When I kill the first kid on the rugby field, the first thought that goes through my head, besides having to release the trigger, is that somehow this isn’t so bad. I mean, it’s awful how the bullet—we’re using a clip of half-jacketed hollow points—shatters his skull just above the ear and he falls down, blood splashing and hair fluttering, and I think to myself, after all, Harriet Tubman is also dead. Then Ruan peers over my shoulder, looking down at the blood sinking into the ant-filled grass. Nice headshot, he says to me. Then Cissie takes the gun from my hands and carelessly shoots another kid in the throat. I guess this one would’ve been the lock in the team: that’s how high he jumps. His throat explodes into winglets of flesh and all three of us have to shut our eyes against the blood. I step forward and say to my friends, I don’t know. I say, do you think this will work? Cissie hands me the gun and takes her shoes off. When the green grass spikes between her toes, she smiles, and I guess this is what killing for the government is like. The gun is slicked all over with sweat, and every time I blink, I see the world through a prism of blood. Then another kid falls and Ruan bends over his bleeding head and asks, why us though? If they’re so good at killing, he says, then why don’t they do it themselves? I tell him this isn’t so much killing as it is cleaning up a mess. These kids, all of them, they’re already dead. Cissie says it’s eerie and we both ask her, what is? She says, gunshots with no sirens. Then Ruan and I look up at her through the sound of the day’s rising traffic. Cissie opens her mouth again, as if to say something further, but when her lips close in silence, I wake up in the bathroom at work.
My back cramps on the toilet seat. I lean over and try to stretch it. Then I take two more painkillers and look down at the space between my legs. In the dim light, my phone blinks blue before going off again. This indicates the arrival of a new message.
I hear my colleague Dean stumble into the next stall. His knees drop on the floor and he starts to heave, the room filling up with the smell of vomit. Without fail, Dean brings a hangover to work with him on Sunday shifts. Saturday nights, he plays drums for the house band at The Purple Turtle, a popular punk bar in the middle of Long Street. The owner, a Rastafarian named Levi, keeps half the earnings the bands bring in for him at the door. He compensates for this by keeping a bar tab open for the performers when they finish a set. I stand on the toilet seat and give Dean the rest of my painkillers. Then I sit back down and press a button to take my phone off standby.
Ruan maintains the email account we use for orders. The new message, cc’d to Cissie, is about a bulk order. I open it and read the MMS on the toilet seat.
It’s one paragraph long, and it doesn’t have a lot to describe. The client says he’ll buy everything off us, paying us double for the order. He doesn’t want any parcels or messengers, he specifies; we have to meet him in person or there’s no deal. I read it twice and look at my phone for another moment. Then I flush the toilet and rinse my hands off at the sink.
On my way out, Dean looks up from his open stall and thanks me.
Dude, really, he says, and I nod.
His blond hair sticks to the sweat on his forehead, and he sits crumpled on the floor. He’s wearing an old torn Pantera shirt. I reach for the handle and shut him in.
Then I walk back out to work.
I have this job I guess I should’ve mentioned. I work in Green Point, at a DVD rental store—the Movie Monocle—and I clock in every Sunday to Wednesday. The money from the orders Ruan, Cissie and I take in, as well as the allowance I receive as compensation for what happened to me all those years ago at Tech, is enough to keep me on my feet when my landlord calls me at the end of each month.
What they have me do here is stand behind a low vinyl counter—a hollowed-out semi-circle—where I become captain in my black shirt and orange cap, taking in rolled-up twenties and membership cards from the patrons of the Movie Monocle. This is where you’ll find me. Whenever I look up from my hands, I can see movie posters lined up against the yellow walls, about three meters above the gray carpet tiles, each one touching the edges of the next. Directly in front of me, two ceiling fans whop the air, equidistant from my counter and the back wall.
I dry my hands on my jeans before I settle myself behind the counter. Then I take another look at Ruan’s email. I press reply and ask Cissie and Ruan if this client isn’t a cop.
They don’t answer me for a while. Then Cissie sends back a reply: I hold reservations about thinking it’s a cop thing…
I wait for her to finish.
She writes, I mean, guys, we shouldn’t panic right away, should we? This could just be someone’s idea of a bad joke, right?
I sigh.
On Sundays, Cissie takes a train out to visit her aunt in a nursing home in Muizenberg. She uses this time to ease herself into a gentle comedown. In order to organize her body’s depletion of dopamine, and to quell her unease about mortality, Cissie surrounds herself with aging bodies.
In an octagonal courtyard, she and her aunt pick out grass stalks which they knit into small bows and wreaths. This is where I imagine her now: lying on her back and typing with the sun in her face.
I decide to let it go. Then I get a message from Ruan.
I had the same thought about the police, he says.
This doesn’t surprise me, either. Like me, Ruan rarely shares a moment of Cissie’s tranquility. He gets comedowns no worse and no better than anyone else. Sundays for him just mean another computer in another room. He tells me he knows where I’m coming from.
I’m about to scroll down when I hear the storeroom door open. I slip my phone in my pocket and place my hands on the counter. I try to keep my back straight.
My manager appears from the door in the far wall, holding up a plastic clipboard.
That’s it, keep smiling, he tells me.
I nod.
Until two months ago, Clifton was just another peon who worked the counter here at the Monocle. He got promoted after Red, our last manager, gave notice and moved to Knysna. Clifton’s been giving us orders ever since. I wait for him to turn the other way before I pull out my phone.
Placing it on the counter, I read the rest of the message from Ruan.
This guy isn’t a cop, he says, but he knows who we are.
He forwards Cissie and me a new mail. We each take a moment to read it. The message was delivered by the client at noon. It includes our names, where we live and where we work, and at the bottom it says, I am not the police. Then the client tells us he’ll pay us first. We can decide what we want after that.
Meaning we can just take the money, am I right? Cissie says.
I’m about to answer her when I hear Clifton meandering into our store’s Action section. He’s run out of things to do again. He raises his clipboard and scratches the back of his neck, powdering his black collar with a mist of dandruff. I go back to my phone.
To Ruan and Cissie: okay, what’s going on here?
Neither of them replies for close to a minute and I start to feel concerned. This returns me to Bhut’ Vuyo, and on impulse I open my uncle’s second message. I’m about to reply when Clifton raps his knuckles on the counter.
Hey, he says, there’s no sleeping on the job.
I nod.
No chatting on the phone, either.
I close the text from my uncle and put the phone away.
Good, he says.
I watch Clifton turn his head towards the unit we’ve got mounted above the counter. Slowly, his face pinches inward.
Jesus, okes, he says. This is not on. This won’t work at all.
I turn and look up at the unit. It’s a black-and-white horror movie Dean’s put on mute. Cornered by a hideous monster, a young woman backs up against a dungeon wall.
Clifton shakes his head. Guys, come on, he says. This isn’t appropriate. You know what the rules are for the DVD.
I tell him it isn’t my fault, everything was on when I came in.
Sure it was, he says.
The woman is now naked, lying in a puddle of black blood. Clifton walks around to my side of the counter, squeezes past me, and turns it off.
He sighs. Where’s Dean?
He’s in the bathroom, I say.
