The Reactive Page 8

  I tell Vincent we’re here for hospital work; that we’re working in the field as volunteers. The three of us, I say, we’ve all got jobs in a ward at Groote Schuur. That’s what we have to talk about with the man inside. We’re consulting.

  He clicks his tongue. Consulting, he says. Still staring at us, Vincent raises a beefy paw to his face and draws a slow, tight circle in front of his forehead.

  Was his face eaten by pigs? he asks.

  I don’t know what to tell him. To my right, Ruan says we can’t disclose that.

  Then Vincent nods. He sizes up Ruan before his eyes glide down to the quarts in our hands. Tell me, he says, what kind of hospital meeting is it where you have three children holding bottles of beer?

  I sigh. I can’t think of anything else.

  Then the door cracks open and a woman approaches Vincent from behind. She lays a thin hand on his shoulder, and her voice flows out of her like a whisper.

  Vincent, the man says to let them in, she says. You can collect your tip at the bottom till. Her hand drops and she disappears back into the room.

  Vincent considers us a moment longer. Then, slowly, he starts to nod.

  Okay, he says. You’ve convinced me. Feigning reluctance, but clearly pleased by his tip, he opens the door to the upstairs bar and waves us in like a butler.

  Ruan, Cissie and I step over the threshold one after the other. Then we stand there holding our quarts, our eyes adjusting to the dimness.

  I realize I’ve stopped breathing. That’s when I hear his voice.

  Please lock the door after you, he says. You’ll soon learn how much I’m devoted to my people, but I’m afraid I’m not very fond of their intrusions.

  It’s strange, but when I hear him, I feel I have no choice but to do as he says. There’s a strange, but commanding quality to the man’s voice, and not only in volume, but also in texture. It has a metallic ring around its loudness, like a recording pushed through a speaker.

  I take a shallow, faltering breath. Then I lock the door and trace his voice to a corner in the far left, where there’s a silhouette of a man leaning back on one of the leather couches, one leg bent at the knee and crossed over the other. Above him, ribbons of smoke curl against the ceiling light, forming a mist in front of the windows overlooking St Peter’s Road.

  I’m over here, he says, waving his hand.

  My head clears and my nausea thins out. I look through the room and locate his head, a long narrow face in silhouette against the large road-lit panes.

  Please take a seat with me, he says.

  Ruan, Cissie and I move towards him.

  The woman behind the bar stares at us with a blank expression. She’s also pressing the buttons on a cellphone. I watch its blue glow playing up her neck, a light that reveals a sharp jaw moving around a wad of gum. The three of us move past her.

  You can’t possibly still imagine I’m the law, the man laughs.

  This is how he talks. He booms in a register that’s picked out from two centuries ago. His tone sounds tired and tickled at the same time.

  Ruan, Cissie and I find our seats opposite him at the low table.

  Here we are, I guess.

  Here’s the ugly man. Here’s our client.

  He has his head down, his face covered in shadows. You get the feeling his features are nondescript, even in sunlight, and that his skull, closely shaven and dimly reflecting the street glow, looks like the skull of any other man. It’s almost as if, in calling himself ugly, he’s erased his features, drawing attention to something that isn’t there. There’s no way to describe him above the V of his white shirt. I lean back, confused.

  Please allow me a moment, he says.

  We do. We watch his fingers prod, fussing over a black PDA device on the coffee table. It’s thick, about the size of my hand, and he’s set it flat on its back. It’s probably what he used to send us the emails, and the scanned IDs he intimidated us with. It has a dim screen light that illuminates only his wrists and cufflinks. More than once, he cracks the knuckles of his right hand as if in frustration at its speed or, I think to myself, as if to ground a stray current. Either way, I wouldn’t be surprised.

  The man clears his throat. He doesn’t look up at us, but we watch him as he bunches his fingers around a stylus pen. He swipes a gray icon across the small screen.

  I should tell you I’m rather pleased you were able to find your way to me, he says. I was beginning to wonder if I might’ve been the cause of too much trouble. I understand I called for us to meet at short notice and for that I should extend an apology, and believe me when I say I do. However, as you’ll soon learn for yourselves, the matters which bring us together bear their own sensitivities regarding the dictates of time, and for that reason alone, I’m confident that our arrangement, as hasty or as modest as it might seem, is perhaps the one that could serve our purposes best.

