Dub Steps (14 page)

‘Am I sweating?’ he asked suddenly, dropping the monologue.

‘Sho. Fair bit.’

‘Shit, where’s that bottle? In the car? Fuck fuck fuck. I’m gonna lose them if I don’t piss now.’ His face crumpled.

‘Here, you told me to bring it.’ I pulled the Energade bottle from my pants pocket, where it had been sitting uncomfortably for the last few hours.

‘Oh sweet baby Jesus, thank you for that.’ Tebza whipped out his dick and pissed into the bottle. ‘You’ve seen this before so I’m not going to get all coy on you. The only way to save the bots. Disgusting, I know, but I can’t let go.’ He crouched carefully over the bottle. The level rose rapidly.

‘What happens if you overflow?’ I panicked on his behalf.

‘Doubt it, I don’t drink anything before for that reason. Soon as you start sweating, that’s the sign the bots are ready to jump ship. You got five minutes and thirty seconds before you actually start sweating them out.’

‘And then what, you drain the piss to get them back?’

Tebza shook off, zipped up and let his face take shape again. ‘Askies. No.’ He winked at me. ‘They’re molecular, nè? That’s one of the things I was looking for at the CSIR nanotech lab. A fucken nano sieve. I’m getting very tired of drinking my own piss.’ The wink had died away. He was serious.

‘Serious? You been drinking your own piss all this time? And the bots are still active – they don’t fade?’ I was incredulous.

‘Ja. There’s only a one to two per cent loss factor.’

‘Shit. And it’s that good?’

‘Actually no, it’s pathetic,’ he said shyly. ‘It’s just a blank canvas. No other players. No software, no functionality. With the nanobots I’ve got all you can do is bounce around between four templates. Desert, nightclub, bedroom and forest.’ Tebza rubbed the bottle between his hands as if trying to warm himself, or start a fire.

‘So why, then?’

‘Because … you need to understand, Roy. Because hack could explain this.’ He waved a theatrical hand at our empty city.

Contrary to his declared where-were-you-when-it-happened story, Tebza had been on hack in the Slovo Mansions flat. During the last few minutes of his trip – a clubby thing, he said – he was suddenly alone; the interface had emptied out. When he came around at three in the morning, the flat was deserted. It was doubly confusing because they had loaded up on MDMA, along with the hack.

Hack, while cognitively revolutionary and of a higher order to anything that had gone before, eventually took the path of all narcotics. It became expected. Slowly you recognised the parameters of the software and the experience, and the limitations – initially so far out on the horizon as to be irrelevant – became tangible. ‘Obviously people want to take it further,’ Tebza said. He was sheepish again, the scar on his cheek crinkling in an endearing embarrassment. ‘You know – humans must. We must take it on.’ According to my stockbroker friend, who was now considerably more than that in my eyes, the street had been making steady inroads into the initially glass-office hack scene. Traders were joined by dealers. Financial administrators by DJs. Artists – replete with piercings and tattoos and strangely coloured hair – started popping up outside the Sandton stock exchange, just kinda waiting. Tebza shook his head. ‘People were really starting to go off. Whoonga. Nyaope. Tuk. Buttons.
^*
The mixes created a video game that was completely real and mad violent. Bad stories. Terrible shit going down in some places. People were getting damaged. Out of this
world, Roy. Out of this world.’

‘OK, so, why are you now drinking your own piss to go play on a blank VR canvas?’

‘It might be blank but it’s real, mfana. Completely real. As real as the ground you’re walking on right now.’

‘I get that. A very real experience.’

‘Completely real. One hundred per cent real. As real as what you’re thinking and feeling and experiencing now. As real as this step on the ground.’ He hopped slightly for emphasis, then again. ‘Come, Roy, I’m leading you to the obvious.’ Tebza moved ahead at a trot, then turned and faced me dramatically, the Energade bottle swinging from his fingers. ‘So, when I came around and saw that there was no one left in the flat, in the city, my first thought wasn’t that everyone else had disappeared—’

‘But that you had.’ The penny clanged on its way down.

‘Exactly.’ He fell back in next to me. ‘My first thought is the same one I keep on having now – that I hadn’t come out. That something had happened. That I was stuck.’

