“I’ve been studying, hard. Find it and read it, okay? Right where Professor Schwarz first mentions shadow matter.”
Amused, Skosana shook his head and read: “ ‘… a new kind of matter, sometimes called shadow matter, that doesn’t interact, or only interacts extremely weakly, with the ordinary matter that we are familiar with. It you wanted to—’ “
“Skip down, Winston. Below where it says we can’t see shadow matter because it doesn’t interact with everyday light.”
Skosana grimaced. He ran a finger along the lines of print and finally read: “‘... it does interact with our kind of gravity—we share our gravity with shadow matter.” “
“Yes,” Thubana said. “Yes.”
“You called me gravity,” Myburgh said, annoyed that this highly complex guff had no guy lines to solid earth. “Now you’re calling me shadow matter. Make up your mind!”
“I called whites gravity,” Thubana said. “Not you. I was using analogy to explain a point. Now I’m making another one.”
“There’s nothing metaphorical about my situation! Damn it, I’m invisible to my own kind!”
“Shadow matter,” Thubana said smugly, as if he had just solved a devilishly abstruse equation.
“I can see you,” Skosana said. “Clearly.”
“Read,” Thubana commanded. “Read what the professor says about shadow matter and gravity.”
“There’s hardly anything, Mordecai. He only says we’d notice a shadow planet by its gravitational effects—but we wouldn’t see it with ordinary light.”
“I’m not a planet! I’m a person!”
“Person or planet,” Thubana said bitterly, removing Myburgh’s monogrammed handkerchief from his cheek and examining it, “you’re shadow matter to those fucking Boers.” He nodded at the bakkie’s cab.
“How? Why?”
“Ask God. That’s what I do. I ask him every day: ‘Dear God, Great Jehovah, how did my people get to be such thin shadows in our own country?” “
“What am I going to do?”
“What are we going to do?” Thubana said.
“I yelled in Jeppe’s face,” Myburgh said. “He didn’t hear me. He just leaned away—as if a soft breeze had touched him.” The memory of the major’s lack of reaction was painful. Humiliating.
“Gravitational effects,” Skosana said, sliding the book back into a coat pocket. “Mr. Myburgh has a gravitational effect on the stormjaers. They can’t see him, but he can—I don’t know—move them, maybe. Just a little.”
Silent tears traced Myburgh’s cheeks like liquid fuses; he sat down beside Skosana. When Wessels opened the nylon’s doors, he could dismount in front of Pretoria’s security police headquarters and walk the formidable distance to his condo or the much shorter distance to the offices of Jacobus & Roux. Even if no one his own color could see him, he could make it home, resume his life, and forget these past few disorienting hours.
But for how long? No one could hear him. He couldn’t make a living if the clients for whom he prepared loans, stock options, capital-outlay schemes, and Krugerrand investments could neither see nor hear him. He would have no real existence, he would be a walking cipher, a ghost of blood and bones.
“How did I get this way? When did it happen? I was all right when I left Huilbloom. Physically.”
“Hitting that elephant did it,” Thubana said. “There aren’t any elephants between Pretoria and KwaNdebele.”
“This morning, there was an elephant—I saw it, I hit it!”
“Okay, okay. But the elephant you hit was… a totem from the old times, shadow matter from yesterday. It changed you. It took Kabini a moment or two to pull you into focus when you came up to the bus. Remember? He saw your wrecked car, yes, but after he stopped and opened the door, what he first saw was only mist, night and mist, and then your ghost—which, of course, he couldn’t see—filled up with Africa, and he could see.”
“That’s poppycock. You’re trying to say I’m dead.”
“No. I know you’re not dead. I’m trying to explain something very hard to explain.”
“How do I change back? Explain that.”
“Back to what?” Skosana said, finding a packet of Rothman’s 30s and a book of matches in Thubana’s coat. “A dead man? Maybe you were dead —killed in your wreck—until number 496 came along. What do you think?” He tapped out, and lit, a cigarette.
