10. You’ve Got to Have Fun to Make Fun
Alex sat grinding his forehead against a glass panel in the Settler’s Hospital emergency room. A pointed, resolute and hateful grey streak slashed across his countenance as a nurse applied a cast to his sutured arm. Considering what had just happened, and the fact that he still had no idea what the hell had just happened, a fractured arm was his least concern.
Sheila was there. He glared at her.
“Look, lady, he fell off the wall outside the Monument, I don’t know what else you want me to tell you. These things happen.”
“Never used to happen,” Alex moaned.
She frowned at him, and he returned the look with what he hoped was flat hatred.
“Never mind Moodypants here. He’s just pissy because he isn’t going to make the underwater polo team with his new boo-boo.”
The burly woman engaged with the plaster-cast work shot Sheila a glance that said she neither believed her story, nor had the time for her sass.
An hour and a half later, Alex and Sheila strode through the hospital’s automatic doors, discharge papers tucked under his newly set arm cast.
“I can’t believe I broke my arm,” he whined on the car ride home through the twilight.
“Oh pipe down, it’s a fracture. I thought guys loved big, showy injuries.”
“I guess, but I’d have to exist in order to be a guy, wouldn’t I?”
The car groaned around a corner, blowing a gust of dried mulch and lawn clippings up from the wide gutters.
“I’m sorry about your friend. Are you handling this okay?” she asked as they passed under the old crosswalk at the bottom of Settler’s Drive. The yellow glow of the streetlights illuminating the inside of the car for just a second, before each slid by and out through the rear windshield.
“Well, I’ve got a broken arm from falling like ten feet after I inexplicably flew earlier this afternoon. People are disappearing all around me. You’re saying these impossible things. I’m failing the one course I’ve ever loved, and my feet itch, which I know doesn’t have anything to do with anything, but I just thought of it now and it’skilling me.”
“Okay, Alex, I…”
“I feel exhilarated, why do you ask?”
Sheila paused, then pursed her lips and slapped his leg as they arrived at a set of robots.
Alex shoved her back in faux retaliation.“I mean it. I don’t know why... I’m heartsore, about...Ruth, and just really super confused, but my heart’s also racing.”
Sheila parked the car on the side of the road. “I know.”
“I flew earlier today.”
“Yes. You did.”
He ran his good hand through his hair, pulling it back from his face, as if clearing the way as he searched for meaning. “I fucking flew, oh my god, you saw that! What was that? Flying? How did that happen?”
“It’s not impossible, what you did today. It’s a matter of control, and nobody has as much natural control as you do. It’s...never been done before, I can tell you that. Never, by anybody, but that didn’t stop you, and the second you did it, it went from being potential to being fact, and that’s the wonder of your gift. You can unlock the potentiality of the world. All this time, the whole world, just waiting for someone like you to unlock your power.”
Sheila tapped the side of her cigarette against the edge of the car window, small comets of fire trailing down outside as the vehicle wheeled through the dark. “If you’re going to last in this world, dude, probably best you stopped thinking in terms of possibility and accept the way of the probable instead.”
“I know Fred with the Alfa didn’t think it was all that probable when I clipped his car on my way down.”
“Yeah, well luckily for you he was on his way back from a shroom party in the Bot Gardens then, huh? Ain’t nobody going to believe Doctor Greenthumb when he gets the balls to tell this little story.”
His face, lit up by the luminescent dials of the car dashboard and the demon glow of her cigarette, felt heavy—serious, but open—stony, yet light. He felt pulled in two unique directions. She smiled softly, and nodded from behind the wheel, almost to herself.
“You’re the seventh person in the history of the world to do something like what you did today. And let’s be clear: everyone else paled in comparison. It’s called Anchoring. It’s a way for our restless consciousness to give the imaginary world we inhabit a nexus of stability. You’re...transcending the mask, to put it in art-grad terms. This ability means everyone else can sleep safe in their comfort zone of mediocrity. You can burst out of the shell of the world around you and do something incredible, because it’s this kind of wonder that builds the dark scaffolding of the reality nexus.
