The Reactive Read online

Olive suffers from an undiagnosed respiratory obstruction, and on occasion it clogs the walls of her larynx, causing her breath to make a racket on its way out. I can hear the air pushing out from her throat, a wheeze that reaches me from six members away. Maybe it’s a song, a whistle of the damage she carries inside her, or maybe it’s just human wear: the kind we all have, waiting to waylay us.

  Like most places filled with the sick and the dying, there’s always an opportunity to learn something about being a person here. Our parking lot turns into an academy at times, and we get educated on the survival of people like Leonardo and people like Linette, on people like Neil and people like Olive. Maybe it’s best for me to forget my own troubles and grow a greater sympathy for others. Like Cecelia, this could be what Bhut’ Vuyo wants from me.

  During my time here, I’ve learned everything there is to know about Olive. Her last name is De Villiers, and she was born to pious Presbyterians, a young couple rooted in a community church in Maitland. Her family clipped its extensions to preserve its piety, and as an only child, Olive grew up with an urgent need to see other people. Her teenage years were split between Hanover and Grassy Park, and she says she watched her friends breathing out thick white plumes for years before she joined them at sixteen. She’s a single mother now, headed towards the end of her thirties, and she has the kind of hard but pleasant face you often see in women from the Flats. She works as a soup-kitchen cook at a backyard orphanage in Lavender Hill, and when she stands up to talk, every story she tells us circles the same subject. It’s about her struggle to form a relationship with Emile, her son and only child.

  He’s just a child, she says. I know, I know, but he’s starting to make out that everything I do is a gemors. I can sommer hear it in the way the child speaks to me when I visit my parents and they have people over.

  Olive’s dressed in black today. She has on a ribbed polo-neck sweater and a sea-colored doek that holds her dreadlocks in a neat parting. Her hair’s pushed back into two thick columns that fall away in rolling curves behind her ears, and her dreadlocks are tinted a color that, depending on the kind of day you’re having, reminds you of either sunset or rust.

  Today, I can’t help it.

  I fill up with an image of bursting pipes.

  Inside my pocket, I release my cellphone. Then I knead my knuckles and crack them. I decide to circle my thoughts around

  Olive.

  The worst day she ever had as a user, she’s told us, began when she forgot her son’s name. She tried to ask him for it, putting on a wide smile to throw him off guard, but she could tell he knew. Olive couldn’t recall the three years in which she’d met Emile’s father, in which Emile had been conceived, and in which she’d given birth to him. It had all disappeared, she said, and she’d had to watch her son growing up without her smell, knowing only the instruction of his grandparents.

  Today, she shares her latest suspicions about Emile. Olive says her apologies have started to harden him, to make him believe she’s a woman who deserves nothing better than scorn. Listening to her, the rest of us nod.

  Olive’s the one I’ve come to feel for the most in our meetings, but there’s nothing I can do to help. She suffers from something I have no treatment for, and I can only watch her when she drops her head in shame. Often, I’ve had to avert my eyes when Olive starts to weep, but today my gaze remains passive and arrested on her frame. I realize that my feelings for her have been drained from me, and that I can no longer use her as a hiding place. The two of us sit apart, returned to the distance we once knew as strangers: two people walking into a basement parking-lot in the daytime, heads bowed and smiles coated with nicotine.

  In most meetings, half the members don’t make the move to draw close to one another. We enter each session prepared to deflect the counsel leader, whose job is to put whatever remains of us under glass. If you listen to counselors, they’ll tell you they want full disclosure in meetings, but most of us know to hand the facts out in small doses only. Therapy won’t walk you home after you pack up the chairs. Telling too much about yourself can leave you feeling broken into, as if your head were a conquered city offered to the circle for pillaging. This is how we know Olive won’t finish Emile’s story in front of us. I close my eyes again.

  One week after I deregistered from university and my mother grew resolute in her decision to bar me from her home, I began to visit prostitutes in Mowbray, a block up from the bridge in Rosebank. I never slept with any of them, but one morning, returning late from having gone out for happy hour at a bar on lower Long, and after allowing another one to fondle my penis through my jeans next to the bath house on Orange Street, I bungled the directions to my flat and asked the taxi driver to pull over at the Engen garage. I wanted to buy a spinach-and-feta pie, a pack of Doritos and a bottle of water. That’s when I saw them—across the main road, shivering. When our eyes met, they began to beckon to me all at once.

