Эндрю Миллер (ЮАР) - Dub Steps

When did it come to this? I wonder as I work. Exactly when did dub become the enemy, and trance the master of all things, the very meaning itself? I use headphones as I compose. As I ponder. The chances of the wrong echoes reaching the wrong ears are too high, and I don’t want to put my final moment, my Johnny Cash farewell, at risk.

Somewhere around 2064 Sthembiso was in his twenties and began flexing a considerable set of muscles. He applied them across the full scope of the farm. Soon he controlled food production and music and education and – well, wherever you turned, there was a new policy in place, a new approach, a new way of thinking and doing.

But the big shift was with the pigs.

The archives clearly, and accurately, reflect the brutality of the slaughter. [10] See the Mbangi section for a full video narrative. I suggest you consult them. They show the heads rammed onto poles. They even manage to suggest the insane stink of so many porcine corpses, all burned in a single day. Not only were all the pigs killed, they were explicitly savaged. They were to be made to understand in their bones (the survivors, that is) where the new boundaries had been set.

The archives do not show, however, what happened to English.

Sthembiso had whipped his kids into a killing frenzy, which manifested in all the hallmarks of genocide. Small squads marching up and down. Yells and smacks and grunts and male voices barking indecipherably. The muffled yet occasionally sharp screams, like metal tearing, of the animals as they were chased and sliced sounded so human it was like they were trying, even in their annihilation, to speak some kind of deeper truth to us.

I doubt very much if anyone else saw her face up there in the second-floor window. They were too busy – either killing or organising or telling themselves that it couldn’t possibly be so. But it was there, that face. I saw it. Each tear, I feared, could have been the last, the very last, she would ever be able to produce. And I’m afraid that’s how it turned out. We murdered the pigs, and slaughtered in the process her last bridge back to us.

She saw me, briefly. I wanted to wave, to reach out physically, but what do you say with your arms when your eyes and your ears and your tongue are no longer able to function? I held both my palms out and up, imploring her silently not to let go, not to leave.

But it was too late.

It was days before anyone saw her again, and even when she did eventually come back, and finally even resorted to the occasional use of words, she was as hollow as the sounds falling from her lips.

Now she sits underneath the weaver tree, her primary occupation, talking to the colony as it expands, offering useless, muttered help to the males as they thread their nests together and wait for the inevitable. When a human tries to have a similar kind of conversation with her, she stops. Folds her hands into her lap. Smiles.

Snowball’s head was never seen. Or I, at least, never saw it. Initially I told myself it could have been a mark of some kind of benevolence from Sthembiso, but over time I realised the opposite was far more likely. Now I am sure he kept it out of view to torment her, to torture us, completely. To leave us without that final, terrible yet necessary knowledge.

Why did he do it?

There was never any formal explanation, but here’s what I think.

The pigs were no threat, but their presence represented an element of life beyond Sthembiso’s control. It crept up on us quietly, the fact of his growth and his need to control. I suppose this has always been the way – you fail to see what is most obvious, the things that are actually taking shape, in your offspring. Anyway, suddenly there it was, a horrific burning heap of pork. And deep inside that fire, right in the guts of the heat, baked the ambitions of our new leader.

Now the kids fuck wildly, breed wildly – but always under his careful eyes. Our noble, calculated aims with the cup and the genetic mapping have drifted. Instinct is instinct and evolution demands diversity (and let me say now, hard as it is, that the rape of English by the dub Zambians – how else does one describe them, these people, this hidden force? – was an essential addition for us, for the group, for the future), and so they fuck and breed and I don’t even know who is who any more, it’s an endless succession of little heads running and smiling and asking and taking and the phones ring and there are screams and yells and tears and everything you would expect, really, from a bunch of apes let loose with computers and time and imagination and ceaseless ambition.

And yes, they have a god. They pray to him and he guides them, releasing small, important miracles, and they latch firmly onto each one. He is smart that way, their god – he understands that miracles need to be obvious. He keeps them in check with his titbits and they go to church on a Thursday and they scribble in their little books and make sure the rituals are kept and that the numbers add up and that the theorems apply, and really, he is smart, has been very smart, for now they pray to equations and circuits and connections and motherboards and parallel processing, of course, always parallel processing, and through their god they have learned how to switch this shit on and make the blue lights shine with actual, practical meaning, and they will go forward, they are rushing forward into something new, completely new and different.

We are, after all, human.

There is something wild in those opposable thumbs.

Occasionally I catch a glimpse of my reflection. I see – suddenly and shockingly – what I have become. A shuffling grey beard on fragile, bandy legs with a gaping guillotine tooth and a smile that shocks even its owner.

I think, not bad. Not too bad, considering. It could have been worse. I could have been worse.

The wall flashes. Message from Beatrice. She’s coming over with her long fingers and again I think, not bad. Not too bad, considering. This grey beard. That jagged tooth. This girl, this woman, this old lady, still attached to me, still holding this claw after all this time.

After the pigs I retreated.

I collect. I file. I archive. Sthembiso keeps me at it. He won’t let me stop, and he pays real attention, making sure I don’t follow my growing instinct just to form piles. I cross-reference and I cross-index and there are about seven of the little buggers who do what I say, even though no one ever goes in there. Ever. And of course there’s that fucking statue of me mounted at the front of it. The plaque has some ridiculous shit about the wizardry of knowledge and learning. Sthembiso made a speech and everyone cried, myself included. It’s strange how sentimental the years make you – even when you’re being screwed, even when you can feel the very twist, you remain pathetically vulnerable to the things you know are hurting you, must be hurting you, are actually making you sick.

Ego.

I have great-great-grandchildren – too many to count, too many names to try to file and match with faces. Their parents bring them to sit on my knee and I pat their heads and tell them whatever I can remember about a life I have pretty much forgotten myself.

They look up expectantly, following the eyes of their parents, as if I have some knowledge, some great thing to give, and that they must therefore per force receive, but are not sure how. Of course I do, I have great things, but they’re all locked up in this head and none can be put to use now. But still… still… I like them, the little ones, and some I even love – certain names and faces stick in my heart and these I favour with what little I have to offer.

Camille Paglia sits on my lap most afternoons. She’s about sixteen now and my hope is that we manage somehow to time the demise so as to leave this thing together. Can a cat be the true love of a human’s life? The one great and enduring emotional connection? As inured as I am to death – and life, for that matter – there is something about Camille and me, about how we live, that makes me want to weep. We are so close as to be welded. Of all the beings I have known and loved, she tops the list. I don’t say that lightly.