  Done, he pushes his PDA aside. Clicking open his gold cigarette case, he pauses for a moment. Then he weaves his head and trains his eyes through the dimness, raising his right hand to signal to the bartender.

  My dear, he says, might we have the lights back on?

  I hear the bartender closing her till. Her silhouette saunters around the counter and approaches the entrance. It turns a knob and a mist of yellow light settles over us.

  Finally, here he is, I think to myself. He’s wearing a three-piece suit, a deep red that matches the hat on the table. The hat is a long-brimmed fedora. It has a feather tucked inside the band.

  This is when I realize what’s unsettling me about his face. He’s wearing a mask.

  The man clears his throat and starts talking again.

  You’d be shocked, he says, sounding both surprised and amused, how little science has accomplished for the facial prosthetic. The field’s first and, by my humble estimate, truest visionary was a man born in the year of 1510. He was a Frenchman by the name of Ambroise Paré, who used to shear the hair off kings to earn his keep in the royal courts. He had as his regular clients Henry II, Charles IX and Henry III. Francis II is also said to have sat under his blade during his short kingship. In his work as a surgeon, however, he was a man at home on the battlefield. He made limbs for soldiers maimed during the wars, you see.

  Here he pauses. He taps his cigarette filter on the gleaming case, his long fingers pushing the air out of the stick and compacting the tobacco leaves.

  I see you’ve already helped yourselves to something to drink, he says. It’s no bother, but should you want more, I beg you only to mention it. I should say, also, that Nolwazi here holds my vote as the best bar maiden this side of the mountain. He turns his head towards her, then back to us.

  Now, he says, where was I? Oh, yes, we were discussing Ambroise Paré, weren’t we?

  He goes on like this. It turns out it’s from the First World War, this mask he has on. That’s what he tells us, anyway. He says nothing about his voice, but I can detect a hum whenever he takes a moment to breathe. I keep my eyes settled on his mask.

  Well, he says, the technique itself is from the Great War. I’m afraid this hunk of tin isn’t quite as old as that. You’ll have to forgive me my indulgence. I tend to have a desire to get the face and mask out of the way as soon as I can. It’s the only way I can guarantee myself anyone’s attention. My face is somewhat of an attraction, you see. I myself am no stranger to its oddities. However, I invited you here for matters unrelated to my appearance. Now, friends, if you don’t mind, may I?

  He raises his hands to the sides of his face and holds them up against his ears. Ruan, Cissie and I sit with our hands by our sides, staring at him in silence.

  The man’s mask is painted the sandy color of his hands and his neck, with two round holes for eyes and two piercings at nose level for breathing holes. Just above the chin, it’s carved into three narrow slits for him to speak through.

  Cissie says, so there’s a reason you didn’t get plastic surgery?

  This doesn’t surprise us, me
and Ruan, that Cissie would be the first to break through our silence.

  I reach down for my beer again. The sip I take from the bottle tastes warm, and it causes my mouth to fill up with saliva. The bitterness clings to the sides of my tongue, trickling down my throat and knotting my stomach. I put the bottle back between my knees.

  The man, as if noticing my discomfort, drops his hands.

  He shakes his head and says, Monsieur Paré. The first men he patched up from the wars broke his big foolish heart. He gave them back their arms and legs and they took their own lives. They didn’t favor their looks, you see. I’ve never understood those men. If you ask me, a man is given his scars as a consequence of his spirit, his battles out in the world.

  He shakes his head, his answer to plastic surgery.

  Then, following a brief pause, he says, now, I do trust I have your permission?

  The man’s hands pull at the sides of his mask and he lifts the tin off his face. Leaning back on the couch, with his arms set apart and his one leg over the other, his hands find the arm rests and his face reveals itself. If he’s smiling, then none of us can tell.

  Half his face appears burnt, the skinless meat gleaming in full view.

