Zulu

by Caryl Ferey

  Tembo knew the subject well. Ever since LSD and BZ gas, innovations in the fields of neuroscience and pharmacology had widened the range of possibilities. It was now possible to reprogram molecules so that they targeted certain mechanisms affecting neuronal functions or cardiac rhythms. What had emerged from this extensive experimentation was increasingly computerized, and the most promising bio-active components could be identified and tested with amazing speed. After having experimented in Iraq with drugs that increased the vigilance of soldiers, the military hoped, in the near future, to see troops leaving for combat filled with medication that increased their aggressiveness and their resistance to fear, pain, and fatigue, while acting, through a selective erasure of memory, to suppress traumatic memories. Tembo, who followed these things with great interest, was not very optimistic. September 11th had ushered in a period when international norms had been infringed, especially in the US. Experiments on chemical weapons that were banned in theory continued, linked to the use of lethal injections in judicial executions and of tear gas to maintain order. But the real purpose of these experiments was “counter-terrorism,” a sphere in which legal constraints were increasingly being ignored. There were research projects in progress everywhere. The Russians had not revealed the name of the chemical agent used to end the Moscow theatre siege in 2005. Since the first Gulf War, the US Air Force had been considering the development and dissemination of extremely powerful aphrodisiacs capable of provoking homosexual behavior in the enemy ranks. A Czech laboratory was working on the transformation of anesthetics combined with a series of ultra-rapid antidotes that could be used to induce a state of shock in crowds, after which special commandoes would be able to go in and carry out targeted assassinations.

  Rejected because of undesirable side effects, thousands of molecules lay dormant on laboratory shelves. It was possible that some had been recycled by unscrupulous organizations.

  Neuman listened without saying a word. There was no shortage of Mafias in the country—Colombian cartels, Russian, African Mafias. One of them might have perfected a new product.

  Tembo’s eyes lit up, as if he had just discovered the secret of the Pyramids. “I tested your samples on rats,” he said, with a clinical smile. “Interesting. Come and take a look.”

  Neuman followed him into the next room.

  The shelves were full of specimens in jars. Two female lab assistants were hard at work amid the tiled surfaces.

  “Is the protocol ready?” Tembo asked.

  “Yes, yes,” one of the assistants replied, enigmatic behind her mask. “Start with number three.”

  They walked to the cages at the far end of the room. There were a dozen of them, hermetically sealed and carefully labeled.

  “Here’s the cage I was talking about earlier,” Tembo said. “The one where we tested the iboga.”

  Neuman peered in. There were half a dozen rats, sleeping peacefully, one on top of the other.

  “Cute, aren’t they?” Tembo pointed to the next cage. “We filled this one with smoke from the powder found in the mobile home. The rats you see here are currently in phase two. In other words, they inhaled the product recently.”

  Neuman frowned. The occupants of this cage were extremely agitated. Half the specimens were going around in circles as fast as possible, others were copulating, and all of them seemed totally confused.

  “Rape, deviant behavior, erotomania. After being high for two to three minutes, the existing couples and any sense of hierarchy just went to pieces, as you can see, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Phase three is a little more unpleasant.”

  In the next cage, a dozen rats were roaming about frantically.

  “Apathy, loss of sensory bearings, repetition of apparently illogical actions, breakup of the group, antisocial and even paranoid behavior. This phase can last several hours before the specimens sink into a deep sleep. The first ones still haven’t woken up. But now,” he said, with an icy glint in his eyes, “look at what happens when the dose is increased.”

  Neuman peered into the next cage and caught his breath. There were dozens of corpses behind the glass, in a terrible state: paws eaten away, muzzles torn off, fur flayed, heads half missing. The survivors, wandering in the middle of this charnel house, were not in much better condition.

  “After a brief period of euphoria, all the specimens lost control, and not only of their inhibitions,” Tembo explained. “Some started to eat each other. The dominant ones attacked the weakest, killing them and tearing them to pieces. Then they went on to the others. The carnage lasted for hours until they were exhausted.”

