“There’s this character, Norm, who worked as the head of the studio before Spielberg bought it. Norm’s a good guy—hard working, talented. Smart as hell, but he’s never cranked out a winning or notable production on any level. Nothing of significance to his name, at all, man, and Spielberg, the villain that he is, he knows it. Offers him a job as his assistant, knowing Norm’s close on forty and not likely to find work anywhere now that his precious studio’s in the tank. Norm has to take it.
“The next year and a half becomes this hellish montage of late nights and shit work for Norm. His boss keeps him busy running between the studio and three other film houses. Back and forth, carrying messages, lugging film. Shit work, you know. Never gives him a second to breathe. Keeps his pay low and his options limited, on some huge power trip like he’s God.”
Clark watched his neighbours, the Russells, exiting through the front doors, talking under their breath and looking at his mother’s balcony as noise spilled out into the street from their house. They never even noticed the figures perched on the roof. Alex seemed like he barely noticed any of them either.
“Eventually, though, this cat, Norm, he just snaps, under all the pressure, right? And with good reason—by now, man, Spielberg’s got him running to frat houses to pick up coke for him and his board-members, cleaning hooker spittle off of his pillow cases. It’s gotten ridiculous. Anyway, Norm loses it. Creates this elaborate scheme where Spielberg will have to come in to the office late at night, right? The lights are out when he arrives—it’s all office furniture and evil lighting, and Spielberg gets locked inside.”
A hoot from downstairs. The old Nissan they’d seen a thousand times these past few years pulled up out front.
“It’s Tony.”
“Yeah, well, that means this’ll be over soon. Listen, though. So Norm confronts Spielberg in his office, spouting all sorts of non-sequiturs. Tweaked stuff about taking over the world through Cinemax, creating the new international Creole. Giant magnets that suck people down by the coins in their wallets. He jumps him and breaks his phone. Starts speaking in a monologue, but...also kind of a dialogue. Like he’s two different people, while Spielberg tries locked door after locked door, trying to escape.”
“Mmhmm”.
“Norm’s going on, like, ‘Are you sure about this, Brain?’ ‘It’s a necessary evil, Pinkie.’ ‘How is this going to help us take over the world?”
“Oh God.”
“Exactly! This dude, he becomes the twisted precursor for Stephen-PH Spielberg’s great breakthrough into cartoons. Except he’s going to murder his creator before he even writes the damn thing. It’s complete subversion, man. Both Pinkie, and the Brain, not trying to take over the world, but to stop themselves. Totally Nietzschen.”
Alex breathed a berg wind deep into his lungs—the slow warm cancer of the PE wind make-up, creating afternoons that stretched into ridiculousness with every hot, musty exhalation.
His brother mumbled, “You’re totally Nietzchen,” but his response was just a grunt.
“So, it sounds like they’re talking in there,” Clark continued.
“They’re always talking. She always has so much to say.”
“Says the college graduate who actually just used the word Neitzschen in a conversation about cartoon characters.”
“Yeah, well.”
The pigeon that had been eating out of the gutter nearby since the two of them climbed out here stopped rummaging for just long enough to cock its head towards the sun, before taking off in a flurry of feathers. From their apartment downstairs, with the open balcony door, a pair of voices rose rapidly in volume from resolution to argument to name-calling, before softening out into a muffle, painful and quiet.
“So what happens to Spielberg?” asked Clark.
Alex pushed himself up onto his feet and put out his hand for his brother to take footing with. “Who cares, man? Some people just get what’s coming to them...”
–
Julie and Ruthie were both leaning over the railing by this stage, watching as uniformed men in the parking alcove below escorted the man from the traffic into their blue-and-white bakkie. Julie hunched over, half trying to get at the view she’d chastised Ruth for earlier, half from laughter, as she squeaked out short bursts of incredulous words to the woman next to her on the balcony: “And when they got through the doors...at this poor girl’s house...house party, they...he was honestly using her toothbrush?” She squealed with glee, as Ruth nodded solemnly, a small smile holding the corners of her mouth hostage.
