Sheila shook her head. “No, I think it’s the exact opposite of that. First Daedalus approaches you, then Koosh attacks Crink in the same night?”
Crink’s head swam with all of this new information, as Alex said, not making eye contact with him: “I think they’re in it together”.
This was, undoubtedly, the worst day of Charles Cranston’s life.
-
“You’re sure Jules is on her way to the airport?”
Alex was pacing through dead, unswept leaves and trash on the back porch, hidden from the grey skies overhead by a corrugated plastic overhang, covered in a few good months’ worth of uncleaned rain, mould, and gutter sludge. Sheila was somewhere inside, probably calling her family or plotting another way to ruin their lives.
“She’s safe,” Alex said. “I don’t know, I can’t think about her right now. Dude, these guys are fucking serious! What the hell are we going to do?”
The winter chill outside was breathing life back into Crink’s cheeks, clearing his mind out somewhat. He felt refreshed, and much clearer, all of which meant nothing because this situation felt completely impassable. He shrugged at his friend and said, “Get drunk?”
Alex stopped in his tracks and kicked a clump of dirt down two steps into the grass below. “Goddammit, enough with the funnies, man! I need you to focus up, now, Crink, I don’t know what to do!”
Crink didn’t respond, so his friend followed this plea up with more shouting. “I don’t know what to—”
And then Alex van der Haar’s eyes rolled back, before Crink could react, and he sank to the floor. As Crink reached him, yelling out to Sheila inside to come quick, he rolled his friend over and found his eyelids shut lightly, the balls behind them darting back and forth rapidly.
Sheila arrived a second later. Neither of them could wake Alex.
-
Alex was at a bus stop, as he opened his eyes and stood upright and motionless in a strange and shifting orange light. Shedding the cold of the back porch for a new and comforting warmth, he was awake, aware and blinking in a place he recognised from his past.
He was at the Second Avenue bus stop on Villiers Road, Port Elizabeth. It was hot, a distant shimmer on the road. The gravel crunched beneath his bare feet, as he waited for a bus, the road stretching out and into the suburban distance to his left, around a corner to his right.
His mother walked up beside him, smiling in the sunlight, but staring into the middle distance. Alex waited a chalkboard-scratch eternity for her to say something.
She cleared her throat. “Where you heading, slugger?”
“You never call me that.”
“That’s true. I’ve never called you that.”
He paused for a beat, then Alex said, “You’ve...technically never called me anything, have you?”
“You already knew that, pookie.”
“Do I?”
“No, you don’t. How could you?”
The sky flickered dark, some pointless rolling flashing bouncing off the world. A low, rumbling, earthglow radiated out from the tarmac in front of them.
“Chinatown.”
“What?”
Alex faced forward, gazing over the hedges of the neighbourhood in which he’d been raised. “You asked where I was going. I want to find this elusive piece. Something...missing in me. The A in Chinatown. An answer, somewhere close to home.”
“There ain’t no such thing, babydoll. And certainly not before you’ve done what needs to be done.” She smiled.
Alex shuffled his bare feet. He looked up at Virginia. “It’s getting bad now, isn’t it?”
“I don’t blame you. Frank always meant so much to you. Should’ve known it would all end like this. You were always more trouble than chuckles, kiddo.”
A compressor valve exhaled sharply near his ear, and Alex snapped his head forward through the yawning burg air to find a Greyhound bus door opening next to him. It must have pulled up while he was talking.
“You see this shit?” he asked Virginia, already aware before he turned his head that she wasn’t there anymore. The air where she had been rolled backwards into eternity. Alex drooped. He was more alone than he had ever been in his life.
A cough came from his right that filled him with ice—a cough he’d only ever heard once. It belonged to the grinning, tattooed death head of a man named Daedalus. Alex slowly turned, as Chuck stepped down the three short bus steps, a pair of Ray-Bans balanced on his nose, and a summery smile on his face.
