by Ilze Hugo
“Can we talk to you, sister?” said the man. “Just a minute of your time, please?”
“We are so excited to share our good fortune with you,” said the woman.
“Now isn’t the best time,” said Faith, sticking her key into the lock on her door.
“Please, sister. Five minutes. If you don’t like what we say, we will leave. God’s honest truth.”
Too tired. She was too tired to fight. So she said fine. The trio came in and she pointed them towards the couch. Defeated. Resigned to her fate. They sat in a solemn row, from big to small, hands folded identically on their laps. The girl’s pamphlet stack was balancing precariously on her knobby knees—one knee pink, the other a purply-yellow-blue flower.
Faith remained on her feet. “Coffee?” she asked.
“Do you have tea?” said the man. “Rooibos?”
“Yes, sure.”
“No milk,” said the woman.
She fished some clean cups from the cupboard and arranged them on a tray. The power was out again. Lucky thing she’d remembered to pour some boiling water into the thermos this morning. She poured the water into the cups, scooped some chicory into her own cup, plopped tea bags into the other three. There was a packet of biscuits in the cupboard. She hadn’t eaten all day, so she opened up the packet and put it on the tray, too, carried the tray to the couch.
The trio took to the tea. Faith noticed how loose the man’s suit hung on his shoulders. Same with the woman’s coat.
“Biscuit?” asked Faith, holding the packet out to the girl.
“Oh, no. No-no,” said the girl with a face like a springbok in headlights, looking at her dad, eyes wide.
Faith put down the biscuits and picked up her cup. That was when she saw the toddler slung across the woman’s chest. The boy must have been tucked away underneath her coat. Now the coat was unbuttoned. The woman unclipped the sling and put the kid down on the carpet, where he sat vrooming and brrrrooming a toy car up and down the arm of the couch. As Faith’s eyes followed the toy’s trajectory up the armrest, she noticed the big block letters printed on the pamphlets on the girl’s lap—THE TWELVE COMMANDMENTS OF FOODISM—and it all clicked into place. There was a family of foodists sitting in her lounge. Great. Just great.
The man put down his cup and cleared his throat. Faith steeled herself while he ran his fingers through his greased-back hair, straightened his tie, folded his fingers into a teepee, freed the frog from his throat, and began to speak. “I have something exciting to tell you, sister. Something that could save you. Something that could fix everything.”
Yes, please, Faith thought. Bring it on. Save me.
“We have come here to bring you good news,” the man continued. “Have you heard the expression ‘You are what you eat’? Well, we are here to tell you today that this is true, sister. Truer than you could have ever thought. Your health, your thoughts, your emotions, every particle and participle of your entire being is influenced by what you eat. By changing what you ingest, you can change everything. By adhering to the twelve food commandments and banishing all that is unholy from your lips, you can reach absolute absolution.”
She couldn’t deal with this right now. She was tired. So tired. Lead-weights-tied-to-her-soul tired. All she wanted was for the suit to stop talking. For these holier-than-thou crazies to get off her couch. Don’t be an ass, she chided herself. Don’t be an ass. Keep calm. Carry on.
Yesterday that would have been easy. She would have feigned interest, tried to keep an open mind, maybe even asked a question or two. But not today. All she could see when she looked at the family of four sitting in her living room were those cocoons. Four in a row, stacked from large to small. Wish you were here, at the top.
“What’s so unfortunate, sister, so unfortunate, is that if only everyone could have broken free from the shackles of consumerism and become enlightened to these principles from the start, the Laughter would have been banished from the city years ago. It’s so unfortunate, so unfortunate, that all those souls had to die because they weren’t shown the light. That’s why we’re here today, sister. To change that. It might have been too late for those poor unfortunate unenlightened souls, but it’s not too late for you.”
“Really?” She felt a prickle of anger rising beneath her weariness.
“Yes,” said the man, dialing up his Kool-Aid grin. He wasn’t wearing a mask. Neither was his wife or kids. He was that sure of himself.
