The Reactive Page 7

  I’ll tell you all about it later, he says. You’ll be around, right?

  We might be, Cissie says.

  Sure, he tells her. We’ll talk then.

  I pour out more wine for us, and find a shelf for our beer inside the fridge. Holding our coffee mugs, the three of us walk out into the living room.

  In the lounge, Ruan, Cissie, and I join an audience for Julian’s latest performance. Everyone else draws closer to watch, and Julian presents himself as our party host, kneeling down in front of us. Smiling from the head of the coffee table, his metal face gleams while a string of sweat drips down the bridge of his nose. He removes a button pin from his blazer and turns it over to take out the fifteen tabs of LSD he’s concealed in the back. Then he returns his hands to his pockets and tells everyone they should know what to do by now.

  They nod.

  Ruan, Cissie, and I keep still. We watch as Julian’s followers gather around the coffee table, each of them with their head bowed. In order, they raise their left hands and Julian nods as he passes them the acid.

  Cissie pulls on my sleeve. Let’s go, she says.

  I nod.

  Ruan pulls on the sliding door at the end of the living room. Then the three of us walk out onto the balcony.

  I have very little regard for Nietzsche’s detractors.

  This comes from a guy sitting on the floor. He has his legs spread out in a narrow V over Julian’s tiles. He introduces himself as an ecology student. He’s wearing a fitted leather jacket under a black balaclava that covers his face, and he’s speaking to a girl leaning against the balcony wall. The girl laughs at his quip. I’m doing my third year in linguistics, she says.

  We share a marijuana cigarette with them. Then it’s followed by a leaking pipe we take a pass on. On the balcony, the breeze feels tactile around our fingertips. We take hits from the weed and sip on our wine. From where we’re standing, our view of Cape Town is a maze of brick walls; a checkerboard of abandoned office lights. Exhaust fumes waft up from the streets below, mixing with the smell of rubber baked during the day, a combination that reminds me of Ruan’s summation of our planet’s atmosphere: that the ozone layer is Earth’s giant garbage lid.

  Julian looks like a deep-water mutant, Ruan says.

  Cissie and I laugh. I inhale and blow out smoke.

  To defend herself against the cold, Cissie’s wearing a green hoodie. The strings on the sides are pulled and knotted under her chin. She leans out over the balcony.

  You know, Julian asked about my documentary, she says.

  Cissie has an audio documentary she edits for two hours each month. The subject is a twenty-eight-year-old from Langa called Thobile. Last year, Thobile quit his job to live on eight rand a day. It was in solidarity with his community, he said, and in the clips Cissie played back for us at West Ridge, we could hear the difference in his tone at the beginning of the experiment, and then a month later. Cissie, who planned to paint a portrait of him—using only her memory and her recording as a guide— said he lost eight kilograms in three weeks.

  Leaning on the railing, I turn to face her. How’s it going? I say.

  Cissie shrugs. I don’t know. They all started getting sick.

  I remember listening to Thobile in the clips Cissie played for us. He described how he hadn’t robbed anyone, yet.

  He has this little brother, you know. In June, Vuyisa contracted bronchitis. That’s why Thobile had to go back to work.

  I nod.

  Cissie digs in her pocket and retrieves a soft pack of filters. The two of us watch as a car speeds down the narrow lane below. Its headlights illuminate a piece of graffiti on the opposite wall: PLEASE DON’T FEED THE ANIMALS.

  You know, Cissie says, I don’t mind my job.

  Since our wine is almost finished, we drink what’s left of it in shallow sips.

  No, really, she says, but there’s all this shit in between. I mean, what are we even doing here? My aunt died today, Cissie says, and here I am, standing on a balcony, listening to people talk shit about Nietzsche.

  Ruan looks over her shoulder. Loud enough for the ecology student to hear, he says, Nietzsche’s the Nazi one, isn’t he?

