This morning, when I opened my eyes, I found another warm Saturday wrapping itself around the peninsula. Someone had left Cissie’s living-room window open again, the one on the east-facing wall, above the copy of Rothko’s No. 4 that she’d painted for the three of us last week. Standing there in front of the glass, I couldn’t tell you which one of us had left the window open, only that when I heard the wind blowing under the wooden sash again, I felt I was on my own here. There was a blanket of smog stretching itself thick over the rim of the metropolis, and everything looked inflated and exhausted all at once. I remembered all the different things inside this city, and how they changed the moment you got used to them. Then I remembered myself, too.
I closed the window after that, and soon my eyes followed.
Now it’s a little later. Outside, the sky seems geared up for another humid weekend over the city, another three days of trees at war with their roots, and of dirty window panes getting stripped clean by the late winter rain.
I take a shallow breath.
Then cough.
Where I am right now is Newlands. I’m over at Cecelia’s place, and I suppose the situation is easy enough to explain. It’s still a long stretch of time before I die, but only three short hours since I received the message from my uncle, and everything’s happening the way it usually does between me and my friends. Like always, the three of us—that’s me, Ruan and Cecelia— we wake up some time before noon and take two Ibuprofens each. Then we go back to sleep, wake up an hour later, and take another two from the 800-milligram pack. Then Cissie turns on the stove to cook up a batch of glue, and the three of us wander around mutely after that, digging the sleep out of our eyes and caroming off each other’s limbs. We drift through whatever passes for early afternoon here at Cissie’s place.
This morning, I find my skin mottled with goose-flesh. I’m standing with one foot on cold chipped tile and the other on wet concrete. I’m yawning, still wiping stray motes from my eyes, and in a way, I guess these motes might be tears, but that’s also me having my eyelids closed against that idea. That’s also me not wanting to find out.
Now I open them again.
I’m always the last to walk out of Cissie’s bathroom. Today, since the pedal on her flapper bin’s broken, I leave a string of dental floss floating inside the toilet bowl. I find Ruan watching her from the other end of the kitchen, lighting up incense sticks and placing them flat on the kitchen counter. He’s trying to cover up the smell of glue wafting from the oven.
Most of the walls are stained here, by the way, and the floors are cracked, too. This isn’t Cissie’s doing, only the nature of her building. It’s what makes it affordable for her to rent a flat in this area. Once, when I was sitting on my own on her couch, sober but I guess still half-asleep, I’d tried to count the cracks I could find in her floor-boards. They reminded me then of Sis’ Funeka’s smile in the days before we’d buried her, and, in a way, I guess they still do. My aunt refused to look at me after Luthando was gone, and though I never attended her funeral, I was told she mistook me for him on her hospital bed. I thought I was lucky, back then, to have escaped the insight of her dementia. Maybe she would’ve pointed me out as the one who’d killed him. Instead, I’m here.
Hung over in Newlands, six foot two, bone-thin, soaked through and dripping pipe-rusted water all over Cissie’s threshold. In the kitchen, Cissie has the only dry towel in the flat wrapped around her waist. I look in from the door. Then cough loud enough to annoy her.
Really, I say, Cecelia, tell me this isn’t typical.
Standing by the stove, Cissie doesn’t answer me. Instead, she starts laughing. Or she scoffs, rather. Which is what Cecelia does these days. She scoffs.
I watch her take her time as she turns around, and when she’s done with that, with giving me and Ruan her performance, she throws me a tattered dishcloth to dry myself off with. Even though it’s stupid of me to catch it, that’s what I do, and before I can say anything in protest, she tells me to look at what she’s busy doing. I look up and Cecelia waves at me.
Dude, she says, can’t you see I’m being a breadwinner here? I’m the only one who pays the rent on time on the fourth floor of this damn building. Can’t you see that?
In response, I sigh. Then, since she’s right, I nod.
I dry my neck and behind my ears. In the bathroom again, I pull on a pair of shorts and find a dry shirt in the hamper. It belongs to her, but it used to be mine, so I put it on. I pat my hair with the dishcloth and hang it on the shower rail to dry. Then I walk around her and open the kitchen windows for air. I’m sure we all need that by now.
I unbolt each latch on the front door and step out onto the balcony. Leaning back against the railing, I breathe out and watch Cissie wiping her brow with a sigh. She gathers the brown goo in the pot with a small wooden spoon and lets it drip slowly into the pit of a yellow bowl. I stand there and she stands there. We stare at each other for a while.
I guess this is how everything moves today. It’s like riding on the back of a large, dying mammal. It matches the tepid warmth, and I close my eyes against it. I try not to think about Bhut’ Vuyo’s message. I try not to think about everything I’ve had to put away about Luthando, my dead brother, in the days that have grown out into years between us. Instead, I think about how it’s the weekend, again. It’s the weekend, and this is what the three of us do on days like today.
Sitting cross-legged in the living room, Ruan opens his laptop and starts up the printer on Cissie’s coffee table. He feeds paper into the machine and watches as the computer boots up with its usual noise. I suppose you could call this our operation, our way of making a little extra in this place, here in Cape Town, where we are.
To understand it better, you’d have to meet Cecelia.
Cissie’s our resident chemist here at West Ridge. She’s in charge of cooking the glue we use to hang up our posters; and in order to make it the way Cissie does, you need flour, brown sugar and a small amount of vinegar. You need to pour these into a bowl, add a cup of water and mix thoroughly, making sure to squash out all the lumps from the flour. Have the oven preheated at 180°, bring the bowl to a boil, keep stirring and build up the texture. During this entire process, what helps is to be as patient and attentive as Cecelia when she’s cooking a batch. Failing that, you can at least try to be halfway as demanding as she is, and halfway for Cissie, of course, means all the way for the rest of us.
I remember how I’d been out of a job for seven months, once. I was living off the last of my severance pay when Cecelia, who’d just showered and burnt her hand on her new but broken sandwich grill, came to sit next to me on her bed and asked me if I ever considered what would really happen to me the moment I died. That’s how things were back then, about two years ago, and I suppose they aren’t that different now. It was a warm night in October. The South-Easter had descended on Cape Town to dry-clean our skins, and Cecelia, with her hair dripping and the smell of Pick n Pay conditioner fuming off her scalp, left dark spots of moisture scattered across my Jobmail paper.
I told her then how I never thought about that, how thoughts like that wouldn’t have allowed me to do what I had done.
Cissie listened with her head tilted, and took a long time before she answered me and said okay. Then she leaned into my chest and closed her eyes to fall asleep, and with everything silent and her flat feeling like an old tomb around us, I bent down to touch her on the part of her finger that was dying. With her eyes still closed, Cissie raised her hand and stuck the burnt finger inside my mouth, and sliding it slowly over my tongue, told me to suck on the skin until it came back to life.
