“Isn’t it your scientific community pushing the idea that ‘not being sure’ is the most honest and open-minded you can be?”
“You might be taking the argument little far away from home there, Van der Haar.” Sheila’s eyes took on a cold element as she said this, piercing and serious.
Alex shivered slightly in the cold as he shot back, “Yeah, like atheists never do that.”
“Never said I was an atheist,” said Sheila.
“What are you?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
He stammered for just a second at the question. Had she read his mind? She was, for all of her words and the short time they’d known each other, just an outline to him at present. What was the colour on this woman? She seemed familiar, or like she knew something he didn’t. A certain manner to her that screamed...
“You’re an idealist,” he said, tilting his head towards her and watching the glow from his cigarette spread over his own nose as he dragged on it. “I’m right, aren’t I? ‘We create reality’—that whole schtick?”
Sheila tipped an imaginary hat to the man. “At your service.”
“Oh that’s so rad, and my agnosticism is being called out by someone who believes we all live in a storybook world.”
Sheila scrunched up her nose at him. “That’s some pretty drastic boiling down of my point of view, don’t you think?”
“Well, why don’t you enlighten me?”
“I will when you tell me where your friend went.”
Alex blinked, glancing largely around himself, his mouth dropping into an O that was half shock, half amusement. Ruth had bailed while they were talking. “Did she leave? Were we not...talking to her?”
“What am I, her girlfriend? How should I know?”
Alex smiled. “I’m going to have some explaining to do tomorrow.”
Sheila shrugged, and the pair started walking down Prince Alfred Street. “Well,” she began as they stepped around root-cracked paving and dustbins, “ultimately, our reality is something we construct mentally, and there is no anything except for what we perceive. We shape everything. Society. Ourselves. Even the things we can touch and see.”
“Are you being serious?”
“Doesn’t change the world as we live in it, though. Can’t live as if this secret information is going to change my life. I don’t get to make those kinds of calls.”
Alex shook his head and bounced onto the pavement parallel to them while they walked. “I reject that idea.”
“Care to weigh in on why?” she lilted, taking to the ruined, old pavement next to him.
“Well, it’s conceited, for starters. Imagining that we’re the only reason there is a reality at all. You can’t honestly believe there’s nothing in the background of our lives. That when we go to sleep or turn our backs, there’s just, what? Nothing?”
“Sure I can. I’m doing it right now, and it feels sexy.”
“Sexy like a bad joke.”
Sheila frowned. “Now look who’s taking all the fun out of the introduction experience. Look, Alex, just because you’re not sure about the important things in life doesn’t mean the rest of us haven’t given some thought.”
They stopped, or rather Alex stopped and anchored her to the conversation, whipping her around to stop across from him and wait, exasperated and annoyed. “I’m sorry, that was rude.”
“You’re forgiven.”
“I don’t believe you actually believe that horse shit, though.” He smirked.
Sheila laughed, sudden and crackling in the crisp night air, flicking her half-burned cigarette as they walked side by side. “Look, my life philosophy kind of scrapes the barrel, if I’m being honest,” she admitted, shrugging.
God, she actually shrugged. Some people, Alex thought, there was just no explaining them.
“It changes. I feel like the wheel could turn at any minute some days.”
They started walking again, as Alex responded, “So you’re, what, working your way up to real truth?”
“I do what I can.”
“All right, then what do you think is a good substitute for faith?”
“You don’t want to know,” she said as they arrived at the intersection of Prince Alfred and Somerset, and she stopped, forcing him to stop as well this time.
His smile felt like fish hooks in his cheeks as he turned to her. “No, I don’t. I ask questions for no reason, hoping the people I ask will dismiss them instantly. It’s why I came to university. There has to be something, though, right? For the big-ticket punch? If not faith, then what?”
Sheila exhaled, her cigarette burned nearly to its end. She looked up at him. A group of students were marching by over the street, arm in arm, and singing drunkenly to the clouds as the two of them stood there on the corner. “Oblivion.”
Alex was about to respond, mid-eyeroll, as Julie rounded the corner and threw her arms around his shoulders, squealing. “Lover! I’ve found you!”
Alex let out a grunt as he crouched down, supporting his drunk girlfriend. “Baby.” He smiled over his shoulder as he braced with his knees. “Where’ve you been all my life?”
“I went to Carrie’s...‘something’-party, up behind CPU, gorgeous. But I left, because, because I needed to find you!”
Alex laughed. “And here I am.”
“And here you—” Julie burped. “I may have had peach schnapps. Who’s your friend?”
“This is Sheila... I didn’t get your last name, actually?”
“It’s Kingston.”
Alex smiled and adjusted Jules on his back. “Well, Sheila Kingston, this is Julie Franko.”
“A pleasure,” Sheila said.
“Baby, can you go put me down somewhere bedlike please?”
Alex shifted his weight under the overly limb-heavy girl and smiled at Sheila. “Until next time, Kingston.”
“I’ll be waiting,” she replied.
