by Mark Winkler
At the bottom of the grey cubicle wall is a big dirty smudge. As if a dog used to sleep against it. I wonder if there are staples in Sonia’s stapler. I wonder how much a staple-bindi would hurt.
“You need to know that a fight will just draw out the process,” Sonia is saying. “It’s a game you won’t be able to win. They will, trust me. It’ll just be miserable.”
Shut up, Sonia. Shut up shut up shut up.
“If you resign,” she says, “you won’t get any severance. So, as a friend, I’d recommend taking the retrenchment package.”
Humans are a stupid design. They can close their eyes just like that. They can’t close their ears. Not while they’re holding onto their shoulders.
“You’ll get two weeks’ pay for every year you’ve worked. Plus they’ve agreed to pay out your commission on the bank deal until the end of the campaign.”
Bye, Sonia. Who would have been allowed to bring a dog to work anyway? Was it an Alsatian? A fat old Lab? An incontinent little Dachshund?
“Nate!” Sonia says. She snaps her fingers. “Sign this.” She hands me a pen and a piece of paper. I don’t read it. At the bottom is my name and an empty line. I put the paper on my thigh. I sign my name. Nathan Lucius. The pen stabs through the paper at the end of the s.
Sonia takes the paper from me. “Okay,” she says. She breathes out as she says it. It comes out like a long sigh. She breathes in again. “Let’s go to Eric’s,” she says in her cheery voice. I can hear the brittleness underneath. My hands are holding my shoulders again. I leave her cubicle. Walk past mine. Pass the lift and take the stairs.
I’ve left nothing behind.
Before
I’m looking at the patterns
I’m looking at the patterns in the Persian rug and they’re swirling and heaving and making me feel sick.
“Don’t you remember me, Nathan?” the woman asks.
I don’t have to look at her to see her face. Cheekbones. Little hooked nose. Glasses on and off. Prim dark jacket over a prim white blouse. I know she has her grinning face on. The Persian is spread over a carpet that is a nothing colour. It has deep reds and greens and blues. My eyes zing when I look at the parts where the red butts up against the blue. You could lose yourself in its swirls. Paint yourself the same colours. Disappear into it.
“Come, Nathan. There’s lots for us to catch up on.”
I keep my nothing face on. There are little sketches on her wall. Thick dark frames with details in gold. The sketches are pencil, pale and grey and barely there. The framer was bolder than the artist. The wall is painted the colour of pot-plant holders. Terracotta, it would have said on the tin. Or maybe Venetian Red.
My name is Nathan Lucius. I live at Number 402, Pansyshell Park, Tamboerskloof, Cape Town. I don’t live here. Wherever “here” is. The wind is blowing. It rattles her window. I like to run. I don’t have a car. There is a woman who is a widow who lives next door who masturbates all the time. I don’t mind. I quite like it actually. She’s stopped now anyway. We were friends for a while. For a few weeks I kept her too busy to masturbate. She kept me too busy to masturbate too. Then she went away. Just like that. Cleaned up her flat and left. I don’t like it when people just go away like that. Maybe she’s back now. Or not. Perhaps she’s somewhere else, brewing coffee and drinking wine and drying her clothes. I don’t know this other woman behind the desk. The desk is at one end of the Persian. I’m at the other. There is a Persian jungle of colour and swirl between us. When I move the leather of the chair creaks. The dead cow protesting. I wonder if they have cows in Persia. I look at the window. On the other side is only sky. That’s why I’m looking at the window. Not through it. Through it is too big. Big blue nothingness that doesn’t end. On the glass are splatters of something. It’s probably seagull shit. Do you know why seagulls make such a noise when they fly? Because they’re scared of heights. The shit helps me look at the window and not at the sky. Then the Persian starts sucking me towards it. I’m being pulled in face-first. This makes it hard to look at seagull shit on the window. In between the big swirls and leaves and lianas of the carpet are tiny other things. Hooky, thorny things. Outside of it all I see the woman look at her watch. Her mouth opens into a slit and air comes out.
“Okay, Nathan,” she says. “Same time tomorrow, then.”