“At her own house party?” Julie continued, breathing deeply, as if she had just run a race, or spent all afternoon diving naked over car bonnets in the summer sun. “Did they even know them? They just showed up there, how could anybody have possibly known who they were?”
“I’m telling you. He and Crink ran literally all the way home. It wasn’t until the next morning that your boyfriend even noticed he’d dislocated his shoulder.”
“All right,” said Julie, stepping back from the balcony and heading back to the table, wiping her eyes as she walked, “so the love of my life is in league with the village idiot.” She drained her glass and checked her watch. “C’mon, I’ve got to get to the Oppi Press offices before deadline tomorrow, and our plane leaves in forty.”
The two young women grabbed their jackets and made for the door. Ruth tugged a loose thread on her handbag as they exited into the stifling February heat, and Jules hailed a cab.
--
For some reason, Ruth thought Julie was giving her funny looks on the plane ride home. She couldn’t escape the feeling of her eyes on her, though she never caught her in the act.
–
“All I’m saying is, you know, after five years of them fucking with the rest of us through, it’s just...”
From the back seat of the car, Clark looked to Alex for confirmation that his discomfort at another one of Tony’s diatribes was justified. There was no speaking over their mom’s sometimes-live-in-when-the-mood-took-him boyfriend to make any kind of point, but he caught his brother’s eye as this moustached man at the wheel steered his words somewhere stupid and ignorant. “...weird how everybody’s always all touchy about the whole Hiroshima thing. I mean, I hate to be ‘that guy’, but can you honestly tell me they didn’t start it? Just that: just tell me they honestly didn’t start it and I’ll be quiet.”
Alex acknowledged his discomfort with a wry smile, as the car pulled up slowly at a red robot in Cape Road. Gear down, brakes, with windows up in the late-afternoon heat. There was an unexpected beat, a gap in the word vomit from the front seat.
“You’re a prince, Tony.”
A moment’s hesitation came from the front seat, before Tony ventured, “Thanks, champ, but what I w—”
“I mean,” Alex continued, “it’s not something you should necessarily thank me for, man. I wouldn’t jump the gun on that. Some of history’s worst people were princes, you know that?”
“Alex, just—”
“Hold on, Ma, I think he’s going to like this,” Alex said, desperate to subvert his mother’s loyalty-fuelled diversion tactics.
“Yes, but it’s your last day here, Alex. We’re on our way to the bus stop. Could you just n—”
“Vlad the Third was prince of Wallachia, Tony. You ever hear of him?”
“Oh Christ, he’s talking about Vlad the Third again.”
“Better than talking about why dropping the bomb was a good idea, Mom.”
Virginia glared at Clark, lit up a cigarette, and rolled down her window.
“Estimates of his victims range from forty to a hundred thousand people. In the space of one lifespan, buddy. Poof. And he was a mean son-of-a-bitch too. All disembowelments and dismemberments and whatnot. Conservative numbers are something like forty thousand. Took them on by hand, as well. Dude would grapple his victims down onto pikes to impale them. Slowly, and with a huge, blood-smeared struggle. Thousands at a turn, and he oversaw t
he processes himself. His subjects thought he was possessed, Tony. Can you imagine? A devil.”
Green light, and the car lurched forward down the endless, sunny rail of Cape Road. Alex sat back as Virginia flicked her cigarette on the windowpane.
Tony scowled at the traffic in front of him. “What’s your point, son?”
Clark, who was used to seeing Alex rush in from other rooms with the express purpose of talking smack at his mom’s Slip ‘n Douche boyfriend was, quite simply, shocked, the next moment, when Alex sat back and said, “Just making conversation, Tony.”
–
“Think she’ll cry after the bus pulls away?”
“Dude, she’s crying now.”
As Alex stood up from stuffing his soft-cover suitcase into the undercarriage, he could see his mother in the reflection of the bus mirror, fixing her mascara in the rear view, looking furtively over her dashboard for a son she didn’t know was already watching her from an impossible angle. He took in a deep breath, and watched the reflection for a few seconds longer as Tony reached over from behind the steering wheel and dragged the back of his stubby mechanic’s finger across Virginia’s cheek. She was smiling.
