The Reactive (2 page)

Now, close to eight years later, I receive a text message from my uncle that reminds me of the words we shared back then, and of the promise I made, on a night so long ago I can hardly put it together from memory.

FIRST PART

SECOND PART

THIRD PART

FOURTH PART

FIFTH PART

 

This morning, when I opened my eyes, I found another warm Saturday wrapping itself around the peninsula. Someone had left Cissie's living-room window open again, the one on the east-facing wall, above the copy of Rothko's
No. 4
that she'd painted for the three of us last week. Standing there in front of the glass, I couldn't tell you which one of us had left the window open, only that when I heard the wind blowing under the wooden sash again, I felt I was on my own here. There was a blanket of smog stretching itself thick over the rim of the metropolis, and everything looked inflated and exhausted all at once. I remembered all the different things inside this city, and how they changed the moment you got used to them. Then I remembered myself, too.

I closed the window after that, and soon my eyes followed.

Now it's a little later. Outside, the sky seems geared up for another humid weekend over the city, another three days of trees at war with their roots, and of dirty window panes getting stripped clean by the late winter rain.

I take a shallow breath.

Then cough.

Where I am right now is Newlands. I'm over at Cecelia's place, and I suppose the situation is easy enough to explain. It's still a long stretch of time before I die, but only three short hours since I received the message from my uncle, and everything's happening the way it usually does between me and my friends. Like always, the three of us—that's me, Ruan and Cecelia— we wake up some time before noon and take two Ibuprofens each. Then we go back to sleep, wake up an hour later, and take another two from the 800-milligram pack. Then Cissie turns on the stove to cook up a batch of glue, and the three of us wander around mutely after that, digging the sleep out of our eyes and caroming off each other's limbs. We drift through whatever passes for early afternoon here at Cissie's place.

This morning, I find my skin mottled with goose-flesh. I'm standing with one foot on cold chipped tile and the other on wet concrete. I'm yawning, still wiping stray motes from my eyes, and in a way, I guess these motes might be tears, but that's also me having my eyelids closed against that idea. That's also me not wanting to find out.

Now I open them again.

I'm always the last to walk out of Cissie's bathroom. Today, since the pedal on her flapper bin's broken, I leave a string of dental floss floating inside the toilet bowl. I find Ruan watching her from the other end of the kitchen, lighting up incense sticks and placing them flat on the kitchen counter. He's trying to cover up the smell of glue wafting from the oven.

Most of the walls are stained here, by the way, and the floors are cracked, too. This isn't Cissie's doing, only the nature of her building. It's what makes it affordable for her to rent a flat in this area. Once, when I was sitting on my own on her couch, sober but I guess still half-asleep, I'd tried to count the cracks I could find in her floor-boards. They reminded me then of Sis' Funeka's smile in the days before we'd buried her, and, in a way, I guess they still do. My aunt refused to look at me after Luthando was gone, and though I never attended her funeral, I was told she mistook me for him on her hospital bed. I thought I was lucky, back then, to have escaped the insight of her dementia. Maybe she would've pointed me out as the one who'd killed him. Instead, I'm here.

Hung over in Newlands, six foot two, bone-thin, soaked through and dripping pipe-rusted water all over Cissie's threshold. In the kitchen, Cissie has the only dry towel in the flat wrapped around her waist. I look in from the door. Then cough loud enough to annoy her.

Really, I say, Cecelia, tell me this isn't typical.

Standing by the stove, Cissie doesn't answer me. Instead, she starts laughing. Or she scoffs, rather. Which is what Cecelia does these days. She scoffs.

I watch her take her time as she turns around, and when she's done with that, with giving me and Ruan her performance, she throws me a tattered dishcloth to dry myself off with. Even though it's stupid of me to catch it, that's what I do, and before I can say anything in protest, she tells me to look at what she's busy doing. I look up and Cecelia waves at me.

Dude, she says, can't you see I'm being a breadwinner here? I'm the only one who pays the rent on time on the fourth floor of this damn building. Can't you see that?

