The Reactive Read online

  I meet Esona when I close the door of the van behind me and take out a Stuyve to suck in with the beer. She’s on her own, the way Esona will always be on her own, and she has a canvas backpack sagging on her bright brown shoulders. When our eyes meet across the hoods of two busted-up Fords, each of us refuses to step down, to be the one who moves away, and so we stay like that for a while, feeling as close as forehead to forehead. Two laaities pick at discarded chicken bones on the tar between us, and Esona and I stare at each other over their backs for a while.

  Eventually, she walks up to me and asks for a skyf. I exhale and stamp out the one I’ve got. Then the two of us light up a new Stuyve each.

  I’ve decided to let my hair grow, and that’s the first thing she picks on. She points at her own head. You’re one of those guys, aren’t you, she says.

  Esona’s smile is slight, showing only half of its bow behind the smoke.

  You grow your hair out like a Rasta, she says, but stand first in line for meat at the bash. Okay, she tells me, I see.

  Then she turns around and shows me the other half of her smile.

  She says, so what’s your deal, my brother?

  I’m not sure how to respond. Esona takes off her backpack and asks me for the time, but when I look down at my wrist, I realize I’ve left my wristwatch in Obs. This reminds me of what Cecelia used to say to me about my listening.

  I don’t know, I tell Esona.

  And I guess this is how she enters my life.

  What’s your deal, my brother?

  She’ll ask me that often.

  These days, I don’t think about Last Life as much as I used to, but I think about the things I’ll remember when it’s time for me to go.

  I think of Esona’s flesh a lot.

  I think of the sticky underside of her breasts when I lift them to my face in the middle of summer, and I think of the smell of burning wood, and of Esona’s last name, Grootboom, and how her grandmother took it to pass them off as coloreds in ’78.

  I think of our hair, too, the way the smell of coal still lingers on our necks and up our heads for a day after sitting on the dirty benches of a shisa nyama. I think of all the sticky vinyl under the J&B ashtrays we fill up at the local taverns.

  I want you to fuck me like a new man, she tells me.

  She’s standing behind me in the kitchen, looking for a lighter, and I’m on my feet, trying to tune a new station into their old set.

  Esona lives in a two-room with her aunt in Slovo. Her mother’s a nurse, stationed across the country and I guess growing old there. For most of her life, that’s how it’s been between them. First there were nightshifts at Grey Hospital in King William’s Town, and then there was the move to Fort Beaufort, and then another to Grahamstown, and now she’s moored in Stutterheim. Sometimes, when Esona speaks, I try to imagine her mother. I see a woman with Esona’s face, her sleeves rolled up, creasing her brow in a ward full of crying children. Or maybe that’s Sis’ Thobeka. In any case, neither of them is around enough to see what we do on the floors here, so I guess it’s okay that my shirt and her panties already lie inside the fruit bowl on the coffee table.

  I’ve been back a week since my initiation in eMthatha.

  I went over to Luthando’s grave when my family was finally done with me. It was a clear day and I didn’t say much to him, down there. We never had to use words to discover an understanding between us.

  I guess a lot has happened since then. I waved on my way out, and I said, later, Luthando, and that was about it.

  Later, Luthando.

  Now I lie stretched out on Esona’s cold kitchen floor.

  I disclosed my status to her just a day after we’d met and we’ve worshiped at the altar of her caution ever since. Esona gets me to bring our condoms back from Sis’ Thoko’s shop.

  I watch her now as she looks at the inflated flesh around the tip of my penis, still tender from my journey back home. She handles me with caution between her long, thin fingers, and her nails tickle my underside like the tip of an ivy leaf. Then she pushes her teeth into me and puts a hand on my chest when I begin to stir. For a long time, I just lie there, on the brink of screaming, and then I feel surprise when even this pain dissipates. On her knees on the kitchen floor, Esona releases me, grips my scrotum, and squeezes it before I melt and empty myself on her chest. Later, I fall asleep to the feel of her salt water drying on my face, and sleeping beside me, she breathes her air out as hot as a furnace, and I close my eyes; but this time, unlike so many others in my life, I don’t clench them.

  Bhut’ Vuyo never explicitly reminds me of my promise, but I remember and live through it each day. My promise, what I told them then, is the same thing I’ll tell you now. My name, which my parents got from a girl, is Lindanathi. It means wait with us, and that’s what I plan on doing. So in the end, I guess this is to you, Luthando. This is your older brother, Lindanathi, and I’m ready to react for us.

  Also published by Two Dollar Radio

  * * *

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  SQUARE WAVE A NOVEL BY MARK DE SILVA

  “Brilliant.” —3:AM Magazine

  “Enticing and enthralling, [Square Wave] aims to hit all the literary neurons. This might be the closest we get to David Mitchell on LSD. Square Wave is the perfect concoction for the thirsty mind.”

  —Atticus Review

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  “Apocalyptic and psychologically attentive. I was moved.”