“Can it bring the dead back to life?”
“I don’t follow?”
“Can following your twelve commandments bring the dead back to life?”
“Of course not, sister. That would be magic, wouldn’t it? We don’t believe in magic. We follow facts.”
“Facts. I see. I get it now. How stupid of me to get confused. Tell me, then, Mister Know-it-all-so-sure-of-yourself-foodist-freak: what’s the point?”
The man exhaled slowly, deliberately. He fiddled with his tie, recrossed his legs, cleared his throat again. Turned the cup around in the saucer like a doorknob. “Know what I tell folks who disagree with me, sister? I tell them that’s fine, but I’ll be the one having the last laugh when I’m celebrating my hundredth birthday and you’ve already long since succumbed.”
Faith put her cup on the tray and stood up. “Not everyone wants to live to be a hundred, you know. If that’s your life’s purpose, I feel sorry for you, I do. For all of you. Now get out.”
The man’s jaw dropped. The woman almost spilt her tea. She scooped up the baby and his toy car, while hubby grabbed their daughter by the elbow and started tugging her towards the door.
“Just ignore her, sweet pea,” the woman said to her husband, who was looking like he was about to blow. “She’s a hopeless case. It’s already too late for her. All those postbox meds flushing through her system, coupled with all the preservatives clogging her veins, is getting to her. I think she might be going postal, is what. I’ve told you what Tillie told me they’re saying about the postboxes now, haven’t I?”
“Yes, Nora,” said the man to his wife. “You are right. That has to be it.” Then he turned his attention back to Faith. “Just think about it, sister. But get back to us soon, you hear? You are nearing the precipice. I can feel it.”
Faith began herding them through the door in case they decided to give it another go.
“Amen,” said the wife.
“Amen,” chorused the daughter.
“Car, car, broom, broom, toot, toot,” gurgled the son.
“I’m serious,” the man said, one hand on the doorjamb. “Wait another week and it could be too late.” Then the door blotted out his face.
WEDNESDAY
- 29 - THE DAILY TRUTH
PILL SWITCHEROO MAKING US CUCKOO?
By Lawyer Tshabalala
Dear Lawyer: What’s with all the crazy happening in the city right now? you’ve asked me. Well, my dear readers, I’ve searched high and low for an answer, and am chuffed to say I finally have a scoop. News from up the ladder, via a top-secret source, is that the injections distributed via the city’s postboxes are thought to be causing mass hallucinations across the city.
But Lawyer, why now? you ask. Haven’t we been dosing up on those little pricks for close to two years already? Well, turns out we haven’t. Not quite. My source says that our dear government recently switched the original postbox meds for a generic version they are getting cheap-cheap from some unlicensed factory in the Eastern Cape, said to be owned and run by the vice president’s cousin.
When contacted for comment, the government PR machine said it’s all a conspiracy theory, total nonsense, of course—that the injections are all aboveboard with absolutely no side effects whatsoever. Of course, of course . . . Stay tuned for more updates, folks. Over and out.
- 30 - SANS
Sans was dreaming. A swarm of angry scissors was snipping in his ears. He swatted at them with his hands as they dipped and dived, cutting at his fingers. Blood dripped into t
he wet grass. He crouched down and started running. The scissors followed, the blades singing schwee-schwee-schwee as they bit at the air against his skin. She was there, too, his unicorn, and she was laughing, her hair dancing some kind of crazy jig in the wind to a rapid, pounding, techno soundtrack that would turn out to be the beat of his own heart. The closer he came, the more her hair whipped and swirled and grew, until her body became one with the wind and the strands alone remained. Tugging and reeling upwards into the sky like the strings on a thousand helium balloons, which in turn exploded and morphed into a flock of seagulls that lunged at him in one white blur and started pecking off his face.
He woke up to a racket in the hallway. Someone was pounding on his next-door neighbor’s door: “Open up, this is the Virus Patrol! Open up!”
More banging.
“Please, please!” A woman’s voice. “He’s not sick! It’s only the flu, I swear!”