Great. You leave, and he enters. Do you plan it like this?
Maybe.
Clifton presses his clipboard against his chest, scowling like a sitcom villain. I watch him as he stomps off to hassle Dean in the lav. Then I look back down at my phone.
I’ve just received a notification SMS from the bank, Ruan says.
He tells us it’s a deposit, and when he types out the amount, I stare at my phone for a while, making sure I’m parsing the figure right.
The client wants to meet up no later than today, Ruan says. He’s scheduled the meeting at Champs, a pool bar next to the railway station in Mowbray.
I nod, but I have to scroll back up to the figure.
In the end, Cissie recovers from the shock before I do. She asks Ruan for a description of the client, a way to locate him inside the bar.
On his side, Ruan takes a moment to pass the question on and the three of us wait for the man to respond. Eventually, he types back to say we should look for the ugliest man in the bar. I wait for Ruan to explain, but he doesn’t say anything further.
Then, all at once, I feel done at the Monocle. For the first time since I signed on with them, about a year ago now, I don’t wait for my hours to arrive at their official cut-off point, or even for Clifton, my new ex-manager, to come back from scolding Dean inside the bathroom. I turn around and switch the DVD player back on. Then I drop my orange cap on the counter and walk out, making my way to the taxi rank on the station deck above Strand.
I cross over the short steel bridge and buy a packet of Niknaks. Then I walk to the bay marked for Claremont. Inside the taxi, I lean my head against the glass and watch as a pink band wraps itself around the sky over Cape Town—from Maitland to Athlone—and a haze of pollution simmers over the land beneath it. I can feel the cogs of the city’s industries churning down to stillness, and smell the exhaust fumes from the taxis, as if each plume was mixing in with our exhaustion.
On the main road, I decide to put my uncle out of my mind. With the money to consider, this seems a reasonable measure to take. Existence goes on as we all navigate our need for currency. Even Bhut’ Vuyo would understand this. He needs money as much as anyone else. Or maybe, I think, he needs it more.
In Newlands, I find Ruan waiting by the gate, pushing up against the wire fence around Cissie’s building. Cissie isn’t back from her pilgrimage to Muizenberg yet, and by the way Ruan looks, I can’t tell if he’s high or coming down. I join him on the pavement.
Ruan, you have this face on I think you should see.
He shrugs. Is Cissie still in Muizenberg?
I nod.
I need to find an old person, Ruan says. He tries to laugh, bunching his shoulders together, but the feeling doesn’t last. You don’t always get to ward off exhaustion, huffing Industrial the way we do.
I lean my back into the fence.
Ruan pulls out a half-smoked cigarette from his pocket and lights it with a broken matchstick. Then he cups a hand over the flame and waves the match out before chucking it into the garden. I watch him sigh and drop his shoulders before taking a drag.
Man, he says, breathing out smoke. When I saw that money coming in, I just started shaking. I was at my place, right? And I had to stop typing for a while. I mean, Jesus, Nathi. He pauses and looks up the road. When’s the new shipment coming in?
In a day or two, I say.
Ruan nods. Of course I told the client it was short notice, he says. The guy said it was fine, you know, that today was just a meeting between friends. Can you believe that? He called us friends.
Ruan’s cheeks pull inward as he drags on his cigarette, his fingers pinching the sponge as thin as an envelope. I watch the carcinogens leaking out of his body.
I guess we’ve all tried to pack in the filters. We even came close last year, when we decided to quit nicotine and move out of the city entirely. Our plan was to relocate with our pill money to the Eastern Cape, where we’d harvest khat near the Kei River and hike the valley gorge that curves like a wide vein between Bolo and Cathcart. We didn’t plan for long: before the end of the month, we heard reports of how a van, loaded with a boxful of stems, was stopped with bullets on its way to King William’s Town. The urge died in us after that.
Ruan blows out another gray fog from his insides. He passes me the cigarette and I take a short pull, blowing smoke through my nose and through the fence.
The two of us stand in silence as the wind fusses the trees around West Ridge, its force snapping off the winter leaves and blanketing the curb in brown and orange patterns. We watch them scrub without noise against the rutted tar.
Then Ruan breaks through our silence.
This ugly description, he says.
I listen. I flick my cigarette on the tar and turn to face him.
Do you think it’s code for something?
Maybe, I say. I don’t know. It could be a word for dangerous.
Scars, Ruan says.
Then we fall into more silence.
I turn and hook my fingers on the mesh fence, hanging my weight on the sagging wire. I used to cross my eyes on fences like this when I was a child, a private trick that could make the holes in the squares leap out like holograms, but when I try it now, the optical illusion hurts my eyes. I uncross them and watch as the wind pushes against a green cardboard box, turning it over between the bins in the far corner of the parking lot. It knocks over a brown beer bottle, a quart balanced against the wall, and causes it to spew out frothy dregs, the foam washing across a fading parking line.
Cissie says all this silence in Newlands isn’t a coincidence, that her whole neighborhood’s haunted. The suburb’s built on a grave site, she says, the plot of a man called Helperus Van Lier: an eighteenth-century evangelist who lived in the Dutch Cape Colony. Cissie says piety has the ability to flow inside tap water, and that even plant life isn’t safe from Calvinist ghosts. This is the reason behind the stillness, she tells us, or at least why she owns a water filter.
There’s something else I didn’t show you, Ruan says.
I turn around.
I didn’t tell you and Cissie this, but the client sent me copies of our ID’s. He attached them in that email I sent you with our names and jobs on it, remember, but you know how Cissie’s phone is. I had to take the jpegs off the MMS. Here, he says. Take a look at it.
I take his phone and start browsing through his images. It’s true. We come up one after the other. The man did all three of our ID’s in color.
Here’s Ruan, here’s Cecelia, and here I am.
Here’s Russell, here’s Evans, and here’s Mda.
Ruan looks at me with his face pulled back in a wince, a form of apology. I look back down at the phone again.
Then up.
The thing is, he says.
I hand him his phone back. He slides it into his pocket.
The thing is, he says, it doesn’t seem like we have much of a choice here. We have this guy’s money, and we know that he’s dangerous. He’s not a cop, but he’s got the reach of one. We know that he’s free of the law, but we’re not sure he’s outside of it.
I nod. It isn’t hard to see his point. By giving us his money, the client has us bound.
Of course, there can’t be any police for us, either, Ruan says.
I nod again.
Look, Nathi, he says, I can’t just walk into the bank and tell them to reverse the transaction, can I? I mean, we’re lucky having that much money in the account hasn’t raised any suspicion to begin with. Now what if I go in there and start tampering with it? Then what? That’s a sure way of getting people to ask me things I have no answers for. The only option we have is to meet him.
He’s right. I tell him I agree. Then I let another moment pass before I say I quit my job.
Ruan turns around. You quit?
I walked out before cashing up.
He takes a moment to look up the street. Maybe you’ll find another one, he says.
I sigh. I guess he’s trying to encourage me. Which is good. I could use more of that.
Jesus, Ruan says then. I did the same thing.
