We never hear from the ugly man again. I guess there isn’t much else to say about him. He’s just one of this city’s many ciphers, we decide, one of the strange things that happen in the alleyways of the Southern Peninsula. Ruan speculates that he’s a deposed president, and Cissie says he’s the advisor to one. In any case, the money is retracted from our account, laundered most likely, and he never comes back for the ARVs. We decide to call him Ambroise Paré, after the man he admires, and Cissie says we should make masks out of his face. To the three of us, our planned meeting with Ethelia takes on an inevitable air, although we don’t discuss it much. Cissie goes back to work; Ruan and I hang out.
Ethelia shows up at Cissie’s place around a week later, on a Sunday afternoon. She knocks three times and finds the three of us sitting on the floor, each somehow sober. Cissie closes the door behind her. When she sees me, I wave at her and Ethelia smiles back.
I’ve never seen her close up before. She’s dressed in a matching denim top and jeans. Cissie walks to the bedroom to get the package we retrieved for her from the safety deposit box. We had gone straight there—a private security company on Orange Street—after having left the house in Woodstock. We hadn’t really been surprised to discover that Ambroise had prepared the way for us. We only had to present them with the letter.
Ruan’s reading an old comic book, an effort to calm his nerves. He’s had this issue since he was twelve, he says, and he’s let me have a look at it a few times. Half its pages are falling out, and it’s about the Silver Surfer. The superhero wakes up on an alien planet, stranded without his surfboard, the source of his energy. Close to the end, he tries to sell his memories for a way out, but gets cheated by an agency that converts them to video.
I watch him from the couch. Ruan closes the comic book and places it carefully on the table. Cissie returns with the package and hands it to Ethelia, who receives it with both hands.
What is it?
Cissie turns to us. We don’t know, she says, but it’s yours.
Is it from my father?
Cissie doesn’t reply. Ruan and I don’t say anything, either. I realize I’ve never imagined Ethelia as having a voice.
My aunt told me my father was an important man, she says. Then she shakes the parcel. Can I open it?
It’s yours, Cissie says.
Ethelia opens the package and money spills out, scattering on Cissie’s floor. It’s several wads of two-hundred-rand notes, followed by an ID and a passport.
Ethelia bends over to pick up the money, and for a moment it’s as if she’s back with her concrete pieces again—arranging them into another secret empire. Ruan, Cissie and I lean down to help, and Ethelia laughs as she handles the money. She laughs at the images of herself in the passport and ID.
So who knew? Cissie says. You’re a Canadian.
I search the kitchen drawers and find rubber bands for the notes. Then I try to count the money, but it’s too much to guess at a glance. We pack it up in bundles.
Ethelia stands with the package flat against her chest. My aunt will be happy, she says, before going quiet. Then she looks up again. You’ve seen my father, haven’t you?
Yes.
I guess all three of us say this at once.
Then Ruan and Cissie look at me and I go on.
We saw him, I say, and he wanted us to give you this.
Ethelia nods. Did he say anything about coming to my aunt’s?
I shake my head.
Then Ethelia looks down and nods. She starts to turn.
Wait, Cissie says, hold on. I have an idea.
She leaves the room and returns with a piece of paper and a sharpened pencil. Taking Ethelia by the hand, she leads her to the coffee table, kicking away an empty water bottle we were using for huffing. Ruan and I lean closer.
We watch them. Cissie asks Ethelia to draw a picture of the planet. It’s the lesson she’s used in her daycare class, the one her students couldn’t get right. Ethelia takes the pencil and touches it against the foolscap.
Cissie says, imagine you’re away from your aunt, and imagine you’re away from West Ridge Heights. She places a hand on Ethelia’s shoulder. Imagine you’re away from your envelope, and away from the three of us, also.
Then, when Ethelia starts to sketch an oval shape inside the page’s margins, Cissie says: imagine you’re drawing a map into all of us.
In the morning, around seven, I email my landlord and tell him I want out of my twelve-month lease. I’ve come to accept that this has to be done. François replies that it’s fine, it won’t cause much hassle, he’ll start showing the place to people right away. I type back, great, and leave West Ridge with Ruan and Cissie still asleep.
Down at the parking-lot gate, I wait for a car taking someone to work or school, and trail after its brake lights. Then I take a taxi along Main Road to Obs.