  My first reaction was amusement. Then suddenly I felt wanted, in a way that surprised me with its strength. I walked towards them, crossing over a traffic island, and stood by while they took turns soliciting me for sex. In the end, I gave them the bag of chips and went back to the taxi.

  In the weeks that followed, I passed by there often. I made a habit of talking to them, making bribes out of what I bought from the service station, and we’d stand in the cold together. I remember how shattered their faces looked, as if they were the survivors of a protracted battle. Yet I also recall the feeling of comfort they gave me, as if I could disappear in between them.

  In the end it was this feeling, its ability to surprise and take hold of me, that redirected me from moroseness when the nights drew to a close, finding me once more on my own, standing in front of my kitchen counter, boiling curry noodles from a plastic packet or decanting leek soup into a saucepan. I suppose they saw that in me, and I located it in them, too, my need. Maybe I’ve been looking for that same thing in Olive, another woman who’s put her battles before me, having ruined herself with straws of bitter crystals.

  It always happens, Olive says, and my heart is like this. It’s a paper in pieces.

  I watch her as she wipes her tears. When Olive sits back down, a moment passes before the drug trend is broken. I guess this brings a little relief. This part of our talks, the HIV section, is usually when Ruan, Cissie and I start with our orders. We assign one person to take down notes, and whoever’s chosen for the duty has to catalog the stage of the disease in each member. You note an infected spouse, distinguishing symptoms and patterns of remission. Then all three of us work out a treatment plan before we sell it to them.

  Today, I signal to my friends that I’ll volunteer for the job. It might take my thoughts off Bhut’ Vuyo. Relieved, Ruan and Cissie nod and lean back in their chairs. Ta Lloyd takes up his turn to speak next.

  I don’t really know what to say about Ta Lloyd, either. I’ve heard members say he’s the oldest guy in our group, but no one knows that for sure. We’ve all had trouble believing him. When I first joined here at Wynberg, Linette told me his story was make-believe. Ta Lloyd told them he got sick on the job as a paramedic. This was in the mid-nineties. He says they gave him an emergency van to pay him off. Today, he’s seated just two chairs from me. When he gets up, he says there’s a man who’s giving his wife a cure. I turn around and catch Ruan looking up from his cellphone. Paying the two of us no mind, Ta Lloyd continues with his story.

  This cure, he says, it’s a reality.

  That’s the word he uses.

  We listen to him like we’re supposed to, and on her side of the circle, Mary starts to furrow her brow. In her role as our counsel leader, Mary’s duties include making sure all our meetings remain civil and well informed. Sometimes she’ll intervene when the misinformation piles too high. In this way, you could say she takes the role of rearranging our history. Playing the part of proofreader, Mary fixes us wherever she finds us mistaken, adding her own revisions to the stories we use to explain o
urselves to the world. Today, she chooses to remain quiet, however, and like the rest of us, she waits for Ta Lloyd to finish telling us his part.

  I reach into my pocket for my phone. Then I start taking down my notes.

  It’s strange, I know, he says, but look, I swear to you. This man came to Site C not two months ago. He’s a medical doctor.

  He pauses for a moment before pointing a finger at Neil.

  He’s a white man, too, Neil, just like you.

  On either side of him, some of the members bow their heads and stifle their laughter. Then Ta Lloyd widens his grin, but the math teacher swats him away.

  Jesus, Lloyd, Neil says, would you get on with it?

  Our oldest member does.

  I guess I thought I saw my father the first time I saw Ta Lloyd. Imagine a squat guy who’s just crested his mid-fifties. He has a receding hairline, a salt-and-pepper beard, and he stays in good shape for his age and for the type of place we’re in. He’s sturdy from what the hospital pays for him to take down his throat each morning, and he drives a Ford Transit with a cracked ceiling, hauling kids to school and back in Site C. His wife, whose positive status they’ve decided to keep a secret, concealed from both her family and her colleagues, works a till at the Pick n Pay in St George’s Mall. She rings up groceries, like I once had to do myself.

