“And whatever else is going on here?”
“I’m sorry. Not yet.” She took a smoky drag, and watched his face drop, through the tobacco fog.
“Aiight,” Alex said, getting up from the his seat, “Well, this has been awful. Enjoy your cancer, Crypto. I’m going to bail out of here.”
“Try to think about what I said tonight. About Kurtz, yeah?”
“I hope this chapel is the first place Grahamstown Godzilla destroys. I’ll catch you on the Styx.”
-
Twenty minutes and a freezing walk home later, Alex took the steps to his flat door two at a time. Keys, gate lock, Yale lock, door. It was a rhythm he’d repeated hundreds of times during the year and a half since he’d moved in. Wiping his feet on the mat wasn’t even something he cared about, in any way, but by this stage, it was just part of his regular momentum.
God, he’d built up so much momentum with this woman. “Jules?”
Her voice came muffled from the study. “Did you wipe your feet?”
She was going through photos on the computer as Alex walked in and sat down on the bed behind her.
Looking up into the blue glow cut around her silhouette in the dark, he breathed deep and braced for the worst.“Crazy night, huh?”
“I guess. Why, you feeling introspective, Van der Haar?”
Alex skipped a beat. She only called him by his surname when she had bad news. The last time she’d even said the words “Van der Haar”, Alex’s grandma had died.
“You’re mad at me, I get it.”
“Well, there is Sheila...”
Alex threw his hands up at the mention of her name. “God, Jules, you make her out to be so much more to me than she is. For the last time, I’m not...”
“I know. I’m fucking with you. I don’t give a shit about Sheila. I know how friends work, Alex, and, after close on two years with you, I have a pretty good idea how you work. You’d never hurt me.” She spun around slowly on the desk chair. “See her, don’t see her. It doesn’t matter, and, for serious, I’m fine.”
Alex smiled, and thought that he should probably leave the conversation at that.
He didn’t. “Then...what?”
Jules frowned at him in the dark, but he pressed on. “What is all of this recent stuff, with you? You’re one of my best friends, Jules, but you’ve been so tetchy with me lately. What gives? We never fight.”
He exhaled sadly as he made out the shape of her shoulders slumping in the glow of the pressing evening. She lifted her head to address him, stretched out on her bed.
“I’m scared of you.”
“You’re what?”
In the nu-neon hum of their bedroom, Jules got up from her chair and came over to sit by Alex. “Not, like, in the Stockholm syndrome, problems-at-home kind of way. You’re a peach, as I’m sure you already know. But...well, lately you just have this intensity to you. I don’t know, I guess I only see it in glimpses... I know you’d never let it show for long, but...well, I can see you’re worried. And it’s not the usual stuff, like you’ve always had, with bills, and your student loan. The stuff everybody gets. You seem so preoccupied, and...well, sometimes you say stuff.”
“Stuff?”
“Yeah, like...references that don’t make sense. Things you seem to think are...commonplace? You even talk in your sleep. When we got together, and you told me about Frank, I figured it was just a phase or something. I liked it. It was quirky. But...well, lately it seems like you’re stepping up the quirk, son.”
Alex put his arm around her shoulder, nodding in the dark. “It’s hard being a visionary’s SO.”
“It is.” Jules chuckled, and turned into the crook of his arm. “Look, I’ve always been fiercely committed to my future. I guess, with all the trouble in the world gravitating towards your shoulders, and, me being so into everything you say or do...”
“What?”
“I worry about what being in your life means for me, down the line. Because I love you so much, and I wouldn’t even think before I took a bullet for you.”
Alex turned to Jules in the pale nocturne luminescence and laid her down without saying a word.
She looked up at him, and whispered, “I feel like being with you might be the last word in my life, Alex van der Haar.”
He inched slowly in towards her face, a glacial, rumbling blood rush of concrete and soft curves.
“We should make it a word to remember, then.”