So I did that.
I didn’t mind doing it, either.
I watch her now as she opens and closes the oven door. Cissie removes another stray braid from her face and, cupping her left palm, waves away a wisp of smoke. One of the biggest problems she has with me, she says, is that I never pay enough attention to people. Every time I offer someone a shoulder to cry on, Cissie says, my biggest concern is the snot left drying on my shirt. I’ve told her how I think that’s good, how she’s phrased that.
I remember the first time she brought it up. It had just started raining outside, and she’d got up half-naked from the mattress we three sometimes shared. It was close to midnight and the room had cloaked itself in complete darkness. I waited a while, then joined her on the wooden floor. I guess neither of us was in a rush to get up again. We took our time, sitting in silence, and the first gray light fingered its way through the slits between her blinds.
Then, before getting up to shower, I guess having proved her point through silence, Cissie said I check the time a lot when people tell me their problems. In response, I told her I’d work on it. Then I looked at my wristwatch. I guess I’m still working on it.
Even so, while I fail to live up to Cissie’s standards for human sympathy, I have a friend who’s even worse off than I am. His name is Ruan, and he loses no sleep over that sort of thing. I know this because I’ve asked him about it.
I mean really. You should hear Ruan speak.
He’s our resident printer here at West Ridge. To print out as much ink as he does, you need to buy a regular 60XL cartridge, then take it home and print until it reaches half its capacity. Then steam it open and loosen the blade above the chemical toner. Report this as a defect to the manufacturer, add an image for evidence, and print out their response to take back to the shop for a new pack. Most ink companies will corroborate your story like this by accident. Corporations lose nothing in providing customer care to a single claim from a foreign client. What helps, of course, is to know how to lie as often and as easily as Ruan does.
I watch him lean his head back on Cissie’s couch. He has a five-o’clock shadow that runs down half the length of his throat, and his Adam’s apple bobs up and down as the printer chugs, pulling in reams of paper ready for all the ink he’s defrauded from Cape Town’s shop assistants.
This makes us up as a total. You count these two and add me. We make up a team of three, and these days, if you want to know what passes for my social life, just take a look at them, at Ruan and Cecelia.
I know I haven’t said much about Ruan yet. For years now, and maybe even before that, Ruan and I have considered ourselves the closest thing we might ever get to kin. I guess that’s worked out for me in the end, and maybe for him, too, whenever it needs to. Getting to know him, what you learn first is never to believe anything he says, and what you learn second is that whenever he’s high, he’ll tell you that his first near-death experience was a download.
I’m not making that up.
Meet him and he’s probably coming down or high. The three of us don’t manage to stay in between for too long. Ruan will tell you that since he started feeding his plants with the new fertilizer he ordered online, the pigeons have been coming to his flat more than ever. If you listen to him, he’ll tell you how these birds travel all the way down from the Philippines and stop over at Maine before they circle back to his windowsill in Sea Point. When I first started to know him, Ruan and I spent a lot of time talking about these birds. He told me he was an asthmatic and introverted child, and that what he knew about bird migrations wasn’t from taking a lot of trips to the museum. He told me and Cissie how much these birds meant to him, and even though we didn’t understand, we believed him.
Then lastly, there’s me.
In case you’ve been wondering, I was also given a name. My parents got mine from a girl. My mother had a friend who almost went blind from working in a clothing factory in the seventies. They’d both been students at Lovedale College before my mother moved on to Fort Hare, and when they reunited again, years later, under the dome of an East London factory shop, the friend was mending clothes to put her daughter Lindanathi through school. I suppose that child, listless in a corner, wearing knee-length socks and wielding a bag full of textbooks, became a sign of hope for my mother. She convinced my father to give me the same name.
Lindanathi means “wait with us.” What I’m meant to be waiting for, or who I’m meant to be waiting with, I was never told.
It’s just what my name is.
I’m Nathi, and of the three of us, I’m the one who’s supposed to be dying. In order to do as much standing around as I do, you need to be one of the forty million human beings currently infected with the immunodeficiency virus. Then you need to stand at your friend’s computer and design a poster over his shoulder, one telling these people you’re here to help them. Then you need to provide them with your details—tell them you prefer email or SMS—and then start selling them your pills.
What helps, of course, is to try to forget about it as much as possible. Which is what I do.
Maybe it’s this whole slavery thing, Cissie says.
Leaning on her balcony, I try to press reply on my cellphone, but my fingers pause over the buttons. They feel like paper straws. I stare at the blinking cursor.
In the kitchen, Cissie stirs another ladle of water into the glue. This morning, her braids are rolled up in a neat ball at the top of her head, a new style the three of us have started to favor more and more for her. When she moves, a few of the strands loosen and fall like tassels across her chest, and she flicks them away from the stove in a single shake with her shoulders. Cissie has a way of making the smallest things obey her, and I guess that includes me and Ruan.
I put my cellphone away. These days, she’s always wearing a different pack of synthetic hair on her head. Sometimes the color she chooses is black, at other times it’s a blue shade, and at other times it’s this color I can’t even describe to you—like silver or aqua or teal or something. Ruan and I have seen her in the red and blonde ones a lot. Cissie wears them on her head all day and all of them, she says, are more flammable than a wick dipped in paraffin. She tells us to think of her as a human match, with a dormant fire ready to burst into flame between her brains, which is a nice way of telling people not to fuck with you. Or at least the nicest way I’ve heard.
I can feel my cellphone’s weight against my thigh. Leaning back on the railing, I push out three slow breaths for composure. Out on the balcony, the weather changes faces. Spring is stalling, still a month away, but the sun’s rays warm up my skin like geyser water. They throw dappled light across the empty corridor.
Ruan and I have been squatting here for the past few nights, somewhere between falling asleep and overdosing on Cissie’s couch. Cissie’s building, this unattractive cream-colored six-story called West Ridge Heights, was converted from an old ground-level nursing home in the late eighties. It sits tucked away in Newlands, a docile suburb, just a few streets off the main road, and it’s one of the two holes Ruan and I have chosen to call our homes, this year. Or maybe just for the winter, if you want to take Ruan’s view of things.
In any case, this is where Cissie cooks her glue for us. You take a look and the building has the usual overgrown grass, the usual stained ceilings, and the usual dirty lino in its single-lift lobby. There’s a tile missing here and there, with a broken full-length mirror and plastic potted plants leaning back in most of its corners. There isn’t much security to speak of, and below, on the ground floor, there’s a young girl who plays by herself in a small courtyard, building cities with loose pieces of concrete from the broken water fountain. I always wave at her when Ruan and I come over to crash. Often, she just looks up and stares at me with vacant eyes. Then she runs back under the awning and disappears into places I can’t imagine from up here on the fourth. In between these encounters, I’ve learned her name is Ethelia.
