The Reactive Page 9

  Masks, Ruan announces to us, dragging the word in a drawl through each syllable. Cissie and I watch him from the other side of her coffee table. We’re inside the following day, just a minute after noon, and Ruan’s voice sounds weak but determined.

  Just because some people wear a mask, he says, that doesn’t mean they’ve done something wrong.

  Cissie and I nod.

  Ruan sits across from us, printing out three paper masks for us to use.

  It’s been about forty-eight hours since we took the client’s money, and now we’re back at West Ridge Heights, again, watching as the sun slides itself past Cissie’s living-room windows, throwing its rays across Cape Town’s countless bricks and bonnets. With the weary ghosts of Newlands still keeping vigil in their comatose gardens—only now, according to Cissie, beginning to smell our wealth inside her cream-colored building— we pass around her kitchen scissors and knit together links of rubber bands, and then we pull our paper sheets over our faces and turn into people more important than we are. I guess this is what we’re doing instead of discussing the client, and instead of discussing Sylvia, Cissie’s aunt, whose body gets flown out in a pine box to Joburg today.

  Cissie opens the biggest window in her living room and sighs. It’s hot all over Cape Town today, she says.

  I nod. You can feel the heat bouncing off the walls and sinking into the sectional couch, and when we get up and walk around the flat, we have everything off but our underwear. The way we drink, also, is by putting everything into Cissie’s freezer: as soon as we’ve finished one bottle, we replace it with a full bottle of something else. We’ve left multicolored stains all over the kitchen floor.

  In the living room, Ruan passes me another bottle of champagne and I take a deep swig. Then he stands up to tell us who he is today.

  I guess this is how it sometimes starts with us. We have these games we waste our lives on just like everyone else, and today, Ruan’s up first and he tells us we should call him the country of Zimbabwe. The way he’s standing in front of me and Cecelia, we’re both sitting still on the leather sectional, and we’re looking at the Robert Mugabe scowl pressed against his face. The gray printout hangs over his Adam’s apple, a contrast to his wide, pale shoulders, and the way it’s pulled back against his face, it looks like the beginning of a grimace, or like someone about to laugh. Then Ruan tells us he has thirteen million people inside of him, and lying down he’s four hundred thousand square kilometers wide, and the way his pockets are set up, only seventy percent of his people live under the breadline.

  In response, Cissie and I clap for him.

  Then Cissie hands me the bottle of champagne and gets up from the couch in a white bra and boy shorts. She fixes Charles Taylor with rubber bands around her face, and tells us she’s a hundred thousand square kilometers in size. Then she says she only has three million people living inside of her, and that the way her pockets are set up, only eighty percent of them live under the breadline. When Cissie’s done, she drops herself next to me on the sectional couch, and I hand her the bottle of champagne.

  Then I get up in front of them for my turn at the game.

  I’m in my boxers, with a picture of Joseph Kabila on my face, and what I tell my friends is that overall, I’m two million square kilometers in size. I tell them that I’ve got sixty million people living inside of me, and the way my pockets are set up, only seventy percent of them live under my breadline. Then Cissie reaches over and I take the champagne from her and sit back down.

  The three of us lie on the sofa and drink a while.

  What if we had more money than any of the people in those countries? Cissie says. Or more money than their presidents.

  Ruan lights a filter and shakes his head. I don’t know about the presidents, he says.

  Definitely not the presidents, I say. I get up for another bottle of champagne.

  Then Cissie says, what if? She says, you know when people say the people? I always think presidents are what they mean when they say the people.

  Explain, Ruan says.

  I hand Cissie the bottle and she says, well, think about this. You remember about South Africa’s first decade, right, from 1990? For years, South Africa was basically this one man. People used to call him uTata we Sizwe, the father of the nation.

  I tell Cissie, sure. I remember this.

  Then she says, that’s around the same time we were born, right, as citizens? She says, so we all shared a father in that sense, didn’t we?

  Shared, Ruan says. What do you mean?

