by Ilze Hugo
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To the ghosts of Cape Town’s past, present, and future.
MONDAY
- 1 - THE DAILY TRUTH
WE REMEMBER
By Lawyer Tshabalala
It started with a tremor, small and unassuming, as these things generally do, my broe. Just a few words on page seven (by yours truly) about three tween girls stuck in a giggle loop.
The school called in a bunch of experts, who gave the thing a fancy label. And this put the parents’ worries to rest. Because who doesn’t like a good label to help them sleep at night?
Mass psychogenic illness. Also known as mass hysteria. Just a couple of tweens with their hormones running riot. Nothing to worry about.
It had happened once before. In the sixties, in Tanzania. Remember the Tanganyika laughter epidemic? And that story turned out fine. No need to panic, run tests, stick needles into anyone.
The experts took the Tanganyika epidemic as a blueprint and ordered the girls to be isolated from their peers. So, the school sent the girls home to ride out this wave of runaway emotion somewhere else. Case closed, problem solved, job well done.
Only thing was, it didn’t work. The girls didn’t stop laughing.
Four days passed and the girls were burning fevers now. Struggling to breathe, eat, sleep. One by one they were rushed to the emergency room. Test after test was run while they lay shackled to their beds to stop them from falling off. Fed through tubes, attached to breathing apparatuses, and monitored around the clock.
Seventeen days. One day longer than the worst of the cases reported in the Tanzanian epidemic. And the girls were still laughing. Eyes tearing, voices broken, mouths salivating like mutts, faces contorted in the most horrific grins, knees jerking, arms flailing, bodies forever convulsing like crash test dummies.
Meanwhile, the “joke” was catching. The girls’ families started laughing first, then their friends, their coworkers. The nurse with the heart tattoo on her ankle who came in quick to change the IV drip. The car guard holding out his hand for tips.
At first the guys upstairs clung to the mass hysteria diagnosis and tried to stem the tide by closing all channels of information. Lawyers were hired to file DMCAs to stop people from streaming all those YouTube clips or posting images in their feeds on social media. This was the Information Age, after all, and the tide couldn’t be turned. So, the government pulled rank, imitated their chums in China, and orchestrated a total web blackout. Our city became data dark. But like Adam and Eve, we couldn’t go back after tasting from the tree. Social media addicts were up in arms, their trigger fingers were itching and twitching, and a new kind of violence, dubbed “withdrawal rage,” swept the masses. Addicts would snap and bring out their fists for as much as a skew look in a queue, and violence stats soared.
And along the way, more and more people were cracking up. It’s psychological, it has to be, the experts proclaimed: an extreme response to Third World stressors.
But the girls, the ones the Laughter had chosen first, were now showing other symptoms, too. Their bones disintegrating, their organs turning into soup. And this thing, this mass collective joke, was blowing up in everyone’s faces, with laughter resonating on every street corner, and death following suit.
Today, exactly seven years on, we remember the day that changed our sick city forever. Dorothy, Jennilee, and Andiswa: may you rest in peace. Along with every single soul who followed after. And God, Allah, Vishnu, the government, our ancestors (or whoever we choose to believe in) help us. May we one day find a cure for this curse.
- 2 - SANS
Sans was a weasel. A wheeler. A dealer. A scavenging DIY schemer. A once sweet arrow-on-the-narrow turned small-fry ponyjacker, and now also a proper, serious, eye-on-the-prize pony dealer. As a pony man—the best, mind you, in this Sick City—he made a living dealing in real, 100 percent human hair, which a network of street kids and a convent of swindling sisters procured for him by all manner of means. It was the Down Days, sure, and Sick City was worse off than most, but chicks still dug their weaves, and a full head of hair cost a pretty penny.
It had been seven years since the Laughter turned the tip of Africa topsy-turvy. And Sans was doing fine. That was, until he met his unicorn.
He was wasting away his morning in Greenmarket Square playing cards with a bunch of dead collectors. On most days this patch of cobbled earth was a petri dish of industry, but today the air was dissonantly quiet and the traders who called these stones home looked bored and forlorn as they leaned against tables or sat around on plastic crates. It was one of those faux-sham-phony-bogus charlatan days that life sometimes coughed up: when every soul on the planet seemed down and out—like today wasn’t a wise day to get out of bed and face the world—and the streets felt like a film set after most of the cast and crew had gone home.
But this particular set was as old as the city itself. Before the Down Days, the square was a heaving mass of bodies and colorful stalls, with migrants pressing curios from all across Africa on fat-walleted tourists with fanny packs bulging over Gore-Tex shorts. Long before that, barefooted slaves hawked fruit and veg on these same smooth stones.
The city’s tourists had long since gone the way of the quagga, and the slaves, well, their bones salted the earth underneath these same streets. But the vendors remained, now hawking or bartering everything from petrol, Jik, and paraffin to chicken feet. One stall was doing a roaring trade in cooler boxes packed with survivors’ blood. Their sales pitch went that the blood was rife with antibodies that could cure the Laughter. Another vendor was charging his customers’ cell phones using some kind of contraption that he powered by pedaling like a madman on an exercise bike. If you had enough cash, most traders also delivered. That way, those rich saps who hadn’t flown the coop before the borders closed could wait out the Down Days without coming into contact with another breathing, sweating soul.
