Masande Ntshanga - The Reactive

Cissie leads the way past the reception desk; Ruan and I take our time making it out of the front entrance. I put my one foot after the other, and begin to feel my breath heating up like a bed of coals. When I cough, it’s a noise that goes on for a while, rattling inside the numbness in my chest, but it doesn’t do much to clear it.

I take out my cellphone. I’ve decided to deposit money into Bhut’ Vuyo’s account. I ask him for his account number, but the message won’t send. It displays a red x, meaning I’m out of airtime.

We tumble forward again. Cissie buzzes the parking-lot gate open and we wend a curving path through Newlands’s leafy streets. We head down towards the main road, where we stand for a few minutes, smoking cigarettes under a bus awning and leaning our heads against a bright McDonald’s ad, balancing each other as we wait for a taxi. Ruan and Cissie keep blurring together in the small space in front of me. To pass the time, Ruan starts telling us a joke he’s lost the punch line to. We wait another two minutes before catching a taxi headed out to Wynberg.

Through the taxi window, the sky appears heavy, having grown overcast. The light bounces off the surface like a silver coin, a spill of mercury. When we pierce through Claremont’s invisible epidermis, I look down at my hands and find no blood beneath my fingernails. We slow down for an Engen garage and I raise my head again, not sure why I searched through my fingers a moment ago. The thought comes to me that Bhut’ Vuyo might still take offense to my money, whether or not I deem it clean enough for him.

For a moment, I think about that, the idea of my money. The three of us remain afloat on what’s left of the n-hexane in our blood, sitting one next to the other, two rows from the empty back seat.

The driver pulls over at the garage, and I lean forward and feel something jam inside my head. Small orange shapes burst inside the taxi, and from behind my eyelids, I envision myself laughing with Cissie and Ruan, the three of us wearing tailored suits and acting jubilantly, our fingers rolling joints from tall heaps of two-hundred-rand notes.

These days, when we run out of tubes of Industrial, Ruan and I take solace in each other’s misery on Earth, the two of us comparing comedowns as we wait for Cissie to finish her shift. We reload airtime and detail the planet’s shortcomings, never disappointing each other with news of well-being or fortune.

When we first started using, though, Ruan and I would sometimes go on runs together for Industrial. They used to offload the boxes in Epping, back then, and then transport the surplus to Bellville, where they mixed the tubes for distribution. I’d call him about a deal, and I’d say, Ruan, tell me what you think about this one. We mostly stayed in the south whenever we had enough money to buy a tube, where the cut of the glue wasn’t always guaranteed to come out potent. Still, I remember this one day, when I got a lead on a wholesaler in the north. He was a new dealer, an out-of-towner who’d taken a room at the Little House in Belhar.

When I phoned him, Ruan took a while to pick up. Then I heard him shifting his weight. I had to wait for him to finish drumming a stream of urine into the bowl.

Nooit, my friend, he said when he was done.

I heard him hanging over the basin, pushing a dispenser for soap, opening a tap.

Dude, I said, you haven’t even thought about this.

I don’t have to, he said.

I paused. Well, it’s the best lead we’ve had. I don’t want to brag about it.

He was quiet.

I tried him again. You seriously haven’t heard a thing about it?

Not a thing.

He could be an asshole sometimes.

Maybe it’s fresh, I said.

It might be fresh, he said. He agreed to that much, at least.

Listen, he said.

I listened. I heard him kick a door open, walk a short distance and settle himself in a booth. He was drinking a milkshake, I could tell. I sighed. It meant Ruan had gone through a tube of glue alone on his living-room floor, and now he was sitting up the street from his flat at The Blue China, an ice-cream bar we sometimes lumbered into after getting high. The milkshake would no doubt be a banana mint with chocolate shavings and a light sprinkle of cinnamon. I knew it well because it’s the only thing we ever ordered.

This guy has money, I said to him, still thinking it over.

Money, Ruan said.

He wanted me to hear his boredom. It was a hint to get me off the line. I heard him pull in a suck from his shake, which meant he’d already scooped the toppings off the foam with a teaspoon, and that he’d set the teaspoon on a saucer over his doubled napkin. It was a tic. Cissie and I sometimes teased him about it. We said he’d keep this up for as long as his hands were hung on the ends of his wrists, or at least until all our motor functions gave in from the glue.

Your hands are weird, I said to him, giving up.

Really?

Yes.

Really, they are. Ruan has these long thin fingers that shoot out of pale, crusted knuckles. The skin on them looks thin, almost translucent, and his palms sweat out ten liters a day.

It’s like you were something else before a person, I said.

He laughed. Dude, that’s offside.

Let’s go north, then.

Ruan laughed again. Have you talked to Cissie?

No.

You should.

Why?

I already knew why. It was a good reason, too: I didn’t think it was safe enough for her. This was before the Little House on the Prairie, an old tik den based in the south of Bellville, would get on the news, but we all knew Belhar deserved its reputation back then. Even before Mr. Big had taken over the plot on Modderdam Road, there was the story of the guy who’d walked out of the door without his hands on him, the stumps on his arms wetting the cuffs on his pants. I pressed a button and got Ruan louder on the line.

Why should I? I asked him again.

I don’t know, he said, but the damned should stick together, don’t you think?

I don’t disagree with you, I said.

We pull out of the garage. The gaartjie hangs his waist out of the window, his long tongue chafing against his cracked lips, his large voice calling out for Wynberg. He’s a young guy, tattooed and thin, weathered, like most of the gaartjies who work in the south. The glass edge eats into his stomach as we speed past Cavendish, his gold chain rattling around his neck like a piece of snapped film on a reel. This is what you do when you cast your net for the strays, his body seems to say. You push yourself out into their air and echo.

I breathe and look ahead. Ruan and Cissie tap their cellphones as our driver stops again. He scoops up another harried passenger — a woman of around sixty, wearing navy slacks and a dirty cashmere sweater — and then we stay quiet for the rest of the trip. I lean back and feel my neck, moist and cold, pressing hard against the taxi’s torn plastic seating.

We score a lot of our customers at group meetings for the HI Virus here in Cape Town. We’ve been to meetings as far out as Hout Bay, too, to Khayelitsha, Langa and Bellville. We’ve been to two or three in Paarl, and once, when we hitched the twelve o’clock train from Rondebosch, we went out to Simon’s Town. It’s part of it, to get around the way we do. We hand out pamphlets to anyone who wants to place an order. Most of our clients don’t make enough to meet the criteria needed for coverage: they come to us for a pack, or just enough to taper off an initial treatment. I like to imagine it depending on the stage of their illness, but most of it comes down to what they have in their pockets.

The taxi drops us off in Wynberg. I start looking around for a place to buy airtime, but then I realize I have no change to pay the hawkers with. My eyes drop to the thighs of the women vendors, and I begin to feel embarrassed, running my gaze over the wares on their tables. For the first time, I notice how they look like a jury, seated on a row of cracked SAB crates. The old women squint at the world through the leather of their dark, folded faces, their eyes glassy with glaucoma, each orb like a marble spinning in wet earth. Globules of sweat draw runnels down their temples, and their pulses beat together like the hearts of small mammals. Maybe they’ve heard from Bhut’ Vuyo. In front of their hunger, I pull out more lint from the recesses of my pockets. Then Cissie pulls me away.