by Ilze Hugo
The city’s green lung was a relic of Sick City’s days as a Dutch East India Company colony, when greens were planted to save passing sailors from scurvy. As if history was folding in on itself, the Down Days had led the locals to digging out almost all the pretty flower beds to plant vegetables again.
“How about this weather, né?” said the fruit vendor while adjusting her headscarf, dotted with fat little sausage dogs. “The wind’s being a right banshee today. I can’t stand it. And have you seen the mountain? All wrapped up in its shroud. Old Van Hunks and the Devil must be smoking up a storm again.”
“Yes, auntie, they sure must be.”
Van Hunks. The name made her think of her dad, who used to tell her the myth as a bedtime story: about this pirate called Van Hunks who used to live on the slopes of Devil’s Peak back when Sick City was still called the Cape of Good Hope. Van Hunks lived for his pipe. Every day he’d sit on top of the mountain, blowing smoke rings and watching the ships sail by in the bay. One day a stranger approached him there and challenged him to a smoke-off. Van Hunks said yes, and for three days, Van Hunks and the stranger puffed without rest. Day four, they were smoking up a storm when a gust of wind blew the stranger’s hat off, revealing the grooved and twisted horns of the devil himself. A sight like this would have had many a man choking on his own black smoke. But Van Hunks wasn’t deterred. He just kept puffing. And he still is, they say.
On days when the mountain is swathed in fog, the old folk know it’s just Van Hunks and the devil, still up there, smoking. Tongues smarting, lungs burning, neither ready to admit defeat.
Some say their duel has been going on for so long that they’ve developed a strange kinship. Together they huddle, spines curved into frowns like old men’s backs tend to do, watching the empty harbor that has long since stopped sheltering ships and the bodies going about their lives below, while the smoke billows from the bowls of their pipes. Never interfering, just watching. Watching and puffing and packing their pipes on repeat.
“So what do you have for me today, sweetie?” the fruit vendor asked.
Tomorrow bent double to retrieve the bag tucked away underneath one of her brother’s plump legs. Zipped it open and retrieved five glass jars. “For your pickles.”
“What about the eggs?” the vendor asked, her brow knotting into a frown.
“Sorry. Not today. A mongoose got into my hens.”
The lines above the vendor’s threaded eyebrows smoothed out. “Not what I was hoping for. But we can work with it. Here.” Her hands reached across the table. In each cup of flesh rested one green potbellied fruit. “Take two.”
The girl scooped up each ripe avocado and placed them in the trolley next to Elliot. “Thank you. I’ll do better next time.”
The vendor smiled, one hand tugging at the hem of her glove. “You have a good day now, you hear? And cover up that poor boy, will you? Or next thing you know, he’ll be blown away with the wind.”
Tomorrow grinned, happy as a Cheshire cat that the woman had noticed the boy. Elliot was a funny kid, quiet, in his own world, easy to overlook. He tended to slip through the cracks and this worried her sometimes.
“Yes, thank you, auntie, I will. See you next week.”
“As-Salaam-Alaikum, my kind.”
“Wa-Alaikum-Salaam.”
The girl and her baby brother headed up through the garden’s old aviary, which was now a thriving chicken coop. “Cluck-cluck-cluck,” prattled the toddler, pointing a finger at the fat hens as they dug in the dirt. A loud bang cut through the air as the city’s daily med cannon fired, frightening the hens and the boy, who emitted a loud howl. Tomorrow kissed the boy on his head, gave his cheek a quick pinch. “There now, my sweets, no need to cry. Look, look! A squirrel. Let’s follow him. Come!” The boy swallowed his howls, pointed gleefully at the squirrel, and the girl pushed the trolley farther.
At the far end of the garden was the steps of the Iziko South African Museum. The old colonial edifice loomed over them like a goliath’s wedding cake. Slathers of white icing framed the yellow walls.
