Duncan John Reyneke
“Nails in the Sky”
“Duncan Reyneke has effected a vibrant, exciting fusion here. He combines an authentic, funny youth voice with philosophical musings and kick-ass sci-fi. He has you arching a conceptually impressed eyebrow even as you wince at the spleen-bruising ultraviolence.” – Hagen Engler
For Lee.
Mom and Dad.
Mikey, Sharon, and Deon
A.
Every year, millions of people around the world just vanish. Dozens go absent in countries daily. Routine. Widespread. Like the mail. People with families. Politicians. Dancers. Little girls in white dresses, mostly, if the Lifetime Channel is to be believed.
This whole mess began with the disappearances, I guess. Except, well, they’ve been happening for longer than any of us have even been around, so who even knows when it really began. I don’t know. It seems strange to talk about that time now, and what went down. The people who went away... Though, I suppose these kinds of unspoken things happen all the time.
And yeah, look, I know numbers aren’t the best way to talk about it. Missing people. Dozens of hundreds, every minute. It sounds like a news reporter telling you fifty thousand kilolitres of BP’s finest got spilled off the coast of Tanzania overnight. Or Sally Struthers, eyes and cheeks marinated in tears, telling you about Ethiopia, or Eritrea, or a History Channel retrospective on Dachau. Who really gives a rat’s ass? Tragedy isn’t a real number at the levels on which these people talk; it’s a concept. And when you sift through six to eight hours of CNN and C-Span and Al Jazeera a day like I used to, well, it’s a concept that doesn’t seem to stick much anymore.
It’s the clichéd movie villains who talk about things in terms of millions and billions. I think that has a lot to do with it. We ingest concepts like that as part of our entertainment regime. Every second Bond maniac with a Mauser and a bad accent tells his assistant how they’ll be holding the United Nations hostage for billions of unmarked US greenbacks. It’s just static.
We don’t see faces attached to astronomical numbers anymore, whether it’s people or poached rhinos. To your run-of-the-mill Western teen, Rwandans dead in the genocide is a sad idea, incredibly compact and easy to stash far away in the recesses of their minds as the credits rolled on Don Cheadle’s face.
If that sounds needlessly bitter and overly cynical, let’s not be too specific—their parents probably suck too.
Okay. Let me try again. More people than you’ll ever meet in your life go missing every day—no, see, that’s no good either. I’m not a public service announcement; you’re not an audience of idiots. That’s not what this is about. If you want shock and awe about traffic rings and Mugabe’s burlap sack squads, buy tickets to a U2 concert and ask Bono. These Hollywood charity chasers, they don’t care how much they dilute these problems with their BS. And I don’t know about you, but just seeing Oprah itemise her new favourite causes makes me want to throw my TV out the window and drink Jik.
Fine. Here it is. There’s a lot to watch out for in the world. Seriously, so much, and it’s not just for your own benefit, but your friends, family, and guy- and girlfriends. It’s dangerous out there, and more often than not, we don’t even know why. It’s not all bad, obviously—there are camps, book signings, hot cocoa on a Sunday in a church steeple someplace where it’s snowing. Some of it’s actually really nice, from what I’ve heard, but things like violence, addiction, money and bad decisions can snatch people away from you pretty quickly.
God, I feel so bad about everything that happened to everyone, you don’t even know.
But, like I’ve said, you’re not an idiot. You know. You plan for these things. Make provisions. You look after your own, as far as you can, but there are things for which you can’t plan. Some things in life that, no matter who you are, can cut you off from the people you love in the blink of an eye—things that happened to me, my friends, and my family, without anybody ever really being able to explain why.
Billions of people, missing every year, in countries around the world. A lot of them are found, alive or dead. The majority of them, by leagues, stay disappeared.
This story has ended up going to a lot of places, and what’s happening now I can’t ever explain but for telling it. For the people who’ve gone places from where we can’t fetch you, I’d like to dedicate this, firstly, to you. I wish I could show you the lie behind the illusion.
1. The End: Letting Your Thoughts Wander
Dorine had varicose veins. They were nothing new. She was sitting at the dinner table of her two-bedroom duplex, listening to the radio and waiting for Frank to get back from the shed. Hunched slightly, with her legs half folded underneath her, she looked disapprovingly at the edges of those seaweed veins that peeked out obnoxiously from under her white shorts. Now sixty-nine years old, she must have had this tightly knit blue roadmap creeping up her thighs for half her life. She craned her neck to get a better look. This hot net of electric corpuscles pumping through narrow ravines had burned its route through her legs. It was a complete mess, like some godless city planner had run a hideous highway system across the landscape of her body.
It was always the same. Outside, the last tendrils of the autumn daylight were slowly pulling slowly back through the gaps in the trees. The city rumbled off at a distance, softly, as if calling from across a crevasse. It may as well have been a world away, outside of her house. Nothing new.
