The Reactive (3 page)

I put my cellphone away. These days, she's always wearing a different pack of synthetic hair on her head. Sometimes the color she chooses is black, at other times it's a blue shade, and at other times it's this color I can't even describe to you—like silver or aqua or teal or something. Ruan and I have seen her in the red and blonde ones a lot. Cissie wears them on her head all day and all of them, she says, are more flammable than a wick dipped in paraffin. She tells us to think of her as a human match, with a dormant fire ready to burst into flame between her brains, which is a nice way of telling people not to fuck with you. Or at least the nicest way I've heard.

I can feel my cellphone's weight against my thigh. Leaning back on the railing, I push out three slow breaths for composure. Out on the balcony, the weather changes faces. Spring is stalling, still a month away, but the sun's rays warm up my skin like geyser water. They throw dappled light across the empty corridor.

Ruan and I have been squatting here for the past few nights, somewhere between falling asleep and overdosing on Cissie's couch. Cissie's building, this unattractive cream-colored six-story called West Ridge Heights, was converted from an old ground-level nursing home in the late eighties. It sits tucked away in Newlands, a docile suburb, just a few streets off the main road, and it's one of the two holes Ruan and I have chosen to call our homes, this year. Or maybe just for the winter, if you want to take Ruan's view of things.

In any case, this is where Cissie cooks her glue for us. You take a look and the building has the usual overgrown grass, the usual stained ceilings, and the usual dirty lino in its single-lift lobby. There's a tile missing here and there, with a broken full-length mirror and plastic potted plants leaning back in most of its corners. There isn't much security to speak of, and below, on the ground floor, there's a young girl who plays by herself in a small courtyard, building cities with loose pieces of concrete from the broken water fountain. I always wave at her when Ruan and I come over to crash. Often, she just looks up and stares at me with vacant eyes. Then she runs back under the awning and disappears into places I can't imagine from up here on the fourth. In between these encounters, I've learned her name is Ethelia.

Inside, I hear Cissie talking again.

I'm being serious, she says. Look, just think about this thing for a moment.

I try to.

I mean, it's pretty much a habit for us, by now. What we're doing is having one of our talks about what to do for Last Life. Last Life is the name we've come up with for what happens to me during my last year on the planet. Like always, we stayed up for most of the previous night with the question. We finished the wine first. Then we moved on to the bottle of benzene.

Ruan looks up and says, dude, explain this slavery thing to me. He gets up to take a thin book from the counter and flops himself down on a torn bean-bag. Then he starts reading the book—
A Happy Death
by Camus—from the back, his eyes training the sentences inward, as if the French author had written a Japanese manga.

Cissie just says her word again.

Slavery.

She raises her hand and waves the gooey ladle in a small circle above the bowl.

You know what I mean, she says. The three of us, we're basically slaves.

From my side, I remain quiet. I just watch them like I sometimes do. I mean honestly. It's Ruan who usually brings us all this pathos.

The three of us aren't slaves. Ruan, Cissie and I each wrote matric in the country's first batch of Model C's. In common, our childhoods had the boomerangs we used to throw with the neighborhood kids, the rollerblades and the green buckets of space goo. The Sticky Hands with their luminous jelly fingers, each digit rumored to be toxic, which we clotted with wet earth on the first day back from the store and threw into our green pools for cleansing. The Grow Monsters which we watched expanding inside our toilet bowls with awe, and the tracks we dug for our Micro Machines before the day ended, when the orange light would come down and tint the neighborhood roof tiles the color of a lightbulb filament.

Ease. Everything my little brother Luthando never got to have.

For all that time, I remember LT topless in denim shorts and wearing a thin silver chain. Luthando played marbles, that's what he knew most of all to do with his hands. My brother wasn't tough, but he fancied himself a township
ou.
I remember how he didn't know what a spinning top was before I gave him mine. We used the laces from his Chuck Taylors to spin it, and later that night, I was quiet when he refused to drink the water my mother poured for us at the dinner table, telling me later that he'd wanted to preserve the taste of beef in his mouth.