My room is not like my real room. The bed is narrow. I can feel iron through the mattress. The pillow smells like cheese. The window is high and small. There are four bars. No curtains. I’m happy about that. I’m the only one in my room. Most of the others have to share. I am given pills. In the beginning they made me open my mouth afterwards to see if I’d swallowed them. Now they just give them to me. They know I won’t spit them out.
Outside of my room everything is grey and yellow. There are bars across doors and steel mesh in the windows. Everything is lit in neon. It’s hard to tell if it’s day or night. I don’t suppose it matters.
The woman and I meet again. She reminds me once more that we have lots to talk about. She doesn’t say anything to move the conversation along. I could suggest things. Questions she could ask. As in: “Do you know Eric?” Or, “Where do you do your laundry?” I don’t say anything. I’ve decided that I’m never going to speak again. Ever. I disappear into the Persian. I get lost in its swirls and twirls. Then I worry what’s behind them. Beasts and snakes and poisonous spiders, perhaps. Scary tropical things like scorpions and jaguars. She sends me back to my room. Again and again.
One day it’s different. She stands up and walks through the jungle. The tangles and spirals are nothing to her. She stands in front of me. She has her smiley face on. She stands with her legs apart. Planted in my jungle. She’s fearless. The jungle retreats beneath her. I’m impressed. There’s suddenly a photograph in her hand. Like she’s a magician. It’s me at the lake house. Standing in the dappled dark of the pine trees. Like the photograph on the wall of my flat.
“Want to tell me about this?” she asks. She holds it out to me. I don’t take it. She puts it on my knee. I stare at the carpet. It helps to chew the inside of your cheeks if you don’t want to talk. If you chew hard enough you can taste the blood.
After lunch the two of us walked through the pines to the lake. My sister helped me into the canoe. She told me to sit. She pushed the boat from the shore. It scraped along the brown beach. I could hear the mud squidging in her toes. The mud burped sour gas. I sat as low as I could. All hunched over. She had told me about centres of gravity. I didn’t want to capsize the canoe. Isabel laughed before she pushed me off. “Sit normally,” she said. “You’ll be fine. Just don’t stand up.” Then she gave the canoe a push. It went straight for a moment. Then it went left. “Sit in the middle,” she said. I wriggled to the left. The canoe stopped turning once I was equidistant from each side. Hamish barked. I looked over my shoulder. He ran into the water and stopped when it reached his chest. “Woof, woof,” he went in his old broken-voiced way. “Now paddle!” Isabel called.
I dipped the paddle into the water on the right and pulled. The canoe lurched left. I paddled on the other side and it swung to the right. Soon I found a rhythm. The canoe snaked away from the shore. I was the snake-master. Pull left, pull right. “Not too far, okay?” Isabel shouted. I kept paddling. Little waves plinked against the prow of the canoe like bits of liquid metal.
The photograph slides off my knee and lands in the jungle.
It’s self-evident, I don’t say to the woman. It’s me. At the lake house. I’m twelve. There’s a dog in the shadows. I wonder if the photograph will get lost in the jungle. If Hamish will be eaten by a jaguar.
“What was the dog’s name? Was it your dog?” she asks.
Hamish smells of dust and musk and pine needles and dog. From somewhere there’s a smell of chlorine. Or sugar cane. And sweat.
The woman sits down again behind her desk. I stare at the carpet. She waits.
I stare. She opens her mouth a bit. Before the breath comes out I know it’s the end of the session. She smiles without her eyes.
“Let’s try again tomorrow, shall we?”
Sometimes I play chess with Mr. V.J. Naicker. Neither of us cares who wins. The important thing is the playing. The longer the game takes, the better. Mr. Naicker has a black beard flecked with white that they trim back once a month. Like a hedge. He’s told me that he’s not allowed to trim it himself. He says it itches when it gets too long. I know his history. I know his prehistory too. He paints vivid pictures of the Kerala of his ancestors. He’s never been there. Every time we sit down at the board he gives me another chapter. Most of it is coherent. Sometimes he interrupts himself. A comment on the weather. A remark about a politician. A musing on the incompatibility of Hindus and Christians. He says they’re like two friendly drunkards giving each other a high-five. They mean well. Their hands miss. He says this often. When he finishes his history lesson he starts again at the beginning. The beginning always loops in just before the end. Just before he is brought to this place. Just as he is about to have dinner with his wife and the daughter he can’t marry off.