Sans was chucking cards onto the hood of a car. It was the middle of May, although you wouldn’t think it. The sun was searing hot and his mask was soaked in sweat. But he was winning—so he didn’t care—when he saw her. His unicorn. One strand of strong virgin hair uncurling from the scarf fashioned over her scalp. Perfect arms tattooed with dark freckles like a map of the Milky Way. Real-girl hips. And those eyes—one green, one brown.
She walked right up to him and asked him for the time. A seemingly innocent question requiring a seemingly straightforward answer. If only he could have foreseen the path this meeting would take, traced the conjecture with a pen, connecting the dots, maybe everything would have turned out fine. But he couldn’t. So he gave the answer that any man without sufficient foreknowledge of his imminent future would say.
Three words.
“Quarter past eight.”
And with this, his troubles started.
- 3 - FAITH
Faith September sat waiting behind the wheel, staring through the windshield. Outside the wind was playing tennis with an empty crisps packet. A mottled seagull dipped and dived, trying to nip at it.
As the number one driver for the Hanover Lazy Boys Corpse Collection Association, Faith spent her shifts on the streets of Sick City. Her guardjie and general sidekick, Ash, was a stringy white boy with a mullet who was in the habit of spinning tall tales and called his 9mm his baby.
> In her life before the Down Days, Faith drove a minibus taxi. A tough job, with pay-as-you-go—or as many fares as you can load—wages. Time was money, every second wasted was a fare lost, and passengers had to be squeezed in fast and tight, skin on skin, like Tetris blocks. This led to some hairy driving to make ends meet and lots of name-calling from pissed-off passengers and motorists who didn’t understand the challenges of the job and would scream and moan and call minibus drivers all sorts of names, like bastards, lunatics, cowboys, and cockroaches.
Then the Down Days came, and many taxi companies expanded their business into the epidemic industry, pimping their minibuses to move coffins instead of customers. As it turned out, the dead paid better than the living (and never complained about sharing seats) and this cockroach was now quite literally living the high life with a sky-scraping pad perched above the ocean in Clifton and a full tank of petrol whenever she needed it.
That wasn’t to say her life was all roses, though. Carting the dead around was backbreaking work and distraught mourners would often throw things, scream at her, chase her away, or call her all sorts of names, like grim or vulture or hyena. But Faith had come to accept that grief wasn’t rational and couldn’t be argued with, so she just put her head down and got on with it. That said, sometimes there was respect, too. Every now and again a stranger would stop her in the street, call her Charon (after the mythical ferryman who carried souls over the River Styx), and give her a brown coin as a token of appreciation for the work that she did.
Ash was at the market, hunting for air freshener and taking his own sweet time. A girl, no more than a child, crossed the street, pushing a rusted trolley. The girl tugged at the ears of her cutesy teddy bear medical mask, the trolley’s wheels going squee-squee as they rolled over the tar. Startled, the gull fled upwards, leaving the crisps packet behind. As the girl lifted the trolley up and onto the pavement and disappeared into the folds of the Company’s Garden, Faith stroked the bruise above her right eye. The damn thing was tender as hell and throbbing like techno.
Earlier that morning, while playing cards in the square, they’d been called to the home of a preacher who had promised his congregation that he would raise their dead. “Just wait four days,” the sanguine pastor had apparently proclaimed, “and your loved ones will rise and walk among you again.”
Four days had turned into four weeks.
The cops were called when the neighbors started complaining about the smell. So they raided the preacher’s house and found grinner upon grinner stacked next to the TV set. When Faith and Ash came in to load the smiling corpses, the congregation was fuming and a riot was brewing.
The smell of the mob: fear, rage, adrenaline, sweat.
Stones were thrown (hence the ugly purple bruise), along with a couple of eggs. The cops retaliated with tear gas.
When they finally had all the grinners packed in the van and Faith started the engine, her back killing her, Ash began retching, just barely making it out the window. “Sorry, boss,” he’d said. “It’s the gas, it always does this to me.”
After leaving the coroner, they could still smell the sick, so Faith sent Ash to the market for air freshener. She opened her window a crack. In the rearview mirror she studied the file of rusting metal carcasses lining the shoulders of the road: car upon deserted car whose owners had flown the coop, kicked the bucket, or couldn’t afford the skyrocketing price of petrol and opted to skateboard, cycle, hail one of the few remaining minibus taxis catering to the living, or use their feet instead. Some of the windshields were shattered, others thick with dirt and dust on which a hundred and one fingers had left their mark. “Wash me,” “Johannes was here,” “Cindy & Tamatie foreva.” Bright spray-painted imagery adorned others. A kid in a black hoodie was squatting on the roof of a beat-up Mazda, touching up the teeth of an image of a spotted hyena with a yellow spray can. The hyena was flashing its fangs, cold black eyes staring heavenward. The kid’s sunshine-yellow mask had a laughing cartoon mouth painted on it; a brave choice if she’d ever seen one. These days, folks were mobbed or rounded up by the Veeps—the Virus Patrol—for much less.