Another voice, a man’s: “I’m sorry, ma’am. Someone phoned our tip-off line. We have to take him in to get checked.”
A third voice: “It’s going to be okay, Primrose. It’s going to be okay. I promise. Don’t worry. I’ll be home soon.”
Sans listened as the footsteps passed his door, waited until he couldn’t hear any more. When he was sure the coast was clear, he grabbed his jacket and got the hell out of there.
In the hall, the door next to his apartment had a foot-sized hole in it. Through the gap he could hear someone crying softly. He lifted up a finger to the door to knock, thought better of it. He didn’t know the woman that well, and besides, what the hell would he say to her anyway.
After washing down some coffee at the Sad Facts Nights Café, with a shot of something for his nerves, Sans found himself in the square as usual. The dead collectors and the other card players hadn’t arrived yet, so he milled around, keeping an eye out for his unicorn, hoping for the best, while the dream tugged at the back of his mind like a kite stuck on a fence.
He’d contacted everyone in his address book and then some. Every single goddamn coroner, hustler, rat, and dirty cop. None of them had seen Lucky. Gone to the sanatorium, chatted up one of the nurses there, and bribed her for a patient list. No luck. He’d even gone door to door in Lucky’s street, talked to aunties, uncles, kids, bergies, two imams, and a street corner priest. The trio of old grumps who liked to sit and sun themselves outside the barbershop across the street. The glittered and tasseled velvet-masked working girls one street up in their fuck-me boots, synthetic wigs, and elbow-length cabaret gloves, who liked to punt their wares with flair. They hadn’t seen a thing, either. They knew the kid, had shared the odd entjie with him. And the occasional joint. But no luck. They hadn’t seen him since Monday.
He was running out of ideas. Save for plan B—Plan Unicorn. But that was more of a pipe dream than a plan, wasn’t it?
He was sitting on the pavement, watching the vendors reel in their customers with smiles and rhymes, when an idea popped into his head.
He went up to one of the traders, a tall, bald guy who smelled of booze and bleach, took his phone out of his pocket, scrolled to the photo he’d taken in the café, and asked the vendor if he’d seen this girl. Like a cop in one of those crime shows his mom used to watch. But the vendor just shook his head. He approached the chick with the short green braids next, the one who sold cloth nappies and printed masks. She didn’t say anything, just stared at him through the curtain of dangling face masks patterned with Hello Kitty and hearts and dinosaurs and flowers and clouds and pandas and bananas and Delibirds and dollar signs and crosses and dots and stripes and Chimchars and shook her head.
So he fished some coins from his pocket, bought a badass number printed with fanged skull teeth, pulled the elastic bands over his ears, as if that was what he’d intended to do in the first place, and sauntered off.
One by one he worked his way through the stalls, tried them all. But no dice. A tall, slender blood hawker with a tattooed forehead and pencil moustache said he could “organize” him someone who looked just like her: “A little bit of Garnier, my broe, maybe some surgery—I know a guy—and you won’t know the difference. Cross my fingers.”
He was walking back through the maze of stalls when he spotted a guy with a crew cut and a blue sports bag slung across his shoulder, leaning against a street pole reading the Truth. The guy looked mighty familiar. He was about to walk up to the guy, talk to him, when he spotted a black thread on the ground. At first he thought it was a stray piece of weave, a lost lock, but the thread was too long. He trailed it with his eyes. The thing was long as fuck. There seemed to be no end to it. So he followed it. Followed the trail of gleaming black thread. Followed it all the way out of the square down a narrow alley to a grate, where it plunged downwards, disappearing into the dark. He tried pulling at the thread, but it didn’t budge. And the grate was stuck. Now what? He was about to turn back when he thought he heard a voice, from somewhere down there, calling him. “That which we call a rose,” called the voice. “That which we call a rose . . .”
A hoot behind his back. Another hoot. Make that three. A voice. “Hey, buddy, get out of the road! Can’t you see I’m trying to drive here!”