I turn to him, surprised. He falls back on the fence and knits his fingers together. Ruan stretches his arms out to crack the knuckles on each hand, and I notice an expression I’ve never seen on his face before. It reminds me of a game-show contestant I once saw as a child on a show called Zama Zama. The contestant, a man from the rural Eastern Cape, had directed a similar smile at the host, Nomsa Nene, at the crowd, and then finally at his family, after choosing the wrong key for the grand prize.
It was a shitty job, I say to him. When you told us about the money, I don’t know. I just took my cap off and left. The strangest thing was that I hadn’t even decided about accepting it. It just seemed like the right thing to do.
Ruan nods. I felt the same way about the firm, he says.
We go quiet over another cigarette. Ruan smokes it down to the filter and throws it away. Then he lights another one and I take it from him when he’s done.
It’s a favor, you know? To both myself and my uncle. He even spits, now, whenever he sees me in the office parking lot.
I nod. Ruan’s told us this story before.
The company he works for lies in an old office park in Pinelands. Their building, one of fifty five-story units that face out to Ndabeni, an industrial suburb north of Maitland, came as a last resort to him. Early on, when Ruan started applying for posts as an assistant network administrator, he ruined his CV by losing three jobs in succession. The reason for dismissal was a slew of unforeseen panic attacks: from the copy machine to the kitchen area, he could be found curled up, or fainting on carpet tiles or buffed lino. Even though he always went back to work a week later with an apology, and sometimes a note from a doctor he’d paid to say it was epilepsy, he was always fired. Over the phone, even as his former employers expressed their sympathy and good wishes, they described him as too great a liability to keep on a payroll, and suggested he seek out a program for special care.
For a while, it felt as if there had been no options left open to him, and then—after a series of emails, all dispatched with great reluctance, but pushed by the pressure of an increasing interest rate—his uncle relented and put him on a conditional intern’s contract. His uncle’s oldest son had recently relocated to the UK, and this freed up the flat in Sea Point, where Ruan was to stay, paying rent into his uncle’s account. This is what led to his present situation. Ruan’s probation period extended itself to more than four years, and even though he renews his contract every twelve months, there’s never any mention of a pay increase. This is how he still gives a lot of what he earns to his uncle and the bank.
I squash the cigarette ember with my toe and kick it towards the gutter. It rolls in a light breeze, stopping just shy of the pavement’s lip.
I don’t know if I thought of myself as having already taken the money, Ruan says. I just saw it there, when that SMS came, and I thought other things could happen.
I move away from the fence and settle myself on the edge of the pavement. Ruan doesn’t follow, and for a while the two of us speak without facing each other. Two cars drive past us and after they’ve gone, I notice a figure standing in the house opposite. I can’t tell whether it’s a man or a woman, but I can see them looking out at us through a veil of curtain lace. Eventually, when it seems like our eyes have met and locked for a long time, the figure takes a step back and draws the curtain closed between us. I lean back and feel the tar and pebbles digging into my palms.
Then I take a breath and decide to tell Ruan what I’m thinking.
The two of us, I say, we’ve already accepted the money from the client.
Ruan tells me that he knows we have. He sits down on the pavement next to me and kicks a pebble into the road. He says he hopes Cissie has, too.
It takes Cecelia another half an hour to return. The three of us take the lift to her flat, and as we do, she doesn’t speak to me or Ruan.
Cissie walks into her kitchen and starts rifling through the cabinets. Then she crouches and opens the drawers beside the stove.
I’m looking for the Industrial, she says. In case anyone’s interested.
Ruan and I take our seats on the living-room floor in silence, facing each other from the opposite ends of her coffee table.
My aunt died today, Cissie says. It happened just over an hour ago.
She dips her head back behind the counter, rifling through more cabinets. Then she opens a coffee tin and, finding it empty, lets it roll out of the kitchen.
It’s weird, she says. First, we’re picking twigs. Then I take the train and she’s dead.
Cissie turns to the basin, plugs in a drain stopper and starts running the hot water. She removes a heap of cups and plates from the sink and stacks them on the dish rack. Then she draws back the short floral curtains and pushes the windows open to let in a gust of air. The water slams hard against the sink. She squeezes soap against the steam.
On the other side of the counter, Ruan and I watch.
Cissie whisks the soap to a lather with her hand. Then she closes the tap and flicks the foam off her fingers. The crazy thing is, she says, I almost didn’t bother going today.
I return my eyes to my knees and notice a plastic bottle lying on its side under her table. I reach for it and find it still closed. Then I get up and hand it to her.
Cissie receives it with a nod, unscrews the lid and sniffs the top. She starts to huff and the bottle crinkles inward. Done, she leaves it to drop in the sink. She brushes both hands over her face. Then she arranges the plates on the dish rack.
The client, she says. When does he want to meet?
I look at Ruan. He keeps his eyes on his phone.
Tonight, he says.
Cissie nods. I want the money, she tells us.
Then she reaches for a dishcloth and dries her hands and elbows. She turns around.
Do you?
This is what she asks us.
Ruan and I fall silent for a moment. Then we answer her at the same time. We tell her that we do.
Cissie finds half a pack of Tramadol on her top shelf. She’s kept it in an old Horlicks tin above the kitchen counter, saving it for a day like today. We split the pills over her glass coffee table. Then, while passing around a glass of water, Cissie gets a text message from Julian. It’s about a Protest Party at his flat off Long Street. We take what’s left of the pills.
Outside, the sky’s grown dark again, thick and almost leaden in texture. To the north, columns of rain emerge from the hills that once came together, more than a million years ago, to create the crest and saddle of Devil’s Peak. We smoke another cigarette with the painkillers. Then we wait for a taxi out on the main road. I get the feeling, as we do, that the sky could drop down on us at any moment.
Thankfully, the trip doesn’t take long. The sky shows no interest in us, and we arrive at Julian’s an hour later. Standing across the road from his place, I realize that my hours have become something foreign to me, that they’ve taken on a pattern I can no longer predict.
Looking out over the cobblestones on Greenmarket Square— each orb cut from a slab of industrial granite, connecting the cafés on the right with the Methodist Mission on Longmarket, where hawkers and traders from different sectors of the continent erect stalls and barter their impressions of Africa—I feel my thoughts branch out and scatter, grow as uncountable as the cobblestones beneath us, as if each thought were tied to every molecule that comprises me, each atom as it moves along its random course.
Ruan waves to the security guard. I ring Julian’s intercom and we get buzzed to the eleventh floor. On our way up, we stand apart, the mirrors in the lift reflecting the fluorescent lights. We remain quiet, facing ourselves as our bodies get hauled through thick layers of concrete. I lean against the lift wall and think of Greenmarket Square again, and how, not too far from here, and less than two hundred years ago, beneath the wide shadow of the muted Groote Kerk, slaves were bought and sold on what became a wide slab of asphalt, a strip divided by red-brick islands and flanked by parking bays where drivers are charged by the hour; behind them, yesteryear’s slave cells, which are now Art Deco hotels and fast-food outlets. I think of how, despite all this, on an architect’s blueprints, the three of us would appear only as tiny icons inside the square of the lift shaft, each suspended in an expanse of concrete.
Then the lift doors slide open.
