The Reactive (19 page)

I drew a mask for him, once. He'd come over to buy an
entjie
for the doorman at Ta Ace's, where he'd started cleaning tables and floors. We went behind the container, and when I showed him the face I'd drawn on a piece of paper, he said I had the key. It was a sketch of Ambroise Paré—as I remembered him, at least—and Siseko laughed and called me the white man from Sis' Thoko's
spaza.
He said I had the key that would save all of us, and I guess I must've laughed too, since I didn't want to think any more than I had to about it. To me, Monsieur Paré had only been a parent, and Ethelia his daughter: a father.

We smoked in silence after that, and I remember feeling a sense of peace rushing into me as I watched him walking away with the mask. I knew I wouldn't be the only one to do him a favor that day, to make sure he sometimes landed on his feet. The community had taken him in, like it had done with me, and there was no need to be fearful of everything we didn't know.

Sometimes I still hear from Sis' Thobeka. I finally gave her that CD4-count sheet, believe it or not. They say the virus is arrested in my blood.

I took a taxi to town and wrote an email to Le Roi about it. It was a Tuesday. I walked up Long Street and made my way to the basement level of the African Women's Craft Market, just a block down from the Palm Tree Mosque, where I paid a five rand to the Rasta who manned the café counter.

Le Roi wrote back to me fast, telling me how he'd moved to the south of France. I was in luck, he said, since he'd taken my condition as a focus, restricting his research to non-progressors and a handful of immunes. It was a small lab in a middling college, however, and the only way he stayed afloat was by no longer having his South African wife to worry over. I didn't ask him about that, and he said nothing about the job she'd got me. In the end, we exchanged emails for about half an hour, and concluded that I wasn't a modern miracle. I was still reactive, just slow to develop the syndrome. I have a large number of antibodies, for reasons the two of us couldn't fathom.

It was the last time I ever spoke to André, and I suppose he was right in his diagnosis.

Still, before I left, I gave another five-rand coin to the Rasta and sat down to send one last message to Le Roi. I left the body of this email empty—the two of us had said everything there was to say—and linked him to a news article about the government's new Operational Plan. Dated the first of September, the government was reported as having finally relented, ending a five-year struggle: under increased pressure from a civil disobedience suit, the South African cabinet had ruled to provide free ARVs to the country's citizens. Most of us were still in disbelief. Sis' Thobeka, whom I'd called from a pay phone close to work, had held back tears, and Bhut' Vuyo had slapped a copy of the
Voice
against his thigh. The article said that the government planned to provide treatment for a hundred thousand of us by March the following year. Who knew? I thought. It was enough to believe them for now.

I left the café and took a taxi west from the station deck. Passing the Atlantic Seaboard, I thought about how many times I'd taken this same route, my backpack filled with pills that were meant to preserve my life and the lives of those who could afford it. How many of us were affected inside this taxi? Inside the metropolis? I looked at the assortment of heads in front of me and wondered who I would've sold to. Then I thought of my old clients. I thought of Ronny and Leonardo. I thought of Millicent, and I thought of Ta Lloyd and his wife.

Soon, the taxi approached Du Noon.

I felt relieved to be close to home, and later, as I settled down to sleep, I thought about our country's infection rate. I wondered if we'd been selected in particular for this trial. Perhaps HIV was a purge, I imagined, a brutal transition on the other side of which might lie a newer, stronger human species, one resistant to a thousand more ailments and vital enough to survive all the trials that were still germinating in the future. It was just an idea, but I thought that when the time came, those who knew might be looked upon to lead.

The following week, there was an article written about us slow progressors in the
City Press.
Sis' Thobeka, who called, encouraged me to go in for tests, and one of these days, I told her, I might surprise myself and do just that.

Just pull me away from Esona first. I know I haven't mentioned a single thing about her, but this is how all of that goes. The two of us meet on a clear, hot Saturday towards the end of my first November in Du Noon, before Luvuyo and I head up to eMthatha. I've just borrowed my uncle's lorry and driven it out to a park jam in Khayelitsha: a new hip-hop festival that goes on for half a day on a stage outside Mandela Park, on the corner of Oscar Mpetha and Govan Mbeki Roads. That morning, I turn a corner and spot the white Pick n Pay shopping bags which clutch the barbed wire like the flags of a different country, twisting their bodies to the tune of rap music and neglect. Closer, I start to feel the bass coming off the PA system, the thump murmuring against my windows. I pull in, shift down a gear and park close to the gathering. Then I walk to a nearby
spaza
for a warm pack of Amstels. I open a can and stash the rest in the van.