“This ‘reality’ we’ve created? It’s so transitory...always shifting and rewriting itself to make the lie fit. All around you. You are a node, in essence, made from the same ecto soup as all these other people in the street, but so much stronger. It...you are less susceptible to the rules and laws of the world we’ve created. It—you, are beyond that.
“It’s why you remember all of the people who disappeared. Ruth. Your lecturer.”
“Frank.”
Sheila nodded. “And it’s why you can fly.”
Alex slumped in his seat, staring blankly at the dashboard. He kept forgetting he could fly. Because it was fucking insanity, to him.“You said I’m not the first one...to do this. There were others?”
“Nobody else flew. The documentation suggests they were all gifted in some way. Just people, at various stages during history, who began to exhibit real-life powers. Not hoaxes, but actual abilities.”
She paused for a beat. “But nothing ever like what you did today. Never at that level.”
“Great, so you’re saying I take some special honorary plaque on the superfreak podium?”
“You needed to fly to figure that one out?” She smirked at him, started the car up, and rumbled through the last four blocks to the house. They pulled into her driveway fifteen minutes later, and let the headlights die.
Alex turned to her. “Anyway, I still think we should speak to Fred some time. See what he remembers.”
“He won’t remember anything. A useful little side effect to the whole reality-reflex thing is that the world tends to wipe out memories of huge breaks in the natural flow of things. The same way it erases souls. As soon as Fred left us there in the street today, his brain started overwriting it.”
Alex nodded slowly in the dark. A thought, which had been nagging at him all afternoon, came out unbidden. “How do you know all of these things?”
Sheila put one hand out the window to drop her glowing cigarette butt. The other hand landed on Alex’s leg, like an exclamation point in the encroaching oblivion. An unexpected gambit thrown into a bonfire full of burning questions. “That’s a story for a cup of coffee. You coming in?”
Alex hesitated a moment. Then, all at once, he remembered something, and his face stiffened. “Shit!” He grabbed for his seatbelt clip, frantically.
“Not exactly the reaction I was hoping for, but...”
“I left Jules at home without calling. Christ, I left like five hours ago to get milk and Weet-Bix.”
Sheila laughed as they got out of her car. “Better run back home, Forrest, or she’s gonna think you skipped the country to have an affair.”
“Sorry.”
“No problem. We can pick this up some other time,” she said, winking at him as she shut her door and made her way up the driveway. Alex took off, uncomfortably aware of Sheila’s gaze turning to watch him retreat up the road.
–
Crink was leaving the Cross Street Action Bar down from the varsity, a worried man and a little drunk, with his cue case under his arm. His pool game was on the slip, and he’d been trying to sneak in a few practice rounds before dinner. With Alex acting being out of commission socially these past few weeks, he’d felt a little out of sorts, which was ruining his hustle. Alex was hi
s voice of clarity, staunch and unyielding and firmly levelled. He needed that moody child like Linus needs his blanket. He’d have to call him up again tonight after dinner.
He was walking past Mad Hatters tea garden when he spotted Lucille, from the history department, nursing a Jägermeister shake out on the deck.
“Lucille, of history department fame! Fancy meeting you here, rabble-rabbling it up with the Grahamstown hoi polloi.”
“More ‘hoi’ than ‘polloi’ this early in the evening, wouldn’t you say? What’re you doing here, Charles?”
She made him feel as if he were intruding on something. He loved intruding on something. He decided to stay and shoot the breeze a while. “Just invalidating three years of pool experience with a slew of bad games and flat draughts, courtesy of the bar wenches at Cross Street. You?”
Lucille did her best to stifle a grimace at the word ‘wench’, failed, and said, “I’m here with someone.”
“Ooh a date.”
“Ooh, a stylised, mega-juvenile response to a varsity experience as regular as the fibre in Amor Vittone’s diet.”
“Joost’s going to have your ass for that.”
“Yeah, I think the two of them have had enough shit for one lifetime without small-town libel being an issue.”