Cissie walks out of the lift and Ruan and I follow a step behind, trailing her down a long open walkway. We don’t say anything else about her aunt. The three of us don’t mention our meeting with the client, either. Instead, we reach Julian’s flat in silence, propping ourselves up in front of his white door.
Cissie knocks.
Julian’s door has a silver number: an eleven hundred with two missing zeroes. In the corridor, voices mill together in a growing murmur over the music, while shadows dance behind the dimpled window. Outside, a couple sits on the fire escape behind us, a few steps below the landing, holding bottles of Heineken and sharing a cigarette. Cissie and Ruan face straight ahead, focused on getting themselves inside the party. The music seems to get louder, too, and the weather grows colder, but that doesn’t seem to bother us.
Loud footsteps approach on the other side of the door, and before long we hear someone struggling with the lock.
Looking back down, I notice that the couple, both in black winter jackets and thick woolen beanies, have a large cardboard cut-out leaning over the steel steps behind them. The placard bears a detailed illustration of the female anatomy.
Eventually, Julian manages to get his door open. He greets us from the threshold, his face painted bright silver. He’s both tall and peppy tonight, so tall, in fact, that we have to look up to see his face. Smiling, he uses his long arms to wave us in.
Please, guys, he says, come inside.
Ruan, Cissie, and I file into the hallway and then into the kitchen. It’s a small space, with brandy boxes lying flattened across the tiles. The three of us try to walk around them as Julian follows behind.
We went to a farm earlier, he says, waving his hand across the kitchen counter. From one end to the other, the surface is packed with raw vegetables. Liquor bottles emerge intermittently from the grove.
Help yourselves, Julian says, and we do.
Cissie takes our quarts from me. We bought them with a bottle of wine at the Tops near Gardens. I keep the Merlot and rinse out three coffee mugs in the sink. The brown water inside the basin looks a day old, so I yank the plug-chain. Then I stand there for a moment, watching as the fluid swirls out.
I’m not surprised to find the drain half-clogged. I’ve been in and out of places like Julian’s for most of my adult life. One year, Cissie brought a colleague over and we played Truth or Dare at West Ridge. On a Truth, I’d tried but failed to piece together how many times I’d woken up shoeless on someone’s lidless toilet. Nicole, the colleague, had meant the question in good humor, but even as we all laughed, I remembered how most times, my eyes would be half-focused, the door swaying as my pants rode off my ankles.
Well, do you like it?
Julian breaks out in a laugh behind me. He points a finger at his chin and wipes a thumb across his forehead. The contrast between his face and his mascara makes his eyes appear pressed out, or even feral. Each orb bulges out in shock, as if from proptosis, a sign of an overactive thyroid, and a sometime symptom of the virus I have inside me. Standing in place, and swaying on his feet, Julian achieves an eerie trembling, as if he were a supporting character excerpted from a malfunctioning video game, now stranded in a different reality, awaiting instruction in our less tractable environment.
I don’t know, Cissie says. She leans back against the counter.
On her right, Ruan pulls out a carrot and inspects it. He breaks off the stem and starts chewing. I open the bottle of wine and pour us each a coffee mug of Merlot. Then Julian starts laughing again. I look up and find him still swaying.
Think about this, he says. Under the kitchen light, his teeth shimmer like dentures. He waves his hands and tells us to listen.
We prepare to. I hand Ruan and Cissie their mugs and, taking a sip from my own, lean back and wait for him to start.
I’m doing something bigger than all my previous marches, Julian says.
I nod, sipping the Merlot. Ruan pulls out another carrot from the grove.
Cissie and I watch him as he yawns into his sleeve.
I suppose none of this is new to us. Julian hosts a party like this every second month now. He ends each of them the same way, too, by locking everyone inside his flat before morning. The reason he calls them protests is because the following day, he organizes his guests, a half-stoned mass, into a march outside the parliament gates. There, Julian takes pictures of them, which he then sells at a gallery in Woodstock.
Cissie used to be classmates with him. They attended the University of Cape Town together, both receiving MFA’s from Michaelis, before Cissie became a teacher. I once read an interview Julian had given to the arts section of a local weekly. Towards the end, when the interviewer had asked him if his marches were protests in earnest or just performance art, he’d chosen to skip the question. Later, when I googled him, I found a one-minute clip of Julian playing a prank on his agent: he arrived at his exhibition disguised as one of the parking attendants working on Sir Lowry Road, in a green luminous vest and a cap slung low over his forehead. The gallery walls held large framed photographs of his marches, and the video ended with Julian wearing a wine-stained paper cup on his head.
I’ll tell you all about it later, he says. You’ll be around, right?
We might be, Cissie says.
Sure, he tells her. We’ll talk then.
I pour out more wine for us, and find a shelf for our beer inside the fridge. Holding our coffee mugs, the three of us walk out into the living room.
In the lounge, Ruan, Cissie, and I join an audience for Julian’s latest performance. Everyone else draws closer to watch, and Julian presents himself as our party host, kneeling down in front of us. Smiling from the head of the coffee table, his metal face gleams while a string of sweat drips down the bridge of his nose. He removes a button pin from his blazer and turns it over to take out the fifteen tabs of LSD he’s concealed in the back. Then he returns his hands to his pockets and tells everyone they should know what to do by now.
They nod.
Ruan, Cissie, and I keep still. We watch as Julian’s followers gather around the coffee table, each of them with their head bowed. In order, they raise their left hands and Julian nods as he passes them the acid.
Cissie pulls on my sleeve. Let’s go, she says.
I nod.
Ruan pulls on the sliding door at the end of the living room. Then the three of us walk out onto the balcony.
I have very little regard for Nietzsche’s detractors.
This comes from a guy sitting on the floor. He has his legs spread out in a narrow V over Julian’s tiles. He introduces himself as an ecology student. He’s wearing a fitted leather jacket under a black balaclava that covers his face, and he’s speaking to a girl leaning against the balcony wall. The girl laughs at his quip. I’m doing my third year in linguistics, she says.
We share a marijuana cigarette with them. Then it’s followed by a leaking pipe we take a pass on. On the balcony, the breeze feels tactile around our fingertips. We take hits from the weed and sip on our wine. From where we’re standing, our view of Cape Town is a maze of brick walls; a checkerboard of abandoned office lights. Exhaust fumes waft up from the streets below, mixing with the smell of rubber baked during the day, a combination that reminds me of Ruan’s summation of our planet’s atmosphere: that the ozone layer is Earth’s giant garbage lid.
Julian looks like a deep-water mutant, Ruan says.
Cissie and I laugh. I inhale and blow out smoke.
To defend herself against the cold, Cissie’s wearing a green hoodie. The strings on the sides are pulled and knotted under her chin. She leans out over the balcony.
You know, Julian asked about my documentary, she says.
Cissie has an audio documentary she edits for two hours each month. The subject is a twenty-eight-year-old from Langa called Thobile. Last year, Thobile quit his job to live on eight rand a day. It was in solidarity with his community, he said, and in the clips Cissie played back for us at West Ridge, we could hear the difference in his tone at the beginning of the experiment, and then a month later. Cissie, who planned to paint a portrait of him—using only her memory and her recording as a guide— said he lost eight kilograms in three weeks.