  Only the dominant ones remained. Two laboratory rats that must once have been white, each with its tail missing and part of its head scalped, eyeing each other from a distance.

  “They’re in a state of shock,” Tembo said. “We did postmortems on several of the corpses and discovered serious after-effects in the cortex. The drug seems to cause an acceleration in the chemical reactions, some of which give rise to a substance that acts as a catalyst, so that the speed of reaction starts from nothing and then gets out of control, setting off the catalysis and accelerating the process even more. Rather like a chain reaction in nuclear fission.”

  “In plain English?”

  “Euphoria, stupor, withdrawal, anger, shock. The behavior varies depending on the dose.”

  “Any idea of the chemical reaction on humans?”

  Tembo smoothed the tip of his beard. “The results could vary depending on the person’s medical history, nervous system, and weight,” he said. “But according to our comparative tests, we can state with some degree of confidence that with a dose of one cubic centimeter, you would get high. With two cubic centimeters, once past the initial rush, you would float in a kind of paranoid torpor—that was the state Nicole was in when she was murdered. With a dose of three cubic centimeters, you would enter a state of uncontrollable aggressiveness. With four, you would destroy everything in your path, usually ending with yourself. In short, you would go mad.”

  “What state was Stan in when he died?” Neuman asked.

  “Completely off his head,” Tembo replied. “He injected himself with more than ten doses.”

  Night was falling by the time Neuman left the Durham Road morgue.

  He had seen Dan and Brian a little earlier on their return from Pollsmoor prison. Sonny Ramphele had been dealing grass to the surfers in Muizenberg, and his little brother had clearly taken over, but with a far more toxic product. Stan had used his looks to trap a white female clientele and spread his network among the gilded youth of Cape Town. Had he taken advantage of his ride to the beach at Muizenberg with his girlfriend Nicole to stock up on drugs? The iboga could explain the night visit to the botanical gardens—getting high under the stars and making love among the flowers—but the rest didn’t fit. If the lovers had tripped out in the hope of a sex romp, then Stan had deceived Nicole about the nature of the merchandise. He had given her a sophisticated, highly dangerous product, buried in crystal meth.

  The noise rumbling inside Neuman had a distant origin. That a young woman could have been killed while making love among the most beautiful flowers in the world, that you had to pay a price for pleasure, disgusted him.

  *

  Dan told the story of the unloved zebra and the magpie that stole his stripes. He got them back in the end, but all mixed up, with the result that no one in the herd recognized him—which was fine with the zebra.

  “What about the magpie?” Tom asked.

  “She waited for the rainy season, and when the rainbow arrived, she stole his colors.”

  The story was a big hit with the audience in the bunkbeds. He still had to say goodnight to the incredibly black panther, Baggera, negotiate with the collection of teddy bears laid out on Tom’s bed, and after that was it Eve’s turn to agree to be quiet, grab her security blanket, and stick her thumb in her mouth.

  “Night night, my baby giraffe,” he said, kissi
ng her on the eyes.

  Dan closed the door of the bedroom with a feeling like a knife in the stomach. Always the same fear. Fear of losing Claire, of not being strong enough. He had pulled off a magic trick to get the little angels to sleep.

  By the time he joined Claire, who was downstairs reading, he had calmed down a little.

  They had stopped watching TV since her illness. At first it had seemed strange—it never even crossed their minds to switch it on—and then they had realized that spending time together was more important than watching cookery shows.

  Dan and Claire had met five years earlier in a bar on Long Street, an ordinary evening that had changed their lives. Dan Fletcher had grown up in an English-speaking lower-middle-class family in Durban, where his latent homosexuality had boiled down to a few semi-shameful episodes in the toilets of the sports club, where a few sexually adventurous young lads had masturbated him, but he hadn’t dared go any farther—certainly not as far as penetration, the great male taboo. That night, Claire had been singing hits from the Seventies, accompanied by an aggressive black guitarist. “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” even played acoustically, had led him on a leash to her supple hips swaying in a tight-fitting dress under the spotlights. Her charm, the blonde dreadlocks that fell over her bare shoulders, her grave, sad, almost masculine voice—Dan was electrified. He had approached her at the bar with his crippled eyes and Clare had said yes to everything, immediately—children, life.