“Why are you smiling like that?”
“What?” Alex looked over to Clark as the old men and droopy-shouldered girlfriends and college students started filing onto the bus.
“Just now. You were having some totally lame Touched By An Angel moment with yourself, you freak.”
“I’m planning out in my head how I’m going to propose to you.”
The two approached the open bus door, shuffling in the shadow of a sprinting Greyhound logo.
“Okay, seriously, what the fuck, dude?”
“Problem, friend?”
“Listen, I know you love playing confrontation Zen, but you let some gutter trash, who was clearly begging for your verbal one-two punch, get away with saying out loud that Hiroshima ‘wasn’t all that bad’.”
Alex scratched his head and smiled, shrugging as the last people around him climbed on. “Oh that.”
Clark puffed out his cheeks and scrunched up his eyes. “Yeah, that. Thoughts? Comments? Anything?”
The bus driver signalled Alex silently from behind his steering wheel, as the last passenger ahead of him climbed on. “I’ve got to get on now, dude.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve got to get back to Mom and her reject flavour of the month.”
Alex hugged his brother and climbed up onto the step of the bus.
“Will you at least tell me what your point actually was? You know I just want to hear it. Like, for real.”
Alex turned to him as the bus driver tapped a wing-tipped foot behind the steering column. “You want me to drop an insight, right here as the bus is about to pull off? Seconds before the doors close? Do you know how ridiculous you’re asking me to be?”
“You’ve done worse.”
Alex smiled and dropped his bag on the step as the bus driver threw up his hands behind the wheel. “Fine, you Muppet. The point I could have made in that car just then was this: on the best day there is, good men will still find ways to do stupid and harmful things. Sometimes it’s putting down the dumb-shit significant other of your mom who, for whatever reason, loves him. Sometimes, it’s making a call that kills millions of people. Nobody’s beyond that, not Tony, not a prince, and sure as shit not you and me.”
“Well, that was uplifting. Thanks for that. See you next vac.”
“Listen to the rest, Pint-Sized. So, if everybody’s capable of being awful, what is the point of anything?”
“Jy!” the bus driver said with a pronounced aggression that belied his ironed pleats and starched collar, “Ons moet hierdie show oppie road sit, boeta! Kom nou!”
Alex glanced over and had to catch his breath a second. From the front seat of the bus, staring over at him, annoyed and frowning, was his imaginary friend Frank. “We’ve got to get a move on, meneer!” he said, smiling at him knowingly from his seat, as Alex blinked, refocused and discovered the same complete stranger as before behind the wheel now, his hallucination gone.
He rubbed his eyes, and reassured the man with an extended hand that this would only take a minute longer. What the hell had he just seen?
He looked over at his mother in the car one more time then took a deep breath. He reached into his jacket pocket then handed Clark a hard piece of plastic affixed to a pin. “The point is to realise the importance of what you have.”
Clark opened his hand, unfurling fingers sweatier than when he’d started this conversation. In his palm was an aviator’s pin. Gold wings jutting out from circle and star centre, framed in black. He raised his eyebrow at Alex. “You are the lamest person I know.”
“They hand those out to the kids of people who fly first class on SAA. Get it? Not business, not economy. We never get shit like that, man. You and I? It’s not a part of the package. First class, as in ‘have actual business being in the sky, bringing the middle-class along for the ride’. Midway through the flight, these little people get given symbols of who they are, of what about them is better than everyone else, like some ceremony. It’s a bond we don’t even get offered. Affirmation. It’s a symbol of a broken system, though.”
Clark tossed it up lightly in his hands as his brother smiled from the bus steps.
“Just plastic and symbolism,” said Alex.
“So what do you want me to do with it?”
“Keep it forever, obviously.”
The bus doors shut as Alex picked up his satchel and went to find his seat. He mimed a heart shape out the window at his brother, who mimed the shape back.
