The Reactive Read online

  He approaches the counter. I was such a frightened little shit when I was in high school, he says, shaking his head.

  The voice he uses doesn’t sound like him. It sounds as if it’s only meant for his ears, not all six of ours, and when he’s done, he looks up at us with a wan smile. Ruan doesn’t like the year we’ve stepped into, and behind him Cissie takes note of this and raises her eyebrows. Not every story begs to be told, she seems to say.

  I get the airtime and we walk out.

  This is beach weather, almost, Cissie says, when we step outside. She stretches her arms out in front of her to feel the rays for evidence, but the solar system contradicts her. She drops her arms back down.

  Well, half of almost, she says, correcting herself.

  Ruan and I nod. It’s a fitting description. Cissie has a way of sounding concise in the face of disapproval, and as if to defy the weather’s indifference to her will, the three of us trudge into the Milky Lane up the road, next to the Total garage that ends the strip. We buy a vanilla milkshake and a pair of peanut-butter waffles and cross the road to Blouberg beach, stepping over the wooden railing and walking down a short pier to a grassy knot on the sand, not far from the polluted dunes. A large crane ship slowly drifts past the vista of Table Mountain, while above us, the sky clears up in a rounded blue column, spilling down enough light to make the ocean water blinding.

  Ruan opens up our boxed packages. He uses a plastic knife to cut up the waffles while Cissie rolls a joint from the section Arnold sold us. She licks it from the tip to the gerrick and lights it with a copper Zippo from her shirt pocket. She holds in a drag, sipping the air in tiny increments, and then passes the joint on to me as she exhales.

  Taking it from her, I lean back. The air feels cool but pleasant on my skin, and when I look out at the water, it seems to ripple in slow undulations, each one extending to the farthest reaches of the world.

  I close my eyes and take a drag.

  I try to savor the smoke’s effect on my nervous system.

  You know, Ruan says, his voice reaching me from behind my closed eyelids, Napoleon sent some of his troops to fight against a British fleet here. It happened in the nineteenth century, I think. More than five hundred people died.

  I open my eyes. Ruan sits facing out to sea. He scratches his neck, takes a bite from his waffle, and leans back on his elbows. I pass him the joint.

  Imagine, he says.

  Imagine what?

  Like, where we’re sitting now could be the exact place some British or French assholes drove bayonets into each other. Isn’t that weird?

  I guess. That’s probably this entire country, I say.

  No, really, he says. Imagine. One guy could be standing with his boot on another’s face, just over here, pushing the barrel of his musket down his throat and shouting, hey! We found the natives first! Then the other would be over there, going, non! Niquer ta mère!

  Ruan does the accent well and Cissie and I laugh.

  Hey, she says. I didn’t know about that Blouberg and Napoleon thing. Do you think I could talk about it with the kids?

  Sure, Ruan says. Make it a musket adventure.

  He peels off a slice from the waffle and bites into it, sloppily. Then he grunts at us through the batter like a Disney pirate.

  Cissie laughs.

  Wait, she says. I didn’t tell you guys about what happened to me last week, did I? Well, I made my kids draw me a picture of the Earth. Or I asked them to, anyway. Can you believe it? None of them knows what their planet looks like.

  This isn’t new. Cissie likes to think everyone has an opinion on outer space.

  It doesn’t take her long before she starts telling us about Cape Canaveral again.

  If you know anything at all about Cecelia, then you’ll know this isn’t her first time on the subject. The three of us stretch out on the polluted sand, our fingers digging shallow troughs in Blouberg’s white, heated dunes, and Cissie tells us about the headland on the Space Coast, the Cape in Florida, where the United States launches more than half of its space missions into orbit. Then she moves on to the Kennedy Space Center and tells us about the collective unconscious, the embedded memory all of us humans share with our planet. She tells us how she feels like she’s been there at some point in her life, crossing an empty parking lot in Jetty Park, or lying under a clear sky and drinking a molten smoothie, or kicking around a bottle cap, or standing within touching distance of the station and staring out at the launch sites. The details don’t matter, she says. The way Cissie thinks about her kinship with the headland, she tells us, isn’t because she visited a family friend on the Florida coast when she was twelve, it’s because everyone on our planet has a story to share about space. It’s the only thing she’s certain of, she says. That everyone has an idea about what the sky turns into at night.