She sipped her coffee and scowled at her legs. It was silly. She knew that. They didn’t even hurt much. Well, maybe a little more these past few years. She was getting older, and Dr Snyman had told her to expect some discomfort. The slow aches. Stiffness. Even a little nausea, from time to time. For the most part, though, her legs just felt heavy, like she was wearing lead shorts. She got cramps on cold days. Frank would steal her cucumber sandwiches and run, playfully, for the back door, and she’d strain after him. She still gave chase, but it was harder some days. The pain that crept through early in the morning... She wasn’t really sure yet if she was waking with or because of it yet, but there were more of those kinds of mornings than before.
Virginia, her daughter-in-law, brought the kids over some weekends—little Clark and Alex, her grandchildren. She was happy for that. No leg cramps could stop her teaching them to chicken dance in the living room, or lifting little Clark up in her hands to play airplane.
She pulled a cigarette from her handbag as the radio announcer rambled on about Libya or the fuel price or the Czechs, somewhere off in the background. Lighting up, Dorine glanced at the time: 18:56.
Alex was getting too big to play with. He was turning thirteen in... God, it must be three months from now? A mess of blond streaks and fat little cheeks, he was always a little “outside” of his own age, and quiet, his head in the clouds. So much like his granddad, but such a sweet boy.
He humoured her, and of course his brother Clark, playing whichever games they chose, with embarrassment burning red in his ears. Oh, of course Clark had stuck to Alex like a magnet, following him around wherever he went from the day he could walk more than three steps.
Stretching her hands around the warm mug, Dorine inclined her head towards the radio, half to hear better, half to see out the kitchen window. She repositioned her legs underneath her body as she pushed out her neck then slid softly back into the kitchen chair with a sigh.
She remembered the first time she’d met Dan Fitzgerald out on the university lawns. She had been twenty-two, a first year, and a complete knockout. She’d been approached by this grinning-idiot, master’s student on a Tuesday between lectures, while she stood beating the heat under the jacaranda trees along the path to the university main gates. He just walked up to her, out of nowhere,
like he knew her.
She could tell just by looking at him he was the kind of boy who got around: mussed-up hair; that half-cocked grin; and the flared jeans all the musicians had been flashing since orientation week—some kind of charming academic with more brains than common sense.
Still, out in the sun, with all her classes over for the day, he could have looked worse. “I’ll have to write to the mayor of whatever dorp you walked out of and thank him personally for those.”
God, she still remembered the line he used, after all these years.
“Thank him for what, exactly?” Where she was, standing in the dramatically hemmed denim skirt her mother had sent her for her birthday, it was fairly obvious this boy was talking both to and about her legs.
From her spot by the kitchen table, the tip of Dorine’s cigarette swirled heat and a thin plume of smoke, as she sat, lost in thought. She lowered her smile into her cup, as she took another sip of the cheap, strong instant coffee, and closed her eyes.
She had lost her virginity to Dan that semester, though the details largely escaped her. It had been clandestine and awkward and clumsy. Some torrid encounter on a futon, trying not to wake a roommate or knock over a cheap potted plant. Nothing new. Even the details of the biggest moments in a person’s life went hazy after so many years and, honestly, the actual physical lovemaking of it never left that much of an impression in the first place.
Still, she’d been thrilled at the time. Beaming like an idiot, bouncing all the way back to her res room afterwards then immediately calling her sister in the Transkei. They hadn’t dated after that, Dan and Dorine. Which had been fine with her because, well, why should they have? Real life didn’t always work out the way it did in the movies. Before the year was out, Dorine had met a shy sociology student in line to see Vertigo at the Roxbury theatre. Two years after that, they’d be married.
Dan who?
Dorine got up from the table, the last lukewarm gulp of coffee more a hassle than anything else, stretched her legs and wandered over to the sink with her cup.
“Goddamn veins,” she muttered as she splashed the mug through the dishwater she’d left there earlier. She was aware of her eyes, reflected by the glow of the kitchen lamp, staring back in at her as she peered out into the yawning blackness of her garden.
Her heart skidded, tripped over its own shoes, and just stopped itself from falling over. Something had moved. Out there in the blackness, a shadow had shifted. Black on black, a movement she felt more than saw. She blinked her eyes clear and craned her neck, squinting terrified into the glare of the window pane...Nothing. Not a peep. She clenched her jaw and waited a full five minutes, but nothing came.
Stupid old woman. She knew her eyes had played some sort of trick on her – these new specs! What could she have seen out there? In their garden of all places. Nobody ever bothered them. Why would they? They had nothing for anyone but each other. That’s how they’d kept it, all these years.
Where the hell was Frank, though?
–
Frank Sullivan couldn’t find a goddamned thing in his tool shed. It was dark as a casket. Getting caught after nightfall without a screwdriver when the washing machine started acting up was always the same—forty-five minutes of stumbling around in the dark out back, and taking damn near everything off of the shelves before he could find what he needed. He’d been meaning to change the light bulb in here for ages. Whenever he got done looking something, though, he could barely wait to get back to the house. Like his toast was done on a winter Sunday morning, and he had to rush to get back to his bed.
The damn light had gone out eight months ago.
Life in Grahamstown was slow. It was something he often thought as he bristled through shelves full of plastic containers and packets of screws. This was the kind of place that lent itself to long walks. Slow tracings across the Village Green in the heart-stopping autumn chill, brows heavy with thought, shoulders laden with plaid and scarves. In spite of all the joking about it being a backwater hole, though, this was the kind of town that wore its heart on its sleeve.
