Masande Ntshanga - The Reactive

Cissie knocks.

Julian’s door has a silver number: an eleven hundred with two missing zeroes. In the corridor, voices mill together in a growing murmur over the music, while shadows dance behind the dimpled window. Outside, a couple sits on the fire escape behind us, a few steps below the landing, holding bottles of Heineken and sharing a cigarette. Cissie and Ruan face straight ahead, focused on getting themselves inside the party. The music seems to get louder, too, and the weather grows colder, but that doesn’t seem to bother us.

Loud footsteps approach on the other side of the door, and before long we hear someone struggling with the lock.

Looking back down, I notice that the couple, both in black winter jackets and thick woolen beanies, have a large cardboard cut-out leaning over the steel steps behind them. The placard bears a detailed illustration of the female anatomy.

Eventually, Julian manages to get his door open. He greets us from the threshold, his face painted bright silver. He’s both tall and peppy tonight, so tall, in fact, that we have to look up to see his face. Smiling, he uses his long arms to wave us in.

Please, guys, he says, come inside.

Ruan, Cissie, and I file into the hallway and then into the kitchen. It’s a small space, with brandy boxes lying flattened across the tiles. The three of us try to walk around them as Julian follows behind.

We went to a farm earlier, he says, waving his hand across the kitchen counter. From one end to the other, the surface is packed with raw vegetables. Liquor bottles emerge intermittently from the grove.

Help yourselves, Julian says, and we do.

Cissie takes our quarts from me. We bought them with a bottle of wine at the Tops near Gardens. I keep the Merlot and rinse out three coffee mugs in the sink. The brown water inside the basin looks a day old, so I yank the plug-chain. Then I stand there for a moment, watching as the fluid swirls out.

I’m not surprised to find the drain half-clogged. I’ve been in and out of places like Julian’s for most of my adult life. One year, Cissie brought a colleague over and we played Truth or Dare at West Ridge. On a Truth, I’d tried but failed to piece together how many times I’d woken up shoeless on someone’s lidless toilet. Nicole, the colleague, had meant the question in good humor, but even as we all laughed, I remembered how most times, my eyes would be half-focused, the door swaying as my pants rode off my ankles.

Well, do you like it?

Julian breaks out in a laugh behind me. He points a finger at his chin and wipes a thumb across his forehead. The contrast between his face and his mascara makes his eyes appear pressed out, or even feral. Each orb bulges out in shock, as if from proptosis, a sign of an overactive thyroid, and a sometime symptom of the virus I have inside me. Standing in place, and swaying on his feet, Julian achieves an eerie trembling, as if he were a supporting character excerpted from a malfunctioning video game, now stranded in a different reality, awaiting instruction in our less tractable environment.

I don’t know, Cissie says. She leans back against the counter.

On her right, Ruan pulls out a carrot and inspects it. He breaks off the stem and starts chewing. I open the bottle of wine and pour us each a coffee mug of Merlot. Then Julian starts laughing again. I look up and find him still swaying.

Think about this, he says. Under the kitchen light, his teeth shimmer like dentures. He waves his hands and tells us to listen.

We prepare to. I hand Ruan and Cissie their mugs and, taking a sip from my own, lean back and wait for him to start.

I’m doing something bigger than all my previous marches, Julian says.

I nod, sipping the Merlot. Ruan pulls out another carrot from the grove.

Cissie and I watch him as he yawns into his sleeve.

I suppose none of this is new to us. Julian hosts a party like this every second month now. He ends each of them the same way, too, by locking everyone inside his flat before morning. The reason he calls them protests is because the following day, he organizes his guests, a half-stoned mass, into a march outside the parliament gates. There, Julian takes pictures of them, which he then sells at a gallery in Woodstock.

Cissie used to be classmates with him. They attended the University of Cape Town together, both receiving MFA’s from Michaelis, before Cissie became a teacher. I once read an interview Julian had given to the arts section of a local weekly. Towards the end, when the interviewer had asked him if his marches were protests in earnest or just performance art, he’d chosen to skip the question. Later, when I googled him, I found a one-minute clip of Julian playing a prank on his agent: he arrived at his exhibition disguised as one of the parking attendants working on Sir Lowry Road, in a green luminous vest and a cap slung low over his forehead. The gallery walls held large framed photographs of his marches, and the video ended with Julian wearing a wine-stained paper cup on his head.

I’ll tell you all about it later, he says. You’ll be around, right?

We might be, Cissie says.

Sure, he tells her. We’ll talk then.

I pour out more wine for us, and find a shelf for our beer inside the fridge. Holding our coffee mugs, the three of us walk out into the living room.

In the lounge, Ruan, Cissie, and I join an audience for Julian’s latest performance. Everyone else draws closer to watch, and Julian presents himself as our party host, kneeling down in front of us. Smiling from the head of the coffee table, his metal face gleams while a string of sweat drips down the bridge of his nose. He removes a button pin from his blazer and turns it over to take out the fifteen tabs of LSD he’s concealed in the back. Then he returns his hands to his pockets and tells everyone they should know what to do by now.

They nod.

Ruan, Cissie, and I keep still. We watch as Julian’s followers gather around the coffee table, each of them with their head bowed. In order, they raise their left hands and Julian nods as he passes them the acid.

Cissie pulls on my sleeve. Let’s go, she says.

I nod.

Ruan pulls on the sliding door at the end of the living room. Then the three of us walk out onto the balcony.

I have very little regard for Nietzsche’s detractors.

This comes from a guy sitting on the floor. He has his legs spread out in a narrow V over Julian’s tiles. He introduces himself as an ecology student. He’s wearing a fitted leather jacket under a black balaclava that covers his face, and he’s speaking to a girl leaning against the balcony wall. The girl laughs at his quip. I’m doing my third year in linguistics, she says.

We share a marijuana cigarette with them. Then it’s followed by a leaking pipe we take a pass on. On the balcony, the breeze feels tactile around our fingertips. We take hits from the weed and sip on our wine. From where we’re standing, our view of Cape Town is a maze of brick walls; a checkerboard of abandoned office lights. Exhaust fumes waft up from the streets below, mixing with the smell of rubber baked during the day, a combination that reminds me of Ruan’s summation of our planet’s atmosphere: that the ozone layer is Earth’s giant garbage lid.

Julian looks like a deep-water mutant, Ruan says.

Cissie and I laugh. I inhale and blow out smoke.

To defend herself against the cold, Cissie’s wearing a green hoodie. The strings on the sides are pulled and knotted under her chin. She leans out over the balcony.

You know, Julian asked about my documentary, she says.

Cissie has an audio documentary she edits for two hours each month. The subject is a twenty-eight-year-old from Langa called Thobile. Last year, Thobile quit his job to live on eight rand a day. It was in solidarity with his community, he said, and in the clips Cissie played back for us at West Ridge, we could hear the difference in his tone at the beginning of the experiment, and then a month later. Cissie, who planned to paint a portrait of him — using only her memory and her recording as a guide— said he lost eight kilograms in three weeks.