Masande Ntshanga - The Reactive

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 nineteenth century, I think. More than five hundred 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 twelve, 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.

When I kill the first kid on the rugby field, the first thought that goes through my head, besides having to release the trigger, is that somehow this isn’t so bad. I mean, it’s awful how the bullet — we’re using a clip of half-jacketed hollow points — shatters his skull just above the ear and he falls down, blood splashing and hair fluttering, and I think to myself, after all, Harriet Tubman is also dead. Then Ruan peers over my shoulder, looking down at the blood sinking into the ant-filled grass. Nice headshot, he says to me. Then Cissie takes the gun from my hands and carelessly shoots another kid in the throat. I guess this one would’ve been the lock in the team: that’s how high he jumps. His throat explodes into winglets of flesh and all three of us have to shut our eyes against the blood. I step forward and say to my friends, I don’t know. I say, do you think this will work? Cissie hands me the gun and takes her shoes off. When the green grass spikes between her toes, she smiles, and I guess this is what killing for the government is like. The gun is slicked all over with sweat, and every time I blink, I see the world through a prism of blood. Then another kid falls and Ruan bends over his bleeding head and asks, why us though? If they’re so good at killing, he says, then why don’t they do it themselves? I tell him this isn’t so much killing as it is cleaning up a mess. These kids, all of them, they’re already dead. Cissie says it’s eerie and we both ask her, what is? She says, gunshots with no sirens. Then Ruan and I look up at her through the sound of the day’s rising traffic. Cissie opens her mouth again, as if to say something further, but when her lips close in silence, I wake up in the bathroom at work.