  Listening to her, I feel as I always do: uncertain. I have a feeling it might be true, but Ruan, on the other hand, is adamant he doesn’t have a story about space.

  I watch him pull on what’s left of the roach and bury the ember in the sand. Cissie tears off a corner from a waffle and pushes it into her mouth, chewing on it for a long time before sucking the syrup off her fingers. We don’t eat the banana slices. I watch them pile up in the red boxes for later.

  I roll another joint. When I look up to lick it, a container ship makes its way into our view from the horizon. Then Cissie asks me to tell her a space story.

  I don’t have one, I say.

  Unfazed, she leans over and hands me her lighter. Then she draws back and says, of course you do. Everyone does.

  I look ahead. I can feel my elbows digging holes in the sand. I flip the copper lid of the lighter and torch the joint at its pointed end. It burns slowly and I take a long drag before I let the smoke out through my nostrils in thick white plumes.

  I’ll work on it, I say.

  Then the three of us go quiet for a while.

  The sand under my feet feels packed. Closer now, the container ship sounds its horn, its bilge cleaving the water like a scalpel through skin. I watch as a handful of ships melt into the horizon, each one swaying before tipping over the edge of the world.

  It’s better outside those killing pens, Ruan says after a while, and I remember how his face looked inside the internet café.

  Cissie and I don’t answer him.

  I lie back and watch my blood turn orange behind my eyelids. The grass spikes me between my ears and my neck, and the heave of the ocean, when it reaches us, sounds like the breathing of an asthmatic animal. We remain quiet a while longer, and I suppose it’s now, with the column of blue finally closing up above us, and the water losing its shimmer and ability to gouge, that my eyelids turn from orange to red and then to black again, and Bhut’ Vuyo, my uncle from Du Noon, sends me another text message, and this time around, he tells me in clear terms to come home to them.

  SECOND PART

  When I kill the first kid on the rugby field, the first thought that goes through my head, besides having to release the trigger, is that somehow this isn’t so bad. I mean, it’s awful how the bullet—we’re using a clip of half-jacketed hollow points—shatters his skull just above the ear and he falls down, blood splashing and hair fluttering, and I think to myself, after all, Harriet Tubman is also dead. Then Ruan peers over my shoulder, looking down at the blood sinking into the ant-filled grass. Nice headshot, he says to me. Then Cissie takes the gun from my hands and carelessly shoots another kid in the throat. I guess this one would’ve been the lock in the team: that’s how high he jumps. His throat explodes into winglets of flesh and all three of us have to shut our eyes against the blood. I step forward and say to my friends, I don’t know. I say, do you think this will work? Cissie hands me the gun and takes her shoes off. When the green grass spikes between her toes, she smiles, and I guess this is what killing for the government is like. The gun is slicked all over with sweat, and every time I blink, I see the world through a prism of blood. Then ano
ther kid falls and Ruan bends over his bleeding head and asks, why us though? If they’re so good at killing, he says, then why don’t they do it themselves? I tell him this isn’t so much killing as it is cleaning up a mess. These kids, all of them, they’re already dead. Cissie says it’s eerie and we both ask her, what is? She says, gunshots with no sirens. Then Ruan and I look up at her through the sound of the day’s rising traffic. Cissie opens her mouth again, as if to say something further, but when her lips close in silence, I wake up in the bathroom at work.

  My back cramps on the toilet seat. I lean over and try to stretch it. Then I take two more painkillers and look down at the space between my legs. In the dim light, my phone blinks blue before going off again. This indicates the arrival of a new message.

