The Reactive (16 page)

Then Ruan and Cissie look at me and I go on.

We saw him, I say, and he wanted us to give you this.

Ethelia nods. Did he say anything about coming to my aunt's?

I shake my head.

Then Ethelia looks down and nods. She starts to turn.

Wait, Cissie says, hold on. I have an idea.

She leaves the room and returns with a piece of paper and a sharpened pencil. Taking Ethelia by the hand, she leads her to the coffee table, kicking away an empty water bottle we were using for huffing. Ruan and I lean closer.

We watch them. Cissie asks Ethelia to draw a picture of the planet. It's the lesson she's used in her daycare class, the one her students couldn't get right. Ethelia takes the pencil and touches it against the foolscap.

Cissie says, imagine you're away from your aunt, and imagine you're away from West Ridge Heights. She places a hand on Ethelia's shoulder. Imagine you're away from your envelope, and away from the three of us, also.

Then, when Ethelia starts to sketch an oval shape inside the page's margins, Cissie says: imagine you're drawing a map into all of us.

In the morning, around seven, I email my landlord and tell him I want out of my twelve-month lease. I've come to accept that this has to be done. François replies that it's fine, it won't cause much hassle, he'll start showing the place to people right away. I type back, great, and leave West Ridge with Ruan and Cissie still asleep.

Down at the parking-lot gate, I wait for a car taking someone to work or school, and trail after its brake lights. Then I take a taxi along Main Road to Obs.

There was another hospital strike, our driver says when we reach the first stop in Mowbray. The passengers are packed on the seats behind him: twenty-two of us crammed in a fog of mixed perfume. The driver describes the passing of his mother-in-law, whose lungs collapsed in a Golden Arrow bus the previous morning.

That's life, the driver says, before rolling down his window.

From my seat I look out at the racing tar, at the undulating roofs of the brazen storefronts, and I remember how, in my fourth year of high school, my biology teacher took a flying class on the coast of Natal, and discovered a lesson for us in the air above Richards Bay. Her name was Mrs. Mathers, and when she returned to our class the following week, she told us how the Earth was gutted open with so many new graves for paupers, that when the clouds parted, they revealed a view from the sky that looked like a giant honeycomb. Then she watched everyone's expression. Mrs. Mathers was a part-time student of our emotional development. My classmates and I were known as the Math One class, relied upon for acuity but not much else, and we were only eighteen in number. Our teacher told us each grave was meant to contain the bodies of twenty adults.

She said to us, that is HIV.

I get off at Anzio and walk down past Lower Main. I use a round black tag to get inside my building, walk up two flights of stairs and let myself into my flat. The place feels like a storage room. It's dead still and airless. I open a window and drop myself on the bed.

Then I try to doze off and fail.

I peel my phone from my pocket and hold it in my palm. It's open on the text messenger. I remember Bhut' Vuyo's first message to me.

Lindanathi, you've come of age, it said.

It's been almost ten years. That's how long Luthando's been turning into powder inside the Earth. I rub my hand over my face and spend another minute looking at my cellphone. Then I close my eyes and try for sleep again, but nothing comes.

Later, when I try to use the toilet, I get the same feeling. Nothing makes its way out of me as I squat over the porcelain, and I feel time slowing down again. I lift the cistern lid and pull on the lever to flush. Then I walk back to the kitchen and drink a glass of water with ice. In the end, I manage to get two hours of sleep.

Waking up again, I text Cecelia, asking her if she wants anything. I've accepted I'll have to give most of my belongings away.

I wait, but there's no reply, so I turn my computer on. Then I get up from my desk and walk over to the lav again to take a leak. You've never been happy here, I say, observing myself in the speckled mirror. Then I light a cigarette and try to do the dishes, but my hands start trembling. I drain the water and make a cup of tea instead.

