Masande Ntshanga - The Reactive

I cross over the short steel bridge and buy a packet of Niknaks. Then I walk to the bay marked for Claremont. Inside the taxi, I lean my head against the glass and watch as a pink band wraps itself around the sky over Cape Town — from Maitland to Athlone — and a haze of pollution simmers over the land beneath it. I can feel the cogs of the city’s industries churning down to stillness, and smell the exhaust fumes from the taxis, as if each plume was mixing in with our exhaustion.

On the main road, I decide to put my uncle out of my mind. With the money to consider, this seems a reasonable measure to take. Existence goes on as we all navigate our need for currency. Even Bhut’ Vuyo would understand this. He needs money as much as anyone else. Or maybe, I think, he needs it more.

In Newlands, I find Ruan waiting by the gate, pushing up against the wire fence around Cissie’s building. Cissie isn’t back from her pilgrimage to Muizenberg yet, and by the way Ruan looks, I can’t tell if he’s high or coming down. I join him on the pavement.

Ruan, you have this face on I think you should see.

He shrugs. Is Cissie still in Muizenberg?

I nod.

I need to find an old person, Ruan says. He tries to laugh, bunching his shoulders together, but the feeling doesn’t last. You don’t always get to ward off exhaustion, huffing Industrial the way we do.

I lean my back into the fence.

Ruan pulls out a half-smoked cigarette from his pocket and lights it with a broken matchstick. Then he cups a hand over the flame and waves the match out before chucking it into the garden. I watch him sigh and drop his shoulders before taking a drag.

Man, he says, breathing out smoke. When I saw that money coming in, I just started shaking. I was at my place, right? And I had to stop typing for a while. I mean, Jesus, Nathi. He pauses and looks up the road. When’s the new shipment coming in?

In a day or two, I say.

Ruan nods. Of course I told the client it was short notice, he says. The guy said it was fine, you know, that today was just a meeting between friends. Can you believe that? He called us friends.

Ruan’s cheeks pull inward as he drags on his cigarette, his fingers pinching the sponge as thin as an envelope. I watch the carcinogens leaking out of his body.

I guess we’ve all tried to pack in the filters. We even came close last year, when we decided to quit nicotine and move out of the city entirely. Our plan was to relocate with our pill money to the Eastern Cape, where we’d harvest khat near the Kei River and hike the valley gorge that curves like a wide vein between Bolo and Cathcart. We didn’t plan for long: before the end of the month, we heard reports of how a van, loaded with a boxful of stems, was stopped with bullets on its way to King William’s Town. The urge died in us after that.

Ruan blows out another gray fog from his insides. He passes me the cigarette and I take a short pull, blowing smoke through my nose and through the fence.

The two of us stand in silence as the wind fusses the trees around West Ridge, its force snapping off the winter leaves and blanketing the curb in brown and orange patterns. We watch them scrub without noise against the rutted tar.

Then Ruan breaks through our silence.

This ugly description, he says.

I listen. I flick my cigarette on the tar and turn to face him.

Do you think it’s code for something?

Maybe, I say. I don’t know. It could be a word for dangerous.

Scars, Ruan says.

Then we fall into more silence.

I turn and hook my fingers on the mesh fence, hanging my weight on the sagging wire. I used to cross my eyes on fences like this when I was a child, a private trick that could make the holes in the squares leap out like holograms, but when I try it now, the optical illusion hurts my eyes. I uncross them and watch as the wind pushes against a green cardboard box, turning it over between the bins in the far corner of the parking lot. It knocks over a brown beer bottle, a quart balanced against the wall, and causes it to spew out frothy dregs, the foam washing across a fading parking line.

Cissie says all this silence in Newlands isn’t a coincidence, that her whole neighborhood’s haunted. The suburb’s built on a grave site, she says, the plot of a man called Helperus Van Lier: an eighteenth-century evangelist who lived in the Dutch Cape Colony. Cissie says piety has the ability to flow inside tap water, and that even plant life isn’t safe from Calvinist ghosts. This is the reason behind the stillness, she tells us, or at least why she owns a water filter.

There’s something else I didn’t show you, Ruan says.

I turn around.

I didn’t tell you and Cissie this, but the client sent me copies of our ID’s. He attached them in that email I sent you with our names and jobs on it, remember, but you know how Cissie’s phone is. I had to take the jpegs off the MMS. Here, he says. Take a look at it.

I take his phone and start browsing through his images. It’s true. We come up one after the other. The man did all three of our ID’s in color.

Here’s Ruan, here’s Cecelia, and here I am.

Here’s Russell, here’s Evans, and here’s Mda.

Ruan looks at me with his face pulled back in a wince, a form of apology. I look back down at the phone again.

Then up.

The thing is, he says.

I hand him his phone back. He slides it into his pocket.

The thing is, he says, it doesn’t seem like we have much of a choice here. We have this guy’s money, and we know that he’s dangerous. He’s not a cop, but he’s got the reach of one. We know that he’s free of the law, but we’re not sure he’s outside of it.

I nod. It isn’t hard to see his point. By giving us his money, the client has us bound.

Of course, there can’t be any police for us, either, Ruan says.

I nod again.

Look, Nathi, he says, I can’t just walk into the bank and tell them to reverse the transaction, can I? I mean, we’re lucky having that much money in the account hasn’t raised any suspicion to begin with. Now what if I go in there and start tampering with it? Then what? That’s a sure way of getting people to ask me things I have no answers for. The only option we have is to meet him.

He’s right. I tell him I agree. Then I let another moment pass before I say I quit my job.

Ruan turns around. You quit?

I walked out before cashing up.

He takes a moment to look up the street. Maybe you’ll find another one, he says.

I sigh. I guess he’s trying to encourage me. Which is good. I could use more of that.

Jesus, Ruan says then. I did the same thing.

I turn to him, surprised. He falls back on the fence and knits his fingers together. Ruan stretches his arms out to crack the knuckles on each hand, and I notice an expression I’ve never seen on his face before. It reminds me of a game-show contestant I once saw as a child on a show called Zama Zama. The contestant, a man from the rural Eastern Cape, had directed a similar smile at the host, Nomsa Nene, at the crowd, and then finally at his family, after choosing the wrong key for the grand prize.

It was a shitty job, I say to him. When you told us about the money, I don’t know. I just took my cap off and left. The strangest thing was that I hadn’t even decided about accepting it. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

Ruan nods. I felt the same way about the firm, he says.

We go quiet over another cigarette. Ruan smokes it down to the filter and throws it away. Then he lights another one and I take it from him when he’s done.

It’s a favor, you know? To both myself and my uncle. He even spits, now, whenever he sees me in the office parking lot.

I nod. Ruan’s told us this story before.