  Cissie laughs. Okay, she says. I mean, sure, it’s easy to dismiss the whole thing as some bullshit nationalism thing, isn’t it? I get it, but that isn’t my point. I think my point is more like, on a physical and cultural basis, we were all him, you know, we were all this one man from the island. Cissie asks if we understand her.

  I tell her that I think I do. Or sometimes I think I do. Then I close my eyes and see myself back at the beach in Blouberg again. Falling back on the sectional couch, I watch as the ocean laps the quartz in the sand, the water rushing into Cissie’s living room from every angle. From his side of the table, Ruan leans over his computer and his body divides into three bloodless sections. The light begins to intensify inside the living room, the Industrial flushing its final hum through my blood vessels, and I watch Cissie for a long time as she nods. Then I get up to get more champagne for the three of us, and when I return, Cissie says we should all get one big house. Sitting on the sectional couch, and with her head glowing like a child’s crude drawing of the sun, with each light ray pushing out of her head in a thick, flat vector, she says to me, let’s grow to be more than two million square kilometers in size. I nod and close my eyes against the glare, and for a long time, as I hear Cissie’s voice expanding inside my head, the feeling I get, sitting here on her living-room floor, isn’t about my uncle or Du Noon, it isn’t about my sickness or my job. Instead, it’s about the three of us sitting together in her flat in Newlands, the three of us knitting our fingers together, me, Ruan and Cecelia, closing our eyes and becoming one big house.

  THIRD PART

  Now here I am, sitting with luthando, my dead brother, and we’re smoking cigarettes and drinking gin out of a tin can. The field in front of us keeps bursting into flames, but this is only happening inside my head, said our pastor, Mr. Pukwana, when my mother took me to him after service. When I blink, the fire disappears, and then Luthando says to me, Nathi, all you do is read books. I put the smoke out on the grass and say, my girlfriend said she hates violence. My brother ignores me. Her parents are rich, he says, why does she hate them so much? They aren’t rich, I tell him. They just work for the homeland government. I tell Luthando I would hate them, too, if they were mine, and this makes him scoff. There’s something wrong with you, Nathi, he says. I heard your mother say they’re taking you to a doctor. I don’t say anything back. The time right now is close to midnight, and we’re at a park just a block from my house. Luthando takes out his okapi and, placing it flat against my neck, he says, let me kill you first. Then the world is black again, and my mind thrums like it does whenever I’m at my desk at school; whenever my eyes glide over the floor and I imagine meteoroids crashing through Mr. Peter’s gabled roof. I breathe out smoke and cough until my eyes water. Then Luthando laughs and takes my notebook from me. I watch him running down the street. He shouts, why do you always make me so violent in your stories? Then he jumps into a cone of orange streetlight and, tapping his heels together like an actor from a musical, he says, I never killed anyone.

  For a long time, I never thought about him, my dead brother. Luthando had passed away from us, had become another limb my family had to cut off and bury. I already knew how people could die. My grandmother’s death had taught me that while I was still a junior in high school, and there’d also been the case of Bra Ishaak, just a few years before. We were only children when we first watched him fall on his face on a dry bed of paving gravel, his heels knocking toge
ther while he foamed a wild ribbon of saliva at the mouth. That was outside the Wendy flat at my grandmother’s house, eQokolweni. He was an epileptic and the only Muslim in our family, an uncle I knew mostly from his ample and wet kisses, before my aunt—now also a skinless outline melting into the soil—found him hanging from the rafters of the chicken shed.

  We wake up early and finish the rest of the champagne. Ruan prepares a tube of Industrial for us to use and we spend the next few hours weaving in and out of consciousness. It’s a peaceful state: my thoughts meander over a dullness settled in my body. I can no longer tell what part of the day it is, or how long we’ve been sitting here at West Ridge Heights, waiting to hear from our client. Leaning back on the couch, I realize that my uncle has become a distant echo. I don’t know where my cellphone is.

  How many times do you think you’ve been inside a supermarket? Cissie says. I want you to answer me honestly. Think of this as your final Last Life question.

  I don’t know, I say. I used to have a job in one.