After the tourists had left, and the museum’s funding had dried up, the artifact-stacked rooms became an informal mass garage sale, where locals bartered for odds and ends, from toothpaste and chlorine to homemade toilet paper and fried pigeon sosaties. A year ago, the World Food Programme and other international-aid programs had used the museum as a base to distribute food, formula, and rations. But suspicion, fueled by the endless pick of crackpot and not-so-crackpot conspiracy theories that bred like rabbits in these kinds of times—that the Laughter was a plot by either the government or the nebulous “West”—had resulted in mob-led beatings and the odd sjambokking of aid workers. Many of them had since given up on the cause and left. The wall to the left of the entrance was scarred with paint from a previous protest turned violent. STOP POISONING OUR CHILDREN! DEATH TO ALL IMPERIALISTS! the bloodred-painted letters proclaimed. Next to the exclamation point, a queue was forming in front of the museum’s red medmachine. On the other side of the big brown museum doors, a government cleaner in a puffy Tyvek suit was spraying the ground with bleach.
“Come, my little penguin,” Tomorrow cooed into the trolley. The boy looked up, blew a raspberry, and went to work again, banging the coffee tin like a drum. The girl lifted him out of his metal cage, slung him across her hip, tin and all, and pulled the trolley up the stairs behind them, grunting with the effort. She fiddled around in her bag till she found the two plastic medpasses, and the two children waited patiently in the queue for their turn to get checked. Then the big brown museum doors swallowed them with a gulp.
* * *
Inside, spread out underneath the suspended ribs of a giant southern right whale skeleton, the museum was a trickle of activity. Below the leviathan’s broken umbrella of bones, a motley straggle of figures milled about between the tables strewn with things while the dead presided over proceedings from the safety of their glass coffins, their black pretend-eyes betraying nothing. The air had a chill, and the trolley bar felt cool in Tomorrow’s palm. TRY SOMETHING NEW TODAY, read the ad prattle on the bar.
The girl tugged at the beanie on her brother’s head, pulling it down to cover his ears. He gurgled at her as she pushed past a snarling taxidermied gorilla balancing on its hind legs. Someone had thought it funny to dress the poor animal in a yellow health-worker suit, complete with goggles, gloves, and mask. The new garb made the creature look more embarrassed than fierce, but the stuffed monster still left Tomorrow ill at ease.
She pushed harder; the trolley rolled faster. A funny-looking guy with a mullet squeezed past her, gripping a can of purple air freshener. What a weird thing to spend your money on. Who had the cash to spare to make sure their farts smelled nice? Why couldn’t he rather spare a rand or two for her, instead of spraying it away into the toilet bowl?
“What a cute kid.” A woman stopped to bend down and pat Elliot’s head. There was a tattoo on her wrist. A snake curling around a stick. Her bottle-red hair needed a wash.
Tomorrow gave the woman a quick nod (polite smiles were pointless now that everyone wore masks) and forged on, past cabinet after cabinet of forgotten yesterdays. Rows of frozen corpses that, although already dead much longer than she’d been alive, still seemed ready to pounce.
A family of foodists stopped her to peddle their sales pitch, which was all about eating like a monk and humming a lot in order to live into your hundreds. They were handing out little pink pamphlets and selling all sorts of weird supplements in little hand-labeled bottles, from organic bee pollen to caterpillar fungus to colostrum from preservative-free moms.
Tomorrow found the stall she was looking for squeezed in between a tall Sikh selling paraffin and a muthi stall whose youthful proprietor was singing to himself underneath a nylon clothesline strung with dried black cats, anaconda skins, herbs, hippo tails, and horse legs.
While the bug-eyed vendor gossiped with another customer—something about a mutual acqua
intance who had recently gone full hermit from the paranoia, only leaving his apartment once a week to throw out the trash—she picked up a bag of sugar. Looked at the price. It wasn’t cheap. But it was her birthday and it had been ages since she’d last baked anything for the two of them. “Feast when you feast and fast when you fast,” her dad had always said when he was still around.
Decision made, she turned towards the trolley to tell Elliot about the cake and how she was going to decorate it. Red—she’d use red icing, his favorite color. Sure, it would look a bit garish, but . . .
