by Sarah Lotz
CHIYOKO: Maybe I wanted to hear what she was going to say to Hiro. Maybe I was curious.
RYU: How did she react when she saw Hiro’s soul and realised she’d have to talk to him through it?
CHIYOKO: She just stared at it and then she gave it one of those self-conscious bows Westerners do when they’re trying to be polite. I could hear him giggling through it straightaway. He was hiding behind the screen in my room with the computer and the camera. I was impressed that she didn’t scream or freak out.
RYU: And what did she ask?
CHIYOKO: First of all she thanked him for agreeing to talk to her. Then she wanted to know what they always want to know, which is, did her mother suffer.
RYU: And?
CHIYOKO: And Hiro said yes.
RYU: Ouch. What did she say to that?
CHIYOKO: She thanked him for being honest.
RYU: So Hiro admitted that he’d spoken to her mother?
CHIYOKO: Not exactly. He didn’t really give her any straight answers. I thought perhaps that she was going to start getting really frustrated, but then Hiro said, ‘Don’t be sad,’ in English!
RYU: Hiro can speak English?
CHIYOKO: Auntie Hiromi or Android Uncle must have taught him some phrases before the crash. Then she showed him a photograph of her mother, asked him if he was sure that he’d seen her. And again, he said to her, ‘Don’t be sad.’ She started crying; real weeping. I was worried that this would upset Hiro, so I asked her to leave.
RYU: Chiyoko, it is not my place to say… But… I don’t think you should have done that.
CHIYOKO: Thrown her out?
RYU: No. Let her talk to Hiro’s soul.
CHIYOKO: I didn’t ask your opinion about that, Ryu. And anyway, I thought you were in love with the Americans?
RYU: Why do you make it so hard for me?
CHIYOKO: It’s not fair of you to make me feel guilty.
RYU: I wasn’t trying to make you feel guilty. I was trying to be your friend.
CHIYOKO: Friends don’t judge each other.
RYU: I was not judging you.
CHIYOKO: Yes you were. I don’t need that from you as well. I get it all the fucking time from MC. I’m going.
RYU: Wait! Can’t we at least talk about this?
CHIYOKO: There’s nothing to say.
Message logged @ 16.34, 25/03/2012
RYU: Are you still mad?
Message logged @ 16.48, 25/03/2012
RYU: _|7O
Message logged @ 03.19, 26/03/2012
CHIYOKO: Ryu. Are you awake?
RYU: I’m sorry about earlier. Did you see I even sent you an ORZ?
CHIYOKO: Yeah.
RYU: Are you okay?
CHIYOKO: No. Mother Creature and Father are fighting. They haven’t done that since before Hiro came. I’m worried they’ll upset him.
RYU: What are they fighting about?
CHIYOKO: Me. MC says Father has to be stricter on me and make me go back to free school. She says I have to be made to work on my future plans. But then who will look after Hiro?
RYU: You’re really attached to that kid now.
CHIYOKO: I am.
RYU: So… what do you want to do with your life?
CHIYOKO: I’m like you; I never look further than a day ahead. What are the choices? I don’t want to work for a corporation, become a slave for life. I don’t want to do some dumb freeter job. I’ll probably end up living in a tent in the park with the homeless. MC would be happiest if I got married and had children and made that my life’s goal.
RYU: Do you think that will ever happen?
CHIYOKO: Never!!!!!! I love Hiro but the thought of having the responsibility for someone else’s life… I will live alone and die alone. I’ve always known that.
RYU: You’re not alone, Yoko.
CHIYOKO: Thanks, Ryu.
RYU: Did the ice princess just say thank you????
CHIYOKO: I have to go. Hiro has woken up. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
RYU:
PART SIX
CONSPIRACY
MARCH–APRIL
Lola Cando.
The last time Lenny came to see me, he was spitting mad. Second he got to the motel he drank a double bourbon straight down, then another. Took him a while to calm down enough to tell me what was going on.
