When Thubana finally did stumble out, his dark flesh appeared transparent: a fragile, oiled membrane of veins and welts, bruises and lacerations. It hurt to look at him.
“I’m cold,” Thubana said. “Give me my clothes.”
But they didn’t. They returned him to the room in which they had administered the beating, sat him down at the desk, encircled him menacingly. But the cold shower, rather than melting his will, had under-girded it. Unflinching, he looked square into the eyes of each of the men leaning over him.
“Give me my clothes.”
“Give us a statement,” Jeppe said.
“How?” Thubana said. He lifted his dripping arms to show them the obvious: no writing materials.
At a nod from Jeppe, Goosen went to the file cabinet, pulled out several sheets of paper and a ballpoint pen, and returned with these items to the desk.
“A towel,” Thubana said. “Or I’ll ruin whatever I write.”
Wessels disappeared into the room near the shower stall, banged around ill-temperedly, and returned with a towel.
A hand towel, not a bath towel.
But Thubana, grimacing, got up, patted down every part of his severely punished body, and, when no one asked for the towel back, spread it out on the seat of the lopsided chair and sat down on the damp cloth as if it were a cushion. He looked up at Jeppe and the others with a stare that the angry bulge next to one eyebrow made seem a hundred times more defiant and resentful.
“A statement,” Jeppe said.
“Of what?”
“The full extent of your knowledge of and participation in the Armscor bombing. All you know about ANC plans to knock out the dam at Rietvlei. Plus a full—”
“I don’t—”
“Quiet.”
“But I’m not—”
“And a full breakdown of the real meanings behind those T-shirt ‘equations.” “
Thubana hesitated. Then: “It will take some time.”
“An hour.”
“Two,” Thubana said.
“An hour. If your statement is helpful but you haven’t quite finished, then we’ll give you more. Understand?”
“I think so.”
Amazingly, they left Thubana alone in the interrogation room. They carried out their bricks, locked the file cabinet, blocked passage to the shower stall with a sliding metal grille, and set Steenkamp as a guard on the floor’s main corridor. But they left Thubana alone to draw up a statement, his first respite from their badgering since coming into the building.
Myburgh sat down atop the desk, facing away from Thubana as he believed the other man wished. “Sometimes, it’s impossible not to look, Mr. Thubana.”
“That depends on who you are.”
“What they did to you: terrible, barbaric. Mr. Thubana, it’s only because—”
“Please be quiet. I must write.”
Myburgh shut up, and Thubana began filling up the top sheet of white foolscap. For the next hour, the only sound in the room was the faint switching of his ballpoint.
* * * *
The statement was unsatisfactory. It denied any knowledge of the Armscor car bomb, it pretended not to have any awareness of the planned assault on the dam at Rietvlei, and it interpreted all the arcane mathematical symbols on Thubana’s T-shirt as attempts (phony attempts) to unify the four major forces of the universe in a grand Theory of Everything. Besides which, this TOE presupposed that the most basic units of matter were not atoms but tiny, twitchy strings that had sprung into being only seconds after the Big Bang. There was nothing about the ANC, the APLA, or any other leftist-supported revolutionary group.
And so the statement was unacceptable.
Jeppe took Thubana’s statement as a personal affront. Wessels acted as if Thubana had sodomized his grandmother.
Goosen, Steenkamp, Dedekind, Schoeman, and a group of men who seemed to live in closets on this floor (so readily did they pop out to do their commanders’ bidding) assumed Thubana’s questioning; soon enough, they had reduced Myburgh to impotent rage.
He learned the amusing names, and the sickening particulars, of four or five different “interrogation techniques.” Although he tried to help, grabbing one or another of the security policemen by the collar and yanking backward with all his strength, he lacked the somatic specific gravity to do anything but strain his back or herniate himself, so that as Thubana screamed, he screamed, and as Thubana begged his tormentors to stop, please stop, Myburgh begged them too, and the “airplane,” “Dr. Frankenstein,” the “helicopter,” and the “wet cap” rolled past him during that muzzy day like scenes from a half-dozen ineptly spliced horror movies.
“Bastards!” Myburgh cursed. “Bastards!”
When they were finished, and Thubana had told them nothing they wanted to hear (not even confessing that the symbol “Es” in the book Superstrings was mathematical code for a cadre of terrorists in Mozambique, or that “Lie algebras” were a secret means of rating military-aid shipments from Red China), they dragged Thubana from the interrogation room and hurled him into an isolation cell—with bars, a lidless toilet, and a stiff, reed sleeping mat—on the same nightmarish floor.
“Animals!” Myburgh shouted, hobbling after them.
The cry reverberated in his own ears, but Jeppe & Company were infuriatingly deaf to it. Worse, they locked Thubana into the cell and handcuffed him to the lower part of its grille (so that he was unable to use his sleeping mat) without leaving Myburgh enough room to edge into it too. Invisible to his countrymen, Myburgh was one of them again. Thubana was locked up, but he was free. Except that he was a prisoner too, in the same building containing a cell that contained Thubana. Boxes inside boxes. Cages within cages. Bantustans within the Fatherland…
And then the security agents were gone, and Myburgh, clinging to the bars, was alone with Thubana.