“Sunshine! How the devil are you?” he said, planting his feet on the ground in front of Alex and stretching comically.
“Whatever you’re up to, I’m going to stop you.”
“Damn. I’m just getting off the bus, man. Don’t be so rude. Where’s your mom gone? Always liked her.”
“You come near her and I’ll kill you.”
“You’ll die first.” Daedalus chuckled.
“What makes you think I care?” murmured Alex.
“Because I know you. We’re family.”
They stood there for a second, facing each other in a gleaming brown-and-green sliver of dreamscape. “Make like Jesus and help me get my bags, brother.”
Alex followed him, padding a barefoot circle around the metal corrugation of the idling bus.
Daedalus trailed a finger playfully along the polished surface of the vehicle. “You’re a piece of work, Van der Haar, I have to say.”
“How do you mean?”
Daedalus spun, playfully gesticulating as he bounced backwards towards the luggage hold. “Well, I mean, there’s your whole Jesus Christ super-messiah thing, which is just, you know, so overplayed by this stage.”
Alex smiled with half his face as they stopped, Chuck reaching down to flip the latch on the storage compartment so he could pull up the door.
“You sound more and more like a jealous child every time we meet.”
The man reached into the recess to retrieve a rucksack and wheelie bag. As he stood, his face took on a more urgent aspect. “You’re going to end everything, Alex. You, the one person who’s meant to represent life itself.”
Alex scratched his head. “Or the illusion of life.”
Chuck nodded. “Smart boy.” He blinked up into the sun and breathed deeply. “All of this, ended because the human family couldn’t see further than its own two feet. So sad: our selfishness. Our arrogance and intelligence. Still, there’s nothing more important than family, am I right?”
“Our penchant for melodrama?”
“Glad to see you grinding up against the archetype, Alex. All of this progress, of course, led to the destruction of our world. Of every soul. All gone. Which is ironic, because now the ‘soul’ of the world at large...of the planet, our home, our light...is all that remains, and we are all long, long gone.”
Alex straightened, conscious of a rumbling in the corner of his perception, growing like a blush through the crannies of his childhood neighbourhood. “I’ll fight you,” he said.
“I know you will,” Chuck responded. “It’s all coming soon. I can feel it. The big curtain call. The end. Aren’t you excited?”
“This may be the end of one of us,” Alex said, his voice firm, the words coming slowly to him. “But there’ve been others before me. Other Anchors.”
“You’re the last. Didn’t your little friend tell you that? The final Anchor, the last stage in the grieving process. With your passing, the world will slip into chaos and rapid degeneration. Christmas lights blinking off after family dinner. And I’ll be right there, laughing my ass off while it does.”
The rumble grew louder, thick and guttural, colouring Alex’s hearing as Chuck smiled down at him. Calm. Tall, and terrible, a clamour like bees filled the air as Alex began to wake from his dream.
“Who are you?” he pleaded, frantic.
“Never try to bullshit a bullshitter, Alex.” Chuck slung his bag over his shoulder, laughing and throwing a hitcher’s thumb out to the world. He vanishe
d into a darkness that soon engulfed Alex, leaving only his voice as Alex opened his eyes...
“I’m you. Why else would I be trying to kill you?”
–
He shook himself awake with a scream, on the couch in the living room, as Sheila jumped back from mopping his forehead. She tumbled into Crink, who stood behind her.
“What the fuck happened to you, Alex! We thought you’d—”
“We have to go to PE.” His voice sank low with panic, clearing the room of all other talk.
“What? As in Port Elizabeth, PE? Why?”
“Because Chuck’s going to go after my family.”
14. An Eastern Cape Tragedy in Negative Spacing
Virginia was slugging through the opening salvos of a long day at the office, her hands and mind a spaghetti blur over the all-consuming brain-death admin that was customer support and sales. She’d only been here two months, and the position was already a runaway train of scripts and spreadsheets and phone units balanced on her shoulders as she ran through the customer-response manual.