Leaning on the railing, I turn to face her. How’s it going? I say.
Cissie shrugs. I don’t know. They all started getting sick.
I remember listening to Thobile in the clips Cissie played for us. He described how he hadn’t robbed anyone, yet.
He has this little brother, you know. In June, Vuyisa contracted bronchitis. That’s why Thobile had to go back to work.
I nod.
Cissie digs in her pocket and retrieves a soft pack of filters. The two of us watch as a car speeds down the narrow lane below. Its headlights illuminate a piece of graffiti on the opposite wall: PLEASE DON’T FEED THE ANIMALS.
You know, Cissie says, I don’t mind my job.
Since our wine is almost finished, we drink what’s left of it in shallow sips.
No, really, she says, but there’s all this shit in between. I mean, what are we even doing here? My aunt died today, Cissie says, and here I am, standing on a balcony, listening to people talk shit about Nietzsche.
Ruan looks over her shoulder. Loud enough for the ecology student to hear, he says, Nietzsche’s the Nazi one, isn’t he?
On the floor, the student shrugs under his balaclava. The leaking pipe is laced with methamphetamine. I start to feel awake when I try a hit. My pulse begins to pick up and I turn to Ruan. Then I decide to tell Cissie about my job.
When I’m done, Cissie releases the rail and takes a long drag from her cigarette.
Then she tells me that’s good. She says to me, now we have to go to Mowbray.
Julian spots us making our way down the wood-paneled hallway. Maybe it’s his new eyes. He follows after Ruan and raises his arms.
You can’t be leaving, he says.
We are, Cissie tells him.
I haven’t even thought of doing the lock-up yet.
Well, something came up, she says.
Julian shakes his head. He walks past us and starts working the latch.
I get it, he says, you’re a team. I like that.
We watch him struggle over the lock for a while.
I get the feeling that I don’t mind waiting here. I can still hear the laughter coming in from Julian’s balcony. It rings over the music. When I look over Ruan’s shoulder, I notice the ecologist and linguist walking back inside, hand in hand, both of them giggling and shaky on their feet. The ecologist moves in towards her and they kiss. The two of them stand like that for a while, wobbling, kissing and keeping each other in balance. Then Julian gets the door to unlock and holds it open for us.
We file out onto the walkway.
The other couple comes running up from the fire escape. The girl carries their placard like a crucifix. Dude, she laughs, you almost locked us out.
She pushes past Julian and the guy from the landing trails behind her.
I turn around and jog towards Cissie and Ruan. They’ve walked ahead to the lift, where they’re holding it open and waiting.
Inside, when the doors draw shut, the laughter from the flat fades again, and the three of us watch ourselves in the mirrors once more. Cissie inches towards me, and without speaking, she places her head flat against my shoulder. Then the lift grumbles, and a few floors down, she says, there’s nothing to envy about this place or the people inside it.
I nod. Then I look up at the silver ceiling and watch as the fluorescent light falls on her hair. Cissie’s hand clutches my shoulder as we reach the ground floor.
The three of us sit side by side inside a taxi headed out to Mowbray. Up front, behind a cracked windscreen and a GET RICH OR DIE TRYING sticker, our driver shifts his stick up another gear and we hurtle through Woodstock with rising speed, the Hi-Ace gliding past a U-Save store, a hair salon and an internet café that pawns second-hand jewelry.
I can’t control my thinking, again, Cissie says.
From our seats, Ruan and I watch her scratch the bridge of her nose. Then Cissie takes off her green hoodie and says, my head’s doing this thing where my aunt isn’t dead yet.
I don’t think I want it to be doing that, she says.
We drive past another U-Save store. Then Cissie tells us this is how her thinking turned when her mother died of stomach cancer when she was twelve.
This isn’t about either one of them, though, she adds.
I nod at her. Then I turn to look out at the road.
Through my window, the sky looks dull and impenetrable, like the screen of a malfunctioning cellphone. I imagine it made of plastic, each corner suppressing the passage of vital information. Perhaps we’ve all come to malfunction this way. Perhaps language, having once begun as a system of indistinct symbols, would never develop beyond what we knew, but instead, would continue to function as a barrier between ourselves and others.
I’m not sure what to tell her.
I circle my hand around the fingers she’s left on my thigh.
Then our driver stops just before we list into Obs, dropping off an elderly couple who only paid enough to get as far as Salt River. The door slides shut and we move down the main road again.
On my right, Cissie says, we need to make a plan. She widens her eyes and says we need a strategy on how we’re ending our lives, tonight.
Ruan and I laugh.
Or at least we try to.
I thought I could go in first, I say. You guys could wait for me outside the bar. I remind them that after all, I’m the one who’s halfway dead.
They nod, but neither one of them laughs.
I tell them I think we need a strategy for how we talk to him. We should give out as little information as we can, I say.
Ruan and Cissie nod.
Then our taxi pulls over at the McDonald’s in Obs. A few people get off, and the gaartjie leaps out and calls for more passengers. He shouts out Claremont, Wynberg, and then repeats it. I watch him cross over the main road, searching for passengers leaving St Peter’s Square. The sky seems to darken as the minutes pass, and, turning back, I tell my friends I can’t think of anything else.
Dude, I’m sold, Ruan says.
He seems nervous. This is how Ruan talks when he’s nervous. I watch him pound a fist into his palm.
Then Cissie nods. I mean, what else is there to do?
She’s right. There’s nothing else we can do, I say.
The worst thing that can happen in this story, Cissie says, is that someone dies, and that’s already kind of happened, hasn’t it?
From across the road, the gaartjie calls for Claremont.
He doesn’t look much older than us. He’s wearing blue overall pants and a black woolen beanie. I watch him skip between shoppers. He offers to help carry their packages.
On Station Road, we get off and walk past three lit-up hair salons on the main road. Most of the salons are still open in this area, even this late in the evening. Their windows throw yellow puddles of light onto the curb, drawing us a path to the four-way stop at Shoprite: a blurry line that changes this part of town into another suburb, before Rosebank becomes Rondebosch. We head east just before the police station, down St Peter’s Road. We find Champs on the right, close to the bend. It has wide window panes with white vinyl letters on the glass. There’s an eight-ball pattern on each side of the door.
We start off at the bar. Ruan and Cissie take seats on the high stools near the entrance; I step out to buy a filter from a vendor outside.
Somalia, he tells me, when I ask him where he’s from.
The sound of the traffic mixes with the conversation of the pedestrians behind us, and we face each other across the scarred surface of his wooden cart. He’s a thin man, wearing a kufi cap. I haggle him down to one rand fifty, but he has no change, he tells me, so I let him keep the two rand. Under the streetlight, I feel my buzz begin to fade, but when I ask him for khat, he shrugs and shakes his head. Then he starts to pack his wares, and as I watch him push his cart up the main road, I begin to suspect that being here might be a trap. Maybe Bhut’ Vuyo knows I can be lured with money. That I have a price and I’m easy to find. I walk inside the bar. The smell of stale smoke clutches me like a glove.