7. Ex Unitate Vires
Charles Daedalus was a violent man. A sinewy ball of brown, tanned, thin skin and snarling aggression—average height, five-foot-six. Baggy sleeves and folded hems, the brush scratch of old tattoos bleeding their colours around his ankles and wrists, up and across his sun-dried visage.
He looked like a leather praying mantis. He slapped his metal tray down onto the cafeteria countertop and forced a harsh smile at the woman behind the food warmers. “Simba chips, Wicks, and a Coke, thanks,” he murmured, tapping the beaten-up metal bars separating them with an absent-minded finger.
He was thirty-eight, in good shape, and with a youthful-enough appearance, in a country where the young were left out to dry and crack in the harsh light of day. He had old eyes, as the saying went, like burnished portholes into an expanding void.
The heavyset woman reached an unimpressed ladle full of porridge across the counter and slopped a gleaming bowl’s worth onto the tray. The men in line behind him stood restlessly, shuffling, with no one advancing.
From where he stood staring casually out the window, Daedalus spoke calmly to the old woman, his smile unwavering. “Did you ever think it would come to this?”
“Meneer,” she mumbled, “I haven’t got the time.”
Chuck laughed under his breath. “No time...”
“Meneer, please move on. There are people behind you.”
His laughter grew, doubling him over suddenly in the line as the lunch lady looked nervously from him to the guard standing by the wall. He tightened the grip on his daystick in anticipation of a problem as she sighed and looked back at the tattooed man, cackling in spite of her.
“Meneer...”
“Angie.” Chuck’s voice came out low, without any laughter, as he looked up from his tray. The air snapped cruelly around his next words, as Angie the lunchlady caught her breath. “We’ve got all the time in the world.”
Everything rushed forward in a push of air and energy. Then, as quickly as it had started, everything stopped. The air cooled, and the room resumed an
d the buzzing stopped, like nothing ever happened.
Two minutes later, Chuck stepped away from the counter, his tray out in front of him, back into the St Albans prison cafeteria. He strolled, unbothered, past the same guards who had been glaring him down minutes prior. Walking casually past lines of men handcuffed at the feet, spooning tapioca, chicken breasts, gravy and bobotie into their mouths, Chuck took his seat and smiled.
Sally, the lunchlady, had really done a great job with the porridge today.
–
“It just...evaporates?”
“Like water off a Klerksdorp pavement in summer, bro.”
Clark was on the phone to his brother as he listlessly weaved a shopping cart between the payday Pick n Pay shoppers getting their supplies before the new month settled in. His mom was, as always, lost in the chaos five people ahead, looking frustratedly back with arms full of store-brand cereal, trying to find his face in the crowd. He was describing her latest business venture.
“And make-up is something that should evaporate? Is that a thing now?”
“She says that a woman’s biggest annoyance in her day is having to come home after work and take off her make-up. This shit allegedly does the job for you, over the course of the day. It just evaporates, and by the next morning it’s gone.”
“That...sounds like bullshit. And she’s selling this stuff now?”
“Makin’ her way in the world, man.”
“All right, man, well I’ve got to get missioning.”
“Yeah, me too—Mom’s about to bust a squeaker in the rice section if I don’t get this trolley over there pronto. Oh, listen, before I go, there was something I wanted to tell you.”
“If you’re about to propose, I need to find a seat, and all the deck furniture here is wet.”
Clark grimaced as he wheeled his cart away from a Portuguese man’s jams and preserves. “You should be so lucky. No, something weird happened with Cynth last week.”
“Weird how?”
“Well, with Mom busy with this...whatever it is, I’ve been taking Cynth to her art classes down at the Donkin. So I picked her up Thursday, same as usual, and, Mrs Berrington asks me to stick around and have a look at something she drew.”
Alex frowned and prayed it wasn’t a picture of her family with cartoon blood coming out of their eyes. “And?” he said quietly.
“Well, the assignment was for the kids to draw what they wanted to be when they grew up. Berrington says Cynth kept mostly to herself for the whole week and refused to show anyone her picture until it was done. She even turned the easel towards the wall.”
“That beautiful little girl. So...what was the damage? Something violent or something abstract?”
“Well, that’s the thing. She showed me the thing, and it’s basically just this A-three canvas covered in black oil paint, with a massive blue orb.”
“Like a circle? Why a circle?”
“It was just these blue lines in black space, man. A sphere, I don’t know. It’s...really precise, man. Intricate, with, well I guess it was these tiny tracks of white symbols running through them.”
“Symbols...”
“No, seriously. Nonsense symbols. Really precise. Like she’d traced it all. Shading, spacing, and these little symbols, in...just a big orb. It was like this field of hundreds of little blue letters and information. It made no sense.”
“Sounds...impressive? Is it awesome? You sound worried.”
“More like ominous. She was asking me if there were any problems at home.”
“Figures. Did you ask Cynthia about it?”
Clark’s shoulders slumped a little as he came around a chicane of shoppers to find his mom doubling back to find him, mere metres away. “Yeah, I’ve gotta go, but basically, Cynth says, get this, that she just let the paints go and that’s what came out. Mom loves it, but you know how she is.”
“Ostrich syndrome.”