  Five years.

  Today, Claire didn’t sing anymore, her hair had fallen out in handfuls, even the miraculous curve of her hips had melted under the chemo. The shattered beauty, the dread beneath the flowers—Dan wouldn’t be able to bear her death. The threat hanging over them had made them both as delicate as crystal and, beneath the reassuring male air he put on, he was the more fragile of the two.

  “Everything all right?” Claire said, as he came into the room.

  “Yes, yes.”

  She was reading on the couch in the living room, her feet folded under her. She had on a thigh-length white blouse, close-fitting cotton shorts and silver framed-glasses, which, together with her book, gave her quite an attractive student look. He peered at the cover.

  “What’s that?”

  “Rian Malan.”

  The South African writer and journalist who had written the terrifying masterpiece My Traitor’s Heart.

  “It’s his latest,” Claire added.

  But Dan wasn’t especially interested in that. He watched her tuck a lock of blonde hair behind her ear—she was still not used to her wig—and kneeled on the floor. She had thin, soft ankles that moved him deeply. Claire forgot her book and, with a smile, closed her eyes. He kissed her feet, a host of little kisses, as if spreading love dust, then he started licking them, and his tongue weaving between her toes excited her. A lot. She loved his hands on her skin, his fingers ferreting under her cotton shorts. She could feel herself getting wet. Delighted, she let herself tip backwards.

  They had just finished making love when the telephone rang at the foot of the couch. Fearing it would wake the children, Dan made a movement to pick up the receiver. Claire, still joined to him, clung on. He picked up at the fifth ring.

  “Am I disturbing you?”

  It was Neuman.

  “No. No.”

  Dan had stars in his head and an archipelago of comets instead of a pillow.

  “I’ll come and pick you up tomorrow morning for a little trip to the seaside,” Neuman announced. “Brian’s also coming.”

  His wife’s belly was still keeping him snug and warm. “O.K.,” he said.

  “Don’t forget your gun this time.”

  “I won’t.”

  Dan smiled as he hung up. Pure camouflage. He had never told Neuman, let alone Claire, but in reality he was scared stiff. His sick fairy, the children—he was just a little runt worried about the people he loved. Claire called him back to her with a subtle contraction of the perineum. Lovemaking had turned her pale cheeks pink. She was smiling for real now, brave, thin, confident.

  Dan felt a lump in his throat at the sight of her slightly lopsided wig, but her pelvis was undulating slightly against his cock.

  “Again,” she whispered.

  10.

  Gulethu couldn’t remember when things had started to go off the rails. Ten years ago? Twelve? His troubled puberty, savage, white-hot acts—was it his sister, his cousin? Gulethu couldn’t remember. Anything. He had repressed it so much, it had all been swallowed up. Now the iceberg was drifting with the current, without a destination or a pilot.

  According to Zulu tradition, anyone who committed incest should rot while alive. Sonamuzi: the family sin, of which he had been guilty. “Not my fault,” he would cry in the darkness. It was the curse that hung over him and those dirty little whores who had led him astray. It was ufufuyane that made them crazy. Sexually out of control. Ufufuyane, the illness that affected young girls and had struck him, too. The danger was everywhere, you just had to see the way they swayed their hips as they came back from fetching water, their heavy breasts in the sun, and their smiles that caught you as you passed like spider’s webs. Gulethu had been their victim, their prey, not the opposite, as the chief of the village had said. Ufufuyane was the cause of everything, ufufuyane had been sent by the spirits to deceive him. But no one had listened to him. He had been banished from the village. “Let him rot alive!”