‘You still think that’s possible?’

‘Possible, yes. Likely, not so much. The group of us would have had more common experiences. Our frames of reference would have been more in alignment. I think, anyway. That’s what I’ve been thinking.’

We crossed over Simmonds Street. The sun blazed over the city. Late February. Lunchtime. Light wisps of wind ruffled our hair. Bright blue skies to our right, to the north. Purple thunderclouds rising up from the south.

We walked in silence, our footfalls echoing in the streets. Tebza swung the bottle carefully yet casually from his right hand.

I stopped, knelt and undid the shoelaces on my Nikes, then retied them, slowly. I felt the texture of the laces carefully with my fingertips, the combination of a million tiny threads. This lace could not be VR. It was too nuanced. Too subtle. The rub of it between my fingers too complex. I placed my open palm on the pavement and ran it across the gravel and the city dirt. Again, too
textured. Too literal on my fingertips.

‘So, what?’ I remained kneeling, my laces now very well tied, Tebza hovering above me. ‘You’re saying that you and I – theoretically – could be flat out on our backs somewhere, not moving, and this’ – I rubbed my palm over the pavement again – ‘could all be interface?’

‘It’s possible. But I can’t find evidence, anything to support it. The glitch. The thread to pull on. If we were navigating via software there would have to be an outer edge. To the interface. You know this from Mlungu’s, where the edge is soooo obvious.’

‘More than. You have to pretend it’s not there.’

‘Exactly. Even with hack – I was told, but I never experienced it myself – there are limits, edges. Finely threaded and completely invisible, but if you push the right corner the interface will break and you end up back at the entry point. Problem with hack is that it’s seamless. I’ve been pushing at a lot of corners and have never found one. I still don’t know what they look like.’ Tebza flopped down next to me. We sat side by side on the corner of Simmonds and Anderson, facing a McDonald’s.

‘How does one push at a corner – practically speaking?’

‘Run hard at it. Drive fast at forty-five degrees until you smash into the koppie. That kinda thing.’

‘And nothing. No thread?’

‘Not here. And nothing on hack either. Which is why I keep on with the piss. I had one pill left.’ Tebza shook the Energade bottle sarcastically. ‘Which is now at about eighty-nine per cent strength, in this bottle.’

‘How does strength impact it? Does dilution create threads? Interface breakdown?’

‘It just shortens the duration. Designed that way. At the flat the pills would knock us out completely for two hours, and then we would come down through a set of screens designed to make re-entry easy. In total the whole thing would be about two and a half. Now, with just this pill and no network, there are no re-entry screens and it’s a rough jump back. Time is down to somewhere just over eighty minutes.’

‘So in there and out here you’re just looking at – pushing at – corners?’ I felt a little high all of a sudden. Tebza’s profile was cut out against the purple sky building steadily behind him. The thunderous backdrop made his skin look blacker, sharper.

‘Sho. Kinda. At some stage the system has to break down, and I want to know what the breakdown looks like. How to recognise it. Otherwise I don’t know what I’m looking for.’ He paused. ‘But it could also just be because I’m homesick for it. The last time I was there – genuinely there – I was having the craziest sex with Joy. It was extraterrestrial. Like we were aliens. Non-human. Past human. Maybe I want to relive that. I don’t know.’

‘And the others? You haven’t told anyone?’ I thought of Fats, hands behind his back, staring out of the third-floor window.

‘Nah. I mean, I wouldn’t have told you if you hadn’t bust me.’ He looked sheepish again. ‘I mean, it’s just too much, you know? Too far-fetched. Turns me into some kind of cyborg in everyone’s eyes, for no real reason.’

‘I get you. I’d like to try it though, for my own sanity.’ The words were out of my mouth before I had thought about creating them.

We talked and talked and talked on that pavement. It was the first emotive, heartfelt conversation I had had with anyone for years – certainly since the people disappeared, but also since well before that, stretching all the way back to that uncertain point in time when I withdrew from people, and from my life. The most obvious thing about our conversation – and I realised this fully at the time, and relished it – was the clarity. The smell of the impending rain. The burn of the afternoon sun on my skin, searing it. The silence. The way the absence of sound actually enveloped our voices. Each word had weight, fell down on top of the last and clattered.