Sometimes Ricky Chin comes over to watch us at the chess board. Ricky’s father was Chinese, he tells us. The apartheid government didn’t know what to make of Chinese people. Most of them were here because they wanted to be. Not because they were found here. Or imported like Mr. Naicker’s predecessors. They were loaded with business opportunities and tax money. So the Chinese were appointed honorary whites, Ricky says. His chest puffs up. Mr. Naicker snorts and rolls his eyes. “That was the Japanese, and an almighty insult it was too,” he says. “They may as well have made you all honorary opera singers. So what’s the big deal?”
Ricky puts his hands on our table and leans into Mr. Naicker’s face. They’re nose to nose. Ricky’s arms are hairless. The muscles are stringy and hard under the skin. I see a vein throbbing purple in the crook of his elbow.
“The big deal,” says Ricky. He speaks slowly and quietly and his voice rasps. “The big deal is that he was never a coolie like you.” Ricky walks off. His legs are stiff. He’s like a pissed-off dog. Johnson steps forward. He is one of the nurses. He looks like an American football player or a movie star. His head is shaven. Shiny as a shoe. When he clenches his teeth you can see the muscles in his jaw. Johnson is from Nigeria. He has a great rich Nigerian voice with a great rich Nigerian accent. They say he was some kind of doctor in Lagos. They say he models in his spare time. His medical degree doesn’t mean anything over here. I don’t know why. Here, he’s just a nurse. Ricky Chin shouts once, loudly. He flails an arm about and he stamps a foot. He bangs on his temples with his fists. Then he flops into a chair. Johnson steps back again. Mr. Naicker’s hand is shaking. He puts his bishop into the path of my knight. He has black rings under his eyes. They look blacker than usual. His bishop is unprotected. He shrugs and shakes his head as if to dislodge Ricky’s words from his ears. I take his bishop.
The windows have
The windows have been cleaned. There’s nothing to help me focus on the pane. I look down at the jungle. Her feet are there. Right under my nose. The shoes are shiny and have openings at the front. A toe and a half sticks out of each shoe. The nails are the same colour as her walls. I wonder if she did that on purpose.
“Let’s start again, Nathan. Let’s pretend we’re meeting for the first time, shall we?” From where I’m not looking I see her stick out a hand. Her voice changes. She sounds like Sonia trying to sell ad space to a client. “Hello. I’m Doctor Aphrodite Petrakis. Please call me Aphrodite. It’s very nice to meet you.”
The hand wavers. It’s blurry. I can see it where the jungle disappears at the edge of my eyes. She speaks again in her salesperson voice. “Oh my goodness—haven’t we met somewhere before? You look so familiar.”
How old does she think I am?
The hand drops. The feet turn and march off. I can hear them as if the rug and the carpet weren’t there. The high heels making sharp, angry clicks. At the desk they turn again. Like choreography or a marching manoeuvre. Hup two three—hup. A click click click that isn’t there.
She leans back on the desk. She turns and picks up the photograph. She flutters it like a fan. Holds it out to me with both hands. “Do you want to tell me about this yet?” The sales voice is gone. She drops a hand. There’s a mug on her desk. She turns again and picks it up and sips from it. If that were my mug it would be full of whisky. I won’t tell her anything. She knows it all already. The coyness, the extraction game. It makes me want to grab her by the ears and break her head open against the corner of her desk and distribute its contents across the jungle of her carpet. I try to move. The drugs pin me to the dead cow. It moans.
She puts the photograph down, picks up another. “How about this one?” she says. I look up. I can’t help myself. My sister. Her thick hair in a pudding haircut. The bangs an inch deep at least. It’s my photograph of Isabel, from my wall. In my flat. Nobody nobody nobody goes into my flat. The possessive is easy enough to understand. Should be even easier if you have a degree. My flat. My photographs. My photographs. My flat. Mine mine mine. I look from the photograph to Doctor Petrakis. I will punish her. I will stare at her until something of hers falls out of her. Falls out of her eyes or her face or from under her skirt. I will stare at her until her terracotta toenails drop off. Until her fluids squeeze from her pores. I will stare the breath out of her. I will look at her until something of hers is mine. Quid pro quo, you sneaking snooping thieving cunt. You owe me. You take from me, I take back.
