and his wife spend most of their lives making a home inside a shipping container. This isn’t an unusual way to live in Du Noon. The containers here have multiplied since my last stay, in ‘95, and I can see them from the taxi as we drive in: hair salons, eateries and phone shops, all of them packaged inside steel boxes like time capsules. Ta T-Man sticks in a CD full of house MP3s, and, as we push deeper into the township, I can’t help but peer into the dim insides of the crates. It feels the same as seeing regular poverty, but cut into sections and prepared for export. In front of the containers, lined up like mechanical sentries, portable toilets stoop under the slanting sunlight, four for every dozen containers. It’s supposedly a temporary measure, meant to tide the people over until after the upcoming local election.

  The container I’m traveling to is red, corrugated and a source of concern for its owner. Even at a glance, you can tell it’s old and falling apart. Bhut’ Vuyo spends a few days each month extending it with sheets of discarded zinc, sometimes driving his lorry to Blouberg, where he scours the shore for bits of wood, planks, or anything he can find that isn’t too rotted from the ocean. He’s learned to make his way with what he finds, discarded by the hands of others. My uncle is a large and laughing man, but if you get close enough to him, it isn’t hard to tell that he’s walked into places that surprised him with bloodshed.

  I arrive at the corner of Ingwe and Bhengu Streets just after three o’clock. It’s a weekday and quieter than usual. I spot a makeshift pit latrine, its walls made from corrugated iron and wood, leaning precariously at the side of Bhut’ Vuyo’s home. The clouds have allowed the sun free rein, and its light slams brilliantly into the ribbed metal, the earth still muddy at the base, with spikes of chopped plank exposed. Flies hover in a cloud around the structure. I find my uncle sitting on a crate in front of his container, observing his work with a quart between his ankles. His beer belly flows over his thighs, the sweat on his head sparkling as it catches the light. You can tell by the way he looks at the tin that it’s a fresh triumph. He’s sweaty and lively when he sees me. When he extends his hand, it isn’t to shake my own, but to draw me into an embrace. Welcome home, he says with warmth, and I smile, not knowing what else to do.

  The first day at my uncle’s place comes and goes without consequence. He doesn’t mention his message to me. I help him with the pit latrine, which caves in shortly after my arrival, and for supper he fries us beef livers and onions, dished generously with pap and bread crusts. I wash the dishes in a yellow bucket, and afterwards I unroll umkhukhu on the vinyl tiles. We share a Courtleigh and he tells me how his wife has taken the children to visit her parents in Langa. Outside, the township comes to life with the sun having set. I watch the smoke hovering around the mountain of my uncle on his bed. There are indications that parts of him still belong out there. His forearms bear scars from stripping cars with their engines still hot, back when he worked as mechanic in a chop shop in Khwezi Park. His movements are quick, an instinct he’s retained from his days in the syndicate.

  We’ll talk after her return, he says, and I nod.

  I open the door to flick out the cigarette stub and stare with surprise at how close the moon looks. Inside, Bhut’ Vuyo blows out the candle and I coil myself inside a blanket and a towel. Soon, the container fills up with the sound of his labored breathing; I trip into unsettled dreams after he goes down.

  The next two days pass just as quietly. Bhut’ Vuyo leaves for Blouberg while I sleep on his floor. I don’t see him until the early evening, when we cook and sit for our supper and a beer. He prepares dumplings and then samp. He promises to keep us chin-deep in meat this entire week, and, during meals, he keeps me abreast on who comes and goes in the community. I recognize Ta T-Man, the taxi driver, from one of his faster stories. He shows me a scar on his forearm. Ta T-Man and his men were trying to introduce a nyaope cartel in the neighborhood, he says, but the Cape took little interest in the drug. I get close to telling him about my ARVs, but I decide against it. I have an idea he still thinks I’m a student.

  During the day, when Bhut’ Vuyo disappears, I take Industrial and lie on the floor to read. He buys the Daily Voice, which he uses to wallpaper the container, and on the walls I read about gangs spraying bullets across the streets of Lavender Hill, or I read about Delft, where the women have started to mark tik houses with large X’s on the garages. The rest of Cape Town starts to feel distant beyond these pages, surrounded by uncertainty and receding into memory. There are other times when I don’t read. I lie on the floor with my eyes closed, listening to the sounds of the neighborhood. When I run out of airtime, I decide to go without it. Then I spend more time listening to what Du Noon might have to say to me.

  On Saturday, Bhut’ Vuyo and I finish up with the latrine. He fetches a box of tools from Milnerton and this makes our job go
faster. We work hastily, barely a word passing between us, and get done in just under three hours. Every time I lay a plank down, I feel myself filling up with relief and gratitude, thankful that I missed the spade work before I arrived. Digging the hole must’ve taken a fortnight, at the very least, and I’m careful not to bring this up with him, in case he finds more work for me to take up.

  His latrine is more of a gesture than a necessity. It’s a political project, I realize, and in reality a lot less functional than the toilets that insult him. The residents on his block have developed an efficient ecosystem with the Portaloos, and, when Bhut’ Vuyo leaves for Blouberg, I try one out for myself. The formaldehyde has turned a brownish green, meaning it’s stopped neutralizing the odor, and it smells like the combined waste of eight households. I hold my breath as much as I can before I give up. It’s a public toilet, after all, I tell myself. I rub one of Bhut’ Vuyo’s papers soft between my knuckles and wipe myself. I’ve been told by the neighbors that my uncle’s family makes use of the toilets, too, and that he’s a fool for putting up that zinc wreck in his yard. I listen to this with a mixture of pride and embarrassment. Here, no one else seems to bother with gestures any more. Perhaps this counts for something, I think.

  Later, we share a quart outside the container. They should be burned, Bhut’ Vuyo says.

  Standing and facing Bhengu Street, the two of us wait for our turn with the water. I follow his gaze, tracing it to the blue and gray plastic toilets that line the narrow street. They’re built wide and tall, and from where I’m standing I can see the marks defacing one of them. Like Bhut’ Vuyo wants, someone has held a fire to it. This must’ve been a weak flame, however.