We sit facing the packed beer fridges. The vodka and brandy bottles reflect the dim light, and my eyes feel dry as they glide over the whiskey and sherry. Green swathes fall across the counter in a soft pattern, the result of a soccer match playing on the sets.
I use my sleeve to wipe the sweat off my temples. I can hear my heart tapping inside my chest. I recall what I know about the pharmacology of tik: in one of Olive’s stories, a baby was born with its intestines unspooled outside its body.
Maybe we should get a drink, Cissie says.
I lean forward and raise my hand for help. The woman tending the bar smiles under a helmet of bleached hair. We watch her standing at the other end of the counter, her back turned to us. From our place at the bar, we can see her texting on her phone. Now and then, she raises her head to laugh with a man in a cowboy hat. The man looks around fifty. He’s wearing a white shirt under a brown suede blazer. On close inspection, his features are unremarkable, and I discount him as a candidate for our client. The match blares on a set above him: a game between Sundowns and Chiefs.
Our throats dry, the three of us fall silent. We spend the next minute leaning over the counter. I remind myself to take in normal breaths, which reminds me of Olive: the damage that makes her throat whistle.
What would you drink on your last day on Earth?
This comes from Cecelia, and it’s timely as always.
She says, what if Last Life was moved up to now?
Ruan and I take a while to answer. Cissie plays with the strings under her chin.
I don’t know, Ruan says eventually.
I don’t either, I tell her. Maybe it is now.
The bartender works the other end of the bar. She’s wearing a blue halter top over a pair of stonewashed jeans, and her short legs drag her feet across the floor. She serves the man in the hat another brandy and he beams at her.
I don’t think I have any more money on me, I say.
Me neither, Cissie says.
Ruan pats his pockets. I might, he says.
Eventually, the bartender sees him waving. She approaches us, using one hand to wipe down the counter while the other holds up her phone. When she comes to a stop in front of him, Ruan takes out his money and places it on the rubber spill mat. It’s enough for three quarts of beer.
We take small sips from the tall brown bottles. I swivel on my chair to catalog the patrons present at Champs. I try to convince myself that our client isn’t here: that he would’ve approached us by now. Or we would’ve noticed him. Then I take another sip.
The bartender returns with Ruan’s change, a combination of green notes and bronze coins. Placing the money on the counter, she pauses and looks up from her phone.
He’s upstairs, she says.
The three of us look up and the bartender sighs.
The man, she says, turning to me, the strange one, the handicap. He told me to tell you he’s waiting for you upstairs. He has the floor blocked off, but you can tell Vincent at the door and he’ll let you in. Tell him you’re the three guests. He’ll see your friends, anyway, she says, pointing at Cissie and Ruan. Then she shrugs, done with her message.
I thank her as she sends another text from her phone. She doesn’t respond, and I watch her walk back to the man in the cowboy hat, who orders another brandy.
Jesus, Ruan says, this guy booked the whole floor.
The whole floor, Cissie echoes.
My brain gives me nothing to add to this, so I ask them if we should finish our beer or take it up with us.
We need to revise our strategy, Ruan says.
Yes, we need to do that, Cissie says. Let’s decide on a plan.
I tell them again that we shouldn’t volunteer any information.
Ruan asks if we should mention seeing the money.
Not until he mentions it first, I say.
Then Cissie takes a long sip from her beer and we do the same. Fuck it, she says. What can he do to us here? She pushes back from the counter. This is a public place, isn’t it?
It is. We’ve really done all we can to prepare, I say.
Ruan agrees, and in my head, I think: if he’s Bhut’ Vuyo then he’s Bhut’ Vuyo.
We just have to keep a cool head with him, I say.
Right, Ruan says. He gets up and stretches his arms. I need to take a leak. Don’t sneak off without me.
Like you’d mind that, Cissie says.
Then Ruan takes a gulp from his quart, and, wiping the foam off his lips, stalks off to the bathroom. Left behind, Cissie and I slouch on our seats.
During a free kick, she turns to me and says, be honest, Nathi, are you afraid?
I tell her honestly, I don’t know.
Me neither, she says. I have no idea what to think any more.
I got stabbed once, I tell her.
Really? Where?
I was in Obs.
The ghouls gathered around the plasma screen roar at another missed goal. For a while, Cissie and I drink in silence. Then Ruan comes back and leans on the counter.
He sighs.
I’m ready, he says, clasping his hands together.
He takes another sip from his beer, and when he’s done, I say we should go up and see what happens to us. Ruan and Cissie try to laugh, but it doesn’t last long. I can tell it’s only to humor me.
We leave the counter just as the game hits half-time. The soccer louts rush back to the bar, each of them griping and cheering over their glasses of brandy. I guess it gets hard to pick them apart, sometimes, the winners and the losers, but in any case, the three of us don’t stick around to find out who’s who.
We take our beers and walk up the staircase next to the men’s room, where we find Vincent, the resident bouncer, arranging his face into a scowl. To get a clear image of Vincent, you’d have to imagine five slabs of braaied beef, all arranged in a pile and wrapped up in a beanie and a black dress shirt. Then you’d have to think of a pair of black jeans and black desert boots. None of them new, but pressed and buffed to look it.
I slow my friends down. Keeping myself at a distance, I tell the bouncer that it’s us and that we’re here for a meeting.
Vincent looks dubious.
He faces down and creases his brow. Naturally, he asks me who we are.
We’re here to see the guy, I say, and point at the door.
He eyeballs us. Prove it, he says. Vincent centers himself in front of the door. I guess it’s a bouncer maneuver or something.
I look at him and all I can think of is, whatever, I concede.
I tell Vincent we’re here for hospital work; that we’re working in the field as volunteers. The three of us, I say, we’ve all got jobs in a ward at Groote Schuur. That’s what we have to talk about with the man inside. We’re consulting.
He clicks his tongue. Consulting, he says. Still staring at us, Vincent raises a beefy paw to his face and draws a slow, tight circle in front of his forehead.
Was his face eaten by pigs? he asks.
I don’t know what to tell him. To my right, Ruan says we can’t disclose that.
Then Vincent nods. He sizes up Ruan before his eyes glide down to the quarts in our hands. Tell me, he says, what kind of hospital meeting is it where you have three children holding bottles of beer?
I sigh. I can’t think of anything else.
Then the door cracks open and a woman approaches Vincent from behind. She lays a thin hand on his shoulder, and her voice flows out of her like a whisper.
Vincent, the man says to let them in, she says. You can collect your tip at the bottom till. Her hand drops and she disappears back into the room.
Vincent considers us a moment longer. Then, slowly, he starts to nod.
Okay, he says. You’ve convinced me. Feigning reluctance, but clearly pleased by his tip, he opens the door to the upstairs bar and waves us in like a butler.
Ruan, Cissie and I step over the threshold one after the other. Then we stand there holding our quarts, our eyes adjusting to the dimness.
I realize I’ve stopped breathing. That’s when I hear his voice.
Please lock the door after you, he says. You’ll soon learn how much I’m devoted to my people, but I’m afraid I’m not very fond of their intrusions.
It’s strange, but when I hear him, I feel I have no choice but to do as he says. There’s a strange, but commanding quality to the man’s voice, and not only in volume, but also in texture. It has a metallic ring around its loudness, like a recording pushed through a speaker.