“May I ask about your printer cartridge needs?”
Schedule reports. Client info stats. Staple, bundle, clip. File.
“At our seasonal prices, the question really is, ‘Why shouldn’t you switch to Redline Stationers?’”
Click, slide. File. Printouts went down to receiving, but they had to get there before Alan left for his squash game.
“Thank you! You’ve made the right choice for your company.”
Still, in the beats between the business of the work day, she had to admit she was having a good time. She’d been on top form at this place, and the customer reviews were the kind of promotion fodder they talked about at the Addo team-building exercise two weeks ago. She finally had a job she felt she could work at for a long time to come.
Cassandra came in to get orders for the coffee run.
“Black, two sugars. Bran muffin if they’ve got them.”
Her life had always been hard. Her father had been a tail gunner during the South African border war. He had been at the battle of Cassinga, South Africa’s first significant air assault during the conflict. A lot of soldiers had come out of that totally bossies. Moody, with the lingering silence that festered and slowly strangled men who had gone to war. Not George Swart. He had been so proud of his involvement. He’d kept the commendation from his commanding officer in floating glass in the study.
He’d told her and her older sister how much he loved making a difference. He’d played a significant part in the history of his country, at a time when young men his age were clamouring to leave their mark somewhere. Thinking back on it now as an adult, she felt ashamed of the history around that conflict, and embarrassed she hadn’t see it with the same rose-coloured glasses as him.
A call came through, the beige wall unit bleating shrilly at her from across the desk. She picked up. “Redline Stationers, this is Virginia.”
Clark’s voice came in small and digitised from the other end of the receiver, muffled and joking. “Have you got a moment to talk about our lord, Jesus Christ, lady?”
She smiled. “Hey, that’s Mom, to you, mister.” The sound of her boy’s voice always put her instantly at ease. “What’s up, kiddo?”
“How’s work?”
“It’s crazy busy, as always.”
“Ah. Well, I just wanted to let you know I’m going out with the band tonight to this last-minute gig thing Sakkie managed to organise at Checkerboard.”
“Clark, what about your sister? You know I won’t be finished here until late.”
“She’s staying over at Chelsea’s. They’re going to the boardwalk for frozen yogurt or cotton candy or butterfly rainbow snickerdoodles or whatever girls eat with their babysitter.”
“Who’s picking her up?”
“Laurie, the aforementioned babysitter.”
“All right, Chuckles, then I guess there’s no problem. I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon to go pick up your new insoles?”
“Mom, our shopping is so lame.”
“Have a good evening, boy. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
As she hooked the phone back into the receiver, Virginia saw her coffee waiting for her next to her muffin, and smiled. She was proud of her sons. Cynthia was still so young, and everything was still new and innocent and wonderful for her, but those two, well...they’d lived through some of the hardest times their family had ever seen.
Otis, their dad, hadn’t been any saint when he was alive. He had developed an ugly gambling addiction after he got back from the army. The man had basically been a genius. Well, compared to the East London and Port Elizabeth flotsam and jetsam they’d hung out with while they dated.
He was a good person =- you couldn’t argue against that, but one of those head-in-the-clouds types. He was obsessed with literature - always reading. It had been difficult to be around, and he had become more distant as the years progressed. They had watched on as he started trying to run away from reality. Away from his commitments... Looking back on it, when the black and white of it all was laid out years later, Otis had never really been there.
He had been killed in a botched shoplifting in Govan Mbeki Avenue one day on his lunch break. He’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was a miracle he’d made it out of the World Trade Center wreckage, so many years before. The same wreckage that killed his father, Joel. All of that, she’d thought so many times since, just to get gunned down in a crapshoot in PE, of all places, what was maybe twelve years ago now. It was like death had sought him out, tracked him down across continents. She had picked up the call about a half hour after it was too late. Simple. Cataclysmic. One gunshot that had torn their family apart.