Tebza’s emotional tap was wide open thanks to the comedown. He explained in passionate detail the intensity of the experience, his hand forming explanatory circles, his fingers drawing words and ideas in the pavement dirt. The cracking open of his cognitive horizon, his falling in love with the girl and the alien sex and,
finally, his tipping over the edge of experience into compulsion and, yes, ultimately, addiction.

I followed Tebza intently, my tongue sliding in and out of the guillotine, slicing gently, evoking the smallest dribbles of blood. Slowly I began adding, telling, agreeing, and revealing those parts of myself that, well, that I had spent many years pushing down.

The clouds moved over us. Suddenly we were covered in rolling purple.

‘That is the point, isn’t it?’ Tebza said, rising to his feet. I remained sitting, knees tucked into elbows. ‘The desperation. We need people. Even when we hate them. Especially when we hate them.’

I stood.

We decided to walk it. To use our feet all the way back, through the wet.

Despite the intensity of the day, despite the revelations and the change of view and the confessions we had engendered, despite it all – I could not mention rape.

I did not mention rape.

I would not mention rape.

During our time in PE I had grown to love, for my own reasons, Babalwa’s emotional distance from me. Even when we were at our closest, even on those rare occasions when we rose together to the heights of actual lovemaking, we were far apart. The distance was comfortable. It fit easily with my own abstracted state. And so I rendered her form in easy, hard lines. I constructed Babalwa as a simple PE girl. I never really considered other possibilities. Now I had to broach the notion that she may not have been that simple. That her dry, withdrawn PE state may have been tailored around my presence rather than being an inherent part of her personality. That she had throttled so far back in self-defence in reaction to an impossible situation in which she could not tolerate me, nor life without me.

After we arrived in Jozi, she began to express herself in ways I hadn’t seen before. And since she had taken up sexually with Fats, what I had known as her natural silence had morphed into a quiet, assertive confidence. Now she was allowing herself to think, and then to communicate her thinking. The white shorts and Castle Lager T-shirt had slowly disappeared, replaced by fitted jeans, vests and the occasional skirt. In group conversations she sat back and forward in equal measures.

I suspected that Fats was particularly successful at making love to her. That, instead of twisting and rubbing mechanically (as I now was forced to admit I may have been doing), he enticed her out into the world of active expression. Maybe that inner process was translating into her external life.

I felt shamed.

I looked back with half-shut eyes at our sexual encounters. I saw myself humping and jabbing, fucking and grinding. I wished now that I could erase it. Take it back. Reconstruct.

I also imagined her in his arms, exhausted and raw emotionally and otherwise, confessing, letting go of that terrible first memory of me on the heavy black grill. I pictured the creeping tears, his strong black thumb pushing the first one back, then massaging its companions from their hiding places.

I was shamed.

But was it rape?

Did I overpower her and force her?

Did I hold those wrists in a lockdown, pin her so she couldn’t move, break her open and stab and stab and stab?

We stomped home through the monsoon. Initially talking, but when the thud of the drops drowned our voices out, just stomping, walking, stomping. We were wet – soaked through – but refreshed, in a childlike, druggy way. Up to the top of Rissik Street, round Constitution Hill, up past the park, past Joburg General and east into Houghton. By the time we got to the St Patrick gate, clouds had wiped the blue away completely and it was pitch-dark. And the gate was locked.

The spikes on top of the wrought-iron fencing were not to be fucked with. Fats had made sure the fence was impossible to climb without a genuine risk of impalement.

The idea of walking back in the rain seemed suddenly very stupid. The drops drove into us like industrial knitting needles. We ducked into a decaying wooden guard hut that stood a few hundred metres back down the street. The thudding of the monsoon prevented all but the most basic communication.

‘That fucker Fats.’

‘Who locked the gate?’

‘They knew we must be coming.’

‘These fucking gates.’

‘Stupid, stupid shit.’

The hut was rank with decay and wet wood. The floor planks had curled in protest and most had ejected the nails trying to hold them down. An ancient radio tape deck sat helpless on one rising piece of wood, surfing in perpetuity. A small pile of
Houghton Times
and
Daily Sun
newspapers, held down with a brick, rotted neatly underneath a single dirty-white pool chair.