Inside, I hear Cissie talking again.
I’m being serious, she says. Look, just think about this thing for a moment.
I try to.
I mean, it’s pretty much a habit for us, by now. What we’re doing is having one of our talks about what to do for Last Life. Last Life is the name we’ve come up with for what happens to me during my last year on the planet. Like always, we stayed up for most of the previous night with the question. We finished the wine first. Then we moved on to the bottle of benzene.
Ruan looks up and says, dude, explain this slavery thing to me. He gets up to take a thin book from the counter and flops himself down on a torn bean-bag. Then he starts reading the book—A Happy Death by Camus—from the back, his eyes training the sentences inward, as if the French author had written a Japanese manga.
Cissie just says her word again.
Slavery.
She raises her hand and waves the gooey ladle in a small circle above the bowl.
You know what I mean, she says. The three of us, we’re basically slaves.
From my side, I remain quiet. I just watch them like I sometimes do. I mean honestly. It’s Ruan who usually brings us all this pathos.
The three of us aren’t slaves. Ruan, Cissie and I each wrote matric in the country’s first batch of Model C’s. In common, our childhoods had the boomerangs we used to throw with the neighborhood kids, the rollerblades and the green buckets of space goo. The Sticky Hands with their luminous jelly fingers, each digit rumored to be toxic, which we clotted with wet earth on the first day back from the store and threw into our green pools for cleansing. The Grow Monsters which we watched expanding inside our toilet bowls with awe, and the tracks we dug for our Micro Machines before the day ended, when the orange light would come down and tint the neighborhood roof tiles the color of a lightbulb filament.
Ease. Everything my little brother Luthando never got to have.
For all that time, I remember LT topless in denim shorts and wearing a thin silver chain. Luthando played marbles, that’s what he knew most of all to do with his hands. My brother wasn’t tough, but he fancied himself a township ou. I remember how he didn’t know what a spinning top was before I gave him mine. We used the laces from his Chuck Taylors to spin it, and later that night, I was quiet when he refused to drink the water my mother poured for us at the dinner table, telling me later that he’d wanted to preserve the taste of beef in his mouth.
Inside the kitchen, Cissie tries to drive home her point. What if babies cry because birth is the first form of human incarceration? What if it’s a lasting shock to the consciousness to be imprisoned inside the human body? If the flesh is something that’s meant to go off from the beginning, doesn’t that make it an ill fit, since the consciousness, naturally amorphous, is antithetical to disintegration?
Still stirring the glue in her yellow bowl, Cissie asks if we understand.
I can’t really tell.
I don’t think LT is still around. Maybe it’s because my body’s breaking down that she’s speaking to us like this, or maybe it’s because her own body’s fading away from her. You can’t always tell with Cecelia. It could be everyone’s body that’s bothering her.
I walk back inside, anyway, and take the spoon from her. She gives me a mock head-butt with her match head, and then she sits on the counter to light up a cigarette. Sighing with relief, she closes her eyes to suck in the carcinogens.
From behind his book, Ruan tells us we aren’t selling enough pills. He places the book aside and looks up at me. Of course, this isn’t really news to us.
I tell him that my case manager said she’d give me a call. For months now, I say, my insurers, I think they’ve been holding out on me.
Ruan sits up.
Jesus, Nathi, he says, don’t tell me they’ve started reviewing your case. He pulls his computer onto his lap. Quick, dude, he says, gooi me her name and email.
This is Ruan’s solution for most of our problems. Mention something to him and he’ll ask you for a name and an email address. Right now, I shrug, since I don’t have either one.
I guess I could find out, I say.
I keep stirring.
I tell myself this is what’s important.
I wipe my brow like I’ve been watching Cissie do all morning. When I look up, I find her closing her eyes, leaning back on the kitchen counter. She blows out a pair of smoke rings. Then her hand drops to ash the last of her cigarette, and she says it again, this word she’s been using on us all morning.
Slavery.
On the bean-bag, Ruan doesn’t respond. He goes back to reading and I take out my cellphone. I plug it into the charger next to the stove, and, using my other hand to stir, I read the text message from my uncle.
Lindanathi, my uncle Bhut’ Vuyo says, ukhulile ngoku, you’ve come of age.
He tells me I haven’t been seen in too long. I read this second line for a while before I delete the message.
Returning to the glue, the relief I expect to wash over me doesn’t arrive. Instead, I think of each word I’ve read off the screen. I think of coming of age in the way Bhut’ Vuyo means. Then I think of my last night in Du Noon, and about those two words, ukhulile ngoku, and of coming of age once more.
My case manager calls my cellphone close to an hour later. We’ve put away Cissie’s cooked glue in plastic containers to cool off in the freezer, and we’ve taken up our noses what’s left of the tube of industrial-strength glue she keeps in her drawer. It’s now just a little after one, and we’re sprawled sideways across Cissie’s living-room floor, our lungs full of warmth from n-hexane. When I don’t pick up and answer my case manager’s call, my cellphone seems to melt inside my palm. It’s a strange sensation, but one you get used to after a while.
With another hour passing, we watch as Ruan pulls his baseball cap over his forehead. He plays “By This River” by Brian Eno on his laptop, tapping the repeat button under the seek bar, and then the next hour arrives and Cissie hands us three Ibuprofens each. She pops them out of a new 500-milligram bubble pack, and we take them with glasses of milk and clumps of brown sugar. From where I’m sitting, I can still feel the warmth from the glue expanding through me, a thick liquid spilling out from my chest and kneading into my fingertips. The sunlight casts a wide flat beam over the coffee table, and after we’ve swallowed, we place the tumblers holding the rest of our milk between its narrow legs. I close my eyes again and hear my cellphone calling out for me. Its vibration feels like a small hand running over my thigh, and when I pick it up, my heart squeezes into itself as I think of Bhut’ Vuyo. I see Luthando’s stepfather stretching his vest under his heavy blue overalls, sitting inside a sweating phone container and hefting a fistful of change, but then I look down and the code reads 011, connecting my line to the grid in Joburg.
I place the receiver back against my ear, hearing the sound of a hundred telephones ringing in unison, and then the sound of my case manager climbing up from underneath this din, shouting at me through a deep ocean of static. The missing copper—I imagine kilometers of it stolen from our skyline each year— leaves a yawning gap of silence between our sentences, and then a big wind pushes behind her voice when she tells me about missing another meeting, how it means my insurance will have no choice but to cut me off. She tells me they haven’t received a sheet with my CD4 count for close to five months now, and that I should know better than to be this reckless with their program. I’m sitting down as I listen to this. Since I can’t do anything else, I nod at the table.