Turned out that Lenny had found out Dr Lund had organised a rally for Mitch Reynard in Fort Worth. Some sort of pro-Israel, ‘Believers Unite’ convention, and it burned Lenny bad that he hadn’t been invited to speak at it. And that wasn’t all of it. After he did that radio show–the one where that New York DJ ripped him a new one–Dr Lund had sent a publicist down to see Lenny. The publicist (who Lenny described as a ‘jumped-up two-bit lackey in a suit’) told him that he wasn’t to draw too much attention to himself, and to let Dr Lund and Flexible Sandy spread the news about Pamela’s message their way. Lenny was also pissed that Dr Lund didn’t want him involved in searching for that fourth child.
‘I’ve got to find a way to convince him that he needs me, Lo,’ he said. ‘Pamela chose me, me, to spread the word. He has to see that.’
I wouldn’t say I felt sorry for Lenny, but Dr Lund cutting him off, hijacking his message, you could see it made him feel like the unpopular kid at school. And I don’t think it had anything to do with money. Lenny said his website was bringing in donations from all over the world. You ask me, it was pride more than anything.
Dr Lund may have cooled towards him, but Lenny’s message was catching on like wildfire. People I never thought of as religious were going and getting themselves saved. Couple of my johns even went and did it. Some of them, sure, you could see they were just doing it as insurance–in case it did turn out to be the truth. Didn’t matter that the Episcopalians and even those Muslim leaders were saying there was no reason to panic, people really started believing it, you know? There were just all these signs happening all over the world–signs of plague, famine, war and whatever. That puke virus and the foot and mouth disease were getting worse, and then came that drought in Africa and the big scare when the North Koreans threatened to test their nuclear weapons. That was just the start. Then there were all those rumours about Bobby’s grandfather and that robot stuff that was going down with the Japanese kid. It was almost as if every time Lenny’s theories were shot down by someone, up would come another sign that backed them up. If you’d asked me back when I first met Lenny if he could have caused such a stir, I wouldn’t have credited it.
‘I need a stronger platform, Lo,’ he kept saying. ‘Dr Lund’s taking everything. He’s acting like it was all his idea.’
‘Isn’t this all about saving souls though, honey?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, course it’s about saving people.’ He got real mad about that, went on about how time might be running out and how he and Dr Lund should be working together. He didn’t even want to do his usual that day. Too wound up, couldn’t… you know. Said he had to go meet with that Monty fellow anyhow, start planning on how he was going to get back into the big boys’ good graces. He told me that there were quite a few ‘messengers’ like Monty already staying at his ranch, and I guess he was thinking about how it would be a good thing to invite more.
After he left, I was getting all my stuff together, ready to head on back to my apartment and my next client, when there was a knock on the door. I figured maybe it was Lenny again, regretting that he’d wasted our hour together just talking. I opened it, saw a woman standing there. I knew who she was straight away. I’d have known her just by the dog, that Snookie. She looked even thinner than when she appeared on Dr Lund’s show. Skinny–too skinny, like one of those anorexics. But her expression was different. She didn’t look as lost as she did back then. She didn’t come across as angry or anything like that, but there was a look in her eyes that said, ‘Don’t mess with me.’
She looked me up and down and I could tell she was trying to figure out what Lenny saw in me. ‘How long have you and
him been doing this?’ she asked straight off.
I told her the truth. She nodded, and then pushed past me into the room. ‘You love him?’ she asked.
I almost laughed. I said that all Lenny was to me was one of my regulars. I wasn’t his girlfriend or mistress or anything like that. I know quite a few of my clients are married; that’s their business.
This seemed to give her some comfort. She sat down on the bed, asked me to fix her a drink. I handed her the same drink Lenny always has. She sniffed it, then drank it in one gulp. It ran down her chin and made her gag, but it didn’t seem to bother her. She waved her hand around the room and said, ‘All this, what you been doing with him. I paid for it. I paid for everything.’