I meet Esona when I close the door of the van behind me and take out a Stuyve to suck in with the beer. She's on her own, the way Esona will always be on her own, and she has a canvas backpack sagging on her bright brown shoulders. When our eyes meet across the hoods of two busted-up Fords, each of us refuses to step down, to be the one who moves away, and so we stay like that for a while, feeling as close as forehead to forehead. Two
laaities
pick at discarded chicken bones on the tar between us, and Esona and I stare at each other over their backs for a while.

Eventually, she walks up to me and asks for a
skyf.
I exhale and stamp out the one I've got. Then the two of us light up a new Stuyve each.

I've decided to let my hair grow, and that's the first thing she picks on. She points at her own head. You're one of those guys, aren't you, she says.

Esona's smile is slight, showing only half of its bow behind the smoke.

You grow your hair out like a Rasta, she says, but stand first in line for meat at the bash. Okay, she tells me, I see.

Then she turns around and shows me the other half of her smile.

She says, so what's your deal, my brother?

I'm not sure how to respond. Esona takes off her backpack and asks me for the time, but when I look down at my wrist, I realize I've left my wristwatch in Obs. This reminds me of what Cecelia used to say to me about my listening.

I don't know, I tell Esona.

And I guess this is how she enters my life.

What's your deal, my brother?

She'll ask me that often.

These days, I don't think about Last Life as much as I used to, but I think about the things I'll remember when it's time for me to go.

I think of Esona's flesh a lot.

I think of the sticky underside of her breasts when I lift them to my face in the middle of summer, and I think of the smell of burning wood, and of Esona's last name, Grootboom, and how her grandmother took it to pass them off as coloreds in '78.

I think of our hair, too, the way the smell of coal still lingers on our necks and up our heads for a day after sitting on the dirty benches of a
shisa nyama.
I think of all the sticky vinyl under the J&B ashtrays we fill up at the local taverns.

I want you to fuck me like a new man, she tells me.

She's standing behind me in the kitchen, looking for a lighter, and I'm on my feet, trying to tune a new station into their old set.

Esona lives in a two-room with her aunt in Slovo. Her mother's a nurse, stationed across the country and I guess growing old there. For most of her life, that's how it's been between them. First there were nightshifts at Grey Hospital in King William's Town, and then there was the move to Fort Beaufort, and then another to Grahamstown, and now she's moored in Stutterheim. Sometimes, when Esona speaks, I try to imagine her mother. I see a woman with Esona's face, her sleeves rolled up, creasing her brow in a ward full of crying children. Or maybe that's Sis' Thobeka. In any case, neither of them is around enough to see what we do on the floors here, so I guess it's okay that my shirt and her panties already lie inside the fruit bowl on the coffee table.

I've been back a week since my initiation in eMthatha.

I went over to Luthando's grave when my family was finally done with me. It was a clear day and I didn't say much to him, down there. We never had to use words to discover an understanding between us.

I guess a lot has happened since then. I waved on my way out, and I said, later, Luthando, and that was about it.

Later, Luthando.

Now I lie stretched out on Esona's cold kitchen floor.

I disclosed my status to her just a day after we'd met and we've worshiped at the altar of her caution ever since. Esona gets me to bring our condoms back from Sis' Thoko's shop.

I watch her now as she looks at the inflated flesh around the tip of my penis, still tender from my journey back home. She handles me with caution between her long, thin fingers, and her nails tickle my underside like the tip of an ivy leaf. Then she pushes her teeth into me and puts a hand on my chest when I begin to stir. For a long time, I just lie there, on the brink of screaming, and then I feel surprise when even this pain dissipates. On her knees on the kitchen floor, Esona releases me, grips my scrotum, and squeezes it before I melt and empty myself on her chest. Later, I fall asleep to the feel of her salt water drying on my face, and sleeping beside me, she breathes her air out as hot as a furnace, and I close my eyes; but this time, unlike so many others in my life, I don't clench them.

Bhut' Vuyo never explicitly reminds me of my promise, but I remember and live through it each day. My promise, what I told them then, is the same thing I'll tell you now. My name, which my parents got from a girl, is Lindanathi. It means wait with us, and that's what I plan on doing. So in the end, I guess this is to you, Luthando. This is your older brother, Lindanathi, and I'm ready to react for us.

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