  I remember this one afternoon when I still worked a till at the Spar in Rondebosch East. I’d taken a job there the previous summer, ringing up groceries and saving money for my first tubes of Industrial, and to supplement the rent for my new place in Obs. I only had three days a week, and nothing much had been happening that afternoon, a Thursday, except maybe for my walking away early from my shift.

  We were in Ruan’s living room, and Cissie was telling me that maybe he was right. This was the same Ruan who, with two cigarettes in his mouth, would tell you that every day the tobacco industry recruits three thousand new smokers to compensate for the ones it kills; the same Ruan who, without taking his eyes off his computer screen, would tell you that in some Asian country, seven hundred kids fell into a seizure after watching an animation program with bad lighting techniques.

  He was now right.

  Maybe my job is one of the most dangerous ones around, Cissie said, before sinking the bottleneck of beer between her lips.

  The two of us were watching an old werewolf movie on mute. Cissie said she could stomach the gore, but it was really the screaming that got to her. Personally, I thought the silence was because she was trying to get closer to Zanele, her new deaf pupil at the daycare. Her job that she all of a sudden hated so much.

  From somewhere upstairs, Ruan laughed. He was over downloading, he said, and had now taken to uploading parts of his soul to cyberspace.

  In the lounge, Cissie took another sip.

  Something else about her back then was that she always wore long-sleeved sweaters. Cissie had these bad rashes, and her arms gave her away as a human zebra with all that scar tissue. When she lifted her bottle, one of these scars looked at me, and she said, today, one of my kids swallowed a cup of detergent. Can you believe that? It had to be Zanele, of course. Joy and I had to call an ambulance out to Mowbray for her.

  Then Cissie told me that Zanele’s name meant that her parents had had enough girls.

  Can you imagine that? she said.

  I could, but the two of us didn’t say much afterwards. We sat side by side for the rest of the afternoon, watching werewolves leap across courtyards in a foreign city. Later, when Ruan came downstairs, he was dressed in his boxers, a shirt and his ugly, badly made tie. He had his computer under one arm, its cords leading all the way to the room upstairs; and standing at the foot of the staircase, he told us, salvation.

  Cissie drank her beer and Ruan asked me to imagine my entire being reduced to the size of an electron, living free in the vastness of cyberspace.

  I decided to let my friends in on a bit more detail about myself. I told them that, apart from being numbed daily from the waist down by spending eight hours packing people’s groceries, I also committed genocidal murder. I told them it didn’t matter what they looked like or who they were, whether they greeted or not. I killed them without accounting for difference.

  Cissie remained silent. Ruan typed on his computer and swiveled the screen so I could read it. It said, make the choice to transmute: discard all desire for a better prison.

  Then Cissie finished her beer and reached for mine on the coffee table. She nodded and told me to go on.

  I did. I told them that once, this lady had forgotten that I’d given her her change. She’d had an outburst at my station, and in response I’d stuffed her baby’s leg down her throat. This was my third hour at work, I said, and I had twenty-five casualties and counting.

  On the TV screen the credits for the werewolf movie rolled, revealing true identities as they emerged from the horizon of a nightmare, and Ruan typed on his computer again. He swivelled the screen and this time it said, forgo the desire for permanence: locate the ending in all experience.

  For a while, Cissie and I listened to the patter of his keyboard. Then I told them I couldn’t live like that anymore. I told them there was only one way to end it and Cissie looked at me through an empty beer bottle and asked me how; and that’s when I told her I was the next casualty.

  Once, Ruan says to us now, in Cissie’s living room, and Cissie and I both nod. It’s a good answer, I tell him, and he grins before he starts to yawn.

  Once, he says, because he hasn’t found an exit, yet.

  Cissie and I agree.

  Maybe we were never meant to, Cissie says.

  In response, Ruan shrugs. Then Cissie gets up to switch on her TV. It’s this old black and white unit, and Ruan and I sit back, watching her as she flips through its channels.