I didn’t know how to answer that. I knew Lenny depended on her for money, didn’t know the extent of it though. She put the dog down on the bed next to her. It sniffed the sheets, then slumped on its side as if it was fixing to curl up and die. I knew they didn’t allow animals in the motel, but I wasn’t about to tell her that.
She asked me what Lenny liked, and I told her the truth. She said that at least he hadn’t been hiding some weird sexual fetish from her all those years.
Then she asked me if I believed in what he was saying, about the children being the horsemen. I said I wasn’t sure what to believe. She nodded, stood up to leave. Didn’t say anything else to me. There was a deep sadness inside her. I could see that straight off. It had to have been her who told the Inquirer about me and Lenny. It was only a day or so afterwards that this reporter called me up, pretending he was a regular john. Luckily I had my wits about me that day, but it didn’t stop the photographers trying their luck for days afterwards.
I came clean to Denisha after that, told her that Lenny was one of my clients. It didn’t surprise her. You can’t shock Denisha. She’s seen it all. Probably you’re wondering how I feel about Lenny now. Like I say, people are always trying to get me to say he was a monster. But he wasn’t. He was just a man. I guess when I decide to do that book those publishers are always after me to write, then I might talk about it more, but that’s all I’ve got to say on the subject for now.
The following article, by award-winning blogger and freelance journalist Vuyo Molefe, was first published in the online journal Umbuzo on 30 March 2012.
Bringing Home the Bodies: The Personal Cost of the Dalu Air Crash
It’s the day before the Dalu Air crash memorial is to be unveiled in Khayelitsha, and the press photographers are already circling. Teams of council workers have been bussed in to cordon off the area around the hastily constructed memorial sculpture–a sinister black glass pyramid that looks like it would be more at home on the set of a science-fiction B-movie. Why a pyramid? It’s a good question, but despite the number of editorials damning the peculiar choice of design, no one I’ve spoken to, including Ravi Moodley, the Cape Town city councillor who commissioned it, and the sculptor herself, artist Morna van der Merwe, seems to be prepared to give me (or anyone else) a straight answer.
The site is also swarming with conspicuously fit security men and women, all wearing stereotypical black suits and ear pieces, who eye me and the other press representatives with a mixture of contempt and distrust. Among the great and the good lined up to attend tomorrow’s ceremony are Andiswa Luso, who’s pipped to be the new head of the ANC Youth League, and John Diobi, a Nigerian high level preacher-cum-business-mogul who reportedly has ties with several US mega-churches, including those under the sway of Dr Theodore Lund, who hit the headlines worldwide with his theory that The Three are the harbingers of the apocalypse. It’s rumoured that Diobi and his associates are putting up the reward money for the discovery of Kenneth Oduah, the Dalu Air passenger deemed most likely to be the fourth horseman. Although the South African Civil Aviation Authority and the National Transportation Safety Board have insisted that no one on board Dalu Air Flight 467 could have survived, the reward has already ignited a hysterical man-hunt, with locals and tourists alike eager to get in on the action. And the fact that Kenneth’s name is etched on the memorial, despite the absence of his remains or DNA being discovered in the wreckage, has angered several Nigerian evangelical Christian groups–another reason for the high security presence.
But I’m not here to antagonise the security staff or petition the VIPs for an interview. Today, it’s not their stories I’m interested in.
Levi Bandah (21), who hails from Blantyre, Malawi, meets me at the entrance to the Mew Way community hall. Three weeks ago, he travelled to Cape Town in order to search for the remains of his brother Elias, who he believes is one of the casualties killed on the ground when the fuselage cut a deadly swathe through the township. Elias was working as a gardener in Cape Town in order to support his extended family back in Malawi, and Levi suspected something was wrong when Elias did not contact the family for over a week.
‘He sent us a text every day, and money came to us every week. My only choice was to travel here and see if I could find him.’