“Head in the sand. This girl drew a flawless still life in her first week in that class, now she’s drawing this stuff. Mom wants to stick it up in the living room.”
“My sister, the abstract flake case. I can’t wait for her next work.”
“Yeah, you and the school guidance counsellor, I’ll bet. Cool man, well, I’ve gotta chuck.”
“All right, dude, send my love to Mom. I’ll catch you later, though. We need to start making plans for fest.”
–
“Excuse me.”
A few days later, as Irwin Walker was leaving the Eden Blue lecture hall, Alex came up from behind him. “Excuse me... Professor Walker?”
“Mr Van der Haar. How can I help you today?”
Alex paused for a second, surprised this man he didn’t know recognised his voice so well. He pressed on, shaking it off. “I just wanted to apologise for what happened during your lecture on Monday. I was being disrespectful.”
“You know my policy on chatters. Why would you think, after three years, I would be any less ready to enforce it?”
“I don’t know sir, I must not have been thinking.”
“Well, come with a better-prepared thought process next time and I’m sure we’ll get along just fine.”
“I will, professor.”
“Was there anything else?”
Alex wet his lips as they took the front foyer staircase together. “Yes. I just...well, I was hoping for some clarification on this term’s lecture schedule. I must have got the wrong info during registration, and nobody seems to be able to help me. Do you know when Prof De Villiers is expected back?”
“Depends on which department he’s in, I’d suppose. I don’t have such a tight grip on the administrative side of things, what with me being a lecturer. Mr Van der Haar, I get the impression you’re purposefully wasting my time.”
Alex shook his head as they approached Walker’s car near the front entrance, circling around to the passenger side in order to keep talking. “No, no, I’m just... Well, see, I’m a little confused. I was under the impression Professor De Villiers would be taking us this term.”
“For this class? Son, what on earth are you talking about?”
Walker unlocked the driver door then paused. “Wait a second. ‘De Villiers’ was the name of that character you used so laboriously in last semester’s paper, wasn’t it? The hypothetical history teacher or some such thing?”
“Paper?”
“Yes, yes I remember it quite clearly now. You kept trying to use the example of one transient man existing throughout time to...to represent some kind of anchor to the human spirit? Is that what this is about? Look, I appreciate your perseverance, and honestly, I think it would make for some fine science fiction, but the reason I gave you that failing grade...”
“What failing grade? What are y—”
“Yes, the forty-two percent for your paper ‘The Face of History is Man’, was because, while this is a class of theories and analyses, it is still a university course, and, as such, is not open to any post-modern, self-aware, formless papers its students feel like writing. Especially if they choose not to reference a single source over the course of two thousand five hundred words.”
Walker climbed into the driver’s seat as Alex stammered near the passenger handle. “Sir, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Well, regardless, I have to get going, and it seems I don’t have any answers you’ll be able to benefit from regarding your elusive Professor De Villiers. It would seem he’s still not producing the insights you’d hoped for.”
8. The Dread Flat Hum of Feet in Motion
A month and a half later, it was Alex’s birthday. In a hitherto-unheard-of bout of cooperation between them, Crink and Ruth had arranged a surprise picnic for him at the abandoned drive-in cinema in Grahamstown’s eastern quarter. It was a hard spot to find, the gang had circled two decoy dried-out parking lots for an hour before they found the right one.
The place didn’t look like much, either—essentially a quarry, high, craggy rock faces
stretching up and around an entrance that was long grown over with weeds and rusted wire mesh. Short metal poles stuck out of the ground at equidistant intervals, where the cinema mics used to stand, now just old and regimented and devoid of purpose. In the ebbing light of the day, the bright rock walls painted the landscape a thundering Hollywood hue that put twitches directly into any eye.
The screen had vanished long ago, and the stage on which it had once hung was a wooden ribcage. The venue had been Crink’s end of the deal, and he’d held up, magnificent in his lackadaisicality, draped in all the good fortune of an idle best friend with a few connections in the know.
“This place is where dumps go to die.” Ruth was not impressed. She had organised music, picnic blankets, food (a Grahamstonian picnic was essentially crippled if one skimped on the brie cheese, Salticrax, olives and box wine), decorations, a card and plush toys for her friends to toss around carelessly while they discussed the order of the day under an unfiltered midday sun. She had even set an extra plate for Frank, which made Alex’s cheeks burn. In the machine of this party, she was every gear that turned inside the shell of Crink’s venue, a fact that gave her boasting pleasures beyond the irritation and self righteousness she so clearly also felt. “But at least have hummus!”
Sprawled on the Pep-store, boarding-school blankets between looming rock and the skeleton of an old movie screen, they were listening to Crink tell the story of how he’d wrecked a stranger’s BMW, for the millionth time over.
Alex only half listened, as he’d been there himself anyway.
“So, why’d you break into the school again?”
“Well, it was our primary school, man. I dunno, I guess we wanted to see it again, after all those years. We lived right there. Well, my mom and I, we did. And you know how sappy this motherfucker gets with the end of vac approaching.” He nodded towards Alex. “Plus, and I have to stress this: what the fuck else do two teenage boys do on a Tuesday afternoon in Port Elizabeth?”
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