“True that,” Crink offered, scratching his stubble. “Have you noticed everyone around here’s been acting insane?”
“What, more so than usual?” She stirred her shake idly, snatching a glimpse into the restaurant windows, probably looking for her date.
“Well, no. Not really. It’s just...you ever feel like things are making some kind of big, slow shift all around you and nobody seems to notice?”
She smiled and stirred her drink. “No, that’s just the washed-up snooker players I go to school with. Now, if it’s not too much bother, I’ve got a date on their way back from the bathroom any second now. I’d hate to look like I’m chatting up a man out here while I wait.”
Crink winked and fired two very enthusiastic finger pistols at her, then realised what he was doing and mimed putting them in their finger holsters. “Go get ’em, champ,” he said over his shoulder as he trundled off down the road.
–
At that moment, in the dwindling twilight in a park, behind the Elizabeth Donkin Art School in Port Elizabeth, hidden between tall shrubs of overgrown weeds, and grass, a little girl sat waiting for her mom to pick her up. Only, she hadn’t called her yet. She didn’t want to go home just yet. There was something she wanted to do, first.
“What do you want from me?” Cynthia asked calmly, out loud, her head pointed towards the setting sun. A silence was all that responded, only the sounds of a soft breeze playing between the feet of the slide on which she sat. She nodded anyway, like someone playing a game or remembering something valuable. Her button nose and pudgy features, caked with dirt as always, looked severe and out of place against the dread serious expression she wore. It didn’t matter that nobody spoke. She knew what was being said.
She closed her eyes. “Can it be me instead? In the picture? Or...can I help him?” A cloud passed by the sun, briefly covering the park in shadow, and as Cynthia opened her eyes, she paused a moment, letting the dark and coldness wash over her. The sun returned, no more than a few seconds later, but it was like an eternity had passed across her face.
She exhaled, resolutely, and let her head hang against her own chest. “But who’s going to help me get rescue Bella once he’s gone?”
-
Lucille straightened her hair in the reflection of a parked delivery van, as Julie Franko strode out of the bathroom, smiling at her. The autumn winds picked up and their tablecloth billowed around the knives and forks. The neon lights of the street began blinking awake...
“Where were we?”
“You were telling me about your vac in Cape Town...” Jules’s phone rang out, truncating the conversation in a brilliant trill from her pocket.
“Oh Christ, I’ve gotta take this, it’s the Oppi.”
Lucille sipped her drink while Jules walked around outside. She could see her protesting briefly in the gathering wind. She watched her put her finger to her ear and sigh as she made a series of confirmation noises and head nods. She couldn’t hear her, but she had the look of someone asking for and trying to remember directions, tracing left and right with her index finger, before hanging up.
“Bad news.” She was already picking up her purse and getting her jacket.
“Coming from the varsity press, it probably means good news for reporters.”
Julie stopped and smiled sweetly at her. “I have to go. There’s this thing I’ve been trying to get onto for a month now. Oppie’s got a boner for this local government guy, but he’s cancelled three times now. Someone just spotted him coming out of a massage parlour down High Street. They need me on it now.”
Lucille smiled and nodded as they got up from their chairs.
“Understood.”
“I’m so sorry to cut out.”
“Don’t be silly.” The two stood opposite each other, nervous shapes cut clean against the warm summer backdrop. “This was nice, though. Maybe we could do it again sometime?”
Jules brushed her hair from her face and hugged Lucille goodbye. “I’d like that a lot.”
–
Alex arrived at Julie’s place down Russ Dingeman Avenue once he discovered his flat in Beaufort Street empty. After he’d banged on her roommate’s window, then the mailbox at the guest entrance, it was clear no one was there either, so he called.
“Jules. Hey...no, I stopped in at your place after I saw mine was empty. I am so sorry, I just got caught up with a friend. It was a whole thing.”
From the other end of the line, Jules said softly, almost happily. “I figured, you dingus. Still, I can’t believe you left me stewing in your crapshack apartment.”
“I know. I’m completely backwards.”
