The Reactive Read online

  I blink, and I’m about to answer her when she says she has another call coming in. I wait for her when she tells me to wait, and I’m still doing that when her voice turns into a dial tone.

  Later, when I open my eyes, I find Ruan and Cissie staring down at me. Their brows crease as they edge towards my place on the floor, their outlines melting into the walls stained and cracked behind them.

  Cissie says, Nathi, are you okay?

  My mouth feels blow-dried, packed thick with stiff clouds of cotton wool.

  I look up and ask them the same. I say, are you okay?

  In response, Cissie points a finger at her ear. Then she gets on her knees, takes my hand, and says, Nathi, your phone’s dead.

  + + +

  The way I got to know them, by the way, my two closest friends here, is that we met at one of the new HIV and drug-counseling sessions cropping up all over the city. We were in the basement parking lot of the free clinic in Wynberg. The seminar room upstairs had been locked up and taped shut, there’d been a mercury spill, and our group couldn’t meet in there on account of the vapors being toxic to human tissue. Instead, they arranged us in the basement parking lot, and in two weeks we got used to not being sent upstairs for meetings. I did, in any case, and that was enough for me in the beginning.

  In those days, I attended the meetings alone. I’d catch a taxi from Obs over to Wynberg for an afternoon’s worth of counseling. By the end of my first month, when the seminar room had been swept once, and then twice, and then three times by a short man who wore a blue contamination meter over his chest, each time checking out clean, everyone decided they preferred it down below, and so that’s where we stayed.

  Maybe we all want to be buried here, I said.

  It had been the first time I’d spoken in group. Talking always took me a while, back then, but the remark succeeded in making a few of them laugh. It won me chuckles even from the old-timers, and later, I wrote down my first addiction story to share with the group. It was from a film I saw adapted from a book I wasn’t likely to read. Ruan and Cissie arrived on the following Wednesday.

  I noticed them immediately. Something seemed to draw us in from our first meeting. In the parking lot, we eyeballed each other for a while before we spoke. During the coffee break, we stood by the serving table in front of a peeling Toyota bakkie, mumbling tentatively towards each other’s profiles. I learned that Cecelia was a teacher. She pulled week-long shifts at a daycare center just off Bridge Street in Mowbray, and she was there on account of the school’s accepting its first openly positive pupil. Ruan, who was leaning against the plastic table, gulping more than sipping at the coffee in his paper cup, said that he suffocated through his life by working on the top floor of his uncle’s computer firm. He was there to shop for a social issue they could use for their corporate responsibility strategy. He called it CRS, and Cissie and I had to ask him what he meant.

  In the end, I guess I was impressed. I told them how I used to be a lab assistant at Peninsula Tech, and how in a way this was part of how I’d got to be sick with what I have.

  When we sat back down again, we listened to the rest of the members assess each other’s nightmares. They passed them around with a familiar casualness. Mark knew about Ronelle’s school fees, for instance, and she knew about Linette’s hepatitis, and all of us knew that Linda had developed a spate of genital warts over September. She called them water warts, when she first told us, and, like most of her symptoms, she blamed them on the rain.

  That day, when the discussion turned to drug abuse, as it always did during the last half-hour of our sessions, the three of us had nothing to add. I looked over at Ruan and caught him stashing a grin behind his fist, while on my other side, Cecelia blinked up at the ceiling. I didn’t need any more evidence for our kinship.

  The meeting lasted the full two hours, and when it came to an end, I collected my proof of attendance and exchanged numbers with Ruan and Cecelia. I suppose we said our goodbyes at the entrance of the parking lot that day, and later, within that same week I think, we were huffing paint thinner together in my flat in Obs.

  Coming down from Industrial isn’t as easy as pulling in your first huff. It isn’t for me, and I guess it never is for my two friends, either. I’ve put the cellphone back on the charger after Sis’ Thobeka’s call and the three of us are taking turns splashing our faces with cold water from the kitchen tap. When we’re done, I remove my phone from the socket by the stove. Then Cissie bolts her door and we take the lift down to the ground floor.