I take a shallow, faltering breath. Then I lock the door and trace his voice to a corner in the far left, where there’s a silhouette of a man leaning back on one of the leather couches, one leg bent at the knee and crossed over the other. Above him, ribbons of smoke curl against the ceiling light, forming a mist in front of the windows overlooking St Peter’s Road.
I’m over here, he says, waving his hand.
My head clears and my nausea thins out. I look through the room and locate his head, a long narrow face in silhouette against the large road-lit panes.
Please take a seat with me, he says.
Ruan, Cissie and I move towards him.
The woman behind the bar stares at us with a blank expression. She’s also pressing the buttons on a cellphone. I watch its blue glow playing up her neck, a light that reveals a sharp jaw moving around a wad of gum. The three of us move past her.
You can’t possibly still imagine I’m the law, the man laughs.
This is how he talks. He booms in a register that’s picked out from two centuries ago. His tone sounds tired and tickled at the same time.
Ruan, Cissie and I find our seats opposite him at the low table.
Here we are, I guess.
Here’s the ugly man. Here’s our client.
He has his head down, his face covered in shadows. You get the feeling his features are nondescript, even in sunlight, and that his skull, closely shaven and dimly reflecting the street glow, looks like the skull of any other man. It’s almost as if, in calling himself ugly, he’s erased his features, drawing attention to something that isn’t there. There’s no way to describe him above the V of his white shirt. I lean back, confused.
Please allow me a moment, he says.
We do. We watch his fingers prod, fussing over a black PDA device on the coffee table. It’s thick, about the size of my hand, and he’s set it flat on its back. It’s probably what he used to send us the emails, and the scanned IDs he intimidated us with. It has a dim screen light that illuminates only his wrists and cufflinks. More than once, he cracks the knuckles of his right hand as if in frustration at its speed or, I think to myself, as if to ground a stray current. Either way, I wouldn’t be surprised.
The man clears his throat. He doesn’t look up at us, but we watch him as he bunches his fingers around a stylus pen. He swipes a gray icon across the small screen.
I should tell you I’m rather pleased you were able to find your way to me, he says. I was beginning to wonder if I might’ve been the cause of too much trouble. I understand I called for us to meet at short notice and for that I should extend an apology, and believe me when I say I do. However, as you’ll soon learn for yourselves, the matters which bring us together bear their own sensitivities regarding the dictates of time, and for that reason alone, I’m confident that our arrangement, as hasty or as modest as it might seem, is perhaps the one that could serve our purposes best.
Done, he pushes his PDA aside. Clicking open his gold cigarette case, he pauses for a moment. Then he weaves his head and trains his eyes through the dimness, raising his right hand to signal to the bartender.
My dear, he says, might we have the lights back on?
I hear the bartender closing her till. Her silhouette saunters around the counter and approaches the entrance. It turns a knob and a mist of yellow light settles over us.
Finally, here he is, I think to myself. He’s wearing a three-piece suit, a deep red that matches the hat on the table. The hat is a long-brimmed fedora. It has a feather tucked inside the band.
This is when I realize what’s unsettling me about his face. He’s wearing a mask.
The man clears his throat and starts talking again.
You’d be shocked, he says, sounding both surprised and amused, how little science has accomplished for the facial prosthetic. The field’s first and, by my humble estimate, truest visionary was a man born in the year of 1510. He was a Frenchman by the name of Ambroise Paré, who used to shear the hair off kings to earn his keep in the royal courts. He had as his regular clients Henry II, Charles IX and Henry III. Francis II is also said to have sat under his blade during his short kingship. In his work as a surgeon, however, he was a man at home on the battlefield. He made limbs for soldiers maimed during the wars, you see.
Here he pauses. He taps his cigarette filter on the gleaming case, his long fingers pushing the air out of the stick and compacting the tobacco leaves.
I see you’ve already helped yourselves to something to drink, he says. It’s no bother, but should you want more, I beg you only to mention it. I should say, also, that Nolwazi here holds my vote as the best bar maiden this side of the mountain. He turns his head towards her, then back to us.
Now, he says, where was I? Oh, yes, we were discussing Ambroise Paré, weren’t we?
He goes on like this. It turns out it’s from the First World War, this mask he has on. That’s what he tells us, anyway. He says nothing about his voice, but I can detect a hum whenever he takes a moment to breathe. I keep my eyes settled on his mask.
Well, he says, the technique itself is from the Great War. I’m afraid this hunk of tin isn’t quite as old as that. You’ll have to forgive me my indulgence. I tend to have a desire to get the face and mask out of the way as soon as I can. It’s the only way I can guarantee myself anyone’s attention. My face is somewhat of an attraction, you see. I myself am no stranger to its oddities. However, I invited you here for matters unrelated to my appearance. Now, friends, if you don’t mind, may I?
He raises his hands to the sides of his face and holds them up against his ears. Ruan, Cissie and I sit with our hands by our sides, staring at him in silence.
The man’s mask is painted the sandy color of his hands and his neck, with two round holes for eyes and two piercings at nose level for breathing holes. Just above the chin, it’s carved into three narrow slits for him to speak through.
Cissie says, so there’s a reason you didn’t get plastic surgery?
This doesn’t surprise us, me and Ruan, that Cissie would be the first to break through our silence.
I reach down for my beer again. The sip I take from the bottle tastes warm, and it causes my mouth to fill up with saliva. The bitterness clings to the sides of my tongue, trickling down my throat and knotting my stomach. I put the bottle back between my knees.
The man, as if noticing my discomfort, drops his hands.
He shakes his head and says, Monsieur Paré. The first men he patched up from the wars broke his big foolish heart. He gave them back their arms and legs and they took their own lives. They didn’t favor their looks, you see. I’ve never understood those men. If you ask me, a man is given his scars as a consequence of his spirit, his battles out in the world.
He shakes his head, his answer to plastic surgery.
Then, following a brief pause, he says, now, I do trust I have your permission?
The man’s hands pull at the sides of his mask and he lifts the tin off his face. Leaning back on the couch, with his arms set apart and his one leg over the other, his hands find the arm rests and his face reveals itself. If he’s smiling, then none of us can tell.
Half his face appears burnt, the skinless meat gleaming in full view.
He’s still facing us when the bartender walks over with a brandy snifter on a cloth-covered tray. The man nods at her and she disappears without a sound to sit behind the bar. He smokes his cigarette through a long white tube fitted into his throat, and half of the right side of his face is missing. The skin on the bottom half of his neck seems to lighten on its way down to his chest. It’s a pattern that gives definition to how his larynx varies in relief. Tracing it down from his chin, it continues to rise as it descends, until it pushes itself taut against his skin, outlining the contour of a perfect cylinder.
The man watches me as I stare at him. Then he raises a hand to his neck.
Of course, I’ve had to adopt a more recent approach with my voice. I find it rather important that one does what one can in order to be heard, don’t you?
The flesh around his larynx vibrates when he speaks, and this is when I realize he has a machine humming against the walls of his throat. I look up.
You paid us a lot of money, I say. What for?