  He’s still facing us when the bartender walks over with a brandy snifter on a cloth-covered tray. The man nods at her and she disappears without a sound to sit behind the bar. He smokes his cigarette through a long white tube fitted into his throat, and half of the right side of his face is missing. The skin on the bottom half of his neck seems to lighten on its way down to his chest. It’s a pattern that gives definition to how his larynx varies in relief. Tracing it down from his chin, it continues to rise as it descends, until it pushes itself taut against his skin, outlining the contour of a perfect cylinder.

  The man watches me as I stare at him. Then he raises a hand to his neck.

  Of course, I’ve had to adopt a more recent approach with my voice. I find it rather important that one does what one can in order to be heard, don’t you?

  The flesh around his larynx vibrates when he speaks, and this is when I realize he has a machine humming against the walls of his throat. I look up.

  You paid us a lot of money, I say. What for?

  The man breathes out smoke through his nostrils. I’m under the impression my intention was clear, he says. I want to make a purchase.

  We don’t have any pills on us, I say.

  He considers this and nods. I watch the smoke holding still around his face, like a meadow fog.

  I figured as much, he says, unfazed. It was, after all, very short notice, as I’ve said. He inhales again and lets the smoke seep out.

  I ask him, why did you bring us here?

  Why, he says, you provide a social service, do you not?

  It’s a scam, I say.

  The man laughs. He does that for a while.

  Now, now, he says, we both know that isn’t true.

  He lifts one leg off the other and straightens himself up on the couch. Then he slips his cigarette case inside his jacket and reaches for his feathered hat. He packs his device away and buttons his cufflinks.

  I’ve kept you for far too long, he says. Let me know when you have the package.

  He adjusts his hat and somehow, his mask is already strapped over his face.

  I’ll be in touch, he says.

  Then he nods and walks away from the three of us. He tips his hat at Nolwazi and finds the door.

  We sit back on the couch, and I guess that’s all there is between us.

  It’s happened.

  The three of us are left alone in the yellow light and the remaining ribbons of his cigarette smoke. Ruan, Cissie and I take a look around the empty bar. Then, with our beers turning to warm water between our knees, and almost at the same time, we whisper to each other, saying: what?

  I get a delayed text message from my case manager, Sis’ Thobeka. The three of us are back at Cissie’s place, again, and Ruan’s high on khat, playing an erratic set of drums on his kneecaps. We met a dealer in Rosebank who sold us twenty stems. He agreed to drop the price by a third.

  At Cissie’s place, we listen to Ruan as he drums. Pausing for a moment, he says we should just use the money and then kill ourselves.

  That could be a life, he says.

  Cissie and I agree. We share another stem and tell Ruan that this isn’t a bad idea.

  It’s like that book, he says. There was a guy. He wrote a book and won a prize for it.

  I open the text message and Sis’ Thobeka says to me, Lindanathi, your CD4 count.

  She writes: Lindanathi, you didn’t fax us your CD4 sheet, I thought I told you yesterday to—

  I delete her message.

  Then Ruan says, I can’t remember the guy who wrote that book. He tells us he’s googling it and Cissie and I get up to watch. We lean over him, and, for the rest of the night, we keep stems between our teeth and chew until we can’t feel our faces any more. Then we prod our fingers into each other’s sides and laugh like well-fed children.

  The following morning finds the three of us still awake. The sun rolls over Table Mountain just after six a.m. on Monday morning, and under it we lie sprawled across Cissie’s leather sectional couch. It rained last night, and Cissie tells us there’s a leak in the roof that’s wet her cushion. She keeps extending a palm to pat the damp spot. Ruan and I lie still, watching her.

  Guess what today is, she says.

  What?

  It’s a holiday, Cissie sighs, but guess which one?

  We can’t, and when we don’t answer her, she tells us it’s Women’s Day. I don’t have to go in to work today and my aunt is still dead, she says. What now?

  Ruan and I remain silent. Then Cissie falls back on the sectional couch and lies there, motionless.