Elias is not listed among the deceased, but with so many unidentified remains–most believed to belong to illegal immigrants–still awaiting DNA matches for formal identification purposes, this isn’t a guarantee of anything.
In many African cultures, including my own–Xhosa–it is vital that the bodies of the deceased be returned to their ancestral homeland to be reunited with the spirits of the ancestors. If this is not done, it is believed that the spirit of the deceased will be restless and will cause grief to the living. And bringing home the body can be an expensive business. It can cost up to 14,000 rand to transport a body back to Malawi or Zimbabwe by air freight; without help, a sum way beyond the reach of the average citizen. For the families of refugees, transporting a body over two thousand kilometres by road is a daunting and gruesome prospect. I’ve heard stories of funeral directors colluding with families to disguise bodies as dried goods in order to cut the air-freight costs.
In the days following the crash, Khayelitsha rang with the sound of loudspeakers, as families of the victims petitioned the community to donate whatever they could so that bodies could be returned to their homelands. It is not unusual for the bereaved to receive double the amount they need; with many people from the Eastern Cape migrating to Cape Town for work, no one knows when they will be the one in need of help. And the refugee communities and societies are no different.
‘The community here has been generous,’ says David Amai (52), a soft-spoken and dapper Zimbabwean from Chipinge, who has also agreed to talk to me. Like Levi, he is in Cape Town waiting for the authorities to give him the go-ahead to bring the remains of his cousin, Lovemore–also a victim of the crash devastation–home. But before he left Zimbabwe, David had something Levi’s family didn’t have–the certainty that their loved one was dead. And they didn’t hear it from the pathologists working the scene. ‘When we did not hear from Lovemore, at first we did not know for sure if he had died,’ David told me. ‘My family consulted with a herbalist (sangoma) who performed the ritual and spoke to my cousin’s ancestors. They confirmed that he had connected with them and we knew then that he was gone.’ Lovemore’s body was eventually identified by DNA and David is hopeful that he can soon bring his remains back home.
But what if there is no body to be buried?
With no remains to bring back to his family, Levi’s only option was to collect some of the ashes and earth at the site, which would be immediately buried when he returned home. This is where his story veers into the stuff of nightmares (or farce). As he attempted to gather a small bag of earth, an over-zealous cop swooped down on him, accusing him of stealing souvenirs to sell to unscrupulous tourists and ‘Kenneth Oduah hunters’. Despite his protestations, Levi was arrested and thrown in a holding cell, where he languished, in fear of his life, for the weekend. Thankfully, hearing of his plight, several NGOs and the Malawian Embassy stepped in, and Levi was released relatively unscathed. His DNA has been taken and he’s waiting for confirmation that Elias is amon
g the victims. ‘They say it won’t take long,’ he says. ‘And the people here have been good to me. But I cannot return home without some part of my brother to restore to my family.’
As I leave the site, I receive a text from my editor saying that Veronica Oduah, the aunt of the elusive Kenneth, has landed in Cape Town for tomorrow’s ceremony, but has refused to speak to the press. I can’t help wondering how she must be feeling. Like Levi, she is living in a cruel limbo of uncertainty, hoping against hope that somehow, her nephew hasn’t joined the ranks of the dead.
Superintendent Randall Arendse is the controller of the Site C Police Station, Khayelitsha, Cape Town. He spoke to me in April 2012.
Fourth horseman, my arse. Every bloody day we’d get a new ‘Kenneth Oduah’ being brought into the station. Usually it was just some street kid who’d been bribed with a couple of bucks to say he was Kenneth. And it wasn’t just us. They were rocking up at every station in the Cape. Those US arseholes didn’t know what they’d started. Two hundred K USD? That’s nearly two million rand, which is more than what most South Africans will see in a lifetime. We had a photograph of the boy, but we couldn’t see the point of comparing it with the chancers that came in. Most of my guys, they’d been there that day, seen the wreckage. No ways anyone on that plane made it out alive, even if they were a bliksem rider of the apocalypse.