–
Alex got back to his apartment in Grahamstown later that afternoon. Julie and Ruth arrived that evening, bussing in from Port Elizabeth airport. The week that followed did so unnaturally quickly, bringing with it the usual array of first-semester administrative shadows. Those undefined and overlooked facets of living crept in with their velvet bandoliers of tasks and ritual. Things that were ultimately forgotten in favour of things far more important, things which ate the minutes, hours, afternoons, and months of their lives. An inescapable poetic device, giving teeth to gears so loud they blocked out the rumblings of the Earth itself.
Before they knew it, in so very little time, third year was in full swing.
5. A Change of Pace, and a Place for Everything
Crink’s car was a piece of shit. His dad, Topher, had gotten him the old Mazda 323 as a high-school-graduation-gift-slash-passive-aggressive-shot-at-his-single-call-centre-mom manoeuvre, following his impromptu marriage to a legal clerk from Lithuania. Alex had grown up so close to this hazard of a family, he’d seen all of this unfold as if he was their son. After years of second-hand, busted-clock radios and last-minute birthday cards scribbled on the backs of Pofadder bar coasters, it didn’t surprise anybody when Topher rolled up in that yellow-and-orange tin bucket the day before first semester. The car was, without a word of a lie, so beat up, Crink could only start it by brushing exposed wire ends against each other, as if he were hotwiring it. It was almost not even worth the trouble.
As he idled outside Alex’s colonial-era digs, Crink lay on his back on the bonnet, staring up at a plume of blue exhaust smoke curling up into the crisp morning air and listening to RMR’s morning talk segment chittering from the car radio.
“Despite popular opinion, I do have classes to attend today, friend,” he called out to the air above him. Alex was fumbling with his keys at the door while Crink turned his head and chuckled. “Every day, with this guy. You know, you’re going to have to learn how to wake up on time in the mornings at some point in your life.”
Alex squinted in the morning sun, and shambled down the walkway to where the sixteen hundred Mazda coughed and spluttered by the pavement. “You know my neighbours all think we’re drug dealers when you pick me up in Themba, dude.”
“Sweet, it only took three years, but I’m finally cultivating a public image my mom can
be ashamed of.”
They cruised down Beaufort Street, as much as any vehicle with a hole in the exhaust and a radiator that couldn’t work for longer than thirty minutes at a time could really ever cruise. Alex rifled through a satchel of dog-eared lecture plans and course outlines.
“Dude,” Crink said, with that manic smile he wore like a clown mask at this time of the morning, “registration was yesterday, and your notes already look like Martha Stewart had a seizure and tried to make potpourri out of her back taxes. I’ll bet you can’t find half your course outlines in that mess.”
“Oh, and where are your notes, Chuckles Cranston?”
“Well played, I left them all at home. Look. We’re going to have to park outside Eden Grove and walk the rest of the way to anthro.”
“Dude, I keep telling you to turn this beast off when you get to my place.”
“But, I like the sound of Sinethemba’s voice on the radio when he tries to take calls from girls asking about the morning-after pill.”
Alex laughed quietly to himself from the passenger seat as Crink rounded the corner outside Canterbury House without stopping.
“You know these things about me, Alex. Why do you want to change me?”
“We’re going to be so late.”
–
Eden Grove was the centre for academic and administrative activity at Rhodes University. Positioned in the southernmost quadrant of the campus, it was the location of the student affairs office. A week ahead of term, it was a buzzing hub of late registrations and last-minute course changes. Its polished floors clicked and echoed during term time with the sound of government-loan students running back and forth to the loan office. It featured a comprehensive short-loan library, a state-of-the-art computer room, and two lecture halls.
Right then, it was also as far away, on-campus, as Alex van der Haar could be from his anthropology lecture.
“I hate you, Cranston.”
They took the fire escape steps that led around the side of the building two at a time, the pair of them ducking under the rear hanging staircase and rounding the corner outside the computer lab.
Nails in the Sky Page 6