  Part of the appeal of television, Ruan says, is that it arrived to our marketplace with a limited range for choice. It was possible to feel absolved in taking in its misinformation, he says, because the communication was always one-sided.

  On the TV screen now, advertisements roll out the reverse images of people who smile back at us, while exploding angelic-chorus slogans narrate their thirty-second lives into acne cream, nationalism, and McDonald’s.

  In between, Cissie changes the channel and it’s the parliament broadcast.

  In between, Cissie changes the channel and it’s the Christian network.

  I rub my eyes and lean back.

  I believe insanity is a different way of thinking caused by exposure to pollution as a child, Ruan says. Then he looks up at the TV and back at me.

  He says, I know what you’re thinking.

  What?

  That the Americans didn’t land on the moon. That the “Star-Spangled Banner” is stuck atop the tower of Babel.

  I don’t say anything to him. I lay my head on the sofa and close my eyes.

  In the spring of 1979, Ruan says, an Israeli atomic bomb was detonated a thousand kilometers off the coast of Cape Town, and not long after that, a satellite detected the double flash between the Prince Edward and Crozet Islands. Later, the Israeli government denied the existence of the explosion and attributed the flash to a fault in the satellite’s mapping system, and maybe, Ruan says to us, this means we’ve all lived through a nuclear apocalypse.

  Listening to him, I think of the ocean, again. The first time I heard of the open sea was when my uncle squeezed my head between his palms and lifted me up to get a view of the shoreline from my grandmother’s village, which I never saw, but succeeded in instilling in me the idea that the natural world was without borders.

  Later, after a day of stoning crabs and using the clay on the river bank to mold sculptures of my grandmother’s cattle, Bra Ishaak cautioned us against killing living creatures for sport, warning us that at night we would be visited by the forebears of these crabs, who would knock on our doors with bodies as tall as men.

  Maybe they were Ruan’s survivors, too.

  Lying on the sofa, I open my eyes again and wait for them to regain their focus.

  Then Cissie turns off the TV.

  The three of us take more khat. The hours start slipping over and through us again, and two days later, when a humid Thursday settles over Newlands, we receive a phone call from our client. He tells Ruan to put hi
s voice on the loud speaker.

  Cissie fills a milk jug with ginger-flavored ice blocks and places it on the table top. Then the three of us edge in closer to listen.

  When Bra Ishaak hung himself, it was also a Thursday morning, back east in Uitenhage; he wore a sailor’s hat on the day he finally chose to leave us, his family, behind. People died, I decided then. I said it again years later at LT’s funeral, when the rain clouds dropped and smoked up the hillside that nursed his grave like an open wound, the mist moistening our necks and beading our sunglasses under the gray light. I said that people die. Then I cupped dirt over his door-shaped hole and picked up the shovel they gave us to bury him.

  The old-timers were the first to thread away from us, most of them silenced altogether by the business of Luthando’s death. LT was one of three recent casualties in our village, and our elders had grown concerned over this peak in numbers. Death wasn’t new to the camps, but this was still a decade before as many as thirty boys could fall in a season. They knew that Luthando had stolen into a neighbor’s ceremony, and that he hadn’t been assigned a surgeon of his own, but that there were many boys who’d won the community’s admiration for stealing into camps. It was a sport for many. Even before the legislature had reached into our village, our surgeons had seldom shared their blades between initiates. There was the mixing of blood to contend with, but it was also a point of pride for a family to hire a man with a name. No anesthetic was used on the wound, and the blood had to be stopped by palming a clutch of herbs on the cut. It needed someone quick with their hands, and with his mind set on the work, before ukhanki, the healer, would walk into a hut with less care and less pay. Our elders had always been wary of giving too much room to questions posed against their customs, but now, sitting in silence as Sis’ Funeka spoke of my brother from a raised platform, having to be helped back to her feet when she collapsed towards the end, they knew they’d have to reconsider their stance. That day, they folded their hats throughout the sermon, and pressed snuff up their noses on their way out after bending over to wash their hands free of Luthando’s spirit, emadlakeni, in a cracked white bucket.