  I hear my colleague Dean stumble into the next stall. His knees drop on the floor and he starts to heave, the room filling up with the smell of vomit. Without fail, Dean brings a hangover to work with him on Sunday shifts. Saturday nights, he plays drums for the house band at The Purple Turtle, a popular punk bar in the middle of Long Street. The owner, a Rastafarian named Levi, keeps half the earnings the bands bring in for him at the door. He compensates for this by keeping a bar tab open for the performers when they finish a set. I stand on the toilet seat and give Dean the rest of my painkillers. Then I sit back down and press a button to take my phone off standby.

  Ruan maintains the email account we use for orders. The new message, cc’d to Cissie, is about a bulk order. I open it and read the MMS on the toilet seat.

  It’s one paragraph long, and it doesn’t have a lot to describe. The client says he’ll buy everything off us, paying us double for the order. He doesn’t want any parcels or messengers, he specifies; we have to meet him in person or there’s no deal. I read it twice and look at my phone for another moment. Then I flush the toilet and rinse my hands off at the sink.

  On my way out, Dean looks up from his open stall and thanks me.

  Dude, really, he says, and I nod.

  His blond hair sticks to the sweat on his forehead, and he sits crumpled on the floor. He’s wearing an old torn Pantera shirt. I reach for the handle and shut him in.

  Then I walk back out to work.

  I have this job I guess I should’ve mentioned. I work in Green Point, at a DVD rental store—the Movie Monocle—and I clock in every Sunday to Wednesday. The money from the orders Ruan, Cissie and I take in, as well as the allowance I receive as compensation for what happened to me all those years ago at Tech, is enough to keep me on my feet when my landlord calls me at the end of each month.

  What they have me do here is stand behind a low vinyl counter—a hollowed-out semi-circle—where I become captain in my black shirt and orange cap, taking in rolled-up twenties and membership cards from the patrons of the Movie Monocle. This is where you’ll find me. Whenever I look up from my hands, I can see movie posters lined up against the yellow walls, about three meters above the gray carpet tiles, each one touching the edges of the next. Directly in front of me, two ceiling fans whop the air, equidistant from my counter and the back wall.

  I dry my hands on my jeans before I settle myself behind the counter. Then I take another look at Ruan’s email. I press reply and ask Cissie and Ruan if this client isn’t a cop.

  They don’t answer me for a while. Then Cissie sends back a reply: I hold reservations about thinking it’s a cop thing…

  I wait for her to finish.

  She writes, I mean, guys, we shouldn’t panic right away, should we? This could just be someone’s idea of a bad joke, right?

  I sigh.

  On Sundays, Cissie takes a train out to visit her aunt in a nursing home in Muizenberg. She uses this time to ease herself into a gentle comedown. In order to organize her body’s depletion of dopamine, and to quell her unease about mortality, Cissie surrounds herself with aging bodies.

  In an octagonal courtyard, she and her aunt pick out grass stalks which they knit into small bows and wreaths. This is where I imagine her now: lying on her back and typing with the sun in her face.

  I decide to let it go. Then I get a message from Ruan.

  I had the same thought about the police, he says.

  This doesn’t surprise me, either. Like me, Ruan rarely shares a moment of Cissie’s tranquility. He gets comedowns no worse and no better than anyone else. Sundays for him just mean another computer in another room. He tells me he knows where I’m coming from.

  I’m about to scroll down when I hear the storeroom door open. I slip my phone in my pocket and place my hands on the counter. I try to keep my back straight.

  My manager appears from the door in the far wall, holding up a plastic clipboard.

  That’s it, keep smiling, he tells me.

  I nod.

  Until two months ago, Clifton was just another peon who worked the counter here at the Monocle. He got promoted after Red, our last manager, gave notice and moved to Knysna. Clifton’s been giving us orders ever since. I wait for him to turn the other way before I pull out my phone.

  Placing it on the counter, I read the rest of the message from Ruan.

  This guy isn’t a cop, he says, but he knows who we are.

  He forwards Cissie and me a new mail. We each take a moment to read it. The message was delivered by the client at noon. It includes our names, where we live and where we work, and at the bottom it says, I am not the police. Then the client tells us he’ll pay us first. We can decide what we want after that.

  Meaning we can just take the money, am I right? Cissie says.