Something that’s not difficult to figure out about me and my case manager is that we’ve never gotten along. Not in any real sense of the word. I only know her as Sis’ Thobeka, never having bothered to ask her for a full name, and in my head, she’s just one of the many medical bureaucrats I’ll have to pass through on my way out. She calls me from an air-conditioned office in Joburg, and there isn’t much else to say about us. Except maybe this one time, when she took up my case about four years ago. She told me that she’d fallen into her line of work owing to a compulsion she had to assist the frail. She’d grown tired of her nursing job at Baragwanath, however, of all the men, women and children that got swept into the intensive care unit on her watch, most of them broken into soft and wet pieces.
This introduction left a reluctant mark on me. On occasion, I still think of her as existing between then and now, and of the number of people she had to witness turning into powder. Maybe this makes it easier for me to stomach her: that she has this knowledge of loss beneath the protocol. I even told her, once, how I’d got my virus by accident. I remember her silence that day. The two of us stayed on the line for a while, and in the end, she only said: okay. Then she coughed and we carried on. To this day, I doubt she thinks it prudent to believe anything I say. Not that I’d want that from her. This suits the two of us just fine.
On the line now, I tell her, okay.
Okay what?
I’ve got a meeting scheduled.
You have a meeting scheduled, she says. When is this?
It’s today.
Well, that’s good then, Lindanathi. Take yourself to that meeting today, and then fax us a proof of attendance with your CD4 count sheet. We’ve approved the latest shipment of your medications, but now you have to do your part for us and make the program work. Do you understand?
I do. I tell her that.
You have a good care package here, she tells me. Don’t let it go to waste over foolishness.
I won’t.
Right.
I tell her again that I won’t.
Look, it’s in your hands, isn’t it?
It is.
Well then, she says. We’ve added benefits for you Silver members. We could move you up in a few months’ time if you fixed up your file. We’ve had to scale back on the Platinum option, though, so I would suggest a Gold membership for now.
I nod. I can hear Sis’ Thobeka pecking on her keyboard as I consider the options. Voices murmur in her office, and I begin to drift off as she details the premiums.
She lets a minute pass in silence before she asks me if I’m doing fine in any case, if I’m okay despite everything else that’s the matter with me.
I blink, and I’m about to answer her when she says she has another call coming in. I wait for her when she tells me to wait, and I’m still doing that when her voice turns into a dial tone.
Later, when I open my eyes, I find Ruan and Cissie staring down at me. Their brows crease as they edge towards my place on the floor, their outlines melting into the walls stained and cracked behind them.
Cissie says, Nathi, are you okay?
My mouth feels blow-dried, packed thick with stiff clouds of cotton wool.
I look up and ask them the same. I say, are you okay?
In response, Cissie points a finger at her ear. Then she gets on her knees, takes my hand, and says, Nathi, your phone’s dead.
+ + +
The way I got to know them, by the way, my two closest friends here, is that we met at one of the new HIV and drug-counseling sessions cropping up all over the city. We were in the basement parking lot of the free clinic in Wynberg. The seminar room upstairs had been locked up and taped shut, there’d been a mercury spill, and our group couldn’t meet in there on account of the vapors being toxic to human tissue. Instead, they arranged us in the basement parking lot, and in two weeks we got used to not being sent upstairs for meetings. I did, in any case, and that was enough for me in the beginning.
In those days, I attended the meetings alone. I’d catch a taxi from Obs over to Wynberg for an afternoon’s worth of counseling. By the end of my first month, when the seminar room had been swept once, and then twice, and then three times by a short man who wore a blue contamination meter over his chest, each time checking out clean, everyone decided they preferred it down below, and so that’s where we stayed.
Maybe we all want to be buried here, I said.
It had been the first time I’d spoken in group. Talking always took me a while, back then, but the remark succeeded in making a few of them laugh. It won me chuckles even from the old-timers, and later, I wrote down my first addiction story to share with the group. It was from a film I saw adapted from a book I wasn’t likely to read. Ruan and Cissie arrived on the following Wednesday.
I noticed them immediately. Something seemed to draw us in from our first meeting. In the parking lot, we eyeballed each other for a while before we spoke. During the coffee break, we stood by the serving table in front of a peeling Toyota bakkie, mumbling tentatively towards each other’s profiles. I learned that Cecelia was a teacher. She pulled week-long shifts at a daycare center just off Bridge Street in Mowbray, and she was there on account of the school’s accepting its first openly positive pupil. Ruan, who was leaning against the plastic table, gulping more than sipping at the coffee in his paper cup, said that he suffocated through his life by working on the top floor of his uncle’s computer firm. He was there to shop for a social issue they could use for their corporate responsibility strategy. He called it CRS, and Cissie and I had to ask him what he meant.
In the end, I guess I was impressed. I told them how I used to be a lab assistant at Peninsula Tech, and how in a way this was part of how I’d got to be sick with what I have.
When we sat back down again, we listened to the rest of the members assess each other’s nightmares. They passed them around with a familiar casualness. Mark knew about Ronelle’s school fees, for instance, and she knew about Linette’s hepatitis, and all of us knew that Linda had developed a spate of genital warts over September. She called them water warts, when she first told us, and, like most of her symptoms, she blamed them on the rain.
That day, when the discussion turned to drug abuse, as it always did during the last half-hour of our sessions, the three of us had nothing to add. I looked over at Ruan and caught him stashing a grin behind his fist, while on my other side, Cecelia blinked up at the ceiling. I didn’t need any more evidence for our kinship.
The meeting lasted the full two hours, and when it came to an end, I collected my proof of attendance and exchanged numbers with Ruan and Cecelia. I suppose we said our goodbyes at the entrance of the parking lot that day, and later, within that same week I think, we were huffing paint thinner together in my flat in Obs.
Coming down from Industrial isn’t as easy as pulling in your first huff. It isn’t for me, and I guess it never is for my two friends, either. I’ve put the cellphone back on the charger after Sis’ Thobeka’s call and the three of us are taking turns splashing our faces with cold water from the kitchen tap. When we’re done, I remove my phone from the socket by the stove. Then Cissie bolts her door and we take the lift down to the ground floor.
The atmosphere feels warm and slippery on my skin, and my mind instructs me to glide, so I push my arms out and try to do that. I slide my fingers across the walls as we walk through the mouth of the lobby, balancing with my hands and trying not to slip, feeling as if the plastic tiles are peeling beneath my feet.
We follow Cissie across the grassy oval. Ethelia, the little girl who builds and restores peace to concrete empires, has disappeared. Her cities lie in ruin, scattered in a loose ring around the water fountain.
Cissie leads the way past the reception desk; Ruan and I take our time making it out of the front entrance. I put my one foot after the other, and begin to feel my breath heating up like a bed of coals. When I cough, it’s a noise that goes on for a while, rattling inside the numbness in my chest, but it doesn’t do much to clear it.