Inside the kitchen, Cissie tries to drive home her point. What if babies cry because birth is the first form of human incarceration? What if it's a lasting shock to the consciousness to be imprisoned inside the human body? If the flesh is something that's meant to go off from the beginning, doesn't that make it an ill fit, since the consciousness, naturally amorphous, is antithetical to disintegration?

Still stirring the glue in her yellow bowl, Cissie asks if we understand.

I can't really tell.

I don't think LT is still around. Maybe it's because my body's breaking down that she's speaking to us like this, or maybe it's because her own body's fading away from her. You can't always tell with Cecelia. It could be everyone's body that's bothering her.

I walk back inside, anyway, and take the spoon from her. She gives me a mock head-butt with her match head, and then she sits on the counter to light up a cigarette. Sighing with relief, she closes her eyes to suck in the carcinogens.

From behind his book, Ruan tells us we aren't selling enough pills. He places the book aside and looks up at me. Of course, this isn't really news to us.

I tell him that my case manager said she'd give me a call. For months now, I say, my insurers, I think they've been holding out on me.

Ruan sits up.

Jesus, Nathi, he says, don't tell me they've started reviewing your case. He pulls his computer onto his lap. Quick, dude, he says,
gooi
me her name and email.

This is Ruan's solution for most of our problems. Mention something to him and he'll ask you for a name and an email address. Right now, I shrug, since I don't have either one.

I guess I could find out, I say.

I keep stirring.

I tell myself this is what's important.

I wipe my brow like I've been watching Cissie do all morning. When I look up, I find her closing her eyes, leaning back on the kitchen counter. She blows out a pair of smoke rings. Then her hand drops to ash the last of her cigarette, and she says it again, this word she's been using on us all morning.

Slavery.

On the bean-bag, Ruan doesn't respond. He goes back to reading and I take out my cellphone. I plug it into the charger next to the stove, and, using my other hand to stir, I read the text message from my uncle.

Lindanathi, my uncle Bhut' Vuyo says,
ukhulile ngoku,
you've come of age.

He tells me I haven't been seen in too long. I read this second line for a while before I delete the message.

Returning to the glue, the relief I expect to wash over me doesn't arrive. Instead, I think of each word I've read off the screen. I think of coming of age in the way Bhut' Vuyo means. Then I think of my last night in Du Noon, and about those two words,
ukhulile ngoku,
and of coming of age once more.

My case manager calls my cellphone close to an hour later. We've put away Cissie's cooked glue in plastic containers to cool off in the freezer, and we've taken up our noses what's left of the tube of industrial-strength glue she keeps in her drawer. It's now just a little after one, and we're sprawled sideways across Cissie's living-room floor, our lungs full of warmth from n-hexane. When I don't pick up and answer my case manager's call, my cellphone seems to melt inside my palm. It's a strange sensation, but one you get used to after a while.

With another hour passing, we watch as Ruan pulls his baseball cap over his forehead. He plays “By This River” by Brian Eno on his laptop, tapping the repeat button under the seek bar, and then the next hour arrives and Cissie hands us three Ibuprofens each. She pops them out of a new 500-milligram bubble pack, and we take them with glasses of milk and clumps of brown sugar. From where I'm sitting, I can still feel the warmth from the glue expanding through me, a thick liquid spilling out from my chest and kneading into my fingertips. The sunlight casts a wide flat beam over the coffee table, and after we've swallowed, we place the tumblers holding the rest of our milk between its narrow legs. I close my eyes again and hear my cellphone calling out for me. Its vibration feels like a small hand running over my thigh, and when I pick it up, my heart squeezes into itself as I think of Bhut' Vuyo. I see Luthando's stepfather stretching his vest under his heavy blue overalls, sitting inside a sweating phone container and hefting a fistful of change, but then I look down and the code reads 011, connecting my line to the grid in Joburg.