Somewhere under the Grahamstown skyline, its church spires contemplating the trashcan fires and crackling electricity lines of Joza, as university students kicked quart bottles down High Street, life happened in Alex’s bed. Life happened in low, lapping folds of cotton sheets and duvet inners. A slow, stone-aged, silent shriek of living that rang out against the walls, bodies, rooftops and confusion of a life played out in suburbia.
Life happened, as life was blinked out of the landscape forever, and a long night in Grahamstown wound down to its end.
–
The next morning, autumn crept up in chicken-skin crackling sounds around Alex’s tekkies as he hit the pavement outside his flat. As he stepped briskly down to the Bathurst Street superette, reality had the kind of alignment that came after a night spent buzzing inside of something like he had. Someone was braaiing somewhere. Cars were parked next to gutters, shining dully in the hazy honeycomb skyfall of a seasonal Friday morning fairytale. With the smell of meat and dead leaves in the air, it was truly, sincerely South African.
Crink’s name came up on his suddenly vibrating phone.
“Sup, meat puppet.”
Crink’s voice sounded digitised and tortured. “Dude, my head is killing me.”
“Yeah, that was some night.”
“You make out all right with Sheila?”
Alex pause, and Crink’s laughter flooded in from over the phone.
“Not like that, you pervert.”
“You’re the pervert...you pervert.”
“I’m telling Jules you said ‘make out’ and that witch’s name in the same sentence.”
“Uh, that was you.”
“Small details in an otherwise juicy story, Alex.”
Alex laughed, rounding the corner near the horse monument, coming out near the cathedral as he weaved through the pre-weekend shopping crowd.
“Things are good.” Alex smiled to the people he passed by. Things were good. Maybe they’d always been good. There had to be some explanation for everything, and maybe it wasn’t his fucking job to worry about this anymore. Who the hell was braaiing?
“Good, like good?”
“Good like gentlemen not kissing and telling, you sad singleton.”
“Yeah, well, I’m glad to hear you’re in a better mood.”
“Thanks, dude. So, how was the rest of your night?”
“Oh you know, another night in the Eastern Cape’s toilet bowl.”
“Uh huh. And Ruth?”
Crink missed a beat. “Sorry dude, think the cell towers botched my reception. What’d you say?”
“Yeah, I said Ruth. How’s she feeling?”
“Ruth?”
Alex stopped in line outside the pie shop. “Funny man. Seriously, I was worried about her when she called you.” A wash of cold water flooded his chest, and Crink’s next response took years too long to come out.
“When who called me?
Alex frowned, his face feeling suddenly heavy. Something was wrong. None of this felt right. He had to maintain rationality here – this could not be what it felt like. There was no way. “Ruth. Look, I know you’re feeling bad man, but try to keep up. When you left Sheila and me last night? You were going to catch up with Ruth, dude. What happened after you exited stage left?”
The line shifted another person forward, shadowed behind the ancient outline of the cathedral of St Michael and St George.
“Dude, what’re you talking about?”
Alex exhaled, laughing and nervous at the same time. He felt an an
ger swell up inside of him. His friend was being awful to him and he hated it. “Ruth, man, God. C’mon, don’t fuck around, I’m in a good mood.”
“Okay, I won’t,” he laughed. You first though.”
“What’re you talking about?”
Crink laughed. “What are you talking about, man? Okay, look, I left you alone with that bird last night, but if you think making up some random hook-up for me while you were out making goo-goo eyes at Little Miss Tucker-bag is funny, you need to work on your schtick.”
“What?”
“God, it’s not enough you get laid regularly, you need to rub in the fact that I don’t?”
Alex turned around in line, as the weight disappeared from his world. He became, instantly, grief stricken. “Ruth...”Crink didn’t know. It had happened again.
“Alex?” The midday shadow of the cathedral bell tower sliced a line through his complexion. “Alex, what’s going on? Are you there? Who’s Ruth?”