“Go home,” Thubana said. He didn’t raise his head; he mumbled into the pit of his handcuffed arm.
“I can’t.”
Thubana moaned, heedless of the misery escaping him.
“Mr. Thubana, I don’t think I can. I live, and move, but I don’t”— Myburgh searched for the word—”impinge on anything. How can I get out of here?”
Thubana did not reply.
Myburgh got down on his knees. He put a hand through the bars and rubbed a finger over Thubana’s woolly hair. Rivulets of blood had dried in the tiny gullies in this wool. The side of Thubana’s face resembled an inner-tube strip with an infestation of polyplike heat blisters. Myburgh wiped his eyes with a coat sleeve.
“Mr. Thubana—”
“Go home.”
Thubana lifted his head. His face called up images from battle photography and traffic-safety films. Was the poor man a member of a Faking Club… ?
“Try,” Thubana said. “You must … try.”
Myburgh pulled himself up, backed away, and wandered through the maze of the upper floor.
Eventually, he located the door to a stairwell, pulled it open, and went through into a shaft as cold and forbidding as a mine stope. There were fluorescents on each landing, and the window overlooking the billboard proclaiming the “controlled strength” of Jik gleamed under anemic spotlights. It was night, the tag end of an endless day.
He went down, all the way down, and paused at the street-level door, expecting failure. His success at barging into the stairwell and coming down the steps was a fluke of physics. By all rights, he should have no more impact on the physical structures of this building than a shade—for he was a shade, a man-shaped confluence of shadow matter.
Myburgh gripped the push bar on the door. He pushed down on it. It resisted. It resisted as if it understood that his was a conjectural, a ghostly, pressure.
Myburgh examined his hands. The palms were still raw from his attempts to wrest the hosepipe from Goosen. If the hosepipe could do that to him, it seemed logical—in an inevitably symmetrical way—that he could exert some influence on the sort of matter that had scalded him
. Tit for tat.
He pushed down again.
Surprise. This time the bar depressed, clicking open the door to which it was attached.
Myburgh stumbled outside, one hand still on the bar.
Traffic noises assailed him.
The air was brisk and somewhat damp-feeling, but an astonished glance at the sky, between the inward-leaning tops of the security police building and the office building opposite it, showed him an indigo road of stars. If you squinted, if you put your imagination into gear, you could believe that out there beyond those twinkling points of fire vibrated—majestically—a cosmic string light-years in length tying this very moment to the instant of creation. That string would be a stretched remnant of a tiny superstring that had blown clear of the Big Bang and escaped into the cosmos. It would be proof that everything on hand in the universe today had exploded from the same blazing Ur-furnace.
Or so Thubana believed. And so he had told Myburgh and Skosana on their not-so-smooth nylon ride into Pretoria.
Christ. Such thoughts.
It would take an hour to walk home from here, Myburgh decided. Or he could walk to Church’s Square and catch public transport to his condominium. If no one could see him, he wouldn’t even have to pay the bus driver…
The clap on that. Thubana was upstairs, naked and suffering. And if Myburgh stepped outside, letting go of this door, it would lock behind him. He could tug on it all he liked; it would never budge, no matter how strong his will, how mighty his arms. This door locked on people who were not shadow matter, and it would hold Myburgh out even if he rematerialized as a visible Afrikaner, with a thousand questions for Major Henning Jeppe.
So he went back in, let go of the push bar, and trudged back up the six flights of steps to Thubana.
* * * *
Myburgh took off his coat, pushed it between the bars, spread it over Thubana’s shoulders and back. He straightened it as well as he could so that only Thubana’s legs and part of his handcuffed arm remained uncovered.
Then Myburgh curled up on the floor beside the comatose man and fumbled toward sleep.
In his dream, he was driving a bus—not a municipal bus, but a Putco bus like the one Kabini drove from KwaNdebele every morning and back again every night. His riders were plainclothes security policemen from this very building; the bus was packed with them—Jeppe, Wessels, Goosen, Steenkamp, and maybe ninety more, every one standing or sitting ramrod straight as Myburgh drove them through a teeming closer settlement.
The streets were unpaved and dusty. Angry blacks—many armed with rocks, many shaking their fists, some determined enough to leap in front of the bus and spit at the bus’s windshield—crowded in so grimly that it was hard to keep going. Either Myburgh could slow to a walk, letting more and more blacks approach the bus, lay hands on it, and rock it back and forth until it turned over; or he could jam the accelerator, wrestle the steering wheel, and harvest these agitated people like corn.
There seemed to be no other options, only death for his riders or blatant, cold-blooded vehicular homicide. He might have been able to resign himself to the first option if it had not required his own death. He might have been able to adjust to the second one if his passengers had not been Jeppe & Company.