  On the floor, the student shrugs under his balaclava. The leaking pipe is laced with methamphetamine. I start to feel awake when I try a hit. My pulse begins to pick up and I turn to Ruan. Then I decide to tell Cissie about my job.

  When I’m done, Cissie releases the rail and takes a long drag from her cigarette.

  Then she tells me that’s good. She says to me, now we have to go to Mowbray.

  Julian spots us making our way down the wood-paneled hallway. Maybe it’s his new eyes. He follows after Ruan and raises his arms.

  You can’t be leaving, he says.

  We are, Cissie tells him.

  I haven’t even thought of doing the lock-up yet.

  Well, something came up, she says.

  Julian shakes his head. He walks past us and starts working the latch.

  I get it, he says, you’re a team. I like that.

  We watch him struggle over the lock for a while.

  I get the feeling that I don’t mind waiting here. I can still hear the laughter coming in from Julian’s balcony. It rings over the music. When I look over Ruan’s shoulder, I notice the ecologist and linguist walking back inside, hand in hand, both of them giggling and shaky on their feet. The ecologist moves in towards her and they kiss. The two of them stand like that for a while, wobbling, kissing and keeping each other in balance. Then Julian gets the door to unlock and holds it open for us.

  We file out onto the walkway.

  The other couple comes running up from the fire escape. The girl carries their placard like a crucifix. Dude, she laughs, you almost locked us out.

  She pushes past Julian and the guy from the landing trails behind her.

  I turn around and jog towards Cissie and Ruan. They’ve walked ahead to the lift, where they’re holding it open and waiting.

  Inside, when the doors draw shut, the laughter from the flat fades again, and the three of us watch ourselves in the mirrors once more. Cissie inches towards me, and without speaking, she places her head flat against my shoulder. Then the lift grumbles, and a few floors down, she says, there’s nothing to envy about this place or the people inside it.

  I nod. Then I look up at the silver ceiling and watch as the fluorescent light falls on her hair. Cissie’s hand clutches my shoulder as we reach the ground floor.

  The three of us sit side by side inside a taxi headed out to Mowbray. Up front, behind a cracked windscreen and a GET RICH OR DIE TRYING sticker, our driver shifts his stick up another gear and we hurtle through Woodstock with rising speed, the Hi-Ace gliding past a U-Save store, a hair salon and an internet café that pawns second-hand jewelry.

  I can’t control my thinking, again, Cissie says.

  From our seats, Ruan and I watch her scratch the bridge of her nose. Then Cissie takes off her green hoodie and says, my head’s doing this thing where my aunt isn’t dead yet.

  I don’t think I want it to be doing that, she says.

  We drive past another U-Save store. Then Cissie tells us this is how her thinking turned when her mother died of stomach cancer when she was twelve.

  This isn’t about either one of them, though, she adds.

  I nod at her. Then I turn to look out at the road.

  Through my window, the sky looks dull and impenetrable, like the screen of a malfunctioning cellphone. I imagine it made of plastic, each corner suppressing the passage of vital information. Perhaps we’ve all come to malfunction this way. Perhaps language, having once begun as a system of indistinct symbols, would never develop beyond what we knew, but instead, would continue to function as a barrier between ourselves and others.

  I’m not sure what to tell her.

  I circle my hand around the fingers she’s left on my thigh.

  Then our driver stops just before we list into Obs, dropping off an elderly c
ouple who only paid enough to get as far as Salt River. The door slides shut and we move down the main road again.

  On my right, Cissie says, we need to make a plan. She widens her eyes and says we need a strategy on how we’re ending our lives, tonight.

  Ruan and I laugh.

  Or at least we try to.

  I thought I could go in first, I say. You guys could wait for me outside the bar. I remind them that after all, I’m the one who’s halfway dead.

  They nod, but neither one of them laughs.

  I tell them I think we need a strategy for how we talk to him. We should give out as little information as we can, I say.

  Ruan and Cissie nod.

