I can’t answer. I can’t even imagine.
I can only hope you exist. That this is seen, and read, just once.
That would mean something.
Why?
I have no idea. It just feels like it would.
CHAPTER 50
Straight entertainment
It was the smell of the kids that finally decided me.
In my pre-life I always found the smell of children disturbing. Offensive even, at times. All pink and potential. Unfettered. Raw meat.
But as they grew our kids developed their own particular reek, and to me it was, ultimately, and strangely, the reek of potential. Of some kind of happiness. Of my own happiness.
We had grown our family. We were all proud of this, our one true innovation in response to our truest crisis. We were growing the best possible genetic base for the future. We had a new start.
The smell of the kids in their fast-growing innocent pinkness encapsulated the success. Revealing my interactions with Madala, revealing and then proving the truth of them, would push a blade through the heart of it. Right through the pink.
So I kept it to myself.
But I was confused. So much so that I stopped going to the CSIR, as I was sure Madala expected me to. Instead I threw myself into the farm, which held challenges enough to occupy my frontal cortex.
I had always fulfilled my farm duties, but I was never what one would call a driving force. My sole strength was as the library guy, the archivist. Since Madala, however, the idea of knowledge itself, previously so preciously abstract, was now inevitably bound to him, and he, in turn, led only to more confusion.
Continually listless, seeking some kind of philosophical palliative, I fell onto the idea of bringing Javas’s giants over to the farm. Once it had occurred to me I was unable to push it back. We needed, I decided, a defining aesthetic for the community. There could be nothing better, nor more symbolic, than the giants.
Javas was initially put off by the effort involved, but I stuck to it, forcing him, week on week, month on month, to concede one piece at a time, until we had fourteen of the statues scattered across the perimeter of the complex, guarding key points with their scale and implied force. Once they were in place no one complained, least of all Javas. It was, all of a sudden, impossible to imagine the farm without them. The giants gave us an immediate character – something all of our own that was defining and distinct. Something from the past but also uniquely from our own time, the time after. The giants were our outer defence personified. In their raised arms and legs, in their pained, ambitious faces, in their hopeless pressing for movement, they gave us a new identity. And Javas began building anew, this time shaping his creatures to fit the purpose and form of their function. Glasses for the library giant, thick Wellington boots for the guardian of the crops.
I thought of Tebza. His hack craziness seemed a lot less bizarre now than it had while he was alive. Madala had extended the range of possibilities and probabilities. If I was going to accept Madala, I was forced to give equal weight to Tebza’s idea that we had been quietly slipped into an interface. That we were indeed trapped in an experiment or a trick.
The two ideas were binary poles – the one gave credence to the other. Together, they inflated a bubble of possibilities. But how would we ever know? Were we really capable of figuring out what type of maze we were in?
I started charging corners again – partially because it felt good to remember Tebza, to physically acknowledge his legacy, and partially because I couldn’t shake the sense that he was somehow right. My heart was in it: each charge felt like an opportunity. But as emotionally right as it felt, charging corners wasn’t going to do any more than bruise my shoulder, as Tebza had already conclusively proved. Still, I lowered and charged. Lowered and charged. Sometimes the heart demands.
I also paid attention to the small details. I looked as deep as I could into the orange of the setting sun. I tasted things with a triple slap of the tongue. I hunted for any kind of pixelation, visual, auditory or otherwise. I needed a crack within a crack. The tiniest hint of fissure, a fold within a fold, within an opening.
But there was nothing.
One afternoon the twins found me perched on Julius’s foot at the top entrance to Munro Drive, dabbing my tongue-wet finger onto his rusted toe and tasting it.
‘He won’t bite you, Roy. Give him a hug. Go all the way,’ Andile urged, sinking into a cross-legged position on the grass.
‘You were right, Roy, nè?’ Javas joined me at Julius’s feet. ‘They add so much. Everyone says so. It’s good to have them here, for me too. It’s like they’ve finally come home.’
‘Soul,’ I said. ‘They give the place soul. Like we’re real people living here. People reaching for things.’
Andile leaned back on her hands and listened as the conversation developed. This was always her way – she let it roll and roll and then, when most of the energy was released, she would pick a thread and pull.
‘When they dig us up,’ she interjected a few minutes later, while Javas and I were discussing his next piece, currently still a sketch, ‘they’ll think we had some kind of weird civilisation going. I can see them fencing it off and dusting with their little brushes to show what we did and why we did it. They will think these were our gods.’
‘They might be right,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure they aren’t right already. I talk to them all the time, even from the distance of my house. I see them on the horizon and I talk to them. I greet them in the morning. I tell them my worries. I say good morning… I pray…’
‘You and the kids,’ she added. ‘Their stories have changed. They’re bigger – the stories. What happens is bigger. Their events. More people hurt. More people saved. Weird.’
‘Epic,’ said Javas.
‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Epic. They bring scale. Emotional scale. The epic.’
‘Ag fok, you sound like my art tutor.’ Andile tugged us quietly back. ‘It’s true though. I wonder if it will change the way the kids grow.’
‘No doubt it will change what they dream about,’ Javas said, patting Julius’s big toe. ‘And if the scale of your dreams grows as a child, doesn’t matter for what reason, your life will grow like that too.’
Dreams aside, the kids’ world was shrinking fast. By the time the oldest were old enough to look back, they were viewing an opaque set of ideas and buildings and forms. The skylines spoke of another world, rich in temples and glass, but it was exceptionally challenging for them to gain even a tourist’s view of what that world had actually contained.
After the suburbs had grown dense to the point of impenetrability, mother earth launched a steady push – immense by all objective measures – across the concrete. Stretching in ultra slowmo, oceans of tar and commerce and past life were breached, millimetre by millimetre. We grew so used to the invisible speed of it that we forgot it, for years at a time in some cases. And then we remembered.
‘Roy.’ Sthembiso arrived with a fully loaded cannon. I could tell by the calculated lilt of his voice, a soft, pretend-innocuous winding up to something quite large.
‘Rastafari,’ I replied.
He shook his head angrily. ‘Roy,’ he insisted again, this time with a slight whine.
‘Yes, my son. Hit me. What wilst thou know?’ We were sitting on my balcony at sunset. I was sketching another horizon; he was watching me do it, paying careful attention to my treatment of the top of the Northcliff Dome.
‘What’s in the Dome?’ A leading question. The contents of the Dome had been covered many times previously.