  I’m about to answer her when I hear Clifton meandering into our store’s Action section. He’s run out of things to do again. He raises his clipboard and scratches the back of his neck, powdering his black collar with a mist of dandruff. I go back to my phone.

  To Ruan and Cissie: okay, what’s going on here?

  Neither of them replies for close to a minute and I start to feel concerned. This returns me to Bhut’ Vuyo, and on impulse I open my uncle’s second message. I’m about to reply when Clifton raps his knuckles on the counter.

  Hey, he says, there’s no sleeping on the job.

  I nod.

  No chatting on the phone, either.

  I close the text from my uncle and put the phone away.

  Good, he says.

  I watch Clifton turn his head towards the unit we’ve got mounted above the counter. Slowly, his face pinches inward.

  Jesus, okes, he says. This is not on. This won’t work at all.

  I turn and look up at the unit. It’s a black-and-white horror movie Dean’s put on mute. Cornered by a hideous monster, a young woman backs up against a dungeon wall.

  Clifton shakes his head. Guys, come on, he says. This isn’t appropriate. You know what the rules are for the DVD.

  I tell him it isn’t my fault, everything was on when I came in.

  Sure it was, he says.

  The woman is now naked, lying in a puddle of black blood. Clifton walks around to my side of the counter, squeezes past me, and turns it off.

  He sighs. Where’s Dean?

  He’s in the bathroom, I say.

  Great. You leave, and he enters. Do you plan it like this?

  Maybe.

  Clifton presses his clipboard against his chest, scowling like a sitcom villain. I watch him as he stomps off to hassle Dean in the lav. Then I look back down at my phone.

  I’ve just received a notification SMS from the bank, Ruan says.

  He tells us it’s a deposit, and when he types out the amount, I stare at my phone for a while, making sure I’m parsing the figure right.

  The client wants to meet up no later than today, Ruan says. He’s scheduled the meeting at Champs, a pool bar next to the railway station in Mowbray.

  I nod, but I have to scroll back up to the figure.

  In the end, Cissie recovers from the shock before I do. She asks Ruan for a description of the client, a way to locate him inside the bar.

  On his side
, Ruan takes a moment to pass the question on and the three of us wait for the man to respond. Eventually, he types back to say we should look for the ugliest man in the bar. I wait for Ruan to explain, but he doesn’t say anything further.

  Then, all at once, I feel done at the Monocle. For the first time since I signed on with them, about a year ago now, I don’t wait for my hours to arrive at their official cut-off point, or even for Clifton, my new ex-manager, to come back from scolding Dean inside the bathroom. I turn around and switch the DVD player back on. Then I drop my orange cap on the counter and walk out, making my way to the taxi rank on the station deck above Strand.

  I cross over the short steel bridge and buy a packet of Niknaks. Then I walk to the bay marked for Claremont. Inside the taxi, I lean my head against the glass and watch as a pink band wraps itself around the sky over Cape Town—from Maitland to Athlone—and a haze of pollution simmers over the land beneath it. I can feel the cogs of the city’s industries churning down to stillness, and smell the exhaust fumes from the taxis, as if each plume was mixing in with our exhaustion.

  On the main road, I decide to put my uncle out of my mind. With the money to consider, this seems a reasonable measure to take. Existence goes on as we all navigate our need for currency. Even Bhut’ Vuyo would understand this. He needs money as much as anyone else. Or maybe, I think, he needs it more.

  In Newlands, I find Ruan waiting by the gate, pushing up against the wire fence around Cissie’s building. Cissie isn’t back from her pilgrimage to Muizenberg yet, and by the way Ruan looks, I can’t tell if he’s high or coming down. I join him on the pavement.

  Ruan, you have this face on I think you should see.

  He shrugs. Is Cissie still in Muizenberg?

  I nod.

  I need to find an old person, Ruan says. He tries to laugh, bunching his shoulders together, but the feeling doesn’t last. You don’t always get to ward off exhaustion, huffing Industrial the way we do.

  I lean my back into the fence.