Masande Ntshanga - The Reactive

Still, I didn’t make too much of it.

Look, I’m very sorry to lose you, André told me after he summoned me into his office, but why not take some time off? You’ve had an ordeal, you need some rest, he said.

He struggled to keep his eyes on me as he spoke.

Le Roi told me I could sit on my arse at home if I wanted to.

For a while, at least. I mean, come on, he said, you deserve it.

I understood his method. It was important for people in our profession to maintain a casualness around the virus. Even back then, we had to apply reins on how we expressed ourselves on the issue. There was the stigma to bargain with. Even in the most controlled cases, when mishandled, empathy could register as a cause for despair in a patient.

I watched Le Roi settle his eyes on his hands. The two of us fell silent for a while.

It’s not the department’s fault, I told him.

He nodded. I could tell he was pensive, but receptive.

If anyone’s, I continued, it’s my own.

Le Roi shook his head. Then he threw his hands up and said, who bloody well cares? Look, you’re still a boy. You’re a baby. You have a long life ahead of you.

I nodded.

I thought, what else can I do?

Then Le Roi clicked his fingers. The two of us were seated on his leather swivel chairs. He spun his eyes around in his head and grinned over the feel of his new leather blotter. It was engraved with his initials, he told me, before pointing out each letter. He’d had it shipped in that morning, and as he caressed it with his palms, he said something about his wife and a connection. Leaning across his desk, he gave me a reference letter in an envelope.

Of course, everything else will be taken care of, he said.

I nodded.

Then my boss sat on his side of the table and looked down at his blotter. I imagined Le Roi thinking of my accident as much as I was. I couldn’t think of anything else we could have in common. Then I got up and left his office with my envelope.

It was gray and anemic outside. I found a sandwich bar on a corner of Long Street, where a customer had abandoned a book of T.S. Eliot poems on a low table. Sitting with the envelope still unopened in my jacket, I looked at the many lines the poet had hunched over between 1909 and 1962, and then at the coffee table itself, where my tumbler and tea pot sat empty. For a while, I listened to the rain clattering against the roofs of the cars parked outside. Then I put the book down and rubbed the motes out of my eyes. The couch beneath me was made of leather and was comfortable, and I craned my neck to see how the weather had turned outside. The rain had thickened and was bulleting down between the buildings of the City Bowl, punishing the bonnets of German sports cars and the canopies of pita-delivery vans. In the gutter, it raised a soft mist that curled like theatrical fog above the tar, and I saw couples rushing hand in hand to crowd together under the canvas awnings of the bars and the cafés, the teenagers in their school uniforms, the university students with their shopping bags lifted high over their heads. In the sky above them stood the city’s many scaffolds, each rising like the skeleton of a grand and incomplete beast, abandoned by the calloused hands which were meant to bring it into existence.

I took a breath. Then I dug out the envelope.

With the reference letter, there was a small note with an email address written on it. To supplement my severance pay, Le Roi suggested I try my hand at freelance writing. It was something I could do with my time, he advised, but a strange idea to push on a techie like me, I thought. He must’ve seen me sitting down with a book when I brought my sandwiches into the labs sometimes, or maybe reading on the terrace that faced the campus square, where we had the habit of taking our cigarettes in our white lab-coats, struggling to conceal our envy for the leisure of the first- and second-year students.

This was how I went to work. I had enough books to hide my face behind during shifts. My colleagues were much older and we had very little in common outside the job.

I was alone for most of the time: taking down a tube of Industrial each week and longing to control my student debt, which I monitored on my laptop each night. Some days, I couldn’t put anything in order. Often, I went home with a bottle of wine and watched the sun sliding past the Earth’s waist, sitting back on my plastic chair on the balcony. I’d wait for the sun to go down, and only go back inside when I was certain I was feeling cold.

I lived in a flat opposite a small bar in Mowbray, and each night I’d watch it open its doors to the street. Its patrons were mostly commuters, men in blue overalls and black petrol-logo caps, but it also drew in the local prostitutes and a handful of students, all of whom it would slosh between its wooden teeth and gums for hours on end, waiting for the first signs of morning before it allowed them to totter out of its warmth, jubilant or groaning.

My colleagues, on the other hand, had families. They had satellite TV and good skin that could flush red with gratitude. They were well adjusted and easy to admire. Even those who came from places redolent of defeat — District Six, Bo-Kaap or Bonteheuwel — were happy with what they had. I often felt scrutinized by them, and inadequate when we cornered each other in the hallways. Nothing was lost in the silence of our elevator rides. I’d greet my co-workers with a grin, feeling myself expand with the need to rush after them and apologize for something I hadn’t done. Owing to this, I got my library card only a few months into the job.

In short, Le Roi had located something in me I couldn’t deny.

The waitress arrived to tidy up my table. The rain had softened into a sparse tapping on the bonnets of the cars parked outside, and she asked me if I wanted more tea. I shook my head.

Outside, the cars weaved around the corners of the city grid. I felt wrapped in two skins as I pushed up against the wind. The giving famishes the craving, T.S. Eliot wrote. Now I stood on the corner of Long and Strand. I understand none of it, I thought, as I entered an empty taxi. I paid the gaartjie five rand and we headed down to Adderley Street, and when I looked up, storm clouds had started to wad themselves against the sun like gunpowder.

Then night time came.

Then daytime.

Then night time again.

Then daytime.

It went on like this for a while.

The first few days without work passed without ease. I cleaned and arranged the things I owned in my flat. I wound up taking an inventory of them from where I was lying on my bed, gauging the material rewards I’d accrued from my labor at the college. Then I used Handy Andy around my hotplate and mopped up the bathroom floor. I wiped off every insect I found on the window pane, and slowly began to adjust to not having a schedule. I decided to cut down on my use of Industrial, sticking to half a fingernail each day, which would thin my usage to only two-and-a-half tubes a month.

I waited one more week before I took out Le Roi’s note. Then I sent off a copy of my CV to the email address he’d given me. I’d attached it to a cover letter with two paragraphs of tepid motivation. In under a week’s time, I received my first response. I’d been solicited to write something right away. The company was a new website portal that catered to a wide variety of markets, ranging from celebrity gossip to women’s health. It was part of the oldest media group in the country, not without its own checkered past, and, despite Le Roi’s many apologies to Africa, his wife now owned a portion of it. My job was to write for the health segment of the portal. I had to use my knowledge of working in a sterile laboratory environment to give advice on avoiding germs in the workplace.