I place the receiver back against my ear, hearing the sound of a hundred telephones ringing in unison, and then the sound of my case manager climbing up from underneath this din, shouting at me through a deep ocean of static. The missing copper—I imagine kilometers of it stolen from our skyline each year— leaves a yawning gap of silence between our sentences, and then a big wind pushes behind her voice when she tells me about missing another meeting, how it means my insurance will have no choice but to cut me off. She tells me they haven't received a sheet with my CD4 count for close to five months now, and that I should know better than to be this reckless with their program. I'm sitting down as I listen to this. Since I can't do anything else, I nod at the table.

Something that's not difficult to figure out about me and my case manager is that we've never gotten along. Not in any real sense of the word. I only know her as Sis' Thobeka, never having bothered to ask her for a full name, and in my head, she's just one of the many medical bureaucrats I'll have to pass through on my way out. She calls me from an air-conditioned office in Joburg, and there isn't much else to say about us. Except maybe this one time, when she took up my case about four years ago. She told me that she'd fallen into her line of work owing to a compulsion she had to assist the frail. She'd grown tired of her nursing job at Baragwanath, however, of all the men, women and children that got swept into the intensive care unit on her watch, most of them broken into soft and wet pieces.

This introduction left a reluctant mark on me. On occasion, I still think of her as existing between then and now, and of the number of people she had to witness turning into powder. Maybe this makes it easier for me to stomach her: that she has this knowledge of loss beneath the protocol. I even told her, once, how I'd got my virus by accident. I remember her silence that day. The two of us stayed on the line for a while, and in the end, she only said: okay. Then she coughed and we carried on. To this day, I doubt she thinks it prudent to believe anything I say. Not that I'd want that from her. This suits the two of us just fine.

On the line now, I tell her, okay.

Okay what?

I've got a meeting scheduled.

You have a meeting scheduled, she says. When is this?

It's today.

Well, that's good then, Lindanathi. Take yourself to that meeting today, and then fax us a proof of attendance with your CD4 count sheet. We've approved the latest shipment of your medications, but now you have to do your part for us and make the program work. Do you understand?

I do. I tell her that.

You have a good care package here, she tells me. Don't let it go to waste over foolishness.

I won't.

Right.

I tell her again that I won't.

Look, it's in your hands, isn't it?

It is.

Well then, she says. We've added benefits for you Silver members. We could move you up in a few months' time if you fixed up your file. We've had to scale back on the Platinum option, though, so I would suggest a Gold membership for now.

I nod. I can hear Sis' Thobeka pecking on her keyboard as I consider the options. Voices murmur in her office, and I begin to drift off as she details the premiums.

She lets a minute pass in silence before she asks me if I'm doing fine in any case, if I'm okay despite everything else that's the matter with me.

I blink, and I'm about to answer her when she says she has another call coming in. I wait for her when she tells me to wait, and I'm still doing that when her voice turns into a dial tone.

Later, when I open my eyes, I find Ruan and Cissie staring down at me. Their brows crease as they edge towards my place on the floor, their outlines melting into the walls stained and cracked behind them.

Cissie says, Nathi, are you okay?

My mouth feels blow-dried, packed thick with stiff clouds of cotton wool.

I look up and ask them the same. I say, are you okay?

In response, Cissie points a finger at her ear. Then she gets on her knees, takes my hand, and says, Nathi, your phone's dead.

+ + +

The way I got to know them, by the way, my two closest friends here, is that we met at one of the new HIV and drug-counseling sessions cropping up all over the city. We were in the basement parking lot of the free clinic in Wynberg. The seminar room upstairs had been locked up and taped shut, there'd been a mercury spill, and our group couldn't meet in there on account of the vapors being toxic to human tissue. Instead, they arranged us in the basement parking lot, and in two weeks we got used to not being sent upstairs for meetings. I did, in any case, and that was enough for me in the beginning.

In those days, I attended the meetings alone. I'd catch a taxi from Obs over to Wynberg for an afternoon's worth of counseling. By the end of my first month, when the seminar room had been swept once, and then twice, and then three times by a short man who wore a blue contamination meter over his chest, each time checking out clean, everyone decided they preferred it down below, and so that's where we stayed.