I tell her that I think I do. Or sometimes I think I do. Then I close my eyes and see myself back at the beach in Blouberg again. Falling back on the sectional couch, I watch as the ocean laps the quartz in the sand, the water rushing into Cissie’s living room from every angle. From his side of the table, Ruan leans over his computer and his body divides into three bloodless sections. The light begins to intensify inside the living room, the Industrial flushing its final hum through my blood vessels, and I watch Cissie for a long time as she nods. Then I get up to get more champagne for the three of us, and when I return, Cissie says we should all get one big house. Sitting on the sectional couch, and with her head glowing like a child’s crude drawing of the sun, with each light ray pushing out of her head in a thick, flat vector, she says to me, let’s grow to be more than two million square kilometers in size. I nod and close my eyes against the glare, and for a long time, as I hear Cissie’s voice expanding inside my head, the feeling I get, sitting here on her living-room floor, isn’t about my uncle or Du Noon, it isn’t about my sickness or my job. Instead, it’s about the three of us sitting together in her flat in Newlands, the three of us knitting our fingers together, me, Ruan and Cecelia, closing our eyes and becoming one big house.
THIRD PART
Now here I am, sitting with luthando, my dead brother, and we’re smoking cigarettes and drinking gin out of a tin can. The field in front of us keeps bursting into flames, but this is only happening inside my head, said our pastor, Mr. Pukwana, when my mother took me to him after service. When I blink, the fire disappears, and then Luthando says to me, Nathi, all you do is read books. I put the smoke out on the grass and say, my girlfriend said she hates violence. My brother ignores me. Her parents are rich, he says, why does she hate them so much? They aren’t rich, I tell him. They just work for the homeland government. I tell Luthando I would hate them, too, if they were mine, and this makes him scoff. There’s something wrong with you, Nathi, he says. I heard your mother say they’re taking you to a doctor. I don’t say anything back. The time right now is close to midnight, and we’re at a park just a block from my house. Luthando takes out his okapi and, placing it flat against my neck, he says, let me kill you first. Then the world is black again, and my mind thrums like it does whenever I’m at my desk at school; whenever my eyes glide over the floor and I imagine meteoroids crashing through Mr. Peter’s gabled roof. I breathe out smoke and cough until my eyes water. Then Luthando laughs and takes my notebook from me. I watch him running down the street. He shouts, why do you always make me so violent in your stories? Then he jumps into a cone of orange streetlight and, tapping his heels together like an actor from a musical, he says, I never killed anyone.
For a long time, I never thought about him, my dead brother. Luthando had passed away from us, had become another limb my family had to cut off and bury. I already knew how people could die. My grandmother’s death had taught me that while I was still a junior in high school, and there’d also been the case of Bra Ishaak, just a few years before. We were only children when we first watched him fall on his face on a dry bed of paving gravel, his heels knocking together while he foamed a wild ribbon of saliva at the mouth. That was outside the Wendy flat at my grandmother’s house, eQokolweni. He was an epileptic and the only Muslim in our family, an uncle I knew mostly from his ample and wet kisses, before my aunt — now also a skinless outline melting into the soil — found him hanging from the rafters of the chicken shed.
We wake up early and finish the rest of the champagne. Ruan prepares a tube of Industrial for us to use and we spend the next few hours weaving in and out of consciousness. It’s a peaceful state: my thoughts meander over a dullness settled in my body. I can no longer tell what part of the day it is, or how long we’ve been sitting here at West Ridge Heights, waiting to hear from our client. Leaning back on the couch, I realize that my uncle has become a distant echo. I don’t know where my cellphone is.
How many times do you think you’ve been inside a supermarket? Cissie says. I want you to answer me honestly. Think of this as your final Last Life question.
I don’t know, I say. I used to have a job in one.
I remember this one afternoon when I still worked a till at the Spar in Rondebosch East. I’d taken a job there the previous summer, ringing up groceries and saving money for my first tubes of Industrial, and to supplement the rent for my new place in Obs. I only had three days a week, and nothing much had been happening that afternoon, a Thursday, except maybe for my walking away early from my shift.
We were in Ruan’s living room, and Cissie was telling me that maybe he was right. This was the same Ruan who, with two cigarettes in his mouth, would tell you that every day the tobacco industry recruits three thousand new smokers to compensate for the ones it kills; the same Ruan who, without taking his eyes off his computer screen, would tell you that in some Asian country, seven hundred kids fell into a seizure after watching an animation program with bad lighting techniques.
He was now right.
Maybe my job is one of the most dangerous ones around, Cissie said, before sinking the bottleneck of beer between her lips.
The two of us were watching an old werewolf movie on mute. Cissie said she could stomach the gore, but it was really the screaming that got to her. Personally, I thought the silence was because she was trying to get closer to Zanele, her new deaf pupil at the daycare. Her job that she all of a sudden hated so much.
From somewhere upstairs, Ruan laughed. He was over downloading, he said, and had now taken to uploading parts of his soul to cyberspace.
In the lounge, Cissie took another sip.
Something else about her back then was that she always wore long-sleeved sweaters. Cissie had these bad rashes, and her arms gave her away as a human zebra with all that scar tissue. When she lifted her bottle, one of these scars looked at me, and she said, today, one of my kids swallowed a cup of detergent. Can you believe that? It had to be Zanele, of course. Joy and I had to call an ambulance out to Mowbray for her.
Then Cissie told me that Zanele’s name meant that her parents had had enough girls.
Can you imagine that? she said.
I could, but the two of us didn’t say much afterwards. We sat side by side for the rest of the afternoon, watching werewolves leap across courtyards in a foreign city. Later, when Ruan came downstairs, he was dressed in his boxers, a shirt and his ugly, badly made tie. He had his computer under one arm, its cords leading all the way to the room upstairs; and standing at the foot of the staircase, he told us, salvation.
Cissie drank her beer and Ruan asked me to imagine my entire being reduced to the size of an electron, living free in the vastness of cyberspace.
I decided to let my friends in on a bit more detail about myself. I told them that, apart from being numbed daily from the waist down by spending eight hours packing people’s groceries, I also committed genocidal murder. I told them it didn’t matter what they looked like or who they were, whether they greeted or not. I killed them without accounting for difference.
Cissie remained silent. Ruan typed on his computer and swiveled the screen so I could read it. It said, make the choice to transmute: discard all desire for a better prison.