  He could have had his throat cut like a sacrificed zebu, or been flayed to remind him of the power of the ancestral taboo, but the villagers had preferred to let him decay slowly, according to tradition. Gulethu had gone to the city, at least its townships, where others before him had lived amid the garbage.

  Sonamuzi was powerful. The umqolan, the sorceress he had consulted, knew that perfectly well. Someone had told him about her, Tonkia, a toothless old woman who people said consorted with adverse spirits. The umqolan knew his curse. She had already treated others who had it. She would conjure away the family sin that hung over his nights. She would make a muti for him, a magic potion that would remove him from his destiny. He wouldn’t rot. Not now. A young white girl would save him. Any white girl, provided she was a virgin. He just had to bring her back the sperm with which he had deflowered her.

  Gulethu had carefully prepared the act. He had promised young Ramphele a lot, without telling him the whole truth. Things had happened as he had hoped until that damned whore had started screaming, like a bitch in heat. Ufufuyane had struck her, too—Zulus, coloreds or whites, the bitches were all possessed. A young virgin would never have opened her legs like that, or uttered all that crazy talk. The adverse spirits had intervened, before he had had the chance to make his muti.

  He had tried to restrain her, but the bitch kept screaming, louder and louder.

  The screams woke him with a start. Gulethu sat up, panting, his eyes wide open, his face covered in cold sweat. He was between two worlds, and could barely make out the shabby walls of the shed. After a while he saw the straw mattresses spread on the floor, heard the others snoring, and came back to reality. No, it wasn’t the girl’s screams that had wakened him. It was the umqolan, warning him of danger.

  Stan was dead, but the cops could question his brother in prison. They could nose around the beach. The Cat must never know. Never.

  11.

  He felt uneasy as soon as he woke up. There was a weight on his heart, as if he had run in the rain for hours with his head thrown back. As if he had died for lack of breath. Brian Epkeen sat on the edge of the bed, searching in the chaos of his memories, and found only the tail end of a dream. A sense that he had an unpleasant chore to attend to hung in the air of the room. The morning would have done better to shut its big mouth. The fucking alarm clock hadn’t gone off. Or he’d forgotten to set it. His head felt itchy. He’d slept badly. Standing up didn’t help.

  Brian was supposed to be meeting the others, the way things were going he wouldn’t have time for breakfast, it was already h
ot, and this trip to the beach, with or without his friend “Jim,” meant nothing to him.

  “Hmm.” Tracy whimpered, buried beneath the sheets. “Are you going?”

  “Yes. I’m late.”

  Brian lifted the red hair from her cheek. Awkward in her love for him, Tracy caught his hand and pulled him toward her.

  “Come here,” she said, without opening her eyes. “Stay with me.”

  It was stupid, he’d just told her he was late.

  “Please!” Tracy insisted.

  “Let go of me, darling.”

  He wasn’t in the mood for games. Her persistence got on his nerves. He wasn’t in love—he should have told her last night that there was no point, their affair was hopeless, he was only the salt in an ocean of tears, but Tracy had rolled her big love-filled breasts over him, his heart had cracked like a log at the first skirmish, and he had admitted defeat. One more defeat.

  “What’s the matter?” Tracy asked, one eye venturing out from beneath the sheets.

  Brian was coming out of the shower. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  He dressed with whatever he could find.

  “The keys are on the kitchen table,” he said. “Just throw them in the flower pot.”

  Tracy watching him, uncomprehendingly. He took his gun and left.

  *

  A strong wind was blowing over Muizenberg beach. Neuman buttoned his jacket over his Colt .45. Brian Epkeen and Dan Fletcher followed on, protecting their faces from the clouds of sand raised by the gusts of wind. Once past the picturesque old-fashioned beach huts, the beach stretched for miles, as far as the township.

  They had questioned the parking attendants with their brightly numbered shirts, who also dealt a little dagga. One of them had recognized Stan Ramphele from his photo (he had a pickup) and the girl (a pretty young blonde). No other info, from either the local cops or the informers, who’d been grilled for days.