  —New York Times Book Review

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  * The Believer Book Award Finalist

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  A NOVEL BY JAY NEUGEBOREN

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  —Heavy Feather Review

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  * One of the Best Books of 2015 —O, The Oprah Magazine,

  Washington Post, Flavorwire, National Post

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  A NOVEL BY JOSHUA MOHR

  * San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller

  * One of the Best Books of 2009 —O, The Oprah Magaz
ine,

  The Nervous Breakdown

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  A NOVEL BY BARBARA BROWNING

  * Lambda Literary Award Winner

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  “The Correspondence Artist applies stylistic juxtapositions in welcome and unexpected ways.” —Vol. 1 Brooklyn

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  A NOVEL BY KAROLINA WACLAWIAK

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  —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice

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  * One of the Best Books of 2013 —The Millions, Flavorwire,

  Dazed & Confused, The L Magazine, Time Out Chicago

  “McClanahan’s prose is miasmic, dizzying, repetitive. A rushing river of words that reflects the chaos and humanity of the place from which he hails.” —New York Times Book Review

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  “Fascinating, surreal, gorgeously written, and like nothing you’ve ever read before.” —BuzzFeed

  “… suspenseful and haunting… This is a remarkable novel from a very talented author.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)

  MIRA CORPORA A NOVEL BY JEFF JACKSON

  * Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist

  * One of the Best Books of 2013 —Slate, Salon, Flavorwire

  “Style is pre-eminent in Jeff Jackson’s eerie and enigmatic debut. The prose works like the expressionless masks worn by killers in horror films.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  NOG A NOVEL BY RUDOLPH WURLITZER

  “A strange, singular book… somewhere between Psychedelic Superman and Samuel Beckett.” —Newsweek

  “The Novel of Bullshit is dead.” —Thomas Pynchon

  “Nog is to literature what Dylan is to lyrics.” —Village Voice

  THE ORANGE EATS CREEPS

  A NOVEL BY GRACE KRILANOVICH

  * National Book Foundation 2010 ‘5 Under 35’ Selection

  * NPR Best Books of 2010

  * The Believer Book Award Finalist

  “Krilanovich’s work will make you believe that new ways of storytelling are still emerging from the margins.” —NPR

  YOU ARE MY HEART AND OTHER STORIES

  STORIES BY JAY NEUGEBOREN

  “[Neugeboren] might not be as famous as some of his compeers, like Philip Roth or John Updike, but it’s becoming increasingly harder to argue that he’s any less talented… dazzlingly smart and deeply felt.” —Michael Schaub, Kirkus Reviews

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  “Damascus succeeds in conveying a big-hearted vision.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

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  —New York Times Book Review

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  * Queerty Top 10 Book of 2008

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  “Miller, Lawrence, and Genet stop by like proud ancestors.”

  —Village Voice

  Sex is familiar, but it’s perennial, and Levy makes it fresh.”

  —Los Angeles Times

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  * Now a major film starring Sarah Silverman & Josh Charles!

  “Powerful. Koppelman’s instincts help her navigate these choppy waters with inventiveness and integrity.” —Los Angeles Times

  “Koppelman explores with ruthless honesty a woman come undone.” —Bookslut

  ANCIENT OCEANS OF CENTRAL KENTUCKY

  A NOVEL BY DAVID CONNERLEY NAHM

  * One of the Best Books of 2014 —NPR, Flavorwire

  “Wonderful… Remarkable… it’s impossible to stop reading until you’ve gone through each beautiful line, a beauty that infuses the whole novel, even in its darkest moments.” —NPR

  THE PEOPLE WHO WATCHED HER PASS BY

  A NOVEL BY SCOTT BRADFIELD

  “Challenging [and] original… A billowy adventure of a book. In a book that supplies few answers, Bradfield’s lavish eloquence is the presiding constant.” —New York Times Book Review

  “Brave and unforgettable.” —Los Angeles Times

  1940 A NOVEL BY JAY NEUGEBOREN

  “Jay Neugeboren traverses the Hitlerian tightrope with all the skill and formal daring that have made him one of our most honored writers of literary fiction and masterful nonfiction. [1940] is, at once, a beautifully realized work of imagined history, a rich and varied character study and a subtly layered novel of ideas, all wrapped in a propulsively readable story.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  BABY GEISHA STORIES BY TRINIE DALTON

  “[The stories] feel like brilliant sexual fairy tales on drugs. Dalton writes of self-discovery and sex with a knowing humility and humor.”

  —Interview Magazine

  “Dalton handles her narratives with a deft skill and a keen, distinct, confident voice that never eases up.” —The Brooklyn Rail

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  * WOSU (NPR member station) Favorite Book of 2009

  “As a parable of modern China, [The Cave Man] is chilling.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Hair-raising. Xiao’s literary ancestors include Kafka and Solzhenitsyn.”

  —Counterpunch

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  “The funniest American novel since Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask.”

  —Village Voice

  “Like an erotic version of Luis Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.” —The Cult

  THE DROP EDGE OF YONDER

  A NOVEL BY RUDOLPH WURLITZER

  * Time Out New York’s Best Book of 2008

  * Fore Word Magazine 2008 Gold Medal in Literary Fiction

  “A picaresque American Book of the Dead… in the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Terry Southern.”

  —Los Angeles Times

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  A NOVEL BY GARY INDIANA

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  * Sacramento Bee Best Read of 2010

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  —New York Times Book Review

  FLATS / QUAKE

  TWO CLASSIC NOVELS BY RUDOLPH WURLITZER

  “Wurlitzer might be the closest thing we have to an actual cult author, a highly talented fiction writer.” —Barnes & Noble Review

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  Two Dollar Radio Moving Pictures

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  I’M NOT PATRICK A FILM BY ERIC OBENAUF

  A black comedy that follows Seth, a teenager whose twin brother, Patrick, has suddenly, tragically,
committed suicide. Seth doesn’t know what to feel, but everyone is eager to suggest what they imagine to be typical reactions to monozygotic suicide.

  “Bridging contemplations on identity with witty digressions, the dark comedy is an approachable, offbeat tale.” —The Columbus Alive

  Coming 2016!

  THE REMOVALS A FILM BY NICHOLAS ROMBES

  Part-thriller, part-nightmarish examination of the widening gap between originality and technology, told with remarkable precision.

  Haunting and engaging, The Removals imagines where we go from here.

  Also published by Two Dollar Radio