The following is an excerpt from The Reactive, Masande Ntshanga's debut novel forthcoming from Two Dollar Radio in May/June 2016. The story takes place in Cape Town, South Africa, during a time when anti-retroviral medications were not widely available. Ntshanga is the winner of a PEN International New Voices Award and a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing. With The Reactive, he has created an immersive and powerful portrait of drug use, community, and health issues by exploring what it was like to be young, black, South African, and HIV positive in the early aughts.
The three of us spend the next hour putting up posters along the main road, from Claremont to Salt River, all of them telling people how to buy my ARVs from me. Then we carry glue in Tupperware containers from Cissie's fridge, jump the Mowbray train to the city, and take a bus out to the West Coast. I take a look at the time on my phone and it's only mid-afternoon. I guess this is what they mean when they call Cape Town the city of slumber. Time seems to speed up here, and then it stalls, and then it seems to speed up again before it stalls.
We pass Paarden Eiland just as the sun begins to burn itself through the clouds. It throws down a harsh beam that bisects the bus and Cissie taps my shoulder and says I should turn around. She tells me to look at how we're sitting on the right side of the light.
Then we pass Milnerton, the ocean sparkling and still, covered in white spots flecked across its vast surface. It looks as if all the salt has been sucked up to the lid of the Atlantic. After that Blouberg, the destination we've chosen for our excursion today, lists into our bus-driver's wind-screen.
I open the notebook program on my cellphone. I have orders for Ronny, Lenard, and Leonardo. I've got one for Millicent. I write down Ta Lloyd and add a question mark after his name. Then, after a moment, I also add Nandipha, his wife. This makes up the list of reactives we could still sell our pills to at Wynberg. Two previous clients, Gerald and Melanie, haven't come to meetings for a year.
In Blouberg, we stalk into an internet café, this gamer-powered cavern complete with a coffee plunger and blue carpet tiles. The computers are sectioned into black cubicles with little hooks that hold up oversized headphones.
It's one of those LAN-gamer killing pens, I say to Cissie. The first-person-shooter covens that seem to grow in popularity each year.
Cissie nods, somewhat slackened by the place's distractions. I fax my attendance slip to Sis' Thobeka at the front counter. There's a sign here that says they sell R29 airtime vouchers.
I catch Ruan looking around with this grim, beaten-up expression on his face.
He approaches the counter. I was such a frightened little shit when I was in high school, he says, shaking his head.
The voice he uses doesn't sound like him. It sounds as if it's only meant for his ears, not all six of ours, and when he's done, he looks up at us with a wan smile. Ruan doesn't like the year we've stepped into, and behind him Cissie takes note of this and raises her eyebrows. Not every story begs to be told, she seems to say.
I get the airtime and we walk out.
This is beach weather, almost, Cissie says, when we step outside. She stretches her arms out in front of her to feel the rays for evidence, but the solar system contradicts her. She drops her arms back down.
Well, half of almost, she says, correcting herself.
Ruan and I nod. It's a fitting description. Cissie has a way of sounding concise in the face of disapproval, and as if to defy the weather's indifference to her will, the three of us trudge into the Milky Lane up the road, next to the Total garage that ends the strip. We buy a vanilla milkshake and a pair of peanut-butter waffles and cross the road to Blouberg beach, stepping over the wooden railing and walking down a short pier to a grassy knot on the sand, not far from the polluted dunes. A large crane ship slowly drifts past the vista of Table Mountain, while above us, the sky clears up in a rounded blue column, spilling down enough light to make the ocean water blinding.
Ruan opens up our boxed packages. He uses a plastic knife to cut up the waffles while Cissie rolls a joint from the section Arnold sold us. She licks it from the tip to the gerrick and lights it with a copper Zippo from her shirt pocket. She holds in a drag, sipping the air in tiny increments, and then passes the joint on to me as she exhales.
Taking it from her, I lean back. The air feels cool but pleasant on my skin, and when I look out at the water, it seems to ripple in slow undulations, each one extending to the farthest reaches of the world.
I close my eyes and take a drag.
I try to savor the smoke's effect on my nervous system.
You know, Ruan says, his voice reaching me from behind my closed eyelids, Napoleon sent some of his troops to fight against a British fleet here. It happened in the 19th century, I think. More than 500 people died.
I open my eyes. Ruan sits facing out to sea. He scratches his neck, takes a bite from his waffle, and leans back on his elbows. I pass him the joint.
Imagine, he says.
Imagine what?