I take out my cellphone. I’ve decided to deposit money into Bhut’ Vuyo’s account. I ask him for his account number, but the message won’t send. It displays a red x, meaning I’m out of airtime.
We tumble forward again. Cissie buzzes the parking-lot gate open and we wend a curving path through Newlands’s leafy streets. We head down towards the main road, where we stand for a few minutes, smoking cigarettes under a bus awning and leaning our heads against a bright McDonald’s ad, balancing each other as we wait for a taxi. Ruan and Cissie keep blurring together in the small space in front of me. To pass the time, Ruan starts telling us a joke he’s lost the punch line to. We wait another two minutes before catching a taxi headed out to Wynberg.
Through the taxi window, the sky appears heavy, having grown overcast. The light bounces off the surface like a silver coin, a spill of mercury. When we pierce through Claremont’s invisible epidermis, I look down at my hands and find no blood beneath my fingernails. We slow down for an Engen garage and I raise my head again, not sure why I searched through my fingers a moment ago. The thought comes to me that Bhut’ Vuyo might still take offense to my money, whether or not I deem it clean enough for him.
For a moment, I think about that, the idea of my money. The three of us remain afloat on what’s left of the n-hexane in our blood, sitting one next to the other, two rows from the empty back seat.
The driver pulls over at the garage, and I lean forward and feel something jam inside my head. Small orange shapes burst inside the taxi, and from behind my eyelids, I envision myself laughing with Cissie and Ruan, the three of us wearing tailored suits and acting jubilantly, our fingers rolling joints from tall heaps of two-hundred-rand notes.
These days, when we run out of tubes of Industrial, Ruan and I take solace in each other’s misery on Earth, the two of us comparing comedowns as we wait for Cissie to finish her shift. We reload airtime and detail the planet’s shortcomings, never disappointing each other with news of well-being or fortune.
When we first started using, though, Ruan and I would sometimes go on runs together for Industrial. They used to offload the boxes in Epping, back then, and then transport the surplus to Bellville, where they mixed the tubes for distribution. I’d call him about a deal, and I’d say, Ruan, tell me what you think about this one. We mostly stayed in the south whenever we had enough money to buy a tube, where the cut of the glue wasn’t always guaranteed to come out potent. Still, I remember this one day, when I got a lead on a wholesaler in the north. He was a new dealer, an out-of-towner who’d taken a room at the Little House in Belhar.
When I phoned him, Ruan took a while to pick up. Then I heard him shifting his weight. I had to wait for him to finish drumming a stream of urine into the bowl.
Nooit, my friend, he said when he was done.
I heard him hanging over the basin, pushing a dispenser for soap, opening a tap.
Dude, I said, you haven’t even thought about this.
I don’t have to, he said.
I paused. Well, it’s the best lead we’ve had. I don’t want to brag about it.
He was quiet.
I tried him again. You seriously haven’t heard a thing about it?
Not a thing.
He could be an asshole sometimes.
Maybe it’s fresh, I said.
It might be fresh, he said. He agreed to that much, at least.
Listen, he said.
I listened. I heard him kick a door open, walk a short distance and settle himself in a booth. He was drinking a milkshake, I could tell. I sighed. It meant Ruan had gone through a tube of glue alone on his living-room floor, and now he was sitting up the street from his flat at The Blue China, an ice-cream bar we sometimes lumbered into after getting high. The milkshake would no doubt be a banana mint with chocolate shavings and a light sprinkle of cinnamon. I knew it well because it’s the only thing we ever ordered.
This guy has money, I said to him, still thinking it over.
Money, Ruan said.
He wanted me to hear his boredom. It was a hint to get me off the line. I heard him pull in a suck from his shake, which meant he’d already scooped the toppings off the foam with a teaspoon, and that he’d set the teaspoon on a saucer over his doubled napkin. It was a tic. Cissie and I sometimes teased him about it. We said he’d keep this up for as long as his hands were hung on the ends of his wrists, or at least until all our motor functions gave in from the glue.
Your hands are weird, I said to him, giving up.
Really?
Yes.
Really, they are. Ruan has these long thin fingers that shoot out of pale, crusted knuckles. The skin on them looks thin, almost translucent, and his palms sweat out ten liters a day.
It’s like you were something else before a person, I said.
He laughed. Dude, that’s offside.
Let’s go north, then.
Ruan laughed again. Have you talked to Cissie?
No.
You should.
Why?
I already knew why. It was a good reason, too: I didn’t think it was safe enough for her. This was before the Little House on the Prairie, an old tik den based in the south of Bellville, would get on the news, but we all knew Belhar deserved its reputation back then. Even before Mr. Big had taken over the plot on Modderdam Road, there was the story of the guy who’d walked out of the door without his hands on him, the stumps on his arms wetting the cuffs on his pants. I pressed a button and got Ruan louder on the line.
Why should I? I asked him again.
I don’t know, he said, but the damned should stick together, don’t you think?
I don’t disagree with you, I said.
We pull out of the garage. The gaartjie hangs his waist out of the window, his long tongue chafing against his cracked lips, his large voice calling out for Wynberg. He’s a young guy, tattooed and thin, weathered, like most of the gaartjies who work in the south. The glass edge eats into his stomach as we speed past Cavendish, his gold chain rattling around his neck like a piece of snapped film on a reel. This is what you do when you cast your net for the strays, his body seems to say. You push yourself out into their air and echo.
I breathe and look ahead. Ruan and Cissie tap their cellphones as our driver stops again. He scoops up another harried passenger—a woman of around sixty, wearing navy slacks and a dirty cashmere sweater—and then we stay quiet for the rest of the trip. I lean back and feel my neck, moist and cold, pressing hard against the taxi’s torn plastic seating.
We score a lot of our customers at group meetings for the HI Virus here in Cape Town. We’ve been to meetings as far out as Hout Bay, too, to Khayelitsha, Langa and Bellville. We’ve been to two or three in Paarl, and once, when we hitched the twelve o’clock train from Rondebosch, we went out to Simon’s Town. It’s part of it, to get around the way we do. We hand out pamphlets to anyone who wants to place an order. Most of our clients don’t make enough to meet the criteria needed for coverage: they come to us for a pack, or just enough to taper off an initial treatment. I like to imagine it depending on the stage of their illness, but most of it comes down to what they have in their pockets.
The taxi drops us off in Wynberg. I start looking around for a place to buy airtime, but then I realize I have no change to pay the hawkers with. My eyes drop to the thighs of the women vendors, and I begin to feel embarrassed, running my gaze over the wares on their tables. For the first time, I notice how they look like a jury, seated on a row of cracked SAB crates. The old women squint at the world through the leather of their dark, folded faces, their eyes glassy with glaucoma, each orb like a marble spinning in wet earth. Globules of sweat draw runnels down their temples, and their pulses beat together like the hearts of small mammals. Maybe they’ve heard from Bhut’ Vuyo. In front of their hunger, I pull out more lint from the recesses of my pockets. Then Cissie pulls me away.
