Black worms
HE’S NOT THE NATURE-LOVING TYPE. Karl burns rubber through the Karoo. He feels as if he’s hurtling down a river in a barrel heading for a fucking waterfall. No control over his destiny. He feels as if he’s barrelling headlong towards his doom.
In the road there are black worms. He doesn’t know what kind of worms they are or where they’re coming from or where they’re going to. Every so often one or two of them cross the road. They all seem quite confident of their destination — where possible he tries not to drive over them.
He sees two dead tortoises next to the road, and one dead jackal.
In the late afternoon a dirty big cloudbank masses ominously in the west ahead of him. Zilch compared with the dark cloud in his head.
*
The closer he gets to Cape Town, the more he wants to turn back. The less prepared he feels; the less up to the job. He should never have tackled the trip on his own. What was he thinking? He should have brought Hendrik. (They could have stopped over at the Gariep Dam.) Mistake. Error of judgement from beginning to end. His mother used to say: You have only yourself to blame; what goes around, comes around.
Why is the landscape so desolate? The towns, the places people live in! Hemmed in by barren hills. How do they stand it? If he’d lived here, he’d have topped himself long ago. His mother could be pretty unbending, with her maxims and mottos. Like a woman from his Children’s Bible — Rachel or Naomi or Ruth, or someone. She didn’t have an easy life, because her husband died young. He and Iggy were still small — Iggy was eleven, he was nine. She saw many things, his mother, because she wasn’t scared of looking. Jesus — with a mother like that! She loved them, him and Iggy, though she never really showed it, not the affectionate type. But she had a soft spot for Iggy, that’s the only time Karl can remember her having a softness in her glance — when she looked at Iggy. At the stuff he made — the saucer with the germinating bean, the volcano from papier mâché, the bats, the clay stuff.
That he should be thinking of her today. Probably because things are in such a bloody mess. Just as well she’s dead — she’d have had a hard time coping with Iggy’s troubles.
In Laingsburg he stops to have something to eat, in a presentable, quite companionable little place, a kind of home industry and coffee shop, The Red Tea-Cosy, with a vast collection of enamel jugs and containers displayed in a large cabinet, and knitted stuff and cakes and cookies and jams (probably the handiwork of locals wanting to earn an extra pittance). Knitted tea-cosies in pretty colours. He’d have bought Juliana one if they’d still been together. But Laingsburg looks like a very depressing place to him. The Lord knows, he could never live here. If he’d been living here when the floodwaters came, he’d have let himself be washed away, he wouldn’t even have offered resistance.
He suddenly thinks of a lyric of the band Corrosion of Conformity. It just comes to mind: ‘Lying in the sun with a loaded gun.’ Probably because he’s feeling so shit, with a feeling of impending doom, like a gun that can go off at any moment. An intense band, although not as aggressive as the crazy Swedish guys who run around burning churches.
His cell phone rings. He assumes it will be Josias Brandt again, but it turns out to be the Joachim-guy with the beetroot claw.
‘I was expecting a call from you,’ says the man.
‘I am concerned about Ignatius,’ says Karl.
‘Rightly so,’ says Joachim, ‘rightly so. I don’t want to cause you unnecessary disquiet, but Ignatius is embroiled in a bitter conflict, do you understand? Whether he will survive it, we don’t know.’ (For sure, Karl thinks, that point you’ve made by now.)
‘What is he in conflict with?’ asks Karl. His voice sounds appallingly wishy-washy.
‘Look,’ says the man (his voice sounds weird, as if he’s talking through a pipe or a garden hose, or sitting under the road in a big culvert), ‘as I said last time, Ignatius has entered a perilous sphere. There are powers fighting to possess his soul. These powers are cunning and demonic … and they …’
The line starts crackling, an unearthly whooshing sound, and Karl struggles to hear.
‘… evil — iniquity,’ says Joachim, ‘you must understand …’
‘I can’t hear you!’ Karl shouts. An almighty whooshing. Is the man in some underground bunker or something?
‘Evil is like a …’
Karl doesn’t hear very well.
‘What,’ he shouts, ‘evil is like what?’
‘Like a parasite,’ says the man, ‘battening on the divine power within every human being … sometimes the evil is incarnated in a specific person, or people who exert …’
There is a great rushing sound like that of the sea. The man’s words come and go like waves breaking on the beach. Karl presses the phone really hard against his ear. Scrambled brains or not, he has to hear what the man is saying.
‘… their demonic power …’
‘I still can’t hear you!’ he shouts desperately.
‘… wearing down the person’s resistance through time and relentless onslaught, exhausting his spiritual resources, which is the case …’
The owner, Karl realises suddenly, has been eyeing him for a while now from behind the counter with a slightly worried expression on her face. He signals with his hand it’s okay, everything’s okay.
‘… with Ignatius. And this exile of the divine presence, the Galut ha’Shekhinah, who provides the life force to the natural world … she is at times forced to cooperate with evil, with people or …’
Who is the man talking about now? Who is this she?
‘… who speak or act against the divine will … sometimes even hostile to Shekhinah herself, you must understand …’
The line becomes ever less clear. Karl gets frantic. He hears nothing, he understands nothing. Who and what is this Shekhinah?
‘As I say, the evil gets incarnated in specific people … settles in the body and the soul … containers, carriers, delegates, instruments of unholiness who …’
‘Who what?’ Karl shouts.
‘… the person with whom … the persons, the individual with whom Ignatius at the moment … precisely such an instrument of darkness …’
‘Do you mean Josias Brandt?’ Karl shouts.
‘I can’t mention names,’ says Joachim, ‘the person should preferably not be named … but yes, he is … it is him …’
‘Is it him?’ Karl asks. ‘Are you sure it’s him?’.
‘… the death of Nefesh, the incarnation of Yetzer Ha’re … in his best interest …’
Oh Jesus, Karl thinks.
‘… Ignatius, your brother …’
More than that Karl doesn’t hear, because the line suddenly conks out, and when he phones, there is only an unholy hissing.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have talked to the crazy bugger. From the frying pan into the goddam fire. So what did he actually say: that Josias Brandt is evil incarnate? That his name is not to be mentioned — like Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter or some such spaced-out book? Either the Joachim-guy’s story is bullshit, or he, Karl, is an ignorant twat, yomping around in one dimension knowing buggerall about cunning and demonic forces flying around his head in some or other other dimension or stratosphere, or other material dimensions and that kind of thing. Protoplasmic blobs that can only be perceived by psychics. Lord, how would he know? Whose story is he to believe? Iggy’s own report? The off-the-wall allegations of the psychic and the Joachim-guy? Jakes Oosthuizen, who maintained that Josias took him in when he had no other refuge (together with the widows and orphans, who apparently he also takes under his wing)? Josias Brandt sounds like an impatient bastard, but he for sure doesn’t sound like evil incarnate. He must be careful now. Steady now, Karl cautions himself. When he’s so stressed out and off-balance, things can start going wrong. Numbers can come up. Then he’s fucked. Then he’ll sure as hell never get to Cape Town. Then he and Iggy are fucked. Good and solid and permanently fucked. If they aren’t already.