  The atmosphere feels warm and slippery on my skin, and my mind instructs me to glide, so I push my arms out and try to do that. I slide my fingers across the walls as we walk through the mouth of the lobby, balancing with my hands and trying not to slip, feeling as if the plastic tiles are peeling beneath my feet.

  We follow Cissie across the grassy oval. Ethelia, the little girl who builds and restores peace to concrete empires, has disappeared. Her cities lie in ruin, scattered in a loose ring around the water fountain.

  Cissie leads the way past the reception desk; Ruan and I take our time making it out of the front entrance. I put my one foot after the other, and begin to feel my breath heating up like a bed of coals. When I cough, it’s a noise that goes on for a while, rattling inside the numbness in my chest, but it doesn’t do much to clear it.

  I take out my cellphone. I’ve decided to deposit money into Bhut’ Vuyo’s account. I ask him for his account number, but the message won’t send. It displays a red x, meaning I’m out of airtime.

  We tumble forward again. Cissie buzzes the parking-lot gate open and we wend a curving path through Newlands’s leafy streets. We head down towards the main road, where we stand for a few minutes, smoking cigarettes under a bus awning and leaning our heads against a bright McDonald’s ad, balancing each other as we wait for a taxi. Ruan and Cissie keep blurring together in the small space in front of me. To pass the time, Ruan starts telling us a joke he’s lost the punch line to. We wait another two minutes before catching a taxi headed out to Wynberg.

  Through the taxi window, the sky appears heavy, having grown overcast. The light bounces off the surface like a silver coin, a spill of mercury. When we pierce through Claremont’s invisible epidermis, I look down at my hands and find no blood beneath my fingernails. We slow down for an Engen garage and I raise my head again, not sure why I searched through my fingers a moment ago. The thought comes to me that Bhut’ Vuyo might still take offense to my money, whether or not I deem it clean enough for him.

  For a moment, I think about that, the idea of my money. The three of us remain afloat on what’s left of the n-hexane in our blood, sitting one next to the other, two rows from the empty back seat.

  The driver pulls over at the garage, and I lean forward and feel something jam inside my head. Small orange shapes burst inside the taxi, and from behind my eyelids, I envision myself laughing with Cissie and Ruan, the three of us wearing tailored suits and acting jubilantly, our fingers rolling joints from tall heaps of two-hundred-rand notes.

  These days, when we run out of tubes of Industrial, Ruan and I take solace in each other’s misery on Earth, the two of us comparing comedowns as we wait for Cissie to finish her shift. We reload airtime and detail the planet’s shortcomings, never disappointing each other with news of well-being or fortune.

  When we first started using, though, Ruan and I would sometimes go on runs together for Industrial. They used to offload the boxes in Epping, back then, and then transport the surplus to Bellville, where they mixed the tubes for distribution. I’d call him about a deal, and I’d say, Ruan, tell me what you think about this one. We mostly stayed in the south whenever we had enough money to buy a tube, where the cut of the glue wasn’t always guaranteed to come out potent. Still, I remember this one day, when I got a lead on a wholesaler in the north. He was a new dealer, an out-of-towner who’d taken a room at the Little House in Belhar.

  When I phoned him, Ruan took a whi
le to pick up. Then I heard him shifting his weight. I had to wait for him to finish drumming a stream of urine into the bowl.

  Nooit, my friend, he said when he was done.

  I heard him hanging over the basin, pushing a dispenser for soap, opening a tap.

  Dude, I said, you haven’t even thought about this.

  I don’t have to, he said.

  I paused. Well, it’s the best lead we’ve had. I don’t want to brag about it.

  He was quiet.

  I tried him again. You seriously haven’t heard a thing about it?

  Not a thing.

  He could be an asshole sometimes.

  Maybe it’s fresh, I said.

  It might be fresh, he said. He agreed to that much, at least.

  Listen, he said.

