Masande Ntshanga - The Reactive

Half his face appears burnt, the skinless meat gleaming in full view.

He’s still facing us when the bartender walks over with a brandy snifter on a cloth-covered tray. The man nods at her and she disappears without a sound to sit behind the bar. He smokes his cigarette through a long white tube fitted into his throat, and half of the right side of his face is missing. The skin on the bottom half of his neck seems to lighten on its way down to his chest. It’s a pattern that gives definition to how his larynx varies in relief. Tracing it down from his chin, it continues to rise as it descends, until it pushes itself taut against his skin, outlining the contour of a perfect cylinder.

The man watches me as I stare at him. Then he raises a hand to his neck.

Of course, I’ve had to adopt a more recent approach with my voice. I find it rather important that one does what one can in order to be heard, don’t you?

The flesh around his larynx vibrates when he speaks, and this is when I realize he has a machine humming against the walls of his throat. I look up.

You paid us a lot of money, I say. What for?

The man breathes out smoke through his nostrils. I’m under the impression my intention was clear, he says. I want to make a purchase.

We don’t have any pills on us, I say.

He considers this and nods. I watch the smoke holding still around his face, like a meadow fog.

I figured as much, he says, unfazed. It was, after all, very short notice, as I’ve said. He inhales again and lets the smoke seep out.

I ask him, why did you bring us here?

Why, he says, you provide a social service, do you not?

It’s a scam, I say.

The man laughs. He does that for a while.

Now, now, he says, we both know that isn’t true.

He lifts one leg off the other and straightens himself up on the couch. Then he slips his cigarette case inside his jacket and reaches for his feathered hat. He packs his device away and buttons his cufflinks.

I’ve kept you for far too long, he says. Let me know when you have the package.

He adjusts his hat and somehow, his mask is already strapped over his face.

I’ll be in touch, he says.

Then he nods and walks away from the three of us. He tips his hat at Nolwazi and finds the door.

We sit back on the couch, and I guess that’s all there is between us.

It’s happened.

The three of us are left alone in the yellow light and the remaining ribbons of his cigarette smoke. Ruan, Cissie and I take a look around the empty bar. Then, with our beers turning to warm water between our knees, and almost at the same time, we whisper to each other, saying: what?

I get a delayed text message from my case manager, Sis’ Thobeka. The three of us are back at Cissie’s place, again, and Ruan’s high on khat, playing an erratic set of drums on his kneecaps. We met a dealer in Rosebank who sold us twenty stems. He agreed to drop the price by a third.

At Cissie’s place, we listen to Ruan as he drums. Pausing for a moment, he says we should just use the money and then kill ourselves.

That could be a life, he says.

Cissie and I agree. We share another stem and tell Ruan that this isn’t a bad idea.

It’s like that book, he says. There was a guy. He wrote a book and won a prize for it.

I open the text message and Sis’ Thobeka says to me, Lindanathi, your CD4 count.

She writes: Lindanathi, you didn’t fax us your CD4 sheet, I thought I told you yesterday to—

I delete her message.

Then Ruan says, I can’t remember the guy who wrote that book. He tells us he’s googling it and Cissie and I get up to watch. We lean over him, and, for the rest of the night, we keep stems between our teeth and chew until we can’t feel our faces any more. Then we prod our fingers into each other’s sides and laugh like well-fed children.

The following morning finds the three of us still awake. The sun rolls over Table Mountain just after six a.m. on Monday morning, and under it we lie sprawled across Cissie’s leather sectional couch. It rained last night, and Cissie tells us there’s a leak in the roof that’s wet her cushion. She keeps extending a palm to pat the damp spot. Ruan and I lie still, watching her.

Guess what today is, she says.

What?

It’s a holiday, Cissie sighs, but guess which one?

We can’t, and when we don’t answer her, she tells us it’s Women’s Day. I don’t have to go in to work today and my aunt is still dead, she says. What now?

Ruan and I remain silent. Then Cissie falls back on the sectional couch and lies there, motionless.

Half an hour later, we shower and share what’s left of the khat. Then we take the lift down to the ground floor and catch a taxi to the bottle store in Claremont, where we stock up on champagne and liqueurs and everything else we never drink. We walk out of the bottle store with a loaded shopping bag in each hand, skipping across the main road like the world might end tomorrow. Then I guess this is how we spend the rest of our Monday. We talk and sometimes the three of us shout, and then our vision grows sharp around four a.m. and we feel ourselves floating up to the ceiling, speaking many praises to each other’s existence.

Sometime during the night, I think of my late brother. There were summers I’d take Luthando down the block in my old neighborhood, eMthatha, to a big white stippled house at the corner of Orchid and Aloe Streets, where an Afrikaans family from Bloemfontein had moved in. Their son, Werner, who was older than us by a few years, had taken control of his family’s pool house; a flat at least twice the size of my room. Werner liked to make us watch him while he squeezed a tube of Dirkie condensed milk down his throat; and sometimes he’d command my brother and I to laugh with open mouths through his fart jokes, after which he’d collapse into a castle made from his bright plush toys. We always met Werner at the window of his room. He was an only child and coddled by both of his parents. Since moving into the neighborhood, his parents had banned him from leaving his yard; and LT and I had to jump their fence to register his presence. I suppose he was spoilt, in retrospect, almost to the point of seeming soft in the head. As a teen, his teeth had started to decay, turning brown in the center of his lower jaw, but he was also big-boned and well stocked, and would often bribe us over to his home with ice lollies and video games. I had my own video games by then, but not as many as Werner. My mother was still new at her government job and I couldn’t show off in the way I wanted to about living in town. Lately, Luthando had started thinking he was better off than me. My brother had grown a patch of pubic hair the previous summer, and I wanted to remind him that he still ate sandwiches with pig fat at his house, and that one evening in Ngangelizwe, his mother had served us cups of samp water for supper.

Still, we hid together that day.

Like always, Werner told us his parents didn’t allow Africans into their house. He called us blacks, to which we nodded, and then he threw the controllers through his burglar bars like bones on a leash. My brother and I scuttled after them on our bare and calloused feet. If Werner didn’t win a game, he’d switch the console off and turn into an image of his father, barking us back onto the tar like a disgruntled meneer at the store, his face twisting as fierce as a boar’s, fanning out a spray of saliva. When he did win, when Werner felt he’d won enough, he’d say his parents were due home in the next few minutes. Then he’d hoist the controllers back up and wipe them down with a wad of toilet paper. It was the same toilet paper he used to wipe semen off his plush toys, Luthando would later say to me.