  Then our taxi pulls over at the McDonald’s in Obs. A few people get off, and the gaartjie leaps out and calls for more passengers. He shouts out Claremont, Wynberg, and then repeats it. I watch him cross over the main road, searching for passengers leaving St Peter’s Square. The sky seems to darken as the minutes pass, and, turning back, I tell my friends I can’t think of anything else.

  Dude, I’m sold, Ruan says.

  He seems nervous. This is how Ruan talks when he’s nervous. I watch him pound a fist into his palm.

  Then Cissie nods. I mean, what else is there to do?

  She’s right. There’s nothing else we can do, I say.

  The worst thing that can happen in this story, Cissie says, is that someone dies, and that’s already kind of happened, hasn’t it?

  From across the road, the gaartjie calls for Claremont.

  He doesn’t look much older than us. He’s wearing blue overall pants and a black woolen beanie. I watch him skip between shoppers. He offers to help carry their packages.

  On Station Road, we get off and walk past three lit-up hair salons on the main road. Most of the salons are still open in this area, even this late in the evening. Their windows throw yellow puddles of light onto the curb, drawing us a path to the four-way stop at Shoprite: a blurry line that changes this part of town into another suburb, before Rosebank becomes Rondebosch. We head east just before the police station, down St Peter’s Road. We find Champs on the right, close to the bend. It has wide window panes with white vinyl letters on the glass. There’s an eight-ball pattern on each side of the door.

  We start off at the bar. Ruan and Cissie take seats on the high stools near the entrance; I step out to buy a filter from a vendor outside.

  Somalia, he tells me, when I ask him where he’s from.

  The sound of the traffic mixes with the conversation of the pedestrians behind us, and we face each other across the scarred surface of his wooden cart. He’s a thin man, wearing a kufi cap. I haggle him down to one rand fifty, but he has no change, he tells me, so I let him keep the two rand. Under the streetlight, I feel my buzz begin to fade, but when I ask him for khat, he shrugs and shakes his head. Then he starts to pack his wares, and as I watch him push his cart up the main road, I begin to suspect that being here might be a trap. Maybe Bhut’ Vuyo knows I can be lured with money. That I have a price and I’m easy to find. I walk inside the bar. The smell of stale smoke clutches me like a glove.

  We sit facing the packed beer fridges. The vodka and brandy bottles reflect the dim light, and my eyes feel dry as they glide over the whiskey and sherry. Green swathes fall across the counter in a soft pattern, the result of a soccer match playing on the sets.

  I use my sleeve to wipe the sweat off my temples. I can hear my heart tapping inside my chest. I recall what I know about the pharmacology of tik: in one of Olive’s stories, a baby was born with its intestines unspooled outside its body.

  Maybe we should get a drink, Cissie says.

  I lean forward and raise my hand for help. The woman tending the bar smiles under a helmet of bleached hair. We watch her standing at the other end of the counter, her back turned to us. From our place at the bar, we can see her texting on her phone. Now and then, she raises her head to laugh with a man in a cowboy hat. The man looks around fifty. He’s wearing a white shirt under a brown suede blazer. On close inspection, his features are unremarkable, and I discount him as a candidate for our client. The match blares on a set above him: a game between Sundowns and Chiefs.

  Our throats dry, the three of us fall silent. We spend the next minute leaning over the counter. I remind myself to take in normal breaths, which reminds me of Olive: the damage that makes her throat whistle.

  What would you drink on your last day on Earth?

  This comes from Cecelia, and it’s timely as always.

  She says, what if Last Life was moved up to now?

  Ruan and I take a while to answer. Cissie plays with the strings under her chin.

  I don’t know, Ruan says eventually.

  I don’t either, I tell her. Maybe it is now.

  The bartender works the other end of the bar. She’s wearing a blue halter top over a pair of stonewashed jeans, and her short legs drag her feet across the floor. She serves the man in the hat another brandy and he beams at her.

  I don’t think I have any more money on me, I say.

  Me neither, Cissie says.

  Ruan pats his pockets. I might, he says.