  I listened. I heard him kick a door open, walk a short distance and settle himself in a booth. He was drinking a milkshake, I could tell. I sighed. It meant Ruan had gone through a tube of glue alone on his living-room floor, and now he was sitting up the street from his flat at The Blue China, an ice-cream bar we sometimes lumbered into after getting high. The milkshake would no doubt be a banana mint with chocolate shavings and a light sprinkle of cinnamon. I knew it well because it’s the only thing we ever ordered.

  This guy has money, I said to him, still thinking it over.

  Money, Ruan said.

  He wanted me to hear his boredom. It was a hint to get me off the line. I heard him pull in a suck from his shake, which meant he’d already scooped the toppings off the foam with a teaspoon, and that he’d set the teaspoon on a saucer over his doubled napkin. It was a tic. Cissie and I sometimes teased him about it. We said he’d keep this up for as long as his hands were hung on the ends of his wrists, or at least until all our motor functions gave in from the glue.

  Your hands are weird, I said to him, giving up.

  Really?

  Yes.

  Really, they are. Ruan has these long thin fingers that shoot out of pale, crusted knuckles. The skin on them looks thin, almost translucent, and his palms sweat out ten liters a day.

  It’s like you were something else before a person, I said.

  He laughed. Dude, that’s offside.

  Let’s go north, then.

  Ruan laughed again. Have you talked to Cissie?

  No.

  You should.

  Why?

  I already knew why. It was a good reason, too: I didn’t think it was safe enough for her. This was before the Little House on the Prairie, an old tik den based in the south of Bellville, would get on the news, but we all knew Belhar deserved its reputation back then. Even before Mr. Big had taken over the plot on Modderdam Road, there was the story of the guy who’d walked out of the door without his hands on him, the stumps on his arms wetting the cuffs on his pants. I pressed a button and got Ruan louder on the line.

  Why should I? I asked him again.

  I don’t know, he said, but the damned should stick together, don’t you think?

  I don’t disagree with you, I said.

  We pull out of the garage. The gaartjie hangs his waist out of the window, his long tongue chafing against his cracked lips, his large voice calling out for Wynberg. He’s a young guy, tattooed and thin, weathered, like most of the gaartjies who work in the south. The glass edge eats into his stomach as we speed past Cavendish, his gold chain rattling around his neck like a piece of snapped film on a reel. This is what you do when you cast your net for the strays, his body seems to say. You push yourself out into their air and echo.

  I breathe and look ahead. Ruan and Cissie tap their cellphones as our driver stops again. He scoops up another harried passenger—a woman of around sixty, wearing navy slacks and a dirty cashmere sweater—and then we stay quiet for the rest of the trip. I lean back and feel my neck, moist and cold, pressing hard against the taxi’s torn plastic seating.

  We score a lot of our customers at group meetings for the HI Virus here in Cape Town. We’ve been to meetings as far out as Hout Bay, too, to Khayelitsha, Langa and Bellville. We’ve been to two or three in Paarl, and once, when we hitched the twelve o’clock train from Rondebosch, we went out to Simon’s Town. It’s part of it, to get around the way we do. We hand out pamphlets to anyone who wants to place an order. Most of our clients don’t make enough to meet the criteria needed for coverage: they come to us for a pack, or just enough to taper off an initial treatment. I like to imagine it depending on the stage of their illness, but most of it comes down to what they have in their pockets.

  The taxi drops us off in Wynberg. I start looking around for a place to buy airtime, but then I realize I have no change to pay the hawkers with. My eyes drop to the thighs of the women vendors, and I begin to feel embarrassed, running my gaze over the wares on their tables. For the first time, I notice how they look like a jury, seated on a row of cracked SAB crates. The old women squint at the world through the leather of their dark, folded faces, their eyes glassy with glaucoma, each orb like a marble spinning in wet earth. Globules of sweat draw runnels down their temples, and their pulses beat together like the hearts of small mammals. Maybe they’ve heard from Bhut’ Vuyo. In front of their hunger, I pull out more lint from the recesses of my pockets. Then Cissie pulls me away.

  The three of us knit our way through the stream of daytime traffic. In the sky above, the day’s gone full gray, but still holds on to an ember of its heat. Ruan and Cissie don’t say much. We share another cigarette as we weave through the shoppers, hawkers and gaartjies. Then we turn down a one-way that leads us to the clinic.