“You owe me heavily.”
He sighed, loitering under Jules’s awnings, bending at the knees and sliding down onto the soft grass on the sidewalk. “I thought you’d be mad.”
“I haven’t said I’m not, yet.”
“I’m going to have to pay out in a plus-sized man’s worth of fried chicken and beer, aren’t I?”
“Oh baby, you speak my language. So, who were you out ignoring me with all afternoon?”
Alex spoke before he had time to think. “Sheila and I were...”
Then he stopped. It was too late, though. Silence crawled out from the other end of the line, as a sickening dread crept in through Alex’s fingers, off the phone, into his face and spinal column, flooding him. The static residue of the big bang was clearer on the line than her next words.
“Alex, what?”
He cramped up at the throat, which was lucky for him, as Jules was about to launch into a full-swing crapping out.
“Of all the people in the whole world. Oh my god, really Alex? With everything I told you. Alex, how could you?”
His painkillers were beginning to wear off. His arm was already killing him. He’d have to explain this in person; it was just too insane for the phone.
“Babe...”
“You left me in your goddamned bedroom, clinging to the sheets, while you were out...well, what was it you were out doing, Alex?”
“Nothing. Come on, don’t be silly, Jules.”
“Silly!” she screeched at him, cutting through him like a knife. “I give you the magnanimous blessing of letting you be friends with this woman, and you duck out to spend some secret afternoon with the bitch? And I’m ‘silly’? Don’t you know anything?”
The airwaves between them set like concrete. Alex had nothing to say, but he had to say something.
“Jules, the last thing I wanted to do was make you mad. We just sort of bumped into each other and ended up talking.”
“Look, Alex...ugh, I can’t talk long about this on the phone, but... I’m not happy with you. We need to talk.”<
br />
“I love you, babe.”
“Alex, I need to go.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m down at the Drostdy arch. Look, I’ve got to bail. Chat later.”
Alex hung up then took off immediately down Russ Dingeman in the direction of the arch.
–
Stationed at a table at the Gold and Black coffee hut on Somerset Street, Alex sat watching the university archway over the top of a laminated menu. Twenty-six minutes after being seated, he spied Jules emerging from the shadowy walkway beneath. She crossed the street and walked up Standford Road. He took off immediately after her.
“Holy asthma pump, lady,” he wheezed. “You really make a boy work at making an apology, huh?”
Jules spun around, mouth open and poised to give her idiot boyfriend hell when she noticed the cast. He’d nearly forgotten it was there. “What the hell happened, baby?”
Alex decided against honesty, at least until she’d had time to cool down on the whole Sheila issue. He went with the only defence a man with a big secret and a bruised conscience ever has. Divert like a professional and hope for the best.
“I love you.”
“What in God’s name happened to your arm, you shit squeeze?”
Alex frowned. “I’ll get into this with you when we sort shit out.”
“Sort shit out? What? The fact that you bolted on a morning in bed with your girlfriend to spend time with some fake New Zealand nun? There’s all the time in the world for that - tell me what happened to your arm. Did somebody do this to you?”
“She’s actually from Perth.”
Jules hacked him apart with a look, right there in the middle of the street. A pause like eternity ensued. Then she said a set of words that have shrivelled the pit-skin of men since the dawn of civilisation.
Fuck it, he thought. “I fell out of the fucking sky, Jules.” When she didn’t stop him right away, he carried on. He carried on like he was tumbling down a hill: “I’ve...had one hell of a day, but, the short of it is, some guy nearly hit me with his car, I reacted and...and somehow, I flew. And I don’t know how it happened, or why, and I’m well aware this must sound crazy, but it’s the truth. I flew, Julie, for nearly a half a minute, high enough that I could see the tops of the houses around me. Sheila was there, you can ask her. I lifted off the ground, hovered in the air like I was fucking glued there, and then I fell to the ground and broke my arm. I’m so scared baby, I don’t know what any of this means, and I’m sorry I kept it from you, but now it’s out and I’m so relieved you know. I’m relieved because-”
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