The only consolation is that Iggy recognised him. That means he hasn’t yet plunged headlong down some bottomless abyss. This is for the time being Karl’s only hope.
*
That evening Karl buys a six-pack of beer and drops in on Jakobus Coetzee again. He once again sits on the garden chair, Jakobus on a log. The single light bulb above them casts a feeble light, because the room is big. Jakobus has lit a few candles and a small reading light on the floor next to his bed helps to provide more light. In the evening this space looks even stranger — the plethora of objects casts menacing shadows because large sections of the hall-like interior are unlit.
Jakobus inspires confidence in Karl. He has a great need to talk to him so that he can get rid of some of his pent-up tension, and gain some clarity on Iggy. He tells Jakobus about his visit to the psychic, and that it didn’t produce much. (He doesn’t tell him that the woman sensed a place with unholy goings-on, darkness, death and anger. And that one of the men she saw dreams of dead people and bites his hand while sleeping.) He tells him about the Joachim-chap with the beetroot claw. Jakobus apparently finds it all very interesting, he listens attentively. My goodness, hey? He says every now and then, and: Well, well, well.
What does he think of it all? Karl asks him.
‘Look,’ says Jakobus, ‘I suppose one must take all these things seriously. The probable as well as the improbable. Take all things into account, I suppose.’
Karl tells him about the Sheddim (which he still hasn’t googled).
Jakobus knows about it. He also, he says, struggled for the survival of his soul, one could say. It was no minor skirmish and the outcome was always in the balance. He and Josias were friends in their youth, but then Jakobus turned his back on him for seventeen years. It was in this period that he struggled with demonic powers that might as well be called the Sheddim, says Jakobus. He also suffered from delusions, but of a more insidious and treacherous kind. Now his troubled soul has Godbethanked returned to his body. Now he has peace. Now he picks up pigshit with a spade and bucket. Now he’s found a place to rest his head, among the destitute of all colours.
Jakobus has a slow, hesitant manner of speaking. A broad, weathered face; a sympathetic, but attentive gaze.
Karl has not yet told him about Iggy’s letters and allegations against Josias.
‘What kind of a guy is Josias actually?’ he asks.
‘The short version,’ says Jakobus, ‘is that Josias is virtually a genius at large-scale projects. Something between a visionary and an activist. But the Lord help anyone who crosses him.’
‘Why would Iggy want to do that?’ Karl asks. ‘He’s not a guy who thrives on confrontation. He’s the gentlest soul I know.’
Jakobus first slowly rolls a cigarette.
‘That I can’t tell,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what set the ball rolling. Possibly a matter of contradictory and irreconcilable personality types. Two people who were never meant to sit by one fire.’
‘Iggy liked the place at first.’
‘It sometimes takes a while for mutual conflict to manifest itself.’
‘Iggy accused Josias of terrible things,’ Karl says. ‘And the chap with the beetroot claw said in so many words that Josias is … an instrument of darkness.’
Jakobus sniffs. Takes a swig of beer. Looks down. Remains silent for a while.
‘Look,’ he says, ‘you must understand, Josias’s life before he came to settle here was anything but exemplary. He always was and still is an anarchist and a shit-stirrer of note. If somebody had then wanted to describe him as an instrument of darkness … well … with a bit of poetic licence it wouldn’t have been altogether inappropriate.’
For the time being Karl doesn’t question him any further. At the moment he doesn’t have the necessary objectivity or distance to distinguish between Iggy’s delusions and reality. He thinks his own grip on reality has recently been dealt too much of a knock. Heard too many crazy things, too quickly in succession.
But at least at present he’s finding Jakobus’s presence consoling, and he doesn’t feel so fucking alone and doomed to deal with Iggy’s condition on his own.
*
For three days he visits Iggy every morning, and every day his condition is unchanged. Sometimes Karl sits with him in his room for a long time. Iggy is like a man unconscious, or comatose, so heavily sedated is he. He’s lying so still, it’s hard to imagine that perhaps at some level he is still being tormented. Karl cannot imagine what his brother is dealing with in that deep, apparently dreamless sleep. On the surface Iggy seems untroubled, but underneath he may still be fighting for the survival of his soul, as the Joachim-guy said.
Karl asks whether it’s necessary for Iggy to be so heavily sedated and Doctor Lonesome says it’s part of the cure, for the time being he must sleep as much and as deeply as possible before they put him onto other medication.
Karl thinks: The idea of the deep sleep must be to get rid of the delusions. When Iggy has all his wits about him again — is awake, in his right mind — his memory will have been wiped clean like a slate. All delusions deleted. As if he never had all those thoughts. For Iggy’s sake Karl hopes that something like that is possible.
Only occasionally Iggy opens his eyes slightly, it looks as if he wants to say something to Karl, but he doesn’t manage even to half-shape the words.
Sometimes tears well up unexpectedly in Karl’s eyes, when he’s sitting like that with his brother. Mostly he just talks at Iggy, whether he can hear him or not. He tells him about the music that he’s been listening to of late, of his meeting with Stevie and the two chaps in Colesberg and afterwards in Beaufort West. He tells Iggy things he realises he never told him, because he assumed that Iggy would have no particular interest in them. He tells him about the live shows he attended, about the first heavy metal groups he and Hendrik went to listen to in London. About Warrior Soul that he went to see for the first time in the Melkweg in Amsterdam, two years later, and how dreadful he found it that Kory Clarke had cut his hair — as if Clarke had thereby been robbed of his strength, like Samson. On the same trip he and Hendrik and Max went to listen to Megadeth, Queensrÿche and Machine Head in Hamburg. Machine Head in the nineties was still a young group, but even then amazingly professional. Karl tells Iggy that the sound was so powerful that he felt its vibration in his chest — it was as if the air was thicker, almost like honey, and the sound so solid that you could just about touch it. Two years later he saw Pantera and Anthrax in San Francisco with friends. But Armored Saint’s show in Dessel, in Belgium, that, he tells Iggy, was the apex — that was the show that of all shows he had most wanted to see, and it was worth every cent and all the blood sweat and tears. He was right in front, as close as possible to the stage — with the kick-ass, blazing red-and-orange logo on a big banner behind the band. They were tight, and loud, and he was swallowed whole by the music, like Jonah by the whale.
He tells Iggy about Machine Head’s new CD — Unto the Locust. It was released before their Eighth Plague tour. He saw them in Madrid, in a small venue, intimate, much like those on the Reeperbahn. Old Rob Flynn on his black Flying V guitar; a soft-spoken guy, but when he sings, his mouth gapes wide open like the jaws of hell. Behind them onstage were two big screens — one of the images was of flames bubbling up. Amazing. A full-on locust on the CD cover, which makes him think of the Biblical insect whose body is such a burden.