There had been a street magician who stood on a wooden box outside their house sometimes—their old house, that was—and bartered coin tricks for whatever you had to give. He also sold Ziploc bags of Ethiopian coffee beans, which his wife would roast in a pan at her feet, then grind, steep, pour for you into a small blue cup, and sprinkle with salt. But his passion was coin tricks. She knew by the smile he tried to suppress each time a kid would gasp or their mother drop a slack-jawed chin when they gave him a rand and he turned it over in his hand, blew on his palm, and then opened it with a quick flutter of his fingers like a startled dove—and the coin was gone.
Tomorrow used to love watching him, hoping for a glimpse of the vanishing coin that would betray his act. But she never did spot it—the man was too quick.
She would think of him afterwards, when she replayed this moment in her brain. Remembered her cold shock, the optimist in her convincing herself that the empty trolley was a silly trick, a sleight of the brain. A joke. That someone must have picked Elliot up to coo at him. They’d gone for a quick walk to show him the fluffed-up rabbits curled into the corners of their cages down the aisle, but they’d bring him right back.
They would. Sure they would. Any second now.
Any.
Second.
Now.
- 5 - SANS
After Sans had given her the time, he invited the girl for a drink. She suggested this café around the corner, just down the street from his flat. A sign in the window said the place was open twenty-four hours. He made a mental note.
They sat at a table in the back. The waiter brought two beers. Sans couldn’t put a finger on it, but there was something about this chick. She was dressed kind of weirdly, with her hair tied up tightly underneath a doek, except for that one strand. He couldn’t see much of it, but what he did see, he liked.
Her lips were bare, no mask in sight. Maybe it was in her bag? Maybe she’d forgotten to put it on? Maybe he should say something? He slid his eyes underneath the table. No, she didn’t have a bag. A girl without a mask was a recipe for trouble, all right. But Sans had never been one to shy away from trouble, and he wasn’t about to start today.
The girl wasn’t much of a talker, but that was okay because it meant there was more time to drink. So he ordered another round. The speakers were slinging out some seriously sweet tunes. When the Bullitts started with “Run & Hide,” and Jay Electronica dropped that verse about the future being uncertain, with the wizard just a man inside the booth behind a curtain, he kissed her. At first, her lips pursed tight and she pulled away. Then she started kissing him right back. One thing led to another and before he could catch himself, he’d invited her up to his flat. The power was working so he put the kettle on. Waited for the click. They stood in the orange sunlit glare of his tiny kitchen. Her fingers played the wayward strand like a violin.
“Show me your hair,” he said as he passed her the cup.
“Why?” she asked.
“Just ’cause.” She put down the tea. He hoisted himself onto the cold counter with his palms and watched while her fingers fiddled with her headscarf. The strands fell. He was so stunned, he almost let go of his cup.
- 6 - LUCKY
Lucky was standing on the roof of the car, touching up the hyena’s teeth, when he got the text. He put the spray can down and slid his phone out of his pocket. It was Sans. Something had come up and he wasn’t able to make his regular drop tonight. Would Lucky pretty please help a brother out? Lucky sure would. The drop in question was a big deal—think a shitload of ponies and then some. Strange, though—it wasn’t like his boss to ask for help. Maybe it meant the guy really trusted him. Trust was lit. Trust meant more work and more work meant more cash for spray cans—his next piece was already forming in his mind, a big fat pigeon smoking a big fat blunt. He’d paint it on the bleach-white walls of that ugly-ass Sanitation Church in Long Street. A risk, sure, but so damn totally worth it. Those white-robed crazies with their scrubbed-raw hands wouldn’t know what the hell had hit them.
- 7 - FAITH
Speak of the devil. The thud of the passenger door broke Faith’s spell. Ash climbed into the seat, one hand holding a can in a dubious shade of purple.
“Lavender. You know I hate lavender.”
“Take it or leave it. They were all out of that pine-cone stuff you like. Besides, do you know how expensive this stuff is these days? Daylight robbery, man! We’re talking almost half my rent!”
“Since when have you ever paid rent?”
Ash shrugged. Faith grabbed the air freshener out of his hands and started shaking it. “You read today’s Truth?” she said, pressing the nozzle and changing the topic.
