Masande Ntshanga - The Reactive

Something that’s not difficult to figure out about me and my case manager is that we’ve never gotten along. Not in any real sense of the word. I only know her as Sis’ Thobeka, never having bothered to ask her for a full name, and in my head, she’s just one of the many medical bureaucrats I’ll have to pass through on my way out. She calls me from an air-conditioned office in Joburg, and there isn’t much else to say about us. Except maybe this one time, when she took up my case about four years ago. She told me that she’d fallen into her line of work owing to a compulsion she had to assist the frail. She’d grown tired of her nursing job at Baragwanath, however, of all the men, women and children that got swept into the intensive care unit on her watch, most of them broken into soft and wet pieces.

This introduction left a reluctant mark on me. On occasion, I still think of her as existing between then and now, and of the number of people she had to witness turning into powder. Maybe this makes it easier for me to stomach her: that she has this knowledge of loss beneath the protocol. I even told her, once, how I’d got my virus by accident. I remember her silence that day. The two of us stayed on the line for a while, and in the end, she only said: okay. Then she coughed and we carried on. To this day, I doubt she thinks it prudent to believe anything I say. Not that I’d want that from her. This suits the two of us just fine.

On the line now, I tell her, okay.

Okay what?

I’ve got a meeting scheduled.

You have a meeting scheduled, she says. When is this?

It’s today.

Well, that’s good then, Lindanathi. Take yourself to that meeting today, and then fax us a proof of attendance with your CD4 count sheet. We’ve approved the latest shipment of your medications, but now you have to do your part for us and make the program work. Do you understand?

I do. I tell her that.

You have a good care package here, she tells me. Don’t let it go to waste over foolishness.

I won’t.

Right.

I tell her again that I won’t.

Look, it’s in your hands, isn’t it?

It is.

Well then, she says. We’ve added benefits for you Silver members. We could move you up in a few months’ time if you fixed up your file. We’ve had to scale back on the Platinum option, though, so I would suggest a Gold membership for now.

I nod. I can hear Sis’ Thobeka pecking on her keyboard as I consider the options. Voices murmur in her office, and I begin to drift off as she details the premiums.

She lets a minute pass in silence before she asks me if I’m doing fine in any case, if I’m okay despite everything else that’s the matter with me.

I blink, and I’m about to answer her when she says she has another call coming in. I wait for her when she tells me to wait, and I’m still doing that when her voice turns into a dial tone.

Later, when I open my eyes, I find Ruan and Cissie staring down at me. Their brows crease as they edge towards my place on the floor, their outlines melting into the walls stained and cracked behind them.

Cissie says, Nathi, are you okay?

My mouth feels blow-dried, packed thick with stiff clouds of cotton wool.

I look up and ask them the same. I say, are you okay?

In response, Cissie points a finger at her ear. Then she gets on her knees, takes my hand, and says, Nathi, your phone’s dead.

+ + +

The way I got to know them, by the way, my two closest friends here, is that we met at one of the new HIV and drug-counseling sessions cropping up all over the city. We were in the basement parking lot of the free clinic in Wynberg. The seminar room upstairs had been locked up and taped shut, there’d been a mercury spill, and our group couldn’t meet in there on account of the vapors being toxic to human tissue. Instead, they arranged us in the basement parking lot, and in two weeks we got used to not being sent upstairs for meetings. I did, in any case, and that was enough for me in the beginning.

In those days, I attended the meetings alone. I’d catch a taxi from Obs over to Wynberg for an afternoon’s worth of counseling. By the end of my first month, when the seminar room had been swept once, and then twice, and then three times by a short man who wore a blue contamination meter over his chest, each time checking out clean, everyone decided they preferred it down below, and so that’s where we stayed.

Maybe we all want to be buried here, I said.

It had been the first time I’d spoken in group. Talking always took me a while, back then, but the remark succeeded in making a few of them laugh. It won me chuckles even from the old-timers, and later, I wrote down my first addiction story to share with the group. It was from a film I saw adapted from a book I wasn’t likely to read. Ruan and Cissie arrived on the following Wednesday.

I noticed them immediately. Something seemed to draw us in from our first meeting. In the parking lot, we eyeballed each other for a while before we spoke. During the coffee break, we stood by the serving table in front of a peeling Toyota bakkie, mumbling tentatively towards each other’s profiles. I learned that Cecelia was a teacher. She pulled week-long shifts at a daycare center just off Bridge Street in Mowbray, and she was there on account of the school’s accepting its first openly positive pupil. Ruan, who was leaning against the plastic table, gulping more than sipping at the coffee in his paper cup, said that he suffocated through his life by working on the top floor of his uncle’s computer firm. He was there to shop for a social issue they could use for their corporate responsibility strategy. He called it CRS, and Cissie and I had to ask him what he meant.

In the end, I guess I was impressed. I told them how I used to be a lab assistant at Peninsula Tech, and how in a way this was part of how I’d got to be sick with what I have.

When we sat back down again, we listened to the rest of the members assess each other’s nightmares. They passed them around with a familiar casualness. Mark knew about Ronelle’s school fees, for instance, and she knew about Linette’s hepatitis, and all of us knew that Linda had developed a spate of genital warts over September. She called them water warts, when she first told us, and, like most of her symptoms, she blamed them on the rain.

That day, when the discussion turned to drug abuse, as it always did during the last half-hour of our sessions, the three of us had nothing to add. I looked over at Ruan and caught him stashing a grin behind his fist, while on my other side, Cecelia blinked up at the ceiling. I didn’t need any more evidence for our kinship.

The meeting lasted the full two hours, and when it came to an end, I collected my proof of attendance and exchanged numbers with Ruan and Cecelia. I suppose we said our goodbyes at the entrance of the parking lot that day, and later, within that same week I think, we were huffing paint thinner together in my flat in Obs.

Coming down from Industrial isn’t as easy as pulling in your first huff. It isn’t for me, and I guess it never is for my two friends, either. I’ve put the cellphone back on the charger after Sis’ Thobeka’s call and the three of us are taking turns splashing our faces with cold water from the kitchen tap. When we’re done, I remove my phone from the socket by the stove. Then Cissie bolts her door and we take the lift down to the ground floor.

The atmosphere feels warm and slippery on my skin, and my mind instructs me to glide, so I push my arms out and try to do that. I slide my fingers across the walls as we walk through the mouth of the lobby, balancing with my hands and trying not to slip, feeling as if the plastic tiles are peeling beneath my feet.

We follow Cissie across the grassy oval. Ethelia, the little girl who builds and restores peace to concrete empires, has disappeared. Her cities lie in ruin, scattered in a loose ring around the water fountain.