  Half an hour later, we shower and share what’s left of the khat. Then we take the lift down to the ground floor and catch a taxi to the bottle store in Claremont, where we stock up on champagne and liqueurs and everything else we never drink. We walk out of the bottle store with a loaded shopping bag in each hand, skipping across the main road like the world might end tomorrow. Then I guess this is how we spend the rest of our Monday. We talk and sometimes the three of us shout, and then our vision grows sharp around four a.m. and we feel ourselves floating up to the ceiling, speaking many praises to each other’s existence.

  Sometime during the night, I think of my late brother. There were summers I’d take Luthando down the block in my old neighborhood, eMthatha, to a big white stippled house at the corner of Orchid and Aloe Streets, where an Afrikaans family from Bloemfontein had moved in. Their son, Werner, who was older than us by a few years, had taken control of his family’s pool house; a flat at least twice the size of my room. Werner liked to make us watch him while he squeezed a tube of Dirkie condensed milk down his throat; and sometimes he’d command my brother and I to laugh with open mouths through his fart jokes, after which he’d collapse into a castle made from his bright plush toys. We always met Werner at the window of his room. He was an only child and coddled by both of his parents. Since moving into the neighborhood, his parents had banned him from leaving his yard; and LT and I had to jump their fence to register his presence. I suppose he was spoilt, in retrospect, almost to the point of seeming soft in the head. As a teen, his teeth had started to decay, turning brown in the center of his lower jaw, but he was also big-boned and well stocked, and would often bribe us over to his home with ice lollies and video games. I had my own video games by then, but not as many as Werner. My mother was still new at her government job and I couldn’t show off in the way I wanted to about living in town. Lately, Luthando had started thinking he was better off than me. My brother had grown a patch of pubic hair the previous summer, and I wanted to remind him that he still ate sandwiches with pig fat at his house, and that one evening in Ngangelizwe, his mother had served us cups of samp water for supper.

  Still, we hid together that day.

  Like always, W
erner told us his parents didn’t allow Africans into their house. He called us blacks, to which we nodded, and then he threw the controllers through his burglar bars like bones on a leash. My brother and I scuttled after them on our bare and calloused feet. If Werner didn’t win a game, he’d switch the console off and turn into an image of his father, barking us back onto the tar like a disgruntled meneer at the store, his face twisting as fierce as a boar’s, fanning out a spray of saliva. When he did win, when Werner felt he’d won enough, he’d say his parents were due home in the next few minutes. Then he’d hoist the controllers back up and wipe them down with a wad of toilet paper. It was the same toilet paper he used to wipe semen off his plush toys, Luthando would later say to me.

  He’s a pig, your bhulu friend, he’d say, I’ve seen tissues of it all over his bedspread.

  That day, Werner’s parents came home early for a long weekend and he hid us behind a sparse rosebush growing against their newly built fence. The day was gray, like most of them that summer, but the bricks in the wall were still warm. My brother and I were caught not thirty seconds later. Maybe Werner wanted us to be caught. The maid watched us with a blank mask from the kitchen sink while Werner’s mother lost the blood in her face and his father, a large, balding architect with sleek black hair around a hard, shimmering pate, came after us with a roar, waving his belt over his head and shouting, Uit! Uit! Uit!

  We were only twelve years old, so we ran.

  Later, back home, Luthando found me in the kitchen and squeezed my nose between his thumbs from behind. We hadn’t spoken since our escape from Werner’s house, and I’d been making us coffee, watching as two of the neighborhood mutts mated lazily in the yard across from ours. My brother led me to a mirror and mashed my face into the cold pane. Luthando was in a rage, and he asked me if I liked looking that way—with my nose pinched—and nearly broke the glass with my forehead. I struggled and elbowed him and we both fell to the floor and fought. When he tired of pressing my face against the bathroom tile, and with my saliva pooling against my cheek on the floor, I asked him why he was hurting me, even though I knew the reason. Luthando said everything else about me was white, so why would I mind having a pinched nose on my face. Then he heeled my cheek again, and I thought it was to spite him that I smiled at what he’d said, but I knew even then a part of me was charmed by it. Eventually, when he got up and started to walk away, I tried to spit on his heels, and then I called him poor for the first time in our lives. This was me and my brother Luthando.