There was another hospital strike, our driver says when we reach the first stop in Mowbray. The passengers are packed on the seats behind him: twenty-two of us crammed in a fog of mixed perfume. The driver describes the passing of his mother-in-law, whose lungs collapsed in a Golden Arrow bus the previous morning.
That’s life, the driver says, before rolling down his window.
From my seat I look out at the racing tar, at the undulating roofs of the brazen storefronts, and I remember how, in my fourth year of high school, my biology teacher took a flying class on the coast of Natal, and discovered a lesson for us in the air above Richards Bay. Her name was Mrs. Mathers, and when she returned to our class the following week, she told us how the Earth was gutted open with so many new graves for paupers, that when the clouds parted, they revealed a view from the sky that looked like a giant honeycomb. Then she watched everyone’s expression. Mrs. Mathers was a part-time student of our emotional development. My classmates and I were known as the Math One class, relied upon for acuity but not much else, and we were only eighteen in number. Our teacher told us each grave was meant to contain the bodies of twenty adults.
She said to us, that is HIV.
I get off at Anzio and walk down past Lower Main. I use a round black tag to get inside my building, walk up two flights of stairs and let myself into my flat. The place feels like a storage room. It’s dead still and airless. I open a window and drop myself on the bed.
Then I try to doze off and fail.
I peel my phone from my pocket and hold it in my palm. It’s open on the text messenger. I remember Bhut’ Vuyo’s first message to me.
Lindanathi, you’ve come of age, it said.
It’s been almost ten years. That’s how long Luthando’s been turning into powder inside the Earth. I rub my hand over my face and spend another minute looking at my cellphone. Then I close my eyes and try for sleep again, but nothing comes.
Later, when I try to use the toilet, I get the same feeling. Nothing makes its way out of me as I squat over the porcelain, and I feel time slowing down again. I lift the cistern lid and pull on the lever to flush. Then I walk back to the kitchen and drink a glass of water with ice. In the end, I manage to get two hours of sleep.
Waking up again, I text Cecelia, asking her if she wants anything. I’ve accepted I’ll have to give most of my belongings away.
I wait, but there’s no reply, so I turn my computer on. Then I get up from my desk and walk over to the lav again to take a leak. You’ve never been happy here, I say, observing myself in the speckled mirror. Then I light a cigarette and try to do the dishes, but my hands start trembling. I drain the water and make a cup of tea instead.
Sitting back at my desk, I click on a button that sends the browser to my blog. There’s a draft of a post I wrote more than a week ago. I read through it again from the top. This is how it goes:
Last night I projected myself out of my body, going through more loops than is usual for me. I’ve forgotten the first loop, which is common. The second one took place at a party somewhere. No one seemed impressed by my ability to fly for short amounts of time, or to jump really high above the ground. Flying feels like trying to stay awake when you’re extremely tired and half-asleep. I discovered fear is what inhibits flight. I was an artist in the second loop and met another artist. He held my face and looked into my eyes and said, yes, it’s true, you’re dreaming. He was impressed. He talked about it at length. This made me too aware of being in a loop, however, and the loop disintegrated and I found myself at my father’s house. There was a man pacing in the backyard; when I followed him, he dug a hole in the ground and disappeared. I became aware of dreaming again, and feeling exhausted. I tested myself by jumping over a heap of sharp rocks. Then I tried to pull a spider towards me with my mind. It moved, but it could’ve been the wind. Eventually, I heard a voice telling me it was fine, that I could still do it. I felt relief, but at the same time fear because I wouldn’t be able to do it again. I was struck by the idea of being in what you know is a dream, but without capabilities, with a fragmented memory and an unstable reality. I thought maybe this is what schizophrenia is. I didn’t remember having taken off my shirt, but I was topless. I’d had enough, but I couldn’t will myself to wake up and this made me panic. Then I found the shirt in front of the house, and as I picked it up and turned around, that’s when I woke up to now, in bed, my heart beating fast. I recognized this as reality because of the new weight I felt coursing through me, my body recognizing the Earth’s gravitational field. Then I opened my eyes to find everything in place.
My blog has no audience and I’ve never shared a link for the purpose of gaining one. I scroll back up and click on the publish button.
Then my intercom goes off. I can’t stand the sound it makes, so I rush over to it whenever it clangs. I stub my toe on the way to the door.
It’s a guy from the courier: I have your delivery, he says.