  Ta Lloyd continues to describe his new doctor. He’s opened up a hostel at Site C, he says. It’s a place with board and decent facilities.

  That’s where we’ve sent Nandipha, he says. That doctor? He told my wife to stop working one week ago. Remember when I told you last month that Nandi had another fainting spell? Well, it happened again.

  Ta Lloyd rubs a palm over his mouth, and on my left, Cissie inches her chair forward, and so do Ruan and I. The thing about these fainting spells is that they’ve come up before. The three of us, exchanging glances like we’re doing now? That’s from the time I fell on my face from one. We listen as Ta Lloyd explains.

  It’s not easy, I know, he says. It’s not an easy thing to believe. Even in Khayelitsha, not many of us believe.

  The rest of us nod.

  This doctor, Ta Lloyd says. He told me I shouldn’t give Nandi any more ARVs. I swear. He said if I stopped giving Nandipha my pills, he would help us.

  I look up and find Mary glowering at him. Like most professionals, she doesn’t believe Ta Lloyd should be sharing his prescription with his wife—it’s the way most professionals think about the pills. Still, the way Ta Lloyd’s story unfolds, the hospital’s penance didn’t extend to cover his wife’s illness. Mary continues to stare at him while he speaks. The rest of us know where this is headed.

  I close my eyes and wait for my blood to drum my pulse into my ears, a sound I’ve always found reassuring. Sometimes, I like to imagine I can hear my illness spinning inside my arteries, that it’s rinsing itself and thinning out.

  I hear Mary’s voice again.

  Lloyd, she says, I think that’s enough, don’t you? We’ve had our fill.

  It doesn’t usually take her this long.

  I want you to stop this, she says, and listen to me carefully, okay? What we’re here for is to lighten each other’s burdens, not to spread lies from crackpots. I hope you take Nandipha out of that hostel, too. You’re putting your wife at a very big risk with this nonsense.

  Her cheeks draw in as she pushes herself up from her chair. It doesn’t happen a lot, but it’s easy to tell when she’s upset.

  I mean, if money’s the problem here, she says, then why don’t you just come upstairs with me after the session? We can easily look up a treatment plan for Nandipha. Of course, she should be present, but time and time again you’ve refused to bring her to our meetings, haven’t you? You think it’s good that she hides her status from medical professionals.

  Ta Lloyd starts to nod.

  For Pete’s sake, Mary says, don’t just agree with me. You need to stop spreading this nonsense and putting your family in danger. There’s no cure for HIV, but as you can see for yourself, it’s a condition anyone can live with.

  She turns around to confirm this with the rest of us, and we nod, doing our part like we’re meant to. When I look over, I find Ta Lloyd doing the same.

  Yes, Mary, he says.

  Right, that’s enough then, she says. You can sit back down now. She starts scanning the room for the next volunteer.

  Please remember, the rest of you, she tells us, we’re here to help each other heal.

  When no one volunteers, Mary starts flipping through the attendance roster, ticking off our names.

  Let’s have one more speaker, shall we? Then we can break for coffee and biscuits.

  Relieved, we do as we’re told. Ta Lloyd sits back down and I watch his face going slack from his forehead down to his jaw. When the fluorescents flicker twice over our circle, I look up. Then I wonder about all the other people mending their lives on the floors above us. I remember once seeing a woman there who had what I have, compounded with acute tuberculosis. Her salivary glands had blown out as wide as the cheeks of a Bubble Eye goldfish, and she was there to dispute the window-period of her illness, a complication which had rendered her results indeterminate. When the nurses ignored her complaints, she turned around and laughed at them with such exuberant bitterness, the rest of us couldn’t help but look up from our laps. Swiveling on her heel, the woman hurled her objections at the waiting room, next, condemning each of us for our silence.

  This is what I think of now as we sit in our circle. Cissie places her hand on my knee again, and when she does it this time, the table holding our coffee begins to tremble.