He turned a rivet over in the dark and mumbled, “Hrm? You? No, soldering iron,” and resumed his fumbling. The light outside had completely faded during the time he’d been in here. It was all quiet reflection in this place. Lengthy reveries out on the six-by-twelve patch of grass Dorine called a garden in the back of their house, as he raked jacaranda leaves in the evenings. Maybe it was because he was getting older, but there was something about this place. Grahamstown—a cold, simple echo chamber shaped like a town, in which to lose oneself.
His teachers had scolded him as a kid. “Always walking around with his head in the clouds,” they used to say. He’d have loved to disagree, but they were largely on the money with that one. He had spent his childhood, adolescence, and a good portion of his university career with his attention squarely set on the world inside his head. He read a lot, and had fawned over comics as a young boy. He even drew, and he was as likely to drift off in any conversation as he was to contribute to it. It had earned him more than his fair share of lashes at his Joburg military academy. Not to mention on his visits home for the holidays.
Still, he smiled in the dark as he ran his hands over the steel frame of his toolbox. Everything had worked out nicely in the end.
Frank had been an introspective student, opting for philosophy and sociology from day one of his bachelor of arts. It had showed in his studies, as these things did, and, for the first time in his life, it had been a positive factor in his social life. Varsity had been the best-kept secret he’d ever discovered, and the system had been tilted entirely in his favour. University was the one place he’d found where being an academic drew people to him. It had taken him a week to start connecting with people he would grow to love—friends he still had to this day. A few months to get drafted into the debating, arbour, water polo, and free speech societies.
Philosophy had never been his first love. He’d later claimed a major in English lit for that. He had worshipped his lecturers, and become an instant fixture in the passageways of the English department. It was all a beautiful obsession for him. Any module. All of them, it didn’t matter. From The Picture of Dorian Gray to Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, published just a decade before, English was an altar at which to lay down his thoughts. Still, like other BA students from his year, he hadn’t had a clue what he wanted to do with all of the credits he was accumulating. And, like all of them, Frank also realised early on that he would figure it out sometime down the line.
For Frank, his degree was all about the chase, the pursuit, and the questioning of it all. “What was F Scott Fitzgerald trying to say about the nature of love?” was a good enough topic for a first-year paper on The Great Gatsby, but by no means was it a good enough place to stop. The research had a lot to do with it—solid academia, developing arguments from the glorious idea fodder of the library issuings of brilliant academics. How many years lay between Daisy Buchanan’s doe-eyed whimsy and Myrtle Wilson’s wretched subservience, under the thumb of the oppressive Tom? How was Jay’s experience of the world reaching out to him from beyond the page? How could Frank apply it, take the most beautiful parts of this narrative, and internalise them?
Where Frank went with his ideas, once the paper was in his own hands, had always been two steps ahead of the question. He had laid down his writing voice at the steps of the department, and his lecturers had encouraged him from an early stage. He had academia in his veins, and he revelled in it.
Dorine helped anchor him. She always had. That first night, their chittering friends standing in front of them in line for the movie, he could feel her presence on him like a spot of light in the dark. She had distracted him, to the point of helplessness, and yet he’d felt calm around her from the minute they met. The lights of the then-new Roxbury theatre had made everyone appear as if they were arriving for a photo shoot. Dorine looked otherworldly.
“Hi, Frank. It’s nice to
meet you. I hope you like James Stewart.”
Frank had no idea who James Stewart was. He doubted if anyone there did. In a student city such as Grahamstown, tossing around the names of obscure actors, directors or producers was as much a part of any trip out as tipping a waiter. It didn’t mean anything, and the best course of action was to nod and agree.
“I never go to the theatre without him,” he replied.
He’d always regretted not taking her hand first that night, but she hadn’t minded. She had latched onto his on the way through the doors, a sudden cherished weight on his arm. Forward and heart stopping. It felt as if she’d never let go of it since.
He stopped, moved a claw hammer and some pliers around in his pitch-dark shed, then grabbed hold of the familiar grooves of his Phillips-head screwdriver and smiled.
He put the toolbox back on the shelf and threw the screwdriver into his back pocket. As he moved between shelves towards the door, he thought about his grandson’s upcoming birthday. He’d asked for a guitar. Frank could think of nothing better for young Alex than the old Gibson Hummingbird he had tucked in the back of the attic. The thing was a relic, and so beaten up, but with a little spit and polish it was going to be perfect.
He stopped short at the door, bending down to pick up a slip of white cardboard off of the mat there, illuminated by the thin stream of light coming in from the gap under the wood. He pushed the door open to let some light in, smiling down at the photo as he recognised what it was—an old picture of him in the military, hoisting his rifle up to his shoulder in a training field, somewhere in Rhodesia. It must have fallen out of one of the boxes they kept in the rafters in here.
He looked so young, like a different person. God, he still had that old beret of his. Frank took a deep breath, felt a chill run through him, and shoved the photo into his shirt pocket. He smiled. Wait ’til he showed this old thing to Dorine—
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