I put on a pair of slops and walk out of the door, and, as I’m turning the key, I get a text from Cissie saying they just got up half-an-hour ago: they’re waiting for a taxi along Main Road. Ruan’s walking her to work. I text back saying, all right, and that I’ve just received the pill package. Cissie says to meet them in Mowbray with the box.
I won’t go in today, she says. I’ll just tell Lauren I’m taking my leave.
I meet the delivery man downstairs. He’s this older guy, a Shona man, he tells me, and I nod. He’s Zimbabwean the way Ruan’s grandparents used to be Rhodesian, I think. He gives me a pen and I scrawl my name across his clipboard.
Then I take the box back upstairs, drop it on my bed and take off my clothes. I try to do push-ups on the concrete floor, but stop when I reach eleven, feeling my heart race and my muscles wither from my skeleton.
In the shower, the water comes out warm, and more than once I hear the copper pipes groaning like they’re being pulled apart from opposite ends. Then I close my eyes and listen to the water smacking the tiles between my feet. I try to disappear into the patter until the water runs cold on my skin. This will be my last shower here.
Twenty minutes later, I meet Cissie and Ruan outside Cissie’s place of work, her daycare center in Mowbray. Cissie says she’s collected two weeks of holiday; that they have a new girl to make up the gap. I tell them I have the pills inside my bag. We buy bottled water at the nearby KFC and break a stem of khat at a rounded corner table. Then the three of us take one of the taxis heading from Wynberg to town.
In half an hour, we reach the taxi rank. Our driver backs into the bay marked for Wynberg and we get out and walk past a row of Cell C containers into Cape Town Station. I tell Ruan and Cecelia about my uncle Bhut’ Vuyo, and how he’s hatched a harebrained plan to see me today. I say this slowly, to make the two of them laugh, and then I shrug. I tell them I won’t be long. I don’t mention I’ve made no plans to return to the city.
We find the new public rest rooms, smelling like a heap of feces coated in disinfectant, and Cissie waits outside while Ruan and I take the last stall in the men’s.
We’ve always broken the seals on these boxes together. Today will mark the last occasion. Ruan and I split the package of ARVs between us and then flush the toilet. The boom of the train announcer wraps around my head as we walk out, and for a moment, everyone on the buffed floor seems to stop and glance up at us. I pause, but then decide it doesn’t matter either way.
We say goodbye on Adderley Street. Ruan and Cissie want to get Ruan’s things from his uncle’s firm, so they cross over to the Absa ATM while I walk up towards the Grand Parade. The sun feels noncommittal in its bond to our planet today, spilling out light as gray as bath water. On Strand, I cut through the bus depot, skipping in front of a Golden Arrow bus grunting towards Atlantis. Further down, I walk past a vegetable stall, a hairdresser’s tent, and a medicine stand displaying a large plant bulb and bottles of herbal tonic. I climb up the steel staircase that leads back to the taxi rank. It’s the longer route, which allows me to take down a smoke on the way. I buy my third cigarette on the platform, a Stuyvesant red, from a wrinkled woman wearing a blue doek. She sells Cadbury éclairs and flavored water. Next to her, a muscular man in shades and a pea coat leans up against a sooty column, holding a hot Sony Ericsson phone. It’s still on and he’s hawking it for a grand, he says. I pay the woman and walk past them, looking for a taxi headed up the West Coast. Eventually, I find one headed for Parklands, which goes past Table View. It’s a red Caravelle, and I settle myself in the back seat, my head leaning up against the window. I take out my cellphone and wait for the taxi to fill up. Usually they take a while.
Eventually, a girl with red-tinted hair, wearing a green gym tunic, takes the seat in front of me, filling up the passenger count. I hear the music thumping into her skull from her headphones, a kwaito artist, famous for being a minor and beating a drug case. We no longer sleep, he sings, as the taxi grumbles to life around us. We no longer sleep, he repeats, when we start out of the taxi rank. We pass the vendors with their Niknaks and Nollywood rugs, squeezing ourselves between more taxis streaming in from Victoria Road. Then I hear him for the last time. We no longer sleep, he sings, as we turn into Christiaan Barnard and the roof of the Good Hope Center reveals itself, rising like a dull and blind observatory on our right.