The three of us knit our way through the stream of daytime traffic. In the sky above, the day’s gone full gray, but still holds on to an ember of its heat. Ruan and Cissie don’t say much. We share another cigarette as we weave through the shoppers, hawkers and gaartjies. Then we turn down a one-way that leads us to the clinic.
The clinic is this white building with a low green fence and a face-brick finish. Ruan and Cissie walk around the boom gate and I follow a step behind. We make our way down to the basement, where they’ve added extra light fixtures to the ceiling. It surprises me, to see how much brighter the place looks. They’ve painted the walls, and my vision takes a moment to adjust.
We take our seats on plastic chairs set up in a circle in the middle of the space, waiting for the session to begin. Mary, our red-haired counselor, sits on a plastic chair opposite the three of us, a halo from the fluorescents sketching a delicate crown around her Technicolor bob.
I close my eyes for a while.
Sitting in group, everything bears a trace of what you’ve seen before. I remember how once, when we were ten years old, my brother and I visited my grand-aunt in King William’s Town. It was summer, and one Saturday morning we stole out to Candies and Novelties, a small store hidden behind the town’s post office. We were looking for firecrackers. For most of that summer, my brother and I had scoured the town to find thick black widows we could stuff into Cherry Coke cans. We had a plan to set them up as booby traps for the town pigeons.
Inside the store, we spent some time in front of the shop counter, smudging it with fingerprints as we ogled the TV-game cartridges on display. Then we went up and down the aisles, drinking in all the toys we could never afford.
Luthando and I took two different aisles at a time, heading out in opposite directions, and it wasn’t long before a woman who looked like Mary called out to us. She had Mary’s skin and hair. When she demanded to know what we wanted, we told her we were just browsing, and she said we could do that from outside.
I was used to it and said nothing, but after we left, Luthando wanted to go back inside and spit on her forehead. It was pale and as large as a bed sheet, he told me, and I laughed, but I stopped him. I’d been warned by my mother. We were to act like visitors in my grand-aunt’s town.
Cissie touches my knee and shakes me awake. When I open my eyes, I find Neil talking to his feet. My mouth feels scorched and my hands are damp. I crane my neck to take a better look at him.
With Neil, I guess there isn’t much to say. He’s a former math teacher from a gated estate in Westlake. He’s been divorced twice and has rails on both of his arms, the result of a heroin habit that followed from years of blow. He taught private school for thirteen years, he says, and maybe that’s the reason no one likes him here. I’ve heard some of the older members say he won’t make it through the year, and if you look at him, that isn’t hard to believe. This comes from the old users, mostly. Guys from a clinic in Diep River, and one from Strand. They look at him and shake their heads.
Today, Neil’s dressed in a short-sleeved flannel shirt tucked into a pair of pressed chinos. He’s a thin guy, with a gnawed coat-hanger for a frame, and his hair is dark and matted, hanging low enough to touch his shoulders. He’s wearing a crucifix around his neck, and above it a pair of broad-framed glasses, each lens flashing under the basement’s new fluorescent lights.
Like most addicts, Neil has an excuse for each time he feels his life cracking open. Today, he wants a mass deportation of all the illegal immigrants in Cape Town. We should start off with the Nigerians, he tells us, and follow it up with the Somalis.
I look over and find Cissie rolling her eyes.
Out of the three of us, Cissie’s the one Neil bores the most. I remember how she once asked us why he didn’t just get HIV already. Maybe it was an awful thing to say, but Ruan and I laughed because it was true. Even though Neil’s a serf in his community, he’s a nobleman in ours. We could’ve pulled a lot of money out of him.
Neil has these long, bony hands that flop around him when he speaks, and today, he has one of them girded in a bright spotted bandage. He waves it and tells us he cut himself with a lolly—an old glass pipe he’s never changed since buying his first straw—and that he passed out on his kitchen floor. Raising his other hand, he tells us he’s managed to keep away from the ice this week.
Then Mary thanks him and the rest of us nod.
I guess this isn’t really dramatic.
If anything, Neil’s brought our drug talk forward by an hour and a half, and when Olive stands up to speak next, it seems this trend might persist for the rest of our session.
Olive suffers from an undiagnosed respiratory obstruction, and on occasion it clogs the walls of her larynx, causing her breath to make a racket on its way out. I can hear the air pushing out from her throat, a wheeze that reaches me from six members away. Maybe it’s a song, a whistle of the damage she carries inside her, or maybe it’s just human wear: the kind we all have, waiting to waylay us.
Like most places filled with the sick and the dying, there’s always an opportunity to learn something about being a person here. Our parking lot turns into an academy at times, and we get educated on the survival of people like Leonardo and people like Linette, on people like Neil and people like Olive. Maybe it’s best for me to forget my own troubles and grow a greater sympathy for others. Like Cecelia, this could be what Bhut’ Vuyo wants from me.
During my time here, I’ve learned everything there is to know about Olive. Her last name is De Villiers, and she was born to pious Presbyterians, a young couple rooted in a community church in Maitland. Her family clipped its extensions to preserve its piety, and as an only child, Olive grew up with an urgent need to see other people. Her teenage years were split between Hanover and Grassy Park, and she says she watched her friends breathing out thick white plumes for years before she joined them at sixteen. She’s a single mother now, headed towards the end of her thirties, and she has the kind of hard but pleasant face you often see in women from the Flats. She works as a soup-kitchen cook at a backyard orphanage in Lavender Hill, and when she stands up to talk, every story she tells us circles the same subject. It’s about her struggle to form a relationship with Emile, her son and only child.
He’s just a child, she says. I know, I know, but he’s starting to make out that everything I do is a gemors. I can sommer hear it in the way the child speaks to me when I visit my parents and they have people over.
Olive’s dressed in black today. She has on a ribbed polo-neck sweater and a sea-colored doek that holds her dreadlocks in a neat parting. Her hair’s pushed back into two thick columns that fall away in rolling curves behind her ears, and her dreadlocks are tinted a color that, depending on the kind of day you’re having, reminds you of either sunset or rust.
Today, I can’t help it.
I fill up with an image of bursting pipes.
Inside my pocket, I release my cellphone. Then I knead my knuckles and crack them. I decide to circle my thoughts around
Olive.
The worst day she ever had as a user, she’s told us, began when she forgot her son’s name. She tried to ask him for it, putting on a wide smile to throw him off guard, but she could tell he knew. Olive couldn’t recall the three years in which she’d met Emile’s father, in which Emile had been conceived, and in which she’d given birth to him. It had all disappeared, she said, and she’d had to watch her son growing up without her smell, knowing only the instruction of his grandparents.