  I guess I don’t know where to lead us next. My uncle is a man set on changing the nature of everything I’ve known here, and I don’t know where to walk to that’s flung far enough from his reach. Maybe I should accept this and no longer go on fighting him.

  Done with the session, Ruan, Cissie and I decide to go for a pizza. We take a taxi back to Claremont and walk into Café D’Capo on Main Road. They have this special there we can afford, and so we order two bottles of wine and polish them off over a large margherita.

  Then we order another bottle.

  During intervals, I look across the road to where I could buy airtime. Ruan says he knows a guy who lives in a flat in the same building as the café; that he can pat him down for a bankie, about three grams of cheese.

  We take the lift up. The guy holding the bankie’s called Arnold. He comes out in silk boxers, with tousled hair, a boom of down-tempo beats pounding out of his living room. Ruan hands him three five-tigers for the weed, and calls him an overpriced but reliable asshole. They share a forced, stilted laugh, and then we take the lift back down.

  We walk past Café D’Capo, waving guiltily at the waitress clearing our table. She looks twice our age, and has our soiled serviettes bunched in her hands. We cross the road and wait for a taxi at the corner of Cavendish Square, just across the road from the Nando’s. I decide against walking into the mall for airtime. I can get it later, I decide, maybe further along the way.

  What? Ruan says to us, after a while.

  We’ve been staring at him since we bought the weed from Arnold.

  Dude, I know him from a guy at work, he says.

  We grin. Cissie and I don’t say anything. We nod and look across the road.

  Then Cissie says, what do you think of guys like that, anyway? He probably has parents who own half of Cape Town.

  I shrug. Maybe I should send him my CV, I say.

  Then our taxi arrives. The gaartjie leaps out, hefting stacks of coins in a canvas sack, a white Sanlam moneybag that’s gone brown around the bottom stitching. He points us towards the taxi and we pile in before the door slides shut on its own.

  Inside the Hi-Ace, I take Ruan’s cellphone and SMS Yes in response to my uncle Vuyo’s message. Then, to sign it, I write Lindanathi and attach my number for him to reply to. I resist an urge to turn my phone off. If this is what he wants, then this
is what he wants, I decide. I hand the phone back to Ruan.

  The three of us spend the next hour putting up posters along the main road, from Claremont to Salt River, all of them telling people how to buy my ARVs from me. Then we carry glue in Tupperware containers from Cissie’s fridge, jump the Mowbray train to the city and take a bus out to the West Coast. I take a look at the time on my phone and it’s only mid-afternoon. I guess this is what they mean when they call Cape Town the city of slumber. Time seems to speed up here, and then it stalls, and then it seems to speed up again before it stalls.

  We pass Paarden Eiland just as the sun begins to burn itself through the clouds. It throws down a harsh beam that bisects the bus and Cissie taps my shoulder and says I should turn around. She tells me to look at how we’re sitting on the right side of the light.

  Then we pass Milnerton, the ocean sparkling and still, covered in white spots flecked across its vast surface. It looks as if all the salt has been sucked up to the lid of the Atlantic. After that Blouberg, the destination we’ve chosen for our excursion today, lists into our bus-driver’s wind-screen.

  I open the notebook program on my cellphone. I have orders for Ronny, Lenard and Leonardo. I’ve got one for Millicent. I write down Ta Lloyd and add a question mark after his name. Then, after a moment, I also add Nandipha, his wife. This makes up the list of reactives we could still sell our pills to at Wynberg. Two previous clients, Gerald and Melanie, haven’t come to meetings for a year.

  In Blouberg, we stalk into an internet café, this gamer-powered cavern complete with a coffee plunger and blue carpet tiles. The computers are sectioned into black cubicles with little hooks that hold up oversized headphones.

  It’s one of those LAN gamer killing pens, I say to Cissie. The first-person-shooter covens that seem to grow in popularity each year.

  Cissie nods, somewhat slackened by the place’s distractions. I fax my attendance slip to Sis’ Thobeka at the front counter. There’s a sign here that says they sell R29 airtime vouchers.

  I catch Ruan looking around with this grim, beaten-up expression on his face.