When he looked down again, the thread was gone. And the grate had some disgusting muck on it, puke or something worse.
- 31 - FAITH
Faith bent her body over the rim of the bath. Something hit her as she opened the tap. A thought—no, a memory. A Then one, from when there was still a someone and a little someone else. A daily pre-bath ritual of delving into the freshly poured water and fishing out a neon zoo of ducks and fish and boats and cups and spotted giraffes before easing herself into the steaming void. She undressed and sank her legs into the rising water, then her back. As she did, she noticed a small yellow bruise on her left thigh. The little someone else used to get bruises like these on his arms and legs. Then there were the scraped knees and little red cuts that she’d patch up with rainbow-colored plasters.
Little mushroom clouds of steam rose up towards the bathroom ceiling. Her thoughts were spiraling backwards fast—down, down, down a slippery rabbit hole that she knew from experience led nowhere good.
She flicked her head sideways, and shooed the memories back. Shifted gears, tried to concentrate on the new freelance gig instead. Went through it all in her head, replayed everything the girl, Tomorrow, had said. The way she figured it, the problem was this: the boy was a no one. A zero. A nothing. A rat. Sick City’s growing army of orphans was an embarrassment to everyone. An issue that no one had the resources to deal with right now, let alone the heart. So, they all turned a Stevie Wonder. Or put the blame on the kids themselves. Why didn’t the little street rats just toe the line, single file, to those lovely no-journos-allowed care facilities, they probably asked—if they asked anything. With their guards and barbed-wire up the wazoo. Yes. The kid was an embarrassment. A symbol of a bigger problem. One no one was quite ready to face. As far as the rest of the city was concerned, this beautiful boy with his dimpled cheeks might as well have been invisible. So how did one go about finding an invisible boy?
Invisible boy, invisible boy . . .
Yesterday, after Tomorrow had left and before Faith had gone home and had to deal with the foodists—it had been a very long day—she had already asked around at all the morgues, and no one with the kid’s description had popped up on any slabs. So that was a dead end and a blessed one at that.
She’d also visited the museum and asked Ateri to replay the security footage for her, but it didn’t reveal much. He was surprised to hear about her freelance gig. They were neighbors, sure, but not close enough for that kind of sharing and caring. Lawyer would say she was embarrassed. Embarrassed that she cared. And maybe he was right. She’d gone around to the back of the market, which was where Tomorrow had said Elliot had been taken, and talked to both the sugar and muthi vendors. Weird thing was, both of them remembered seeing Tomorrow, but neither of them remembered the boy. Even str
anger, in the middle of talking to the muthi vendor, asking him about Elliot, the man’s phone had rung. As he’d whipped it out of his pocket, she’d noticed the photo of a baby on the screen before he took the call.
“Cute kid,” she’d commented when he’d finished talking.
The vendor had given her this monster beam. “My daughter,” he’d said. “Six weeks old. She’s my whole world now.”
“She’s gorgeous,” Faith had said. “I remember when I had mine I couldn’t help but notice cute babies everywhere—like I’d never noticed a single kid going out before, but now they were everywhere. Do you find that, too?”
The vendor had nodded with vigor, smiling like he had a secret. “Totally. I keep seeing kids all over the place.”
“Yet you didn’t notice the boy. Weird, huh?”
“Come to think about it, that is weird . . .” Then he’d turned his attention to a waiting customer who was asking about the price of the bunches of impepho dangling above Faith’s head and she’d moved off, the encounter teasing at the edges of her mind.
She’d also been in contact with her detective ex to check the official status of the Elliot case. He’d promised to call back as soon as he knew anything, but the department was pretty backed up, he’d warned her, so it could take days, if not weeks, before she’d hear anything.
So what was her next step? Sinking farther down into the now-tepid water, Faith pretended she was a PI in a paperback. What would Bosch do? Or Griessel? Or Quinn? Start at the beginning. Follow the breadcrumbs. Start at the start. But she’d already done all that, hadn’t she? And the crumbs had blown away.