“No,” coughed Ash, pulling his T-shirt over his mouth. “Why?”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” she said, rolling her eyes. “New rumor is it’s the Yanks’ fault that we’re dying all over the place.”
“The Yanks? Last time it was the Russians. Before that, the story was that it was those guys, the Mallemaians, who wanted to cleanse the Rainbow Nation—wash all the colors out.”
“No. That’s yesterday’s news. New word on the street is that it’s the Yanks. That they shipped the Laughter in through vaccine drives. Said it was vaccines for polio and measles they were giving us—for free, from the goodness of their big red-white-and-blue hearts—but that was just a cover-up. ’Cause it’s way cheaper and quicker to stick their needles into us way down here in Africa than into rats or monkeys in their fancy labs—which could take years of testing and jumping through legal hoops. If the vaccines worked, these big pharma snakes could go into production much faster and make fat wads of cash by selling them to the US military. The plan, they say, was to use them on soldiers who would go into war zones and spread the Laughter. All the while being vaccinated against it themselves. Pretty clever, right? Wouldn’t be surprised if our own government was in on it, too—giving those in power the opportunity to cordon off Sick City and invoke martial law.”
“Don’t know,” said Ash. “Sounds a bit out there to me. Pandemics happen. They’ve always happened. Nature is cruel. Don’t know why people always feel the need to blame someone for them.” He pulled his T-shirt down a notch. “Truth be told, I liked your ergot poisoning theory best. Good old Saint Anthony’s fire. Caught from ingesting ergot-infested grain. Made sense, sounded kind of logical, fit most of the symptoms, except for the viral part. No nefarious fairy-tale villains in sight. Besides, I’ve never liked rye bread anyway. Yuck.”
“Ha, ha. Tease me all you want,” she said, turning the key in the ignition. “I mean, who knows what the truth really is. But I’ll tell you one thing—no way I’m reporting it if I ever fall sick. Not me. I’d rather go on the run. The stories you hear about the things that happen in those quarantine holes . . . No, I don’t trust the system one bit. Not anymore.”
“Please. Are you even hearing yourself, woman? Last time I checked, we—me and you—we are the system. And all this paranoia and fear-mongering only make our job, and the job of every single poor damn health worker in this city—who are putting their lives on the line to help everyone, I might add—harder!”
She was about to protest when someone knocked on Ash’s window. The window was fogged up from the cold and still covered in egg from this morning. As Ash wiped at the dirty, eggy glass, it made her think of those little yellow lotto scratch cards. When had she last seen one of those? But his r
ubbing didn’t reveal any cherries, dollars, or treasure chests, just a bleary-eyed uniform stroking his stubble, holding a fat rubber baton with which he was doing all that bloody knocking.
Ash rolled down the window. “Morning, Officer.”
“Morning,” said the uniform. “Can I see your medpasses, please?”
“Sure,” said Ash, who never missed a beat. Just stuck his hand into the glove compartment, scrabbled around, then handed his pass over through the open window.
Faith searched her pants pockets for her own plastic card. A familiar panic flooded her body like muscle memory, slowing down her limbs, folding her fingers into invisible knots. Breathe, don’t laugh, breathe. It’s here somewhere. It has to be . . .
There. Found it. “Here you go, Officer,” she said, stretching across Ash, swallowing down the nervous giggles, trying her best to keep her face blank.
The uniform twisted his brow into a frown and studied the pair of plastic rectangles. He swiped both cards through the box he wore on his belt and waited for the strip at the top of the screen to do its thing.
“Everything hunky-dory over there, Officer?” said Ash, all clownish and chipper, like the whole scene was one fat joke. But Faith had known him long enough to read behind his cool veneer. The kid had a tell, a habit of using ridiculous phrases like “hunky-dory” when he was on edge. Inside Ash’s head, she knew, his brain was sweating buckets. Just like hers.
The uniform’s brow relaxed. Black gloves passed the plastic passes back through the window. “Have a nice day.”
It was over.
Another med check ticked off.
Another day still in the clear.