In response, I sigh. Then, since she's right, I nod.

I dry my neck and behind my ears. In the bathroom again, I pull on a pair of shorts and find a dry shirt in the hamper. It belongs to her, but it used to be mine, so I put it on. I pat my hair with the dishcloth and hang it on the shower rail to dry. Then I walk around her and open the kitchen windows for air. I'm sure we all need that by now.

I unbolt each latch on the front door and step out onto the balcony. Leaning back against the railing, I breathe out and watch Cissie wiping her brow with a sigh. She gathers the brown goo in the pot with a small wooden spoon and lets it drip slowly into the pit of a yellow bowl. I stand there and she stands there. We stare at each other for a while.

I guess this is how everything moves today. It's like riding on the back of a large, dying mammal. It matches the tepid warmth, and I close my eyes against it. I try not to think about Bhut' Vuyo's message. I try not to think about everything I've had to put away about Luthando, my dead brother, in the days that have grown out into years between us. Instead, I think about how it's the weekend, again. It's the weekend, and this is what the three of us do on days like today.

Sitting cross-legged in the living room, Ruan opens his laptop and starts up the printer on Cissie's coffee table. He feeds paper into the machine and watches as the computer boots up with its usual noise. I suppose you could call this our operation, our way of making a little extra in this place, here in Cape Town, where we are.

To understand it better, you'd have to meet Cecelia.

Cissie's our resident chemist here at West Ridge. She's in charge of cooking the glue we use to hang up our posters; and in order to make it the way Cissie does, you need flour, brown sugar and a small amount of vinegar. You need to pour these into a bowl, add a cup of water and mix thoroughly, making sure to squash out all the lumps from the flour. Have the oven preheated at 180°, bring the bowl to a boil, keep stirring and build up the texture. During this entire process, what helps is to be as patient and attentive as Cecelia when she's cooking a batch. Failing that, you can at least try to be halfway as demanding as she is, and halfway for Cissie, of course, means all the way for the rest of us.

I remember how I'd been out of a job for seven months, once. I was living off the last of my severance pay when Cecelia, who'd just showered and burnt her hand on her new but broken sandwich grill, came to sit next to me on her bed and asked me if I ever considered what would really happen to me the moment I died. That's how things were back then, about two years ago, and I suppose they aren't that different now. It was a warm night in October. The South-Easter had descended on Cape Town to dry-clean our skins, and Cecelia, with her hair dripping and the smell of Pick n Pay conditioner fuming off her scalp, left dark spots of moisture scattered across my
Jobmail
paper.

I told her then how I never thought about that, how thoughts like that wouldn't have allowed me to do what I had done.

Cissie listened with her head tilted, and took a long time before she answered me and said okay. Then she leaned into my chest and closed her eyes to fall asleep, and with everything silent and her flat feeling like an old tomb around us, I bent down to touch her on the part of her finger that was dying. With her eyes still closed, Cissie raised her hand and stuck the burnt finger inside my mouth, and sliding it slowly over my tongue, told me to suck on the skin until it came back to life.

So I did that.

I didn't mind doing it, either.

I watch her now as she opens and closes the oven door. Cissie removes another stray braid from her face and, cupping her left palm, waves away a wisp of smoke. One of the biggest problems she has with me, she says, is that I never pay enough attention to people. Every time I offer someone a shoulder to cry on, Cissie says, my biggest concern is the snot left drying on my shirt. I've told her how I think that's good, how she's phrased that.

I remember the first time she brought it up. It had just started raining outside, and she'd got up half-naked from the mattress we three sometimes shared. It was close to midnight and the room had cloaked itself in complete darkness. I waited a while, then joined her on the wooden floor. I guess neither of us was in a rush to get up again. We took our time, sitting in silence, and the first gray light fingered its way through the slits between her blinds.

