Once his lecture series had concluded, Fats put the class through a naming workshop, at which point I bailed out. Workshops were never my thing. The idea, he told the adults expressing doubts as to the worth of the exercise, was history. Creating an expo was a way for the kids to get a real, tangible sense of the past. Of where their parents – and, indeed, their people – had come from. It taught them about money and products and marketing and sales and open markets and all those things that are so hard to explain in the abstract. And if they were going to do it, it needed to be done properly. It started with the name.
He was right, of course, in all these things. In addition, there was the factor that no one really mentioned but that everyone clearly enjoyed.
The expo gave us something to do.
I was desperate for activity. In fact, I stuffed my every waking moment with action. Exercises for the hands and the feet, anything to keep the brain chugging somewhere near neutral, far away from Madala.
Still, even with all the activity, he crept back, probing the gaps, forcing them wider and wider until I was pretty much running two separate operating systems – one for the theory, and the other for the practical realities. As much as I tried, I couldn’t keep the theory down. My brain refused to stop running the permutations and calculations, the options and possibilities. Scenarios trickled constantly in the background.
I watched I, Robot a lot, and then all the other sci-fis, but I couldn’t see whatever it was Madala wanted me to. They were movies. Simplistic, singular and generally sharing the same basic premise. Man makes machine. Machine challenges/crushes/frightens/oppresses man. Man fights back and wins, loses or gets stuck staring at a horizon filled with moving metallic parts. And then the sequels – rehashes of skimpy original plots.
I couldn’t figure out what was so important. It all felt thin – stupidly thin.
Then again, I wondered if he might be subtly anchoring me via the movie references. Perhaps he was setting my perspective within a predictable, easy-to-control context. Maybe it would help him to have me thinking like a movie script.
If that was his intention, in a way it worked. I would catch myself veering into strange if-then scenarios. Tebza’s version versus Madala’s. I felt like I had to choose, to decide which world I was actually in, and then design my actions accordingly. Another component of my inner life was the idea that I was missing vital details, crucial facts and digits that were only just out of my view, and thus my comprehension. I often believed that a fundamental truth lurked somewhere near. I wanted that truth.
But when I pulled the curtain back there was nothing.
Just me, centre stage.
I believed Madala wanted me to come rushing back, so I denied him. Month after month I carried out my duties, educated the kids, helped with the expo. I ran. I ate supper with my people. I went to bed.
It felt good. Holy, almost. Like I always imagined the Buddhists must have felt – nobly apart from the baser instincts, from the need to achieve.
My drift away from archiving and the library was noticed, naturally. As was my increased presence at communal activities. Supper time especially, where I had been a notoriously late arriver.
Beatrice, who continued to pop up at random intervals in her sarong, all fingers and thighs, teased me the most, feeding through the gossip generated by the girls and carried back in pillow whispers to the men. I smiled and rose above, as a good Buddhist would.
And the library always called. I frequently heard the distant voice of the Eeeyus, now just crashing around by themselves, lonely, waiting. I was never completely free from their impatience.
But I turned my head.
I closed my ears.
I looked forward most of all to the rides to the Dome with the kids. This was pure time, unfettered by adults and schedules, and thus liberating. The kids would prompt me, poke and pull at limbs, always seeking more stories, more information, glimpses into the present and the past.
‘What happened to your tooth, Roy?’
‘What was your job, Roy?’
‘What is gravity, Roy?’
‘Did you have a wife, Roy?’
‘Why don’t you have a wife now, Roy?’
‘Why do we just stay here, Roy? Why don’t we go somewhere else?’
‘What’s rugby, Roy?’
I answered everything I could, sage-like. When they sliced too close to the bone, I bailed out with humour, or sarcasm, or ‘You’ll understand when you’re older’.
They loved the music suitcase most of all. Sthembiso would lead the selections, ostensibly offering a range of options but ultimately limiting the choices to suit his own ends. And his destination always turned out to be trance.
Sthembiso loved candy-floss trance like nothing else in the musical world, and he pulled all of the kids with him. Maybe they were just at the right age to get into the silly swooning-girl vocals, suspension of disbelief not yet an issue. Maybe it was because the structure was so easy to anticipate.
They could turn it into a collective game, each taking their own part comfortably as they sang along with the looping pianos, the twinkles and sparkles. Whatever the reason, they managed to turn my father’s career fetish into something beautiful and funny and entertaining and touching. We sang and beeped and bopped our way to the Dome for many months, and each time we did it was like a little butterfly had landed on my heart.
Sthembiso, for his part, latched onto the sudden disappearance of the bass drum. He learned to anticipate the drop-off with precision. He would wait with undisguised relish, his finger in the air, just like my father, the suspense killing and delighting him as he allowed himself to be lifted and lifted and lifted until, wham, it dropped back in and we were off again, doof doof doof doof doof doof…
This, I began to suspect, was somehow my father’s child.
We would park at the Dome entrance. They would go their way, and I would let my Nikes cut a new yellow path into the suburb of North Riding. Initially I was forced to hack through the growth throttling the condominiums, the roads and the complexes, sometimes camouflaged, sometimes swallowed whole by scrub and bush and brown grass.
The condos were all exact replicas of each other, and within them lay the remnants of thousands of replicated lives. Linoleum kitchens. Fake-leather TV couches. Bookshelves absent of books, littered with disks and devices, chords and cables and sockets. Fake art. Distended terracotta clay pots guarding the corners of narrow balconies. Secretaries and administrative managers and IT technicians. Copywriters, brand managers, graphic designers and event planners. Project managers and personal assistants. I came to know them well.
In the second year I began, gently at first, more aggressively later, swapping portions of my run for targeted quests to locate a residence able to deny the pattern. I started, in other words, poking around. One day I decided to run with a crowbar, which sat heavy in my hand as I sweated and prowled. Then I started actually smashing my way in, deeper and deeper, flicking fast through it all, the trash of their lives, our lives, looking for… well, I’m still not quite sure what.
I grabbed iPads and iPods and phones and hand-helds and handsets by the fistful, but it was futile. They were all the same when I got them home and plugged them in, and eventually I just let them fall carelessly from my overloaded arms as I made my way back to the Dome.
Then I started pissing. Again. Over their beds. Onto their pillows. I saturated their lounge suites and their throw cushions.
I was regressing.
I was retreating.
Back into an earlier version of myself.
It wasn’t completely unsatisfying.