Masande Ntshanga - The Reactive

The company had been forward thinking. This was still a few years before the outbreak of SARS, the respiratory disease that would tide across the world’s news portals from November 2002, when a furtive market was finally discovered among the hypochondriacs and health hobbyists. I had the prototype of this market as my readership.

My articles were only three- to eight-hundred-word pieces, limited to basic hygiene principles and the prevention of infection, so they weren’t taxing for me to write. My first batch was received so well I couldn’t help but suspect that Le Roi, in his pity for me, had greased the commissioning editor.

Not that I would argue if he had.

I drafted an invoice, despite these thoughts, and got on with writing more pieces. Then, before I knew it, a few months had passed and I was invited to join the permanent staff. I moved into a new office in Green Point, and soon after that I received my first compensation pay from the technikon. I used it to find a medical-aid scheme for my illness. That was how I met Sis’ Thobeka, my case manager, and started my anti-retroviral treatment.

In the end, however, I couldn’t tell if my articles drew anyone to the website portal, or if they’d been helpful in any way to the people that read them. That same summer, just before the end of December, the company reported a drop in its turnover, they announced a need to restructure, and half of us were dismissed.

The cause, as explained to us by the editor, was anyone’s guess. The directors led us in a brief discussion about the slow growth of the digital economy, explaining why redundancies were inevitable across the board. They played us a succession of PowerPoint slides, demonstrating the numbers, but most of us couldn’t imagine the sums they mentioned.

In the dark, I began to feel as if this crisis meeting, in which my colleagues and I sat mostly silent, was something that had taken place before. This sense of déjà vu would only fade months later, when I saw that the restructure they’d had in mind included disposing of half the human staff, and that the content was now collected from different sources across the Net. I realized then that the feeling I’d had at the meeting had arisen from the fact that, even as we’d sat in the ninth-floor boardroom that day, we’d formed part of a historical moment that had receded. Much like light traveling from the sun, although it had seemed immediate, it had taken time to reach us: the event itself had already taken place. We were obsolete.

Margeaux, who’d been the head of our editorial team just a moment earlier, suggested we meet up afterwards, breaking the silence that had fallen over us in the workspace. We all agreed, and then we walked out and drank drafts of beer at a nearby sports pub.

Later, as I was returning from the bathroom, I found that the music, though still unobtrusive, had grown louder in the bar, and that the place had taken on a rudderless air, one that seemed to fit the mood of our sudden detachment. I felt a surge of grief as I stood on the threshold. There was something final in that red, ill-lit scene, and I could already imagine our future as strangers in the metropolis.

Walking home to my prostitutes in upper Mowbray, and thinking of Le Roi’s wife and what she owned, I thought maybe it was all for the best. I flagged down a cab and fell asleep on the passenger seat, waking later with the cab driver pulling on my sleeve, his headlights piercing the wrought-iron gate of my complex.

Two weeks after my retrenchment, I spent a portion of my severance package renting out a Czech boy and girl I found on the internet. This was on a night I couldn’t sleep, and just a few days after reading Equinox, a novel by Samuel R. Delany that I’d loaned out from the library, in which a sea captain enslaves a pair of blond, teenage twins. I’d sent the email in a moment of inattention, without really expecting a reply, but only minutes later my cellphone went off on my desk. The voice on the line sounded younger than me. We set up a time, and I transferred the money using an EFT.

When they arrived, I prodded Ivan and Lenka as they screwed on my sleeper couch. Later, I came on my fingers as I watched her reaching her climax. We ate leftover roast chicken with seeded rolls after that, and Lenka made us look up her blog, which was a collection of naked children wearing animal masks in a Scandinavian forest, all of them captured in high-resolution images and supported by macabre music: a trip-hop playlist, she later explained. I took an old Ativan in the bathroom, about half a milligram’s worth, and burned hash oil in an incense burner. It took us five minutes to get high from the smoke, and then we each took turns in the shower before Lenka and I lay on our sides on the couch. I jabbed my tongue under the soft hood of her clit and she clamped her thighs around my neck, and then, for close to five minutes, we tongued circles around each other’s assholes. She took me in her mouth after that, pushed down as far as she could take me, then drew back to pull the tip of my stick out of her lips with a pop. Dipping back down, she masturbated me, her wrist rising in speed, and when she leaned back to pop me out of her mouth again, patting her palm firmly against my balls, I ejaculated across her forehead. Recuperating, I instructed Ivan to go down on her while I watched. He did, and when he tired of it, he pushed himself into her anus. I fell half-asleep with him grunting before waking up in a daze a few minutes later. Then I walked over to them and lowered myself into her mouth again. Her lips clutched me like a fist, and my right thigh trembled before I shot into Ivan’s hair. Later, when I entered Lenka, I felt her fingers pressing down on my skin, drawing circles on my sweat, each digit pushing me forward. She lay below me, feeling like a delicate wound around the head of my penis, and as I felt her flesh widening, I pounded deeper into her, imagining I could burrow us through to something vast and embracing.

The next morning, I awoke on the sleeper couch. Lenka and Ivan had left sometime during the night. The living-room window had been left open to release the hash smoke, and for a moment I couldn’t recall what month it was. I could hear the main road coming to life again, the taxis heading up to town with commuters and students, and, except for the dent the three of us had left on my single mattress, everything around me felt the same way it had the previous day.

We never hear from the ugly man again. I guess there isn’t much else to say about him. He’s just one of this city’s many ciphers, we decide, one of the strange things that happen in the alleyways of the Southern Peninsula. Ruan speculates that he’s a deposed president, and Cissie says he’s the advisor to one. In any case, the money is retracted from our account, laundered most likely, and he never comes back for the ARVs. We decide to call him Ambroise Paré, after the man he admires, and Cissie says we should make masks out of his face. To the three of us, our planned meeting with Ethelia takes on an inevitable air, although we don’t discuss it much. Cissie goes back to work; Ruan and I hang out.

Ethelia shows up at Cissie’s place around a week later, on a Sunday afternoon. She knocks three times and finds the three of us sitting on the floor, each somehow sober. Cissie closes the door behind her. When she sees me, I wave at her and Ethelia smiles back.

I’ve never seen her close up before. She’s dressed in a matching denim top and jeans. Cissie walks to the bedroom to get the package we retrieved for her from the safety deposit box. We had gone straight there — a private security company on Orange Street — after having left the house in Woodstock. We hadn’t really been surprised to discover that Ambroise had prepared the way for us. We only had to present them with the letter.