Sitting back at my desk, I click on a button that sends the browser to my blog. There's a draft of a post I wrote more than a week ago. I read through it again from the top. This is how it goes:

Last night I projected myself out of my body, going through more loops than is usual for me. I've forgotten the first loop, which is common. The second one took place at a party somewhere. No one seemed impressed by my ability to fly for short amounts of time, or to jump really high above the ground. Flying feels like trying to stay awake when you're extremely tired and half-asleep. I discovered fear is what inhibits flight. I was an artist in the second loop and met another artist. He held my face and looked into my eyes and said, yes, it's true, you're dreaming. He was impressed. He talked about it at length. This made me too aware of being in a loop, however, and the loop disintegrated and I found myself at my father's house. There was a man pacing in the backyard; when I followed him, he dug a hole in the ground and disappeared. I became aware of dreaming again, and feeling exhausted. I tested myself by jumping over a heap of sharp rocks. Then I tried to pull a spider towards me with my mind. It moved, but it could've been the wind. Eventually, I heard a voice telling me it was fine, that I could still do it. I felt relief, but at the same time fear because I wouldn't be able to do it again. I was struck by the idea of being in what you know is a dream, but without capabilities, with a fragmented memory and an unstable reality. I thought maybe this is what schizophrenia is. I didn't remember having taken off my shirt, but I was topless. I'd had enough, but I couldn't will myself to wake up and this made me panic. Then I found the shirt in front of the house, and as I picked it up and turned around, that's when I woke up to now, in bed, my heart beating fast. I recognized this as reality because of the new weight I felt coursing through me, my body recognizing the Earth's gravitational field. Then I opened my eyes to find everything in place.

My blog has no audience and I've never shared a link for the purpose of gaining one. I scroll back up and click on the publish button.

Then my intercom goes off. I can't stand the sound it makes, so I rush over to it whenever it clangs. I stub my toe on the way to the door.

It's a guy from the courier: I have your delivery, he says.

I put on a pair of slops and walk out of the door, and, as I'm turning the key, I get a text from Cissie saying they just got up half-an-hour ago: they're waiting for a taxi along Main Road. Ruan's walking her to work. I text back saying, all right, and that I've just received the pill package. Cissie says to meet them in Mowbray with the box.

I won't go in today, she says. I'll just tell Lauren I'm taking my leave.

I meet the delivery man downstairs. He's this older guy, a Shona man, he tells me, and I nod. He's Zimbabwean the way Ruan's grandparents used to be Rhodesian, I think. He gives me a pen and I scrawl my name across his clipboard.

Then I take the box back upstairs, drop it on my bed and take off my clothes. I try to do push-ups on the concrete floor, but stop when I reach eleven, feeling my heart race and my muscles wither from my skeleton.

In the shower, the water comes out warm, and more than once I hear the copper pipes groaning like they're being pulled apart from opposite ends. Then I close my eyes and listen to the water smacking the tiles between my feet. I try to disappear into the patter until the water runs cold on my skin. This will be my last shower here.

Twenty minutes later, I meet Cissie and Ruan outside Cissie's place of work, her daycare center in Mowbray. Cissie says she's collected two weeks of holiday; that they have a new girl to make up the gap. I tell them I have the pills inside my bag. We buy bottled water at the nearby KFC and break a stem of khat at a rounded corner table. Then the three of us take one of the taxis heading from Wynberg to town.

In half an hour, we reach the taxi rank. Our driver backs into the bay marked for Wynberg and we get out and walk past a row of Cell C containers into Cape Town Station. I tell Ruan and Cecelia about my uncle Bhut' Vuyo, and how he's hatched a harebrained plan to see me today. I say this slowly, to make the two of them laugh, and then I shrug. I tell them I won't be long. I don't mention I've made no plans to return to the city.

We find the new public rest rooms, smelling like a heap of feces coated in disinfectant, and Cissie waits outside while Ruan and I take the last stall in the men's.

We've always broken the seals on these boxes together. Today will mark the last occasion. Ruan and I split the package of ARVs between us and then flush the toilet. The boom of the train announcer wraps around my head as we walk out, and for a moment, everyone on the buffed floor seems to stop and glance up at us. I pause, but then decide it doesn't matter either way.