Then, before getting up to shower, I guess having proved her point through silence, Cissie said I check the time a lot when people tell me their problems. In response, I told her I'd work on it. Then I looked at my wristwatch. I guess I'm still working on it.

Even so, while I fail to live up to Cissie's standards for human sympathy, I have a friend who's even worse off than I am. His name is Ruan, and he loses no sleep over that sort of thing. I know this because I've asked him about it.

I mean really. You should hear Ruan speak.

He's our resident printer here at West Ridge. To print out as much ink as he does, you need to buy a regular 60XL cartridge, then take it home and print until it reaches half its capacity. Then steam it open and loosen the blade above the chemical toner. Report this as a defect to the manufacturer, add an image for evidence, and print out their response to take back to the shop for a new pack. Most ink companies will corroborate your story like this by accident. Corporations lose nothing in providing customer care to a single claim from a foreign client. What helps, of course, is to know how to lie as often and as easily as Ruan does.

I watch him lean his head back on Cissie's couch. He has a five-o'clock shadow that runs down half the length of his throat, and his Adam's apple bobs up and down as the printer chugs, pulling in reams of paper ready for all the ink he's defrauded from Cape Town's shop assistants.

This makes us up as a total. You count these two and add me. We make up a team of three, and these days, if you want to know what passes for my social life, just take a look at them, at Ruan and Cecelia.

I know I haven't said much about Ruan yet. For years now, and maybe even before that, Ruan and I have considered ourselves the closest thing we might ever get to kin. I guess that's worked out for me in the end, and maybe for him, too, whenever it needs to. Getting to know him, what you learn first is never to believe anything he says, and what you learn second is that whenever he's high, he'll tell you that his first near-death experience was a download.

I'm not making that up.

Meet him and he's probably coming down or high. The three of us don't manage to stay in between for too long. Ruan will tell you that since he started feeding his plants with the new fertilizer he ordered online, the pigeons have been coming to his flat more than ever. If you listen to him, he'll tell you how these birds travel all the way down from the Philippines and stop over at Maine before they circle back to his windowsill in Sea Point. When I first started to know him, Ruan and I spent a lot of time talking about these birds. He told me he was an asthmatic and introverted child, and that what he knew about bird migrations wasn't from taking a lot of trips to the museum. He told me and Cissie how much these birds meant to him, and even though we didn't understand, we believed him.

Then lastly, there's me.

In case you've been wondering, I was also given a name. My parents got mine from a girl. My mother had a friend who almost went blind from working in a clothing factory in the seventies. They'd both been students at Lovedale College before my mother moved on to Fort Hare, and when they reunited again, years later, under the dome of an East London factory shop, the friend was mending clothes to put her daughter Lindanathi through school. I suppose that child, listless in a corner, wearing knee-length socks and wielding a bag full of textbooks, became a sign of hope for my mother. She convinced my father to give me the same name.

Lindanathi means “wait with us.” What I'm meant to be waiting for, or who I'm meant to be waiting with, I was never told.

It's just what my name is.

I'm Nathi, and of the three of us, I'm the one who's supposed to be dying. In order to do as much standing around as I do, you need to be one of the forty million human beings currently infected with the immunodeficiency virus. Then you need to stand at your friend's computer and design a poster over his shoulder, one telling these people you're here to help them. Then you need to provide them with your details—tell them you prefer email or SMS—and then start selling them your pills.

What helps, of course, is to try to forget about it as much as possible. Which is what I do.

Maybe it's this whole slavery thing, Cissie says.

Leaning on her balcony, I try to press reply on my cellphone, but my fingers pause over the buttons. They feel like paper straws. I stare at the blinking cursor.

In the kitchen, Cissie stirs another ladle of water into the glue. This morning, her braids are rolled up in a neat ball at the top of her head, a new style the three of us have started to favor more and more for her. When she moves, a few of the strands loosen and fall like tassels across her chest, and she flicks them away from the stove in a single shake with her shoulders. Cissie has a way of making the smallest things obey her, and I guess that includes me and Ruan.