On the radio, the city’s only remaining nongovernment-affiliated station, run by a passionate group of volunteers, had an interview on with some woman from some organization. Faith didn’t catch the name—Citizens Against Something-Something-Something. She was being interviewed by the station’s husky-voiced midmorning presenter, Sandy B.
“It’s atrocious, simply atrocious,” the woman was saying. Her voice grated. “These kids need guidance. It’s simply unacceptable to have an army of orphans running amok. Children need parents, authority figures, discipline. And when normal family systems break down, the government needs to step in and provide us with a solution.”
“But,” Sandy B. interjected, “we’ve all heard about the current state of these facilities. The government-run orphanages are filled way beyond their capacity. The system is failing these kids. So surely—”
“The system, any system, is darn well still preferable to the situation we have on our hands right now. I mean, every darn day this city is turning more and more into Lord of the Flies, what with these little hooligans on every street corner. Right this morning I caught one going to the bathroom on my daisies! My daisies, for goodness sake! Those bleeding-heart liberals who are moaning and groaning that the current welfare system is legalized child slavery should take their rose-colored glasses off and face facts. I mean, what about education? Who is teaching these street rats to read and write? Give it ten years and we’ll be thrown right back into the Middle Ages, with all these children, now adults, running the country when they can’t even spell. No. I say round up the little trolley-pushing tsotsis.”
“But new reports indicate the situation is temporary. That the French have developed a vaccine that should be in production quite soon. Following this, more schools will be opening their doors again and—”
“Please! Do you really believe that? Open your eyes! The West doesn’t care about us. They’ve closed their borders and left us here to rot. No. Something has to be done, come hell or high water. I say the government has to do its job, keep rounding them up and carting them off or else—”
Faith reached over and changed the station. The boy on the roof of the car put his spray can down and started fiddling with his phone. Then he slid off the bonnet and disappeared down a side street, passing a pair of kids busking on the curb. Kid number one was shaking a tin can to the beat while kid two was drawing dollar signs with a Sharpie onto the other’s free arm. The song their lips were churning was a hot ticket for busking street kids all over the city, although they never seemed to learn more than the first verse, which they belted out in sing-scream until folks plead-paid them to stop. These two were different, though. They seemed to know the words.
Faith reached for the knob and turned the radio down to listen:
We are traveling in the footsteps
Of those who’ve gone before
But we’ll all be reunited
On a new and sunlit shore.
Oh when the saints go marching in
When the saints go marching in
Oh Lord, I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in.
And when the sun refuse to shine
And when the sun refuse to shine
Oh Lord, I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in.
When the moon turns red with blood
When the moon turns red with blood
Oh Lord, I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in.
Faith thought back to all those grinners this morning, stacked next to the TV set. How desperate those families must have been, to believe a crazy charlatan like that, saying he can raise the dead? She got it, though. Wanting to believe in something. She got it more than anyone. What with loading up grinners day after day, taking them away. Then there was that stupid suit. Th
at canary-yellow cage. The way people stared at her when she was wearing it. Stepping back or averting their eyes when she walked past. As if she were death itself.
Not like any of this was new. Sick City had been delivered from the loins of the sick from the start. That’s what her mother had always said. That illness did more than sticks and stones to build and break this city’s bones. Scurvy was why the West first came to the Cape and brought slaves to these shores. Disease was behind the first seeds of segregation, too—the perfect excuse to give voice to silent prejudices. Way before the horrors of District Six, when the bubonic plague had raged through these streets, the homes of those deemed unwhite and unclean were razed to the ground. Their inhabitants chased to tented quarantine camps on the barren, sand-swept Cape Flats. If your skin was lily white, your home was merely disinfected and you were free to come and go as you pleased. If it wasn’t, you needed a plague pass to travel.
No, none of this was new. The cradle of humankind was also the cradle of guns and germs and death. All those little red flags on the map the color of blood. The soil here was thick with bones. This had always been a city shaped by germs. These streets were birthed by disease. And one day, it would be destroyed by it.
But not yet.
For now, most people are still getting by. Chins up, as Ash liked to say. Chins up. Where the hell was that kid anyway?
- 4 - TOMORROW
Tomorrow was at the market, feeling up avocados. Pressing her fingers into each green skin to see which one would give. Finding the perfect candidate, she turned around towards her purse, which was resting in the belly of the rusted trolley where her baby brother, Elliot, was playing with an empty coffee tin.
These days the prices at the local supermarket were a punch line to some kind of bad joke, with most of the shelves standing empty, gathering dust. Queues for what was left stretched around the block. So Tomorrow preferred to do her shopping here, in the Company’s Garden.