  The clinic is this white building with a low green fence and a face-brick finish. Ruan and Cissie walk around the boom gate and I follow a step behind. We make our way down to the basement, where they’ve added extra light fixtures to the ceiling. It surprises me, to see how much brighter the place looks. They’ve painted the walls, and my vision takes a moment to adjust.

  We take our seats on plastic chairs set up in a circle in the middle of the space, waiting for the session to begin. Mary, our red-haired counselor, sits on a plastic chair opposite the three of us, a halo from the fluorescents sketching a delicate crown around her Technicolor bob.

  I close my eyes for a while.

  Sitting in group, everything bears a trace of what you’ve seen before. I remember how once, when we were ten years old, my brother and I visited my grand-aunt in King William’s Town. It was summer, and one Saturday morning we stole out to Candies and Novelties, a small store hidden behind the town’s post office. We were looking for firecrackers. For most of that summer, my brother and I had scoured the town to find thick black widows we could stuff into Cherry Coke cans. We had a plan to set them up as booby traps for the town pigeons.

  Inside the store, we spent some time in front of the shop counter, smudging it with fingerprints as we ogled the TV-game cartridges on display. Then we went up and down the aisles, drinking in all the toys we could never afford.

  Luthando and I took two different aisles at a time, heading out in opposite directions, and it wasn’t long before a woman who looked like Mary called out to us. She had Mary’s skin and hair. When she demanded to know what we wanted, we told her we were just browsing, and she said we could do that from outside.

  I was used to it and said nothing, but after we left, Luthando wanted to go back inside and spit on her forehead. It was pale and as large as a bed sheet, he told me, and I laughed, but I stopped him. I’d been warned by my mother. We were to act like visitors in my grand-aunt’s town.

  Cissie touches my knee and shakes me awake. When I open my eyes, I find Neil talking to his feet. My mouth feels scorched and my hands are damp. I crane my neck to take a better look at him.

  With Neil, I guess there isn’t much to say. He’s a former math teacher from a gated estate in Westlake. He’s been divorced twice and has rails on both of his arms, the result of a heroin habit that followed from years of blow. He taught private school for thirteen years, he says, and maybe tha
t’s the reason no one likes him here. I’ve heard some of the older members say he won’t make it through the year, and if you look at him, that isn’t hard to believe. This comes from the old users, mostly. Guys from a clinic in Diep River, and one from Strand. They look at him and shake their heads.

  Today, Neil’s dressed in a short-sleeved flannel shirt tucked into a pair of pressed chinos. He’s a thin guy, with a gnawed coat-hanger for a frame, and his hair is dark and matted, hanging low enough to touch his shoulders. He’s wearing a crucifix around his neck, and above it a pair of broad-framed glasses, each lens flashing under the basement’s new fluorescent lights.

  Like most addicts, Neil has an excuse for each time he feels his life cracking open. Today, he wants a mass deportation of all the illegal immigrants in Cape Town. We should start off with the Nigerians, he tells us, and follow it up with the Somalis.

  I look over and find Cissie rolling her eyes.

  Out of the three of us, Cissie’s the one Neil bores the most. I remember how she once asked us why he didn’t just get HIV already. Maybe it was an awful thing to say, but Ruan and I laughed because it was true. Even though Neil’s a serf in his community, he’s a nobleman in ours. We could’ve pulled a lot of money out of him.

  Neil has these long, bony hands that flop around him when he speaks, and today, he has one of them girded in a bright spotted bandage. He waves it and tells us he cut himself with a lolly—an old glass pipe he’s never changed since buying his first straw—and that he passed out on his kitchen floor. Raising his other hand, he tells us he’s managed to keep away from the ice this week.

  Then Mary thanks him and the rest of us nod.

  I guess this isn’t really dramatic.

  If anything, Neil’s brought our drug talk forward by an hour and a half, and when Olive stands up to speak next, it seems this trend might persist for the rest of our session.