Soon, Myburgh was crying as he drove. He could not tell if his watery vision stemmed from his own frustrated tears or the dripping spittle on his windshield. He beeped his horn. He beeped it and beeped it. A rock shattered the windscreen, giving it the look of a weird, puzzle-piece spiderweb. His passengers—outwardly calm—began sticking handguns through their windows and firing into the streets as if the closer settlement were a huge shooting gallery. Each time a black fell dead or wounded, a bell rang (Myburgh didn’t know from where), and Jeppe, sitting behind him, got up to reward the sharpshooter with a licorice whip or a stuffed animal: hyena, giraffe, ant bear, elephant. Jeppe extracted these animals from a duffel under his seat, and their supply, like that of the shouting Africans, seemed endless.
Then a bomb exploded in the road, a bomb made out of a knot of blacks banished from South Africa’s cities. When it went off, body parts and clothing scraps flew up into the sky. (Suddenly, it was night. The Coalsack nebula, near the Jewel Box cluster, opened up like a hungry pit.) Myburgh tumbled into the whirlpools created by the explosion. Not knowing what else to do, he grabbed the strands of the puzzle-piece web in his windscreen and pulled himself along them to its center.
When absolutely clear of the driver’s cage, Myburgh looked down and saw his bus on fire, five or six kilometers below. Meanwhile, the strands of the web in which he was swinging—it was a hammock now, a hammock attached to the four stars of the Southern Cross—started reeling at high speed, as if a vacuum cleaner light-years away were cracking him apart atom by atom and sucking him into its bag. It wanted him and his galaxy-sized fears to fly into the bag without tearing it. Myburgh turned over in the hammock, clutching at its lengthening, ever-thinning strings.
The hole of the Coalsack (Kiewit had always called it the Soot Bag) got bigger and bigger. It was like a black widow; no, a black window. And what Myburgh saw through it was the body of a stuffed elephant, slowly rumbling. A minute ago, it had been in the lap of one of Jeppe’s boys, a prize for marksmanship. Now the beast was growing at the same high speed as the Coalsack, and he could see that no matter what he did, he was going to hit it, and hitting the elephant (a doddering bull with fractured tusks, not a stuffed toy) would probably destroy him…
* * * *
“Wake up, man. Wake up.”
* * * *
Myburgh roused; his nightmare had disoriented him. Then he saw Wessels—a.k.a. Pampoenkop—glowering down on him, and he began to suspect that his real nightmare was about to start. It seemed that Wessels could see him.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?”
Myburgh blinked. Wessels’s head—its size, its slanted brows, its crooked teeth, its mounded chins—did resemble a pumpkin. Was it rational to fear a talking jack-o’-lantern?
“Answer me, please.”
“What time is it?” Myburgh said in Afrikaans. (Wait. He had a watch. He checked it: 3:45 a.m.)
“Time you answered me,” Wessels said. “You’re up to your chin, brother-man.”
Myburgh did not stand. He rolled over and scooted up against Thubana’s cell. Thubana was asleep or comatose. In sleep, he had dislodged Myburgh’s coat, exposing most of his back.
“You can see me,” Myburgh said.
“I’m not blind. How did you get in?”
Myburgh shook his head to clear it of some confusing images and swallowed to make his ears pop. His left foot stuck out toward the policeman like a big, mottled sausage. Wessels aimed a kick at it, and the back of Myburgh’s head banged metal.
A warning. Only a warning.
“I am Gerrit Myburgh, a special-accounts executive at Jacobus and Roux. On the road back from Huilbloom, our family farm, I had an accident. I’ve come here to report it.”
“You need the city police, Meneer Myburgh.”
“My accident occurred in the country.”
“You are still in the wrong place. This is the special branch, Meneer Myburgh. You have no business here.”
Myburgh nodded at Thubana. “That man has clearly been through hell. Why is he naked?”
“Did you give him that coat?”
“He looked cold. He still looks cold.”
Wessels was trying hard not to erupt. Maybe he suspected that Myburgh was a member of some kind of governmental Faking Club, sent out to test the humanity of security agents.
Finally, Wessels allowed the dam to burst: “You are a foolish goddamned kaffirboetie, Meneer Myburgh.”
“This man needs medical attention.”
“You have many questions to answer. Stand up, please, and come with me.”
Myburgh stared insolently at Wessels. He massaged the sole of his naked foot. Perhaps it would have been better to remain shadow matter to his compatriots
until he had thought of a way to rescue—if that were possible—both himself and the two innocent Africans now in custody.
“You gave him a coat,” Wessels said. “Maybe you gave him other things as well? Instructions, for example?”
“Telephone my brother. Telephone my superiors at Jacobus and Roux. Dozens of people can vouch for me.”
“At this hour?” Wessels turned and called down the corridor to an office seemingly kilometers away: “Major van Rhyn. Major van Rhyn, we have a problem.”
* * * *
Major W. K. van Rhyn worked on him all that morning. Wessels assisted, and it was a relief—a surprise and a relief—that they only questioned him. The wallet from inside his jacket (which an unseen policeman brought to van Rhyn’s office from Thubana’s cell) contained materials identifying Myburgh.
Full Spectrum 3 - [Anthology] Page 59