Masande Ntshanga - The Reactive

Inside, I hear Cissie talking again.

I’m being serious, she says. Look, just think about this thing for a moment.

I try to.

I mean, it’s pretty much a habit for us, by now. What we’re doing is having one of our talks about what to do for Last Life. Last Life is the name we’ve come up with for what happens to me during my last year on the planet. Like always, we stayed up for most of the previous night with the question. We finished the wine first. Then we moved on to the bottle of benzene.

Ruan looks up and says, dude, explain this slavery thing to me. He gets up to take a thin book from the counter and flops himself down on a torn bean-bag. Then he starts reading the book— A Happy Death by Camus — from the back, his eyes training the sentences inward, as if the French author had written a Japanese manga.

Cissie just says her word again.

Slavery.

She raises her hand and waves the gooey ladle in a small circle above the bowl.

You know what I mean, she says. The three of us, we’re basically slaves.

From my side, I remain quiet. I just watch them like I sometimes do. I mean honestly. It’s Ruan who usually brings us all this pathos.

The three of us aren’t slaves. Ruan, Cissie and I each wrote matric in the country’s first batch of Model C’s. In common, our childhoods had the boomerangs we used to throw with the neighborhood kids, the rollerblades and the green buckets of space goo. The Sticky Hands with their luminous jelly fingers, each digit rumored to be toxic, which we clotted with wet earth on the first day back from the store and threw into our green pools for cleansing. The Grow Monsters which we watched expanding inside our toilet bowls with awe, and the tracks we dug for our Micro Machines before the day ended, when the orange light would come down and tint the neighborhood roof tiles the color of a lightbulb filament.

Ease. Everything my little brother Luthando never got to have.

For all that time, I remember LT topless in denim shorts and wearing a thin silver chain. Luthando played marbles, that’s what he knew most of all to do with his hands. My brother wasn’t tough, but he fancied himself a township ou. I remember how he didn’t know what a spinning top was before I gave him mine. We used the laces from his Chuck Taylors to spin it, and later that night, I was quiet when he refused to drink the water my mother poured for us at the dinner table, telling me later that he’d wanted to preserve the taste of beef in his mouth.

Inside the kitchen, Cissie tries to drive home her point. What if babies cry because birth is the first form of human incarceration? What if it’s a lasting shock to the consciousness to be imprisoned inside the human body? If the flesh is something that’s meant to go off from the beginning, doesn’t that make it an ill fit, since the consciousness, naturally amorphous, is antithetical to disintegration?

Still stirring the glue in her yellow bowl, Cissie asks if we understand.

I can’t really tell.

I don’t think LT is still around. Maybe it’s because my body’s breaking down that she’s speaking to us like this, or maybe it’s because her own body’s fading away from her. You can’t always tell with Cecelia. It could be everyone’s body that’s bothering her.

I walk back inside, anyway, and take the spoon from her. She gives me a mock head-butt with her match head, and then she sits on the counter to light up a cigarette. Sighing with relief, she closes her eyes to suck in the carcinogens.

From behind his book, Ruan tells us we aren’t selling enough pills. He places the book aside and looks up at me. Of course, this isn’t really news to us.

I tell him that my case manager said she’d give me a call. For months now, I say, my insurers, I think they’ve been holding out on me.

Ruan sits up.

Jesus, Nathi, he says, don’t tell me they’ve started reviewing your case. He pulls his computer onto his lap. Quick, dude, he says, gooi me her name and email.

This is Ruan’s solution for most of our problems. Mention something to him and he’ll ask you for a name and an email address. Right now, I shrug, since I don’t have either one.

I guess I could find out, I say.

I keep stirring.

I tell myself this is what’s important.

I wipe my brow like I’ve been watching Cissie do all morning. When I look up, I find her closing her eyes, leaning back on the kitchen counter. She blows out a pair of smoke rings. Then her hand drops to ash the last of her cigarette, and she says it again, this word she’s been using on us all morning.

Slavery.

On the bean-bag, Ruan doesn’t respond. He goes back to reading and I take out my cellphone. I plug it into the charger next to the stove, and, using my other hand to stir, I read the text message from my uncle.

Lindanathi, my uncle Bhut’ Vuyo says, ukhulile ngoku, you’ve come of age.

He tells me I haven’t been seen in too long. I read this second line for a while before I delete the message.

Returning to the glue, the relief I expect to wash over me doesn’t arrive. Instead, I think of each word I’ve read off the screen. I think of coming of age in the way Bhut’ Vuyo means. Then I think of my last night in Du Noon, and about those two words, ukhulile ngoku, and of coming of age once more.

My case manager calls my cellphone close to an hour later. We’ve put away Cissie’s cooked glue in plastic containers to cool off in the freezer, and we’ve taken up our noses what’s left of the tube of industrial-strength glue she keeps in her drawer. It’s now just a little after one, and we’re sprawled sideways across Cissie’s living-room floor, our lungs full of warmth from n-hexane. When I don’t pick up and answer my case manager’s call, my cellphone seems to melt inside my palm. It’s a strange sensation, but one you get used to after a while.

With another hour passing, we watch as Ruan pulls his baseball cap over his forehead. He plays “By This River” by Brian Eno on his laptop, tapping the repeat button under the seek bar, and then the next hour arrives and Cissie hands us three Ibuprofens each. She pops them out of a new 500-milligram bubble pack, and we take them with glasses of milk and clumps of brown sugar. From where I’m sitting, I can still feel the warmth from the glue expanding through me, a thick liquid spilling out from my chest and kneading into my fingertips. The sunlight casts a wide flat beam over the coffee table, and after we’ve swallowed, we place the tumblers holding the rest of our milk between its narrow legs. I close my eyes again and hear my cellphone calling out for me. Its vibration feels like a small hand running over my thigh, and when I pick it up, my heart squeezes into itself as I think of Bhut’ Vuyo. I see Luthando’s stepfather stretching his vest under his heavy blue overalls, sitting inside a sweating phone container and hefting a fistful of change, but then I look down and the code reads 011, connecting my line to the grid in Joburg.

I place the receiver back against my ear, hearing the sound of a hundred telephones ringing in unison, and then the sound of my case manager climbing up from underneath this din, shouting at me through a deep ocean of static. The missing copper — I imagine kilometers of it stolen from our skyline each year— leaves a yawning gap of silence between our sentences, and then a big wind pushes behind her voice when she tells me about missing another meeting, how it means my insurance will have no choice but to cut me off. She tells me they haven’t received a sheet with my CD4 count for close to five months now, and that I should know better than to be this reckless with their program. I’m sitting down as I listen to this. Since I can’t do anything else, I nod at the table.