Like, where we're sitting now could be the exact place some British or French assholes drove bayonets into each other. Isn't that weird?
I guess. That's probably this entire country, I say.
No, really, he says. Imagine. One guy could be standing with his boot on another's face, just over here, pushing the barrel of his musket down his throat, and shouting, hey! We found the natives first! Then the other would be over there, going, non! Niquer ta mère!
Ruan does the accent well and Cissie and I laugh.
Hey, she says. I didn't know about that Blouberg and Napoleon thing. Do you think I could talk about it with the kids?
Sure, Ruan says. Make it a musket adventure.
He peels off a slice from the waffle and bites into it, sloppily. Then he grunts at us through the batter like a Disney pirate.
Cissie laughs.
Wait, she says. I didn't tell you guys about what happened to me last week, did I? Well, I made my kids draw me a picture of the Earth. Or I asked them to, anyway. Can you believe it? None of them knows what their planet looks like.
This isn't new. Cissie likes to think everyone has an opinion on outer space.
It doesn't take her long before she starts telling us about Cape Canaveral again.
If you know anything at all about Cecelia, then you'll know this isn't her first time on the subject. The three of us stretch out on the polluted sand, our fingers digging shallow troughs in Blouberg's white, heated dunes, and Cissie tells us about the headland on the Space Coast, the Cape in Florida, where the United States launches more than half of its space missions into orbit. Then she moves on to the Kennedy Space Center and tells us about the collective unconscious, the embedded memory all of us humans share with our planet. She tells us how she feels like she's been there at some point in her life, crossing an empty parking lot in Jetty Park, or lying under a clear sky and drinking a molten smoothie, or kicking around a bottle cap, or standing within touching distance of the station and staring out at the launch sites. The details don't matter, she says. The way Cissie thinks about her kinship with the headland, she tells us, isn't because she visited a family friend on the Florida coast when she was 12, it's because everyone on our planet has a story to share about space. It's the only thing she's certain of, she says. That everyone has an idea about what the sky turns into at night.
Listening to her, I feel as I always do: uncertain. I have a feeling it might be true, but Ruan, on the other hand, is adamant he doesn't have a story about space.
I watch him pull on what's left of the roach and bury the ember in the sand. Cissie tears off a corner from a waffle and pushes it into her mouth, chewing on it for a long time before sucking the syrup off her fingers. We don't eat the banana slices. I watch them pile up in the red boxes for later.
I roll another joint. When I look up to lick it, a container ship makes its way into our view from the horizon. Then Cissie asks me to tell her a space story.
I don't have one, I say.
Unfazed, she leans over and hands me her lighter. Then she draws back and says, of course you do. Everyone does.
I look ahead. I can feel my elbows digging holes in the sand. I flip the copper lid of the lighter and torch the joint at its pointed end. It burns slowly and I take a long drag before I let the smoke out through my nostrils in thick white plumes.
I'll work on it, I say.
Then the three of us go quiet for a while.
The sand under my feet feels packed. Closer now, the container ship sounds its horn, its bilge cleaving the water like a scalpel through skin. I watch as a handful of ships melt into the horizon, each one swaying before tipping over the edge of the world.
It's better outside those killing pens, Ruan says after a while, and I remember how his face looked inside the internet café.
Cissie and I don't answer him.
I lie back and watch my blood turn orange behind my eyelids. The grass spikes me between my ears and my neck, and the heave of the ocean, when it reaches us, sounds like the breathing of an asthmatic animal. We remain quiet a while longer, and I suppose it's now, with the column of blue finally closing up above us, and the water losing its shimmer and ability to gouge, that my eyelids turn from orange to red and then to black again, and Bhut' Vuyo, my uncle from Du Noon, sends me another text message, and this time around, he tells me in clear terms to come home to them.
Watch a Web-Exclusive Clip from Our Doc 'Countdown to Zero' About HIV Treatment in South Africa:
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 11th 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 200 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.
Julian's door has a silver number: an 1100 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 MFAs 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 15 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 28-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.
VICE Meets Norwegian Literary Sensation Karl Ove Knausgaard:
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 30 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 12 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.
Masande Ntshanga is the winner of the 2013 PEN International New Voices Award, as well as a Finalist for the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing. He was born in East London in 1986. His novel, The Reactive, will be published in May/June 2016 by Two Dollar Radio.
Thumbnail courtesy of Two Dollar Radio
from VICE http://ift.tt/1JyzhPy
via cheap web hosting
No comments:
Post a Comment