Myburgh wiped the wet from his face with the torn sleeve of his jacket. He hated Rothman’s 30s. He hated any cigarette. To avoid the smoke slipping out of Skosana’s head (along with a faint radio speech about the Azanian victory over Armscor), he crossed over to Thubana’s bench.
“What I think is, number 496 couldn’t resurrect anyone. It can scarcely even go.”
“It’s still behind us,” Thubana said. “It’ll make it to Belle Ombre this morning, and back out to KwaNdebele tonight, and back in to Pretoria tomorrow. And so on.”
“But how do I change back, Professor Superstrings?”
Thubana, to Myburgh’s surprise, folded the bloody handkerchief he’d been using to clot his wound and stuffed it fastidiously into the breast rocket of Myburgh’s suit coat. “Right now, Mr. Myburgh, everything is so befok, I hardly care.”
Lifting his muddy foot up to the bench and arranging himself so that one haunch could warm it, Myburgh was unable to meet Thubana’s eyes. He’d got what he deserved. Thubana and Skosana were riding off to detention, interrogation, torture, possibly even (it was a filthy thing to contemplate, a filthier thing to admit) death; and he had badgered Thubana about restoring him to the lofty estate of an upper-middle-class Afrikaner.
Sweet Christ, what weakness. Or what brass. It was hard for him to know exactly how he had erred, but he had definitely erred. The chilly proof of it was Thubana’s silence.
* * * *
Traffic in Pretoria was beginning to thicken, but Jeppe and his driver had beaten the morning rush. From one of the nylon’s windows, Myburgh saw that they had lost Grim Boy’s Toe and that a great many familiar landmarks were kaleidoscoping past. Then they reached the headquarters of the security police, pulled off Potgieterstraat into a concealing side street, and slammed to a jolting halt. The laughter from the cab made Myburgh suspect that Wessels (or whoever was driving) had braked like that for the sadistic joy of shaking them up.
“Out! Out!”
The doors came open. Fists with billy clubs shook insistently at them. Pampoenkop—Lieutenant Christiaan Wessels—appeared among the men waiting to escort them inside. And when Skosana, squinting like a mole, stumbled out onto the pavement, Wessels grabbed him by the trenchcoat lapels and bullied him into the wall of the terraced security building.
“Where did you get this coat, kaffir?”
Skosana nodded at the nylon’s doors, through which Thubana was now warily coming. “Mordecai let me borrow it.”
“He wasn’t wearing a coat when we put him in.” Wessels looked at one of the agents. “Dedekind, did you leave a goddamned coat in there yesterday.”
“No, Lieutenant Wessels. Absolutely not.”
Myburgh had already dismounted. He stood between the tall gray building and the nylon, studying the situation.
Wessels, meantime, stuck his big round head, with its flat pink nose, into Skosana’s gaunt face. “Where in fuck did you get this, Baldhead? Tell me!”
“I had it in my trouser pocket,” Thubana said instead. “Folded up very small. “Compactified,” one could say.”
“It’s a coat in ten dimensions, six of them curled up,” Myburgh said, amazed to hear himself using back talk similar to Thubana’s. Of course, the difference-—the telling difference—was that Wessels couldn’t hear him.
Wessels shot a disbelieving look at Thubana. “Shut up. You’ll have your chance to sing.” Then, back to Skosana: “Take it off, kaffir! At once!”
Skosana got help. Two security agents hurried to yank the coat off him, grabbing down on its sleeves. So zealous were they, they
almost unsocketed one of his arms. Myburgh heard a nauseating pop! and saw both agony and hate flare in Skosana’s eyes, with their immense pupils and muddy-yellow whites.
“Leave him alone!” Thubana cried.
A pretty-boy policeman menaced him with a sjambok. “You want a star on that other cheek too?”