We say goodbye on Adderley Street. Ruan and Cissie want to get Ruan's things from his uncle's firm, so they cross over to the Absa ATM while I walk up towards the Grand Parade. The sun feels noncommittal in its bond to our planet today, spilling out light as gray as bath water. On Strand, I cut through the bus depot, skipping in front of a Golden Arrow bus grunting towards Atlantis. Further down, I walk past a vegetable stall, a hairdresser's tent, and a medicine stand displaying a large plant bulb and bottles of herbal tonic. I climb up the steel staircase that leads back to the taxi rank. It's the longer route, which allows me to take down a smoke on the way. I buy my third cigarette on the platform, a Stuyvesant red, from a wrinkled woman wearing a blue
doek.
She sells Cadbury éclairs and flavored water. Next to her, a muscular man in shades and a pea coat leans up against a sooty column, holding a hot Sony Ericsson phone. It's still on and he's hawking it for a grand, he says. I pay the woman and walk past them, looking for a taxi headed up the West Coast. Eventually, I find one headed for Parklands, which goes past Table View. It's a red Caravelle, and I settle myself in the back seat, my head leaning up against the window. I take out my cellphone and wait for the taxi to fill up. Usually they take a while.

Eventually, a girl with red-tinted hair, wearing a green gym tunic, takes the seat in front of me, filling up the passenger count. I hear the music thumping into her skull from her headphones, a kwaito artist, famous for being a minor and beating a drug case.
We no longer sleep,
he sings, as the taxi grumbles to life around us.
We no longer sleep,
he repeats, when we start out of the taxi rank. We pass the vendors with their Niknaks and Nollywood rugs, squeezing ourselves between more taxis streaming in from Victoria Road. Then I hear him for the last time.
We no longer sleep,
he sings, as we turn into Christiaan Barnard and the roof of the Good Hope Center reveals itself, rising like a dull and blind observatory on our right.

In the end, I guess I was never cut out to be a journalist. During my second year at university, I took an assignment to interview a pop star for my final-term project. The man was part of what was being called a revival in indigenous Venda music, and I wanted to ask him about its representation in the papers. I found the coverage of the band exploitative, but my saying so didn't go down well with the singer. We fumbled our way through my introduction of this angle, before he caught on that I wasn't altogether worth his time. He looked at his wristwatch a few times and asked me for my age. It was clear that I had no inclination towards his music, he said, and perhaps no inclination towards music at all. No soul, he later improvised, when we were both loosened up by our first tray of gin. He fell silent and I followed his gaze out to the main road. It was a bright, sunlit Tuesday afternoon, and cars were driving past with their windows down, hurling snatches of summer anthems into the heat. We were sitting in a café in Rondebosch, full of North Americans, caffeine and the smell of chocolate brownies. He was struggling to log onto the network. Our second drinks had arrived and the alcohol was touching my head.

I felt my interest piqued at the mention of metaphysics. I asked him if the soul was important to Venda culture, and if he knew anyone else like me who didn't have one. He looked across the table at me with the combination of irritation and disgust I'd come to expect from older men in the field. I thought he would get up and walk out, but when I offered him another drink, he accepted. We had the third round in silence and later, outside the café, we shook hands and I gave him directions to the V&A Waterfront, where he wanted to buy clothes from a Gap and Fabiani sale. We parted after that, and I walked back to campus. Then I realized I hadn't managed to switch my recorder on for the interview.

In bed, later that week, I couldn't recall any of his songs by name, and a day after that I decided to deregister from my degree. It wasn't how I was meant to meet the world. On campus, the curriculum advisor, a loud, jovial American man who wore glasses and had a tight white ponytail, asked me to state my reasons. I told him I liked reading, but had no interest in writing. I wanted a career without people skills, I joked, but he didn't laugh. He looked at a copy of my matric results, achieved at a stern boarding school in Natal where there had been nothing else to do but study, and he shouted: science.

Our driver shifts his stick down and changes lanes towards Civic. We pass Old Marine Drive before we swerve into an Engen to fill up with gas. Two petrol attendants walk up to the driver and offer to shake his hand. Ta T-Man, both of them say,
hoezit, groot-man?
The driver nods, handing each a twenty-rand note with the shake. I sit and watch them as they talk. Then I get a text from Cissie telling me Ruan managed to avoid his uncle at the firm. The driver rolls up his window, after that, and we pull off again, on our way to Du Noon.