Something has docked. Something in the way I’m looking at her, I suppose. Doctor Aphrodite Petrakis teleports herself to the other side of the desk. She reaches under it. I’m not stupid. I know there’s a button there. She steps back to stand behind her chair. Like a lion-tamer. The door opens. Johnson comes in. He looks at the woman. He looks at me. He looks at the woman and raises an eyebrow. Her head makes the tiniest jerk in the direction of the door. Johnson comes up to me. He helps me from the chair. He makes gentle Nigerian noises in my ear.
I paddled until my arms hurt. Then I dug the paddle into the water on one side and the boat slowed and turned. I was far away from the shore and from Isabel by now. She was throwing pine cones into the lake. Hamish chased after them and found them in the water and carried them back between his teeth. He dropped them at her feet. Dead ducks. Isabel’s new camera hung around her neck. Each time, she held the pine cone to her chest before throwing it. Her elbow stayed close to her body when she threw. I’d shown her a million times how to do it. The camera made it worse. I could always throw further than her, camera or no camera. Isabel, I’d say to her, you’re six years older than me and you throw like a girl. I am a girl, she’d reply.
I turned the canoe and paddled for the centre of the lake. Soon I stopped and drifted along for a bit. Then I paddled again and drifted again.
Water had splashed into the canoe and my feet were cold and my shorts were wet. The sun burned my shoulders and my neck. Half of me was cold while the other half was hot.
Soon it felt like I’d reached the middle of the lake. I held the paddle in the water and the canoe slowly came around. Then I paddled on one side to turn it completely. Isabel and Hamish were gone. I could see the black roof of the house and some of the white wall beneath. A curtain hung perfectly still out of a dormer window. The dead quietness made all my movements loud. The paddle banged and scraped against the edge of the canoe. The plinking of the water on the hull was sharp and glassy. The air made breathing sounds in my nostrils. I heard Mom laugh from far away. The sound of it rolled through the trees and across the water. When it reached me it was perfectly clear. Just smaller. Mom’s laugh squeezed into a little box. The sound made the quietness quieter. Then someone put on Paul Simon. “Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes.” It swallowed the quietness. The sun felt hotter. I wondered if it
was Saturday or Sunday.
There is no chess today. Just syringes full of stuff that burns into my muscles. The injections bring on the night. A bright blue moon vibrates through the bars. Shining bright blue in my face. There’s a bed under me. There’s a sheet over me. It’s been turned jellyfish-blue by the moon. The iron under the mattress has been softened by the drugs. Over the grid at the end of the bed there’s a gown without a cord. There’s no air in here.
In the morning chairs are flying
In the morning chairs are flying this way and that. Ricky is being Ricky. He is trying to get out again. Maybe he’s not as smart as he makes out. He should understand by now that the bars will always win against the chairs. Ricky is screaming something about needing a woman. There aren’t any here. Apparently we all have issues with women. We can’t be trusted near them. Old Man Jakes is screaming and wetting himself in the corner. He already has porridge all over his lap. Now it’s pee and porridge. The microcephalic Socks Ferreira is hopping from one foot to the next. He claps his hands. He is shouting encouragement to Ricky. Socks shouldn’t be here. He’s retarded. He’s stupid, not crazy. Maybe none of us are. Socks is exciting some of the others. Mr. Naicker sits at a table with his hands over his ears. His eyes are closed. He’s told me that commotions make his head hurt. The commotion makes my head hurt too. It hurt before. Now it hurts more. The drugs are okay while they last. It’s the wearing off that sucks. I’m slumped on a grey couch that has wooden armrests. The chromed frame supporting the wood is mottled by rust. I wouldn’t be able to move if Ricky threw a chair at me. Johnson and the other heavies arrive. One of them is still chewing his breakfast. He has egg at the corner of his mouth. They hang back as Johnson goes in. You can see that they don’t want to mess with Ricky. He’s a ball of Chinese fire. They’ve never quite believed that Ricky can’t do tae kwon do or judo or something. Johnson isn’t scared. He grabs Ricky from behind. Wraps those gymmed-up Nigerian arms around Ricky’s shoulders and chest. Slides his arms down, twists Ricky’s arms up behind his back. Shoves Ricky forwards until he’s on his knees. Then the helpers move in. Take Ricky away.