“All of his cheeks, Goosen,” said Dedekind, a thirtyish fellow with close-set eyes. “He wants a star or two to sit down on.”
“Just as he wishes,” Wessels said. “The filthy bugger.”
As a policeman wrapped Thubana’s trenchcoat around his arm, Superstrings dropped out. So did the package of Rothman’s 30s and the match-book from an Indian restaurant in a condemned Asian neighborhood. One officer scooped up the book, another bent down for the cigarettes and matches.
Wessels turned aside to examine Superstrings. “Well, well,” he said. “This could be a find, Schoeman—a code book, maybe. Carry it in with you.”
Thubana barked a laugh. “Who’s going to decode it?”
This time, the policeman with the sjambok hit him, but Thubana deflected the blow by lifting a hand and hunching his shoulder. A second man made him pay by billying him in the groin. Thubana fell to his knees in front of the bakkie’s yawning doors.
I don’t have to watch this, Myburgh thought. I can walk home. Who’s going to stop me?
Suddenly, Wessels realized that Skosana was again wearing the volleyball cap that, on the road from KwaNdebele, Major Jeppe had hurled off into the night “What the hell is this?” He snatched the cap from Skosana’s head, dangled it from his fingers as if it were a scroll of sodden toilet tissue.
“… King, Tutu and Boesak’s reformism has been endorsed by the imperialists worldwide. Both King and Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to restrict our liberation movements to nonviolent methods. However, their—”
“Shut up!” Wessels shouted.
“—timid political activity can only patch up a few of the more glaring injustices of their morally bankrupt societies. When the armed struggle is it low ebb, they condemn it outright, but when it intensifies and gathers -ass support, they cry, “Negotiate with us, or face them!” This is how they sell—”
“Shut up! Shut up!” Wessels struck Skosana, slapping him with open palms on both sides of the face, like a man playing cymbals in an orchestra.
“Don’t!” Myburgh stepped forward. But, as he knew it would, this heartfelt caution went unheeded.
Skosana, stung, gave Wessels a two-handed shove in the chest, knocking him into Goosen and Dedekind. Meanwhile, his steel plate continued to receive and transmit:
“… revolutionary organizations like the Black Panther Party and the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) in Detroit. It is this common history that unifies mass struggle in—”
Recovering, Wessels jumped back at Skosana with a sjambok taken from the agent named Schoeman. His face as red and bloated as a rising sun, he lifted the flail with all the kinetic fury of Christ going after the money changers.
From his knees, Thubana cried, “He can’t help it, you tsotsis! Give him back his cap!”
Goosen and Schoeman caught Wessels from behind.
“Not out here, Lieutenant,” Goosen said, trembling excitedly. “Save it. You’ll have your chance. All of us will.”
Hyperventilating, Wessels resembled an inflatable, horror-show van der Merwe, an editorial cartoon of the Bad Afrikaner. Myburgh was simultaneously repulsed and fascinated. When Wessels finally gained control of himself, though, he saw the cap in his left hand and slapped it punishingly into Skosana’s palm.
“Put it on!”
Glaring contempt, Skosana obeyed, rendering the broadcast from Zambia as thin and reedy as water trickling through the pipes in an adjoining hotel room.
Wessels appealed to Goosen: “Where did he get it? The major threw it away. I know he threw it away.”
“He probably had the other half crimped up in a pocket,” Goosen said. “That’s all.”
Myburgh bent down beside Thubana, gripped his elbow, put an arm around his waist, helped him stand.
“It’s muddy just like the one Major Jeppe threw away,” Wessels said. “He got it back somehow. The same way he got that coat.”
“How was that?” said Dedekind, nervously cutting his eyes.
“That old black magic,” Thubana whispered to Myburgh. “That I know so well.”
Hearing Thubana quote from an old pop song, in a street next to security police headquarters, tickled Myburgh; against his will, he smiled.
“Go home,” Thubana whispered. “It only gets worse now. Go on home, Mr. Myburgh.”