In the end, I guess I was never cut out to be a journalist. During my second year at university, I took an assignment to interview a pop star for my final-term project. The man was part of what was being called a revival in indigenous Venda music, and I wanted to ask him about its representation in the papers. I found the coverage of the band exploitative, but my saying so didn’t go down well with the singer. We fumbled our way through my introduction of this angle, before he caught on that I wasn’t altogether worth his time. He looked at his wristwatch a few times and asked me for my age. It was clear that I had no inclination towards his music, he said, and perhaps no inclination towards music at all. No soul, he later improvised, when we were both loosened up by our first tray of gin. He fell silent and I followed his gaze out to the main road. It was a bright, sunlit Tuesday afternoon, and cars were driving past with their windows down, hurling snatches of summer anthems into the heat. We were sitting in a café in Rondebosch, full of North Americans, caffeine and the smell of chocolate brownies. He was struggling to log onto the network. Our second drinks had arrived and the alcohol was touching my head.
I felt my interest piqued at the mention of metaphysics. I asked him if the soul was important to Venda culture, and if he knew anyone else like me who didn’t have one. He looked across the table at me with the combination of irritation and disgust I’d come to expect from older men in the field. I thought he would get up and walk out, but when I offered him another drink, he accepted. We had the third round in silence and later, outside the café, we shook hands and I gave him directions to the V&A Waterfront, where he wanted to buy clothes from a Gap and Fabiani sale. We parted after that, and I walked back to campus. Then I realized I hadn’t managed to switch my recorder on for the interview.
In bed, later that week, I couldn’t recall any of his songs by name, and a day after that I decided to deregister from my degree. It wasn’t how I was meant to meet the world. On campus, the curriculum advisor, a loud, jovial American man who wore glasses and had a tight white ponytail, asked me to state my reasons. I told him I liked reading, but had no interest in writing. I wanted a career without people skills, I joked, but he didn’t laugh. He looked at a copy of my matric results, achieved at a stern boarding school in Natal where there had been nothing else to do but study, and he shouted: science.
Our driver shifts his stick down and changes lanes towards Civic. We pass Old Marine Drive before we swerve into an Engen to fill up with gas. Two petrol attendants walk up to the driver and offer to shake his hand. Ta T-Man, both of them say, hoezit, groot-man? The driver nods, handing each a twenty-rand note with the shake. I sit and watch them as they talk. Then I get a text from Cissie telling me Ruan managed to avoid his uncle at the firm. The driver rolls up his window, after that, and we pull off again, on our way to Du Noon.
What will I remember about my friends? The good times, I suppose, even though they didn’t always appear good at the time. I’ll remember West Ridge Heights. I’ll remember Ruan telling us that he’d made an evaluation of our personalities, and that he’d plotted them on a hundred-year time scale and concluded that, in the near future, it would become easier for the three of us to detect the defects carried by other people, their fears and deceits, and because of this, we would have a map to locate others like ourselves, who’d been marked in similar ways.
I remember agreeing with him, that day, and maybe each of us had felt more hopeful than usual. Ruan, Cissie and I had been huffing paint thinner at Ruan’s place in Sea Point. Elaborating, Ruan said that after leaving school, he’d lost his natural ability to cultivate relationships with other human beings, but because of the two of us, he felt this being restored to him.
I guess that was something I could understand.
It was something the three of us shared.
In Wynberg, when we came around to meeting each other for the first time, it was with a measure of caution, and the results surprised us. We’d each resigned ourselves to passing by, whenever we met other people, by then. Things had happened to each of us along the way, I suppose, and, as we stood and mumbled by the serving table that afternoon, watching as the rest of the members bonded over biscuits in Mary’s basement, there was no question of our getting romantically involved with each other. In that short time, we’d seemed to have agreed, with a quiet and complicit relief, that we were somehow too wrecked, and that we had met within obviously wrecked circumstances. Ruan, Cissie and I had never owned up to the things we’d had to do in order to keep seeing each other, in those first few weeks of friendship; never admitted to what it was, where it was, and who it was that we were detaching ourselves from. This secrecy hadn’t been incidental, I later felt, but was meant to maintain something unknowable in each of us: a corner we could keep divested of goodwill, without any breach in conscience, at the times we had to hurt each other to spare ourselves.
Though that hardly ever happened.
Which is what I’ll remember, too.
I’ll remember how, two years ago, Ruan began to vomit and wouldn’t stop even after an hour of heaving on his bathroom floor. He’d had another threat from his uncle and another letter from the bank, and he’d been drinking Gin Rickeys at a bar down the road from his flat. Cissie and I tried to catch up with him when we arrived; we each ordered two drinks at a time, but soon we ran out of money.
