Masande Ntshanga - The Reactive

We often choose the old cemetery in Rondebosch, opposite the mall and the restaurants.

Cissie sinks her fingers into the soil and brings up blades of grass between black fingernails. Then she brings her other hand down and puts the joint out on the bare patch. Sorry, Mom, she says.

Later, I can’t sleep and have to do the next best thing and pass out. We’ve cleaned out the liquor stash and the glue, so I head straight for the fridge and look for the champagne. I miss my grandmother in a way that makes me feel sick again, and I watch another movie that convinces me I have AIDS. There’s a quarter of the champagne left and the bubbles have gone flat. I only have HIV, I say, I don’t have AIDS, and when I take a swig from the bottle, the champagne tastes like lemonade inside my mouth.

We wake up early the following morning, and it takes me a while to orientate myself, to remember that we’re still in Woodstock, divided by the narrow hallway. The electric buzz from the stereo system thrums hard against the walls, and I can feel it pushing a thick hum against the window panes. I sit up on the single mattress and notice the number 718 written in red marker across the wall. The springs creak beneath me. I don’t know what to make of it, so I get up and rub my palms against my eyes.

Stepping out of my room, I find Cissie and Ruan doing the same across the hall. For a while, the three of us stand groggily at our thresholds. Then we shuffle together into the living room. On the coffee table, the laptop has disappeared. In its place, lying in front of the green vase, there’s an envelope addressed to the three of us.

We take a seat on the sofa.

Then Cissie opens the letter.

Friends, it reads.

It’s written in green ink, in neat block letters. Further down it says, before I thank you, please allow me to request your numbers from you.

Ruan, Cissie, and I look up. Then we turn and walk to our bedrooms. Moving like automatons, the three of us come back to the living room and settle on the couch, each choosing the same cushion as before. Our forearms rub against each other’s, as cold as they were on Julian’s balcony. There’s a pen on the tabletop, and I use it to write down 718 in the space left open under the green script. Then Cissie writes down 817, and Ruan 178.

We read on. The letter says, turn me around, and so we do that. We turn the page over. On the back there’s an explanation. It isn’t too long.

The client says he didn’t use any drugs on us, just hypnosis. He says we looked like we needed the rest.

Then he tells us about the numbers, how they’re a code to a safety deposit box. He’d like us to deliver the contents of the box to someone he can no longer visit.

I look up and, sitting here in the client’s empty house in Woodstock, on the corner of Milner and Lawley Streets, and with the world outside muted as the morning light pushes itself against the panes, I wonder why he’d ask us to do this for him. Ruan, Cissie and me, with our pill operation and our need for money. Then it comes to me that this is what he wanted from us all along. Once this idea announces itself, it refuses to take leave of me.

For a moment, the three of us are silent, and then we read on.

I asked my daughter, the ugly man writes, who told me you were the only adults that she knew.

I pause.

Then I look up again, and that’s when I see it: lying flat on the table behind the vase is a photograph of Ethelia, now without her secret empires in West Ridge.

When I got stabbed in Obs, I was told to wait before the ambulance arrived, and I waited. Then I heard my blood filling up in my ears and I began to walk. They found me on Station Road, my blood leaking off a light pole. It was an important occasion, I thought, when the paramedics finally arrived. They got away with all my belongings, I told them, watching as the medics crouched to pull me up by my armpits. I had a cellphone and a bank card, I explained, and the two of them nodded, but didn’t speak to me.

Luthando also saved my life, once.

My brother and I were visiting at our cousins’ house that summer, and one Saturday we made a go-kart. When I took it for a test run, with Luthando running beside me, I jerked the steering wheel, but the wheels wouldn’t turn. Before I slid into the traffic, Luthando clutched my wrist and pulled me off the wood. The go-kart flipped over on its side, and from between my knees I watched as the cars missed my feet by a few inches. The axle wasn’t working, we figured. Then Luthando and I pulled the kart back up and dragged it home. It’s rotten, he said, breaking its wheels in the silence that followed. Then we ran to the playing fields that blocked off Bisho Park — which lay to the north of our grand-aunt’s house; an unsafe area, my mother had told me — where we stalked merry-go-rounds and chafed big blisters on our thighs by going on the metal slide in shorts. On Saturdays, after bowls of porridge we soured with vinegar — or thickened with scoops of peanut butter or margarine — Luthando and I flipped a fifty-cent coin to decide who would push and who would ride; and then we’d pump our calves stiff on the creaking swings at the park, pulling their chains taut as we swung for reputation and bragging rights against the neighborhood kids.

The paramedics got me up and strapped me to a gurney. That’s when I thought of that go-kart we’d had.

The three of us drove in silence through the suburb where my pockets had been emptied. We went over the bridge, across Lower Main Road and up to Groote Schuur Hospital, where I felt the air change. The paramedics gave me a bandage to press on my wound and I was told to wait until I received assistance. Then a nurse arrived and took me to a bright room where there were more of us in the middle of dying. I was given a seat next to a large-eared man who sat reading the paper. My neighbor glanced at me for a moment before he leaned his head back to sleep. I watched him press the loose pages of the Cape Times into a tent over his face. The wheels of another gurney creaked behind us. This one carried a teenager — a boy from Beacon Valley, the medics said — who’d been shot in both legs. He was around sixteen, and was wheeled into the ward unconscious. The bandages around his thighs were dark with blood, the cloth rough from the bone splintered beneath.

I began to lose consciousness in my seat. Then I heard them call my name. Two more nurses arrived to help me up and I was passed through a door and sat in front of a doctor. The doctor was a balding, middle-aged man with spectacles pushed up his forehead. He instructed me from behind his desk, and I peeled off my clothes and showed him my injuries. He used a needle to anesthetize the nerve endings around the wound, and then he used another with a thread to sew it shut. I felt a hot flush before my skin receded back into numbness. Then I was led out and given a bed by a window. They discharged me the following day, on a Sunday morning, and I received my bill a month later.

On the eighth of August, two and a half months after I was stabbed and robbed in Observatory, I resigned from my lab-assistant post in the molecular biology department. My job had been to test samples for HIV antibodies. Those that came out reactive — testing positive for the virus — we divided into HIV-1 and HIV-2. The samples that came back negative we sent for further tests, hoping to detect a genetic mutation that gave a small percentage of the population immunity. Towards the conclusion of this project, which had lasted three years, I scheduled a meeting with the director to finalize the terms of my resignation: the size of my severance pay and the retirement fund I’d take home.

My boss at Peninsula Tech was a Frenchman. We all liked to refer to him as Le Roi, to tease him for his noblesse oblige. His real name was André. In his own eyes, philanthropy was the foremost principle of his work as a scientist, and one he encouraged in all the projects we saw coming in and out of the department. Often, Le Roi lightheartedly mocked himself for living a life without trouble in Africa, a continent he characterized by its health and economic crises; and even though I laughed along to his particular brand of wit, which I found quick, it wasn’t unreasonable to assume that he felt just as sorry for me — that I was, after all, just another of his Africans.