He pocketed his phone, already on his way, on foot, to find Sheila. His friend’s voice crackled, “Al—” from his pocket as he thumbed the red phone button.
He would not lose her. There had to be an answer. And one person had been holding out on him for long enough.
–
The house Sheila was braaiing at in the suburbs belonged to her supervisor, Red. He’d given her the keys so she could feed his dog while he was in East London on business.
She’d invited her family over, cousins and her aunt Fiona on what was likely one of the first sunny days this whole winter. They were all out by the pool when Alex arrived.
“Alex! God, this town is small.”
“Yeah, this was not the first place I checked, but the nuns at the chapel knew where you were.” Alex stood there, at the rear gate to the house, out of breath and squinting in the sunlight. “I need to speak to you, Sheila. It’s about Ruth.”
Sheila furrowed her brow and sighed, placing the sausage back down on the grill, as her cousin Mimi dropped a gigantic cannonball in the pool behind her. “Let’s go inside, yeah?”
Their bare feet slapping on the cold rock tiling of the living room, the two walked through to the bar area at the back of the main house.
“Want a drink?” Sheila asked.
“What I want is some answers.”
She retreated behind the marble-topped bar and grabbed a bottle of Johnny Walker, cracking the seal as she searched for the ice bucket and a glass.
“I know, Alex.”
“And?”
Pouring herself a two-fingered glass, she looked up at him as if for the first time, and spoke with frustration, “And what? You want me to admit I know something you don’t? That I’ve been hiding it from you for months, and now, after all this polite, high school-crush, pussyfooting around the subject, you’ve finally had enough? Is that what this is?”
“You’re goddamned right it is. People are going missing.”
“People always go missing. It’s one of the great mysteries of life. Tell it to the cops.”
“You know that’s not what this is. Why doesn’t anybody remember them, Sheila?” Alex ran his fingers through his hair, and threw himself down into a chair in the TV room, directly across from the bar area. “I just want to know what the fuck is going on in my own life.”
She took a sip.
“I mean...that’s fair, isn’t it?
Without picking up her glass, she walked around from the bar into the living room, and dropped onto the couch next to him.
“You’re right. It is. I’ve been struggling to find the right time to tell you, for reasons that are, well, entirely selfish. It was wrong for me to let you go last night without any answers.”
“Tell me what?” he asked, softer now, a little nervous. He spoke to the wall, unable to face her out of some strange, paranoid hope he could control the situation if he didn’t give her the benefit of eye contact.
“I don’t remember a Ruth.”
Alex frowned at the wall, annoyed. “Yes, you do! What the fuck, you too? You have to remember her. I met you through her, that one night after the Pool Soc party? Remember? Out in the street...come on man, don’t play, not right now.”
“Alex, I’m not, and I’ll bet nobody else remembers her either.”
“What the fuck is happening? You know why this is happening, don’t you?”
Sheila nodded slowly from the couch cushion next to him, pulled a coffee table and ashtray around from the side of the sofa and lit up.
“There’s no easy way to say this, which is why we don’t usually bother saying it. I’m going to start with what this is, and fill in the blanks around that, okay?”
“I’m just glad you’re talking, and we’re not in a clock tower. Holy shit, we were in a clock tower last time. What the hell is wrong with you?”
She exhaled sadly. “Ruth’s gone, Alex.”
“Yeah, I noticed.”
“For sure, but...you don’t understand yet. She’s gone, but she’s always been gone.”
“Sheila, I’ve had enough of your—”
“Ruth’s dead, Alex.”
Alex stopped for a second, as the words hung in the air. “You’re proper crazy, aren’t you?”
“Shut up and listen, dill hole.”
“I am. I’m listening—really listening, finally, to someone I barely know say my friend is dead. Imagine my eagerness to hear more, won’t you?”
“Not just your friend.”
“What the hell are you blabbering about?”
In the moments that followed, Sheila seemed to speak both to Alex, and past him, into some unseen vortex, pulling at something inside of her, from somewhere just behind his head. “Did you ever pick up a baking tray without realising someone else had just taken it out of the oven?”