  Eventually, the bartender sees him waving. She approaches us, using one hand to wipe down the counter while the other holds up her phone. When she comes to a stop in front of him, Ruan takes out his money and places it on the rubber spill mat. It’s enough for three quarts of beer.

  We take small sips from the tall brown bottles. I swivel on my chair to catalog the patrons present at Champs. I try to convince myself that our client isn’t here: that he would’ve approached us by now. Or we would’ve noticed him. Then I take another sip.

  The bartender returns with Ruan’s change, a combination of green notes and bronze coins. Placing the money on the counter, she pauses and looks up from her phone.

  He’s upstairs, she says.

  The three of us look up and the bartender sighs.

  The man, she says, turning to me, the strange one, the handicap. He told me to tell you he’s waiting for you upstairs. He has the floor blocked off, but you can tell Vincent at the door and he’ll let you in. Tell him you’re the three guests. He’ll see your friends, anyway, she says, pointing at Cissie and Ruan. Then she shrugs, done with her message.

  I thank her as she sends another text from her phone. She doesn’t respond, and I watch her walk back to the man in the cowboy hat, who orders another brandy.

  Jesus, Ruan says, this guy booked the whole floor.

  The whole floor, Cissie echoes.

  My brain gives me nothing to add to this, so I ask them if we should finish our beer or take it up with us.

  We need to revise our strategy, Ruan says.

  Yes, we need to do that, Cissie says. Let’s decide on a plan.

  I tell them again that we shouldn’t volunteer any information.

  Ruan asks if we should mention seeing the money.

  Not until he mentions it first, I say.

  Then Cissie takes a long sip from her beer and we do the same. Fuck it, she says. What can he do to us here? She pushes back from the counter. This is a public place, isn’t it?

  It is. We’ve really done all we can to prepare, I say.

  Ruan agrees, and in my head, I think: if he’s Bhut’ Vuyo then he’s Bhut’ Vuyo.

  We just have to keep a cool head with him, I say.

  Right, Ruan says. He gets up and stretches his arms. I need to take a leak. Don’t sneak off without me.

  Like you’d mind that, Cissie says.

  Then Ruan takes a gulp from his quart, and, wiping the foam off his lips, stalks off to the bathroom. Left behind, Cissie and I slouch on our seats.

  During a free kick, she turns to me and says, be honest, Nathi, are you afraid?

  I tell her honestly, I don’t know.

  Me neither, she says. I have no idea what to think any more.

  I got stabbed once, I tell her.

  Really? Where?

  I was in Obs. />
  The ghouls gathered around the plasma screen roar at another missed goal. For a while, Cissie and I drink in silence. Then Ruan comes back and leans on the counter.

  He sighs.

  I’m ready, he says, clasping his hands together.

  He takes another sip from his beer, and when he’s done, I say we should go up and see what happens to us. Ruan and Cissie try to laugh, but it doesn’t last long. I can tell it’s only to humor me.

  We leave the counter just as the game hits half-time. The soccer louts rush back to the bar, each of them griping and cheering over their glasses of brandy. I guess it gets hard to pick them apart, sometimes, the winners and the losers, but in any case, the three of us don’t stick around to find out who’s who.

  We take our beers and walk up the staircase next to the men’s room, where we find Vincent, the resident bouncer, arranging his face into a scowl. To get a clear image of Vincent, you’d have to imagine five slabs of braaied beef, all arranged in a pile and wrapped up in a beanie and a black dress shirt. Then you’d have to think of a pair of black jeans and black desert boots. None of them new, but pressed and buffed to look it.

  I slow my friends down. Keeping myself at a distance, I tell the bouncer that it’s us and that we’re here for a meeting.

  Vincent looks dubious.

  He faces down and creases his brow. Naturally, he asks me who we are.

  We’re here to see the guy, I say, and point at the door.

  He eyeballs us. Prove it, he says. Vincent centers himself in front of the door. I guess it’s a bouncer maneuver or something.

  I look at him and all I can think of is, whatever, I concede.