That had left her with the boys and a newborn baby girl, and years of “roughing it”, as they said, ahead of her.
She couldn’t even remember the call. It was strange to think she couldn’t remember the words. It was like some dream, where people were talking, but nobody said any actual words. It was all just negative space, intrinsic meaning, without real form. A dream dialect, that was as unreachable as the roof of her imagination.
So strange, for someone to just shoot a man like that. No fight. No reasons. Like he’d planned it or something. Otis never had any enemies – well, none important enough to want him dead. All a freak accident. The cops had caught the guy a few months later, but to be honest, she’d stopped following the case entirely by that stage. Good riddance, she supposed. What else can you say when something like that happens? Nobody comes back.
She should call Dorine sometime soon. Just to catch up. Things were so chaotic these days, but it was important to stay connected, especially to family. And Dorine always loved the boys so much.
–
“And what, now this Daedalus cat’s going to PE to hassle Virginia and Cynthia?”
“Clark too, I think.”
“You think? Because of a dream you had just now in the car?”
Alex sighed, waiting by the side of the Corsa as his best friend came stumbling out Sheila’s front door with a satchel slung over his shoulder. “I dunno, man, I’m just...right now, with everything that’s been happening these last few days, and your whole thing with that Koosh fiend last night...”
“Which you’re going to have to go over with me at least one more time on the car ride, because it mostly sounds like Crazytimes two thousand and fifteen and you might be insane.”
Alex smiled at Crink. “I’ve kind of just been going on feeling. Anyway, if there’s any chance they’re going after my family, I need to get there before they can find them.”
“Aye, pookie. When did your life turn into a bad spy movie?”
–
Sheila stood at her cupboard, jamming handfuls of socks and underwear into her rucksack while the boys waited in the car outside.
She’d lived a long time. People like her did, by their nature. She’d had this humiliating need to carry on
, in spite of all the tragedy, and so she simply kept living. She shouldn’t be here. It was all mindless, really, like some weird game of red light, green light. She’d never been able to look with open eyes at the world, but she’d been doing it so long, it never occurred to her to reflect.
Now it was all she could do. It was killing her, literally, but she couldn’t help but think if she’d never met him—never looked with wide eyes she tried to hide, straight into the face of a genuine Anchor, and felt deeply intimate information about his life with this “gift” of hers, she’d be sitting somewhere right now, sipping tea, or watching TV with her mom.
Her mom. God, she would have killed her if she knew what she’d gotten herself into.
She wondered, zipping up her bag and breathing in the room one last time, looking around to check she hadn’t forgotten anything, if she’d been drawn to that spot. If she’d somehow just known he’d be there. It seemed stupid, but, as she grabbed her bag and felt her knees weaken and buckle under the weight of it on her shoulder, she felt like maybe now was as good a time as any to put her faith in fate.
There had to be a reason. All she knew for absolute sure was that, from the moment she’d met him, it had been her duty to help him through this. There just wasn’t any other way around it. She would be with him until the very end.
–
The Corsa rolled out of Grahamstown around Grey Dam, then right onto the N2 towards Port Elizabeth. Clocking 110 on the deserted road, Sheila drove with a dire sense of purpose, although no one was sure of what they were going to do when they arrived. She was also looking paler by the second.
“Is it...like, a stake-to-the-heart situation?”Crink was stretched out in the backseat of the car, his feet up against the ceiling, when he asked what was obviously a burning question to him.
“What?” Alex chipped back, irritably.“Crink? What was that? Stake to the heart? Are you serious?”
“When we find them.”
“Dude, we’re not going to kill these guys. What? We don’t even know what they’re doing. Stop being weird.”
Outside, the afternoon sky loomed over them like some massive blue cage. Alex had spent his morning doing barely anything, but it felt as though he’d been at that smallholding for days. He breathed the fresh air in from the crack in his window and felt his focus returning to him.
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