‘Jesus, imagine spending your work night in one of these!’ Tebza bellowed, hunched up on the sliver of a bench running along the left inside wall.

I nodded. Imagine.

We sat soaking in the hut for ten or fifteen minutes. The rain was going nowhere. The sun was gone, and we had no way of getting back inside the laager. Tebza hugged his knees, shivering, the balls of his feet jackhammering against the pine floor.

Suddenly there was a thud against the rotten wall of the hut and an angry wet snout, flanked by two shortish, chipped brown tusks, burst into the space between Tebza’s legs. I jumped vertically. Tebza tried to climb the side wall with his elbows. ‘Jezuz fuck! What the fuck!’ The snout pulled out, ripping some of the rotten wood along with it, then snuffled back into the vacant space. Tebza tried to kick it, missing completely.

‘Tebz Tebz Tebz. No no no,’ I hissed, grabbing him by the arm and trying to smother the wildly flailing limbs. ‘Kicking pigs in the face. Not a good idea. Not good. Sensitive. They are very sensitive there.’ His eyes were wide as dinner plates. I put my finger to my lips and shushed him. Outside we could hear wet snorting and foraging. There were a few more bumps against the hut.

‘How many?’ Tebza mouthed at me.

It sounded like there were at least three. My immediate worry was that the other two had tusks as big as the first, who, going by snout size, was a certifiably big bastard.

Generally we lived in a state of amicable cohabitation with the pigs, who watched us as much as we watched them. In daylight and with the free run of the land in front of them they didn’t pose much of a threat, but now, at night, all sodden snouts and long tusks, it was a different story. It felt like we were being hunted.

The snout came back a few more times, but in a less aggressive manner. We decided in fearful whispers that they were probably just curious.

About an hour in, as the torrent eased, we walked. The pigs followed, snuffling and grunting in the shadows around us. We looked for holes in the fence, or a small road or alley that would get us back inside the perimeter. Although lighter, the rain pounded
us at every step. With each blow our enmity towards Fats grew. ‘Change in gate policy!’ Tebza screamed into the sodden night. ‘Complete change!’ A pig snorted in agreement, just out of sight.

We eventually found a gap on the Louis Botha side of St John’s, and after six or seven tragic wrong turns we made it back. The pigs dropped off once we were through the perimeter fence, but not before two of them, both males, came into full view and watched us as we poked around. Tebza was more disturbed by the pigs than I was. In the full wetness of the night it seemed obvious they meant us no harm. They were observing, and looked, to me anyway, a little hurt at our fear of them. One male lowered his head slightly as we considered each other, in deference, perhaps. Or maybe just to let me know … what? I couldn’t quite get a handle on the communication. After some time he kicked the turf twice and he and his buddies turned and left.

Tebza stormed into the lounge screaming murder about gate policies and the threat of pigs and consideration for others. I quietly deposited the Energade bottle in my bedroom cupboard and took a shower.

When I came downstairs the pot was still simmering, Tebza confronting Fats, who sat unmoved, arms folded, mouth resisting the invading creases of a smirk. The others, looking bored but nervous, tried to wind the subject down with apologies and promises.

The air was thick. Beatrice, hopefully unaware of the rape subtext shimmering beneath, cleared her throat as if to speak, but no words came. Babalwa was seated on the couch next to Fats and picked at her toenails nervously. Fats folded and unfolded his arms and stared into the middle distance as Tebza raged on.

I was all subtext. I watched Babalwa pick her toes and wondered again what her agenda was. Whether she had an angle on the rape thing, and, perhaps more importantly, whether she was in concert with Fats or not. My earlier reflections had led me to conclude it was against the odds that she had an agenda. More likely the memory had slipped out while she was in his arms and he, typical alpha, could not help but chase me down.

But if that was the case, it meant Babalwa truly believed I had raped her.

I would have preferred an insidious agenda.

I would have preferred a plot.

But she just picked at her nails. Pick. Pick. Pick. Fats staring ahead. The rain bombarding the roof. Beatrice clearing her throat, expectant.

The end of the world.

Beatrice clearing her throat one last time, standing, leaving.

Fats and Babalwa sharing a glance.

Me looking down, allowing myself to dream of another reality.