Masande Ntshanga - The Reactive

What will I remember about my friends? The good times, I suppose, even though they didn’t always appear good at the time. I’ll remember West Ridge Heights. I’ll remember Ruan telling us that he’d made an evaluation of our personalities, and that he’d plotted them on a hundred-year time scale and concluded that, in the near future, it would become easier for the three of us to detect the defects carried by other people, their fears and deceits, and because of this, we would have a map to locate others like ourselves, who’d been marked in similar ways.

I remember agreeing with him, that day, and maybe each of us had felt more hopeful than usual. Ruan, Cissie and I had been huffing paint thinner at Ruan’s place in Sea Point. Elaborating, Ruan said that after leaving school, he’d lost his natural ability to cultivate relationships with other human beings, but because of the two of us, he felt this being restored to him.

I guess that was something I could understand.

It was something the three of us shared.

In Wynberg, when we came around to meeting each other for the first time, it was with a measure of caution, and the results surprised us. We’d each resigned ourselves to passing by, whenever we met other people, by then. Things had happened to each of us along the way, I suppose, and, as we stood and mumbled by the serving table that afternoon, watching as the rest of the members bonded over biscuits in Mary’s basement, there was no question of our getting romantically involved with each other. In that short time, we’d seemed to have agreed, with a quiet and complicit relief, that we were somehow too wrecked, and that we had met within obviously wrecked circumstances. Ruan, Cissie and I had never owned up to the things we’d had to do in order to keep seeing each other, in those first few weeks of friendship; never admitted to what it was, where it was, and who it was that we were detaching ourselves from. This secrecy hadn’t been incidental, I later felt, but was meant to maintain something unknowable in each of us: a corner we could keep divested of goodwill, without any breach in conscience, at the times we had to hurt each other to spare ourselves.

Though that hardly ever happened.

Which is what I’ll remember, too.

I’ll remember how, two years ago, Ruan began to vomit and wouldn’t stop even after an hour of heaving on his bathroom floor. He’d had another threat from his uncle and another letter from the bank, and he’d been drinking Gin Rickeys at a bar down the road from his flat. Cissie and I tried to catch up with him when we arrived; we each ordered two drinks at a time, but soon we ran out of money.

Outside the bar, Ruan began to laugh as he lit up a filter. He waved his hand across the panorama of the beach, and then inwards across the promenade and the traffic. It was in the early evening and the sky was tinted a burning pink, with a streak of orange cirrus hanging over the horizon. The streetlights were beginning to flicker on intermittently, as if roused from a deep sleep by our footsteps. Ruan hadn’t talked about his uncle that day, and Cissie and I knew he wouldn’t. The three of us were quiet as the cars raced past, a play of light obscuring the faces of the drivers. I imagined them to be headed to Camps Bay for sundowners, or to dinner reservations in the center of town.

We stumbled together. Cissie and I kept Ruan propped up between us. We passed our first cigarette quickly and lit up another one. Then Ruan pointed us towards his flat: he said he wanted to crash.

There were windows on two of the walls in Ruan’s living room and they both looked out over the vista of the Atlantic. Most of them were opened wide, pushed out to the hilt of the hinges, and Ruan had given us specific instructions to leave them that way. He said that sometimes the windows, left ajar, could make the flat seem like a moving structure, as if, sitting alone in his living room at the helm of his glass-topped coffee table, he was in control of something large and industrial, and that, by his efforts alone, he could lift it up and maneuver it out to sea.

When I sat down on his bean-bag that night, the walls seemed to stand up in my stead, the windows sliding hazily down off the bricks. The sounds of the traffic, the promenade and the ocean all reached into the living room and mingled with the noises of Ruan and Cissie looking for thinners in the cabinets. Then the windows slowly readjusted themselves on the walls. When I blinked again, closing my eyes for longer intervals, my head had the feeling of being steered in small, concentric circles. I laid it back on the bean-bag and watched Ruan and Cissie from an inverted perspective, their frames slightly elongated, their feet standing where their chins should’ve hung. Ruan’s hands shot down to his mouth and he pushed himself back from the counter, and for a moment Cissie and I stared at each other through his absence. Then we followed him to the bathroom, and there we found his fig trees inside the bath tub. He had a collection of small potted plants he’d splattered with his own blood, the aim being to spread himself to the world through the different birds that ate them.

I won’t forget that.

The first time LT and I saw people having sex was through my neighbors’ bedroom window. This was back home, at my mother’s house in eMthatha, and we’d giggled so loudly that the guy, blond and stocky — with his face flushed red — had banged on the window and screamed, telling us to fuck off. We’d both had our turn with girls after that and I guess I had a few more than LT did before he turned to a boy in his neighborhood. He would remember it better than I would, although I doubt by a very wide margin.

I remember our uncles, with their gold teeth and beer breath, and how they’d find the two of us at every family gathering, hoist us on their knees, and goad us about becoming men. I’d smile at them while my stomach sank. I’d learned early to be deceitful with older drunks. They got on the bottle and treated you like anyone else — not a Model C who didn’t know his clan name from his asshole.

I was scared to go home for circumcision. Most of us were. We’d grown up hearing stories about what could go wrong. There was the initiate who’d had the head fall off his shaft while he swam upstream in the Mthatha River, and the one who had to be rushed to hospital because his wound wasn’t properly dressed. Each winter, the Dispatch reported on guys like us dropping in droves. It wasn’t the pain: we knew that would pass. I’d just never pictured myself as one of the guys who’d come out the other side — someone who could get along up there.

I also knew that, really, I was scared of being close to LT. The rumors about him had spread and he’d been set apart. I didn’t want people to mix us up, to look at me the same way they did him. When the Mda house came under pressure to make a man out of its sissy son, I kept away — I crossed my arms in Cape Town.

LT was younger than me, and he didn’t believe in what they said — what you had to become to be a man — but he still called to ask me for my help. I told him to go in June, and that I would follow as soon as I handed in my assignments. Well, I never went back. I switched off my phone a week later and abandoned him up there. Later, they said LT fought them and that’s what killed him.

Often, I’ve thought about how I wouldn’t know if that was true; about how I was absent during his last hours, and about how, when he died, my arms were still crossed in Cape Town.

+ + +

One year after I graduated from Tech, and a week before the sixth anniversary of LT’s death, I infected myself with HIV in the laboratories. That’s how I became a reactive. I never had the reactions I needed for myself, and I couldn’t react when LT called to me for help, so I gave my own body something it couldn’t flee from. Now here’s your older brother and murderer, Luthando. His name is Lindanathi and his parents got it from a girl.