The man breathes out smoke through his nostrils. I’m under the impression my intention was clear, he says. I want to make a purchase.
We don’t have any pills on us, I say.
He considers this and nods. I watch the smoke holding still around his face, like a meadow fog.
I figured as much, he says, unfazed. It was, after all, very short notice, as I’ve said. He inhales again and lets the smoke seep out.
I ask him, why did you bring us here?
Why, he says, you provide a social service, do you not?
It’s a scam, I say.
The man laughs. He does that for a while.
Now, now, he says, we both know that isn’t true.
He lifts one leg off the other and straightens himself up on the couch. Then he slips his cigarette case inside his jacket and reaches for his feathered hat. He packs his device away and buttons his cufflinks.
I’ve kept you for far too long, he says. Let me know when you have the package.
He adjusts his hat and somehow, his mask is already strapped over his face.
I’ll be in touch, he says.
Then he nods and walks away from the three of us. He tips his hat at Nolwazi and finds the door.
We sit back on the couch, and I guess that’s all there is between us.
It’s happened.
The three of us are left alone in the yellow light and the remaining ribbons of his cigarette smoke. Ruan, Cissie and I take a look around the empty bar. Then, with our beers turning to warm water between our knees, and almost at the same time, we whisper to each other, saying: what?
I get a delayed text message from my case manager, Sis’ Thobeka. The three of us are back at Cissie’s place, again, and Ruan’s high on khat, playing an erratic set of drums on his kneecaps. We met a dealer in Rosebank who sold us twenty stems. He agreed to drop the price by a third.
At Cissie’s place, we listen to Ruan as he drums. Pausing for a moment, he says we should just use the money and then kill ourselves.
That could be a life, he says.
Cissie and I agree. We share another stem and tell Ruan that this isn’t a bad idea.
It’s like that book, he says. There was a guy. He wrote a book and won a prize for it.
I open the text message and Sis’ Thobeka says to me, Lindanathi, your CD4 count.
She writes: Lindanathi, you didn’t fax us your CD4 sheet, I thought I told you yesterday to—
I delete her message.
Then Ruan says, I can’t remember the guy who wrote that book. He tells us he’s googling it and Cissie and I get up to watch. We lean over him, and, for the rest of the night, we keep stems between our teeth and chew until we can’t feel our faces any more. Then we prod our fingers into each other’s sides and laugh like well-fed children.
The following morning finds the three of us still awake. The sun rolls over Table Mountain just after six a.m. on Monday morning, and under it we lie sprawled across Cissie’s leather sectional couch. It rained last night, and Cissie tells us there’s a leak in the roof that’s wet her cushion. She keeps extending a palm to pat the damp spot. Ruan and I lie still, watching her.
Guess what today is, she says.
What?
It’s a holiday, Cissie sighs, but guess which one?
We can’t, and when we don’t answer her, she tells us it’s Women’s Day. I don’t have to go in to work today and my aunt is still dead, she says. What now?
Ruan and I remain silent. Then Cissie falls back on the sectional couch and lies there, motionless.
Half an hour later, we shower and share what’s left of the khat. Then we take the lift down to the ground floor and catch a taxi to the bottle store in Claremont, where we stock up on champagne and liqueurs and everything else we never drink. We walk out of the bottle store with a loaded shopping bag in each hand, skipping across the main road like the world might end tomorrow. Then I guess this is how we spend the rest of our Monday. We talk and sometimes the three of us shout, and then our vision grows sharp around four a.m. and we feel ourselves floating up to the ceiling, speaking many praises to each other’s existence.
Sometime during the night, I think of my late brother. There were summers I’d take Luthando down the block in my old neighborhood, eMthatha, to a big white stippled house at the corner of Orchid and Aloe Streets, where an Afrikaans family from Bloemfontein had moved in. Their son, Werner, who was older than us by a few years, had taken control of his family’s pool house; a flat at least twice the size of my room. Werner liked to make us watch him while he squeezed a tube of Dirkie condensed milk down his throat; and sometimes he’d command my brother and I to laugh with open mouths through his fart jokes, after which he’d collapse into a castle made from his bright plush toys. We always met Werner at the window of his room. He was an only child and coddled by both of his parents. Since moving into the neighborhood, his parents had banned him from leaving his yard; and LT and I had to jump their fence to register his presence. I suppose he was spoilt, in retrospect, almost to the point of seeming soft in the head. As a teen, his teeth had started to decay, turning brown in the center of his lower jaw, but he was also big-boned and well stocked, and would often bribe us over to his home with ice lollies and video games. I had my own video games by then, but not as many as Werner. My mother was still new at her government job and I couldn’t show off in the way I wanted to about living in town. Lately, Luthando had started thinking he was better off than me. My brother had grown a patch of pubic hair the previous summer, and I wanted to remind him that he still ate sandwiches with pig fat at his house, and that one evening in Ngangelizwe, his mother had served us cups of samp water for supper.
Still, we hid together that day.
Like always, Werner told us his parents didn’t allow Africans into their house. He called us blacks, to which we nodded, and then he threw the controllers through his burglar bars like bones on a leash. My brother and I scuttled after them on our bare and calloused feet. If Werner didn’t win a game, he’d switch the console off and turn into an image of his father, barking us back onto the tar like a disgruntled meneer at the store, his face twisting as fierce as a boar’s, fanning out a spray of saliva. When he did win, when Werner felt he’d won enough, he’d say his parents were due home in the next few minutes. Then he’d hoist the controllers back up and wipe them down with a wad of toilet paper. It was the same toilet paper he used to wipe semen off his plush toys, Luthando would later say to me.
He’s a pig, your bhulu friend, he’d say, I’ve seen tissues of it all over his bedspread.
That day, Werner’s parents came home early for a long weekend and he hid us behind a sparse rosebush growing against their newly built fence. The day was gray, like most of them that summer, but the bricks in the wall were still warm. My brother and I were caught not thirty seconds later. Maybe Werner wanted us to be caught. The maid watched us with a blank mask from the kitchen sink while Werner’s mother lost the blood in her face and his father, a large, balding architect with sleek black hair around a hard, shimmering pate, came after us with a roar, waving his belt over his head and shouting, Uit! Uit! Uit!
We were only twelve years old, so we ran.
Later, back home, Luthando found me in the kitchen and squeezed my nose between his thumbs from behind. We hadn’t spoken since our escape from Werner’s house, and I’d been making us coffee, watching as two of the neighborhood mutts mated lazily in the yard across from ours. My brother led me to a mirror and mashed my face into the cold pane. Luthando was in a rage, and he asked me if I liked looking that way—with my nose pinched—and nearly broke the glass with my forehead. I struggled and elbowed him and we both fell to the floor and fought. When he tired of pressing my face against the bathroom tile, and with my saliva pooling against my cheek on the floor, I asked him why he was hurting me, even though I knew the reason. Luthando said everything else about me was white, so why would I mind having a pinched nose on my face. Then he heeled my cheek again, and I thought it was to spite him that I smiled at what he’d said, but I knew even then a part of me was charmed by it. Eventually, when he got up and started to walk away, I tried to spit on his heels, and then I called him poor for the first time in our lives. This was me and my brother Luthando.
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.