“No!” Skosana said.
Wessels looked up as if Skosana had spit in his face. “ ‘No’ is just what we don’t want to hear, kaffir. We’re in the business of manufacturing yeses.”
“Come inside with us,” Skosana said, speaking around Wessels to Myburgh.
“Never fear,” Wessels said. “Steenkamp!”
A policeman came to grasp Thubana’s arm. Myburgh tried to push him aside, to protect his own grip on Thubana, but his efforts only made Steenkamp stumble slightly. In fact, he glanced down at the street as if a stone or a bottle shard had tripped him, then went ahead and seized Thubana, incidentally brushing Myburgh’s arm away as if it were less than a spider’s thread.
“Come inside with us,” Skosana said again. “And stay, please, with Mordecai. He’s never been in before.”
Wessels said, “Neither of you kaffirs will be lonesome—don’t worry about that. And if your friend’s never been in before, it’s past time, isn’t it?”
“Please,” Skosana said. “Come inside.”
Myburgh looked at the man pleading with him with such dignity. He looked at Thubana, and at the security police—Wessels & Company— whose eagerness to escort his two comrades upstairs seemed akin to that of small boys on Christmas. Packages to unwrap. New toys to break in.
“All right,” he said.
* * * *
Getting in was easy. Myburgh squeezed through the street-level door beside Thubana and struggled up through the echoey stairwell behind Skosana.
Each prisoner was bookended by a pair of security agents, who had handcuffed Thubana and Skosana before bringing them in. Didn’t this mausoleum have elevators? If so, they weren’t for detainees, even in the off-limits parts reserved for suspected terrorists and other enemies of the state. So let the kaffirs climb the stairs to their inevitable comeuppance.
Myburgh could not clearly account for his lack of sympathy for Goosen, Steenkamp, Dedekind, and Schoeman. (Wessels had left them on the first landing, perhaps to check in with Jeppe.) After all, he’d grown up with such men. Men somewhat like them, anyway—the sons of farmers on the properties bordering Huilbloom. Freckled, sunburnt, sandy-haired toughs with callused hands and hard-edged laughs.
Several times, in fact, as a teenager, he had ventured out as a balaclava man with these fellows. Everyone wore a hood and rode in Anton Smoot’s tiny Renault, headlights off, to shoot out the streetlamps and robots— traffic lights—in the black areas near Nylstroom. They had carried real pistols (he and Kiewit juggled Papa Myburgh’s Ruger back and forth) and real bullets. And, to this day, Kiewit held that on one outing they had shot a pair of meths-drinking Ndebele drunks along with the streetlamps. Myburgh’s memory of these jaunts wasn’t as clear as his brother’s, nor could he see himself engaging in anything so wild and reckless today. But, once upon a time, he had definitely ridden balaclava…
Jeppe, Wessels, Goosen, Steenkamp, Dedekind, Schoeman, and the others were just doing their jobs. A hard job. A necessary job, albeit a dirty one. And they weren’t much applauded for the hard, dirty job they did. Folks didn’t want to think about them. Just as a man—a city man, at least—putting away a juicy steak doesn’t want to be told that the cow it came from died under the spattering thwack of a sledgehammer.
But Myburgh did know the reason for his animosity toward t
hese men. Mordecai Thubana put roofs on houses and apartment buildings in the new white subdivisions in and around Pretoria; Skosana had paid for his crimes against the state long ago. They were kaffirs, sure, but neither of them belonged in this building. Myburgh knew that. A man who wanted to help the world’s finest physicists come up with a Grand Unified Theory of Everything, and another who made his living loading snack foods onto trucks.
Such reprobates. Such traitors.
Stop worrying, Gerrit. Despite Thubana’s fears (It only gets worse now), Jeppe and his men will see their error once they’ve asked a few questions.
Of course they will. They must.
Full Spectrum 3 - [Anthology] Page 57