Today, she shares her latest suspicions about Emile. Olive says her apologies have started to harden him, to make him believe she’s a woman who deserves nothing better than scorn. Listening to her, the rest of us nod.
Olive’s the one I’ve come to feel for the most in our meetings, but there’s nothing I can do to help. She suffers from something I have no treatment for, and I can only watch her when she drops her head in shame. Often, I’ve had to avert my eyes when Olive starts to weep, but today my gaze remains passive and arrested on her frame. I realize that my feelings for her have been drained from me, and that I can no longer use her as a hiding place. The two of us sit apart, returned to the distance we once knew as strangers: two people walking into a basement parking-lot in the daytime, heads bowed and smiles coated with nicotine.
In most meetings, half the members don’t make the move to draw close to one another. We enter each session prepared to deflect the counsel leader, whose job is to put whatever remains of us under glass. If you listen to counselors, they’ll tell you they want full disclosure in meetings, but most of us know to hand the facts out in small doses only. Therapy won’t walk you home after you pack up the chairs. Telling too much about yourself can leave you feeling broken into, as if your head were a conquered city offered to the circle for pillaging. This is how we know Olive won’t finish Emile’s story in front of us. I close my eyes again.
One week after I deregistered from university and my mother grew resolute in her decision to bar me from her home, I began to visit prostitutes in Mowbray, a block up from the bridge in Rosebank. I never slept with any of them, but one morning, returning late from having gone out for happy hour at a bar on lower Long, and after allowing another one to fondle my penis through my jeans next to the bath house on Orange Street, I bungled the directions to my flat and asked the taxi driver to pull over at the Engen garage. I wanted to buy a spinach-and-feta pie, a pack of Doritos and a bottle of water. That’s when I saw them—across the main road, shivering. When our eyes met, they began to beckon to me all at once.
My first reaction was amusement. Then suddenly I felt wanted, in a way that surprised me with its strength. I walked towards them, crossing over a traffic island, and stood by while they took turns soliciting me for sex. In the end, I gave them the bag of chips and went back to the taxi.
In the weeks that followed, I passed by there often. I made a habit of talking to them, making bribes out of what I bought from the service station, and we’d stand in the cold together. I remember how shattered their faces looked, as if they were the survivors of a protracted battle. Yet I also recall the feeling of comfort they gave me, as if I could disappear in between them.
In the end it was this feeling, its ability to surprise and take hold of me, that redirected me from moroseness when the nights drew to a close, finding me once more on my own, standing in front of my kitchen counter, boiling curry noodles from a plastic packet or decanting leek soup into a saucepan. I suppose they saw that in me, and I located it in them, too, my need. Maybe I’ve been looking for that same thing in Olive, another woman who’s put her battles before me, having ruined herself with straws of bitter crystals.
It always happens, Olive says, and my heart is like this. It’s a paper in pieces.
I watch her as she wipes her tears. When Olive sits back down, a moment passes before the drug trend is broken. I guess this brings a little relief. This part of our talks, the HIV section, is usually when Ruan, Cissie and I start with our orders. We assign one person to take down notes, and whoever’s chosen for the duty has to catalog the stage of the disease in each member. You note an infected spouse, distinguishing symptoms and patterns of remission. Then all three of us work out a treatment plan before we sell it to them.
Today, I signal to my friends that I’ll volunteer for the job. It might take my thoughts off Bhut’ Vuyo. Relieved, Ruan and Cissie nod and lean back in their chairs. Ta Lloyd takes up his turn to speak next.
I don’t really know what to say about Ta Lloyd, either. I’ve heard members say he’s the oldest guy in our group, but no one knows that for sure. We’ve all had trouble believing him. When I first joined here at Wynberg, Linette told me his story was make-believe. Ta Lloyd told them he got sick on the job as a paramedic. This was in the mid-nineties. He says they gave him an emergency van to pay him off. Today, he’s seated just two chairs from me. When he gets up, he says there’s a man who’s giving his wife a cure. I turn around and catch Ruan looking up from his cellphone. Paying the two of us no mind, Ta Lloyd continues with his story.
This cure, he says, it’s a reality.
That’s the word he uses.
We listen to him like we’re supposed to, and on her side of the circle, Mary starts to furrow her brow. In her role as our counsel leader, Mary’s duties include making sure all our meetings remain civil and well informed. Sometimes she’ll intervene when the misinformation piles too high. In this way, you could say she takes the role of rearranging our history. Playing the part of proofreader, Mary fixes us wherever she finds us mistaken, adding her own revisions to the stories we use to explain ourselves to the world. Today, she chooses to remain quiet, however, and like the rest of us, she waits for Ta Lloyd to finish telling us his part.
I reach into my pocket for my phone. Then I start taking down my notes.
It’s strange, I know, he says, but look, I swear to you. This man came to Site C not two months ago. He’s a medical doctor.
He pauses for a moment before pointing a finger at Neil.
He’s a white man, too, Neil, just like you.
On either side of him, some of the members bow their heads and stifle their laughter. Then Ta Lloyd widens his grin, but the math teacher swats him away.
Jesus, Lloyd, Neil says, would you get on with it?
Our oldest member does.
I guess I thought I saw my father the first time I saw Ta Lloyd. Imagine a squat guy who’s just crested his mid-fifties. He has a receding hairline, a salt-and-pepper beard, and he stays in good shape for his age and for the type of place we’re in. He’s sturdy from what the hospital pays for him to take down his throat each morning, and he drives a Ford Transit with a cracked ceiling, hauling kids to school and back in Site C. His wife, whose positive status they’ve decided to keep a secret, concealed from both her family and her colleagues, works a till at the Pick n Pay in St George’s Mall. She rings up groceries, like I once had to do myself.
Ta Lloyd continues to describe his new doctor. He’s opened up a hostel at Site C, he says. It’s a place with board and decent facilities.
That’s where we’ve sent Nandipha, he says. That doctor? He told my wife to stop working one week ago. Remember when I told you last month that Nandi had another fainting spell? Well, it happened again.
Ta Lloyd rubs a palm over his mouth, and on my left, Cissie inches her chair forward, and so do Ruan and I. The thing about these fainting spells is that they’ve come up before. The three of us, exchanging glances like we’re doing now? That’s from the time I fell on my face from one. We listen as Ta Lloyd explains.
It’s not easy, I know, he says. It’s not an easy thing to believe. Even in Khayelitsha, not many of us believe.
The rest of us nod.
This doctor, Ta Lloyd says. He told me I shouldn’t give Nandi any more ARVs. I swear. He said if I stopped giving Nandipha my pills, he would help us.
