Dub Steps (27 page)

‘A multi-level experience means there are three important elements,’ Fats continued. ‘Is anyone writing this down?’ He pushed an eyebrow at Sthembiso, who nodded at Roy Jnr, who was indeed writing it all down. ‘Element number one is straight entertainment. Your audience is looking to get away from it all for a few hours. They want to forget their worldly troubles for a short while. They want to laugh. They want to relax. They want to be entertained. Fail to entertain them and your expo is dead.

‘Element number two is experience. A great expo offers people at least one or two things they have never experienced before. Here we’re talking new and exciting. Things that open their minds to what is possible now, and what might be possible in a new world, a future world.

‘And number three – Roy?’ Fats kindly cut me in.

‘They want to stuff their faces,’ I said.

‘Exactly. Food and drink. People want to eat, and a lot of them, especially the men, want to go home drunk.’

Whatever Sthembiso’s original idea, it was powerfully morphed by the force of Fats’s expo lecture series, which lasted several months and which featured a full presentation of his own work in the field, which was, admittedly, both extensive and impressive. His personal hard drive from agency days still contained before-and-after presentations for Epic Golf, Your Baby, VR Now, The Motor Show, The Boat Show, Sexpo, Cloud Life, Our Community, Golf Life, Mobile Now and many others. Despite my memories of him as a largely useless strategy fuck, I was impressed. Fats had put together good events. They were full of people, and they were very slick. The punters’ faces were invariably excited, aspirational, full of food and, yes, frequently quite drunk.

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.

So, that was my routine during the expo days. I’m sure I am conflating the details as I look back. I know there were days when I
simply ran, when I defied my compulsions. Nonetheless, this is the image: I am smashing things, hoarding electronic devices, pissing against the walls and couches of the middle classes. I am loping ever onward, crowbar in hand, not running as much as hunting.

The defence of my habit was, as it always is with habits, the hardest part. Hiding the crowbar. Stashing the loot beyond the inquisitive eyes of the kids, getting it into my house. All required a degree of subterfuge, even though no one would have cared to question my activities anyway. The dance was for me – an elaborate mechanism through which I protected myself from myself.

I wept at the expo.

All the adults shed tears, save for Fats, who was too involved in the execution to fully see, in the moment, what he and the children had done.

Fats had worked for many months on the rig and single-handedly created the frame for a multimedia experience the likes of which he would have delivered to his pre-life clients. He rigged enough panels to power the entire thing, and then cunningly worked up a labyrinth of painted canvas screens that closed the hall down while opening up the digital horizons. The small, almost suffocating labyrinth of canvas, once digitised, created an inverse universe of vast space and movement.

It was here that our children painted.

We stepped into a new world as we crossed the threshold into the St John’s hall. A world where we were repeatedly reflected at ourselves. The closing down of the physical space and the harnessing of the WAN and the transmission paint represented Fats’s genius at work – it allowed the kids to create the expo on machines, which meant their process wasn’t restricted. They had a planet of images and memories at their fingertips, and they had been chipping away at the thing for years.

I cried at the sight of myself. Of course. Is there any sight as moving?

The montage footage of my form, my image, all scrawny and jagged-toothed and dirty, hand in hand with Babalwa, arriving that first night. There we were, captured at various angles, all gawking eyes and dropped jaws. We were so filthy. Babalwa was also so pretty, beneath the grime, beneath those scrappy shorts and the Castle Lager T-shirt. Waves of nostalgia. I tried to gauge the
reactions of the others but we had been cleverly split apart, each extracted into his or her own personal narrative corridor. This was my story.

Slowly, so slowly it was barely noticeable, the back track began to build. Steady beats – the ethno-India variety that the trance hippies always loved so much, but without the druggy speed. Rhythmic lady warbles pushing on, the beat breaking and reforming. Then the mood changed as the sombre and shocked images of self gave way to the coming together of us. The scenes were cut faster and the mood lifted with the volume, and then, God knows how long after we all entered our respective personal mazes, we gathered again in a central area. The cuts gained pace as we joined. Kids and nappies and bottles and cows and houses and kitchens and tractors and fences and libraries and bakkies and archives and Eeeyus and cups of semen and bread baking and arms linked and smiles and tears and hugs and screams and slaps and meetings and movies and lounges and families … and families. Families. Us together. Tebza and Lillian and death and life and hope and ambition. Over and above it all, hovering like a binding cloud. Ambition.

‘We decided …’ The music faded. Sthembiso stepped forward from the little cluster of desperately formal children facing us to speak, his pubescent voice omnipresent and fully amplified, an almost invisible fishing-line mike hooked over his ear. ‘… that this expo should be different to some of the others you might have experienced.’ He glanced through us, the adults, at Fats, who widened his eyes in encouragement while fiddling with the knobs on the master remote. ‘So we decided that you – that we – should be on display. That we would use this expo to show us to us.’ He paused, confident, yet clearly seeking somewhere inside. ‘Because we are special people. And we have done special things. A lot of special things. But sometimes we can’t see those things. Because we are looking so hard to the sky. To the future. So that is why we named it “Solo: Our Future”.’

He paused. The children started clapping and whistling, on cue, Fats nudging and twirling his producer hands as subtly as he
could behind our backs. We started clapping too, and I cried again, which set Babalwa off. Sthembiso carried on, this time reading a pre-prepared speech from his tablet.

He announced the formalisation of the St John’s expo area as a ‘permanent memorial slash community space’, something ‘long-term and tangible’ and ‘able to tell our story in the future’.

‘Now, if you will follow your attendants, you will be taken to the food hall, where you will be given a ret … ret …’ – his eyes locked back onto Fats – ‘trospective journey into the edible past.’ Sthembiso bowed his head and shoulders ever so slightly. My left index finger was gripped by the soft pink flesh of Katlego, all of five years old, my right hand taken by English. Together they pulled me around the corner to a long table of snacks, meticulously laid out and prepared, each spiked with a toothpick, and a range of drinks – including non-alcoholic – racked up behind them.

We had become our own movie. We had documented ourselves.

I had been documented.

I was also completely integrated. Instead of being off to the left, or off to the right, or just there in the background, I was in the middle, in all my generally grubby glory, tooth gap glaring. I hadn’t ever, as far as I could remember, been at the centre of anything.

Extra laps of the hall once the drinks were done. Long minutes at the screens, reaching out, fingers against the rough transmission paint. Pause. Rewind. Play. Kids in my arms. Smiles and frowns and fingers and gestures in my direction – sometimes through me but just as often with me, at me, binding me.