“God, why do you always need to do this? I just want some answers, and you’re dropping parables like Christ in an old-age home on Christmas.”
“Would you just fucking listen to me and stop being a wise-ass for five seconds, Alexander?”
He sagged his shoulders. “Yeah, two years ago. I had just moved into my current place. Ruth was still living there, and she was going through her baking phase. She made cookies for Ouma and her crew one night, and they all went out to the Cloud Lounge together.
“I came home drunk and started cleaning around the kitchen. It was late, and I didn’t want to wake anybody. I remember, I grabbed the thing with both hands, not realising she’d just left the kitchen, like a minute before, out the back door. She was probably still shutting the back gate. I don’t even know how she didn’t hear me screaming.”
“And?”
“And I got third-degree burns on both hands, you weirdo. I had to spend two hours in the ER and do a make-up test for Albion’s class because I couldn’t write with my hands all bandaged up. What the fuck does this have to do with you saying Ruth is dead?”
“Did you ever wonder how you deal with that kind of burning pain? Where that shock and horror goes?”
“What do you mean?”
“There are about a million different fail safes that shut your perception off entirely if something really bad happens. You read about it all the time, you must have heard stories. You pass out during a fire if the smoke or the heat gets too much. Guys in India push bone saws through their own cheeks during festivals and go into trances where they can do it without any pain. Rape survivors tell news reporters all the time about how they took themselves somewhere else in their minds. Like it wasn’t happening to them at all.
“Call it guided meditation or Zen or whatever you want, there’s a reflex in all of us that will stop pain before we even have the chance to realise it’s there.”So, on a day where you grab a tray and casually pack it into the pot cupboard without a care, did you ever stop to wonder if that’s what really happened?”
Alex looked dolefully at her.
“I mean, what if it was blisteringly hot? Not just hot, but the kind of hot that permanently burns
into your skin, through it, into the nerves underneath? What if what you just did now was the most intense pain you’d ever experienced, injected into three seconds of contact with red-hot metal? At what point, do you think, would your mind simply shut out the white noise of that torture, and imagine yourself somewhere better? Are your reflexes good enough to stop a pain you never saw coming, Alex?”
“I suppose I see what you’re saying.”
“And what if that better place, the first one you could revert to, was the memory of you before you picked up the tray? I mean...it makes sense, doesn’t it? In the seconds of your life just before you hurt yourself. Blissfully unaware of what you were about to do to yourself. Drunk and fumbling around in the dark on a Saturday night. What if you could just be back there, and not feeling your skin burn and stick to a metal pan. Like a safety valve, just shutting down your senses and your perception and your physicality and forcing you to believe you’re somewhere else.”
“The point, Alex, is that this does happen, to people all over the world, every day. It’s a physical reaction, like shock, that can last for minutes or hours. It makes sense from that perspective. But, as anyone who’s been through it will tell you, it’s also extremely spiritual. Something that stretches down into the soul inside of you—that hum underneath the words and actions and feelings and understandings of your daily life. Who you are. It’s not a religious experience, but if there was a God, it’d be the closest thing possible to him.”
Sheila continued, speaking more to herself than anything else, as Alex had stopped talking, or even looking at her. “More importantly than this, though, it also happened to everyone in the world once. All at once, on the day the world ended.”
-
This woman was fucking crazy. Alex couldn’t believe he’d let her get this far into this rant, but...she knew about Frank. She seemed to...really know something about Frank? He decided to hear her out—this insanity had to be nearly played out, soon.
“I don’t follow you,” he muttered, rubbing the patch of stubble on his chin, then his nose, then his arms. Outside, were the sounds of winter – boots landing heavily on slick tarmac as students and petrol station attendants and photographers and the city’s people all rushed to and from their lives, desperate to be out of the chill. This living room was a sauna. Why was everywhere this woman went so fucking hot?
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