I look up and find Mary glowering at him. Like most professionals, she doesn’t believe Ta Lloyd should be sharing his prescription with his wife—it’s the way most professionals think about the pills. Still, the way Ta Lloyd’s story unfolds, the hospital’s penance didn’t extend to cover his wife’s illness. Mary continues to stare at him while he speaks. The rest of us know where this is headed.
I close my eyes and wait for my blood to drum my pulse into my ears, a sound I’ve always found reassuring. Sometimes, I like to imagine I can hear my illness spinning inside my arteries, that it’s rinsing itself and thinning out.
I hear Mary’s voice again.
Lloyd, she says, I think that’s enough, don’t you? We’ve had our fill.
It doesn’t usually take her this long.
I want you to stop this, she says, and listen to me carefully, okay? What we’re here for is to lighten each other’s burdens, not to spread lies from crackpots. I hope you take Nandipha out of that hostel, too. You’re putting your wife at a very big risk with this nonsense.
Her cheeks draw in as she pushes herself up from her chair. It doesn’t happen a lot, but it’s easy to tell when she’s upset.
I mean, if money’s the problem here, she says, then why don’t you just come upstairs with me after the session? We can easily look up a treatment plan for Nandipha. Of course, she should be present, but time and time again you’ve refused to bring her to our meetings, haven’t you? You think it’s good that she hides her status from medical professionals.
Ta Lloyd starts to nod.
For Pete’s sake, Mary says, don’t just agree with me. You need to stop spreading this nonsense and putting your family in danger. There’s no cure for HIV, but as you can see for yourself, it’s a condition anyone can live with.
She turns around to confirm this with the rest of us, and we nod, doing our part like we’re meant to. When I look over, I find Ta Lloyd doing the same.
Yes, Mary, he says.
Right, that’s enough then, she says. You can sit back down now. She starts scanning the room for the next volunteer.
Please remember, the rest of you, she tells us, we’re here to help each other heal.
When no one volunteers, Mary starts flipping through the attendance roster, ticking off our names.
Let’s have one more speaker, shall we? Then we can break for coffee and biscuits.
Relieved, we do as we’re told. Ta Lloyd sits back down and I watch his face going slack from his forehead down to his jaw. When the fluorescents flicker twice over our circle, I look up. Then I wonder about all the other people mending their lives on the floors above us. I remember once seeing a woman there who had what I have, compounded with acute tuberculosis. Her salivary glands had blown out as wide as the cheeks of a Bubble Eye goldfish, and she was there to dispute the window-period of her illness, a complication which had rendered her results indeterminate. When the nurses ignored her complaints, she turned around and laughed at them with such exuberant bitterness, the rest of us couldn’t help but look up from our laps. Swiveling on her heel, the woman hurled her objections at the waiting room, next, condemning each of us for our silence.
This is what I think of now as we sit in our circle. Cissie places her hand on my knee again, and when she does it this time, the table holding our coffee begins to tremble.
I guess I don’t know where to lead us next. My uncle is a man set on changing the nature of everything I’ve known here, and I don’t know where to walk to that’s flung far enough from his reach. Maybe I should accept this and no longer go on fighting him.
Done with the session, Ruan, Cissie and I decide to go for a pizza. We take a taxi back to Claremont and walk into Café D’Capo on Main Road. They have this special there we can afford, and so we order two bottles of wine and polish them off over a large margherita.
Then we order another bottle.
During intervals, I look across the road to where I could buy airtime. Ruan says he knows a guy who lives in a flat in the same building as the café; that he can pat him down for a bankie, about three grams of cheese.
We take the lift up. The guy holding the bankie’s called Arnold. He comes out in silk boxers, with tousled hair, a boom of down-tempo beats pounding out of his living room. Ruan hands him three five-tigers for the weed, and calls him an overpriced but reliable asshole. They share a forced, stilted laugh, and then we take the lift back down.
We walk past Café D’Capo, waving guiltily at the waitress clearing our table. She looks twice our age, and has our soiled serviettes bunched in her hands. We cross the road and wait for a taxi at the corner of Cavendish Square, just across the road from the Nando’s. I decide against walking into the mall for airtime. I can get it later, I decide, maybe further along the way.
What? Ruan says to us, after a while.
We’ve been staring at him since we bought the weed from Arnold.
Dude, I know him from a guy at work, he says.
We grin. Cissie and I don’t say anything. We nod and look across the road.
Then Cissie says, what do you think of guys like that, anyway? He probably has parents who own half of Cape Town.
I shrug. Maybe I should send him my CV, I say.
Then our taxi arrives. The gaartjie leaps out, hefting stacks of coins in a canvas sack, a white Sanlam moneybag that’s gone brown around the bottom stitching. He points us towards the taxi and we pile in before the door slides shut on its own.
Inside the Hi-Ace, I take Ruan’s cellphone and SMS Yes in response to my uncle Vuyo’s message. Then, to sign it, I write Lindanathi and attach my number for him to reply to. I resist an urge to turn my phone off. If this is what he wants, then this is what he wants, I decide. I hand the phone back to Ruan.
The three of us spend the next hour putting up posters along the main road, from Claremont to Salt River, all of them telling people how to buy my ARVs from me. Then we carry glue in Tupperware containers from Cissie’s fridge, jump the Mowbray train to the city and take a bus out to the West Coast. I take a look at the time on my phone and it’s only mid-afternoon. I guess this is what they mean when they call Cape Town the city of slumber. Time seems to speed up here, and then it stalls, and then it seems to speed up again before it stalls.
We pass Paarden Eiland just as the sun begins to burn itself through the clouds. It throws down a harsh beam that bisects the bus and Cissie taps my shoulder and says I should turn around. She tells me to look at how we’re sitting on the right side of the light.
Then we pass Milnerton, the ocean sparkling and still, covered in white spots flecked across its vast surface. It looks as if all the salt has been sucked up to the lid of the Atlantic. After that Blouberg, the destination we’ve chosen for our excursion today, lists into our bus-driver’s wind-screen.
I open the notebook program on my cellphone. I have orders for Ronny, Lenard and Leonardo. I’ve got one for Millicent. I write down Ta Lloyd and add a question mark after his name. Then, after a moment, I also add Nandipha, his wife. This makes up the list of reactives we could still sell our pills to at Wynberg. Two previous clients, Gerald and Melanie, haven’t come to meetings for a year.
In Blouberg, we stalk into an internet café, this gamer-powered cavern complete with a coffee plunger and blue carpet tiles. The computers are sectioned into black cubicles with little hooks that hold up oversized headphones.
It’s one of those LAN gamer killing pens, I say to Cissie. The first-person-shooter covens that seem to grow in popularity each year.
Cissie nods, somewhat slackened by the place’s distractions. I fax my attendance slip to Sis’ Thobeka at the front counter. There’s a sign here that says they sell R29 airtime vouchers.
I catch Ruan looking around with this grim, beaten-up expression on his face.
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.