Outside the bar, Ruan began to laugh as he lit up a filter. He waved his hand across the panorama of the beach, and then inwards across the promenade and the traffic. It was in the early evening and the sky was tinted a burning pink, with a streak of orange cirrus hanging over the horizon. The streetlights were beginning to flicker on intermittently, as if roused from a deep sleep by our footsteps. Ruan hadn’t talked about his uncle that day, and Cissie and I knew he wouldn’t. The three of us were quiet as the cars raced past, a play of light obscuring the faces of the drivers. I imagined them to be headed to Camps Bay for sundowners, or to dinner reservations in the center of town.
We stumbled together. Cissie and I kept Ruan propped up between us. We passed our first cigarette quickly and lit up another one. Then Ruan pointed us towards his flat: he said he wanted to crash.
There were windows on two of the walls in Ruan’s living room and they both looked out over the vista of the Atlantic. Most of them were opened wide, pushed out to the hilt of the hinges, and Ruan had given us specific instructions to leave them that way. He said that sometimes the windows, left ajar, could make the flat seem like a moving structure, as if, sitting alone in his living room at the helm of his glass-topped coffee table, he was in control of something large and industrial, and that, by his efforts alone, he could lift it up and maneuver it out to sea.
When I sat down on his bean-bag that night, the walls seemed to stand up in my stead, the windows sliding hazily down off the bricks. The sounds of the traffic, the promenade and the ocean all reached into the living room and mingled with the noises of Ruan and Cissie looking for thinners in the cabinets. Then the windows slowly readjusted themselves on the walls. When I blinked again, closing my eyes for longer intervals, my head had the feeling of being steered in small, concentric circles. I laid it back on the bean-bag and watched Ruan and Cissie from an inverted perspective, their frames slightly elongated, their feet standing where their chins should’ve hung. Ruan’s hands shot down to his mouth and he pushed himself back from the counter, and for a moment Cissie and I stared at each other through his absence. Then we followed him to the bathroom, and there we found his fig trees inside the bath tub. He had a collection of small potted plants he’d splattered with his own blood, the aim being to spread himself to the world through the different birds that ate them.
I won’t forget that.
The first time LT and I saw people having sex was through my neighbors’ bedroom window. This was back home, at my mother’s house in eMthatha, and we’d giggled so loudly that the guy, blond and stocky—with his face flushed red—had banged on the window and screamed, telling us to fuck off. We’d both had our turn with girls after that and I guess I had a few more than LT did before he turned to a boy in his neighborhood. He would remember it better than I would, although I doubt by a very wide margin.
I remember our uncles, with their gold teeth and beer breath, and how they’d find the two of us at every family gathering, hoist us on their knees, and goad us about becoming men. I’d smile at them while my stomach sank. I’d learned early to be deceitful with older drunks. They got on the bottle and treated you like anyone else—not a Model C who didn’t know his clan name from his asshole.
I was scared to go home for circumcision. Most of us were. We’d grown up hearing stories about what could go wrong. There was the initiate who’d had the head fall off his shaft while he swam upstream in the Mthatha River, and the one who had to be rushed to hospital because his wound wasn’t properly dressed. Each winter, the Dispatch reported on guys like us dropping in droves. It wasn’t the pain: we knew that would pass. I’d just never pictured myself as one of the guys who’d come out the other side—someone who could get along up there.
I also knew that, really, I was scared of being close to LT. The rumors about him had spread and he’d been set apart. I didn’t want people to mix us up, to look at me the same way they did him. When the Mda house came under pressure to make a man out of its sissy son, I kept away—I crossed my arms in Cape Town.
LT was younger than me, and he didn’t believe in what they said—what you had to become to be a man—but he still called to ask me for my help. I told him to go in June, and that I would follow as soon as I handed in my assignments. Well, I never went back. I switched off my phone a week later and abandoned him up there. Later, they said LT fought them and that’s what killed him.
Often, I’ve thought about how I wouldn’t know if that was true; about how I was absent during his last hours, and about how, when he died, my arms were still crossed in Cape Town.
+ + +
One year after I graduated from Tech, and a week before the sixth anniversary of LT’s death, I infected myself with HIV in the laboratories. That’s how I became a reactive. I never had the reactions I needed for myself, and I couldn’t react when LT called to me for help, so I gave my own body something it couldn’t flee from. Now here’s your older brother and murderer, Luthando. His name is Lindanathi and his parents got it from a girl.