Chapter 51
And then Myburgh realized that the voice of the announcer on Radio Freedom was issuing from the toothless cavity of Mpandhlani's mouth: "... conscious rejection of the indoctrinated inferiority complex that sparked the Soweto uprising of 1976 when our students said no to the imposition of the oppressor's language. This fight developed into a rejection of an entire system-'Bantu education'-deliberately designed to keep our people in perpetual subjugation. Therefore, we must enforce a perpetual rainy Monday on every school using these 'techniques of control' and make ourselves-"
Thubana leaned out into the aisle, put his fist under the bald man's chin, and gently closed his mouth. The harangue from the PAC spokesman continued, but mutedly, as if leaking out of Mpandhlani's earholes and nostrils. Mpandhlani woke up and looked at Thubana in groggy bewilderment.
"What's happening, Mordecai?" His words bled into the report on Radio Freedom like a spooky sort of overdubbing. "Oh no," he said, pressing the palms of his hands to his temples. He glanced apologetically at several of the other pa.s.sengers. "Forgive me, my friends. Please, everybody, forgive."
"It's okay," Thubana told him. "Put on your cap." He took the volleyball-half from Mpandhlani and crammed it down on his naked and- Myburgh finally saw-grotesquely st.i.tched-up pate. There was silence again, a vacuum quickly filled by the incessant rattling of Grim Boy's Toe. Riders fore and aft relapsed into self-protective comas, as if, having survived a crisis, they needed to recuperate. Myburgh felt even more isolated than before.
"Mr. Thubana, I don't understand."
"Perhaps your mind is too dim. -Forgive me. It's just that Mpandhlani-his real name is Winston Skosana-has a metal plate in his head. Sometimes, he picks up radio broadcasts, usually illegal ones from Zambia or Botswana. This is dangerous, especially when he's on a loading platform at the rusks factory. That volleyball-he found it in a KwaNdebele midden-saves him from embarra.s.sment. A matter of physics."
"Dunderheaded physics, surely."
"No, Mr. Myburgh. It works."
"It's nonsense. It's impossible."
Thubana shrugged. He nodded at Mpandhlani-Winston Skosana- who'd already dozed off again.
"Why does he have a plate in his skull?"
"He was arrested by security police ten years ago and detained without charge for thirty-two months. Then, one day, while taking him from his cell to an interrogation room, his keepers shoved him down a flight of metal stairs. Suicide attempt, said the security police. But Winston didn't die, and some determined ladies from the Black Sash had him released and operated on."
"He was a terrorist, a guerrilla-in-training."
"I suppose." Thubana appeared bored by the possibility. "He could have been a poet."
"Or a physicist?"
Thubana turned back to Myburgh as if he'd reopened an important area of discussion-but, astonis.h.i.+ngly, he said, "Mpandhlani once told me that we have no word in our Nguni dialect for orgy."
"I beg your pardon."
"African languages are not made to talk about Western mores or contemporary physics. Bantu education-carried out in our tribal tongues-has made it very hard for us to understand the discoveries of men like Einstein and Planck."
"What has that to do with not having a word for orgy?"
"If the Ndebele, the Sotho, the Zulu, and others have no word for this human activity, how may we-speaking only Afrikaans and our tribal tongues-grasp interactions among submicroscopic particles called fermions, hadrons, baryons, quarks? Impossible!"
"Forget it," Myburgh said. "It's all a lot of horsefeathers."
"And now they're saying that these tiny points aren't points at all, but the ends of very small strings-closed strings, probably. Only by viewing them as strings may we construct a workable Theory of Everything."
"Theory of Everything?" Thubana's talk was all over the map, an obstacle course of jargon.
"A series of formulae bringing together the four major forces of the universe."
"Right. Given ten dimensions, six of them 'curled up." Study architecture, man. Study mechanical drawing."
Thubana thumbed through his book. "Gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force, the strong force. Until this theory, Mr. Myburgh, no one was able to prove that these four forces were all separate aspects of one underlying force. That's important. We must prove it. I want to help prove it."
Myburgh found that the pa.s.sion with which Thubana was speaking had touched him. "Not everyone can aid in such discoveries. I can't, for instance. But I won't lose sleep over it. I've other interests, other talents."
It seemed a kind of hubris, Thubana's megalomaniacal desire to put himself in the company of Einstein and Planck. Laughable. But Myburgh couldn't laugh. Perhaps-given Thubana's pa.s.sion-all this superstring business wasn't mere crackpottery.
Thubana said, "Gravity is the most powerful force. It works at a distance even on the macroscopic scale, and it has always been the problem. Various quantum theories have unified the other three forces, the ones working at subatomic levels, but gravity-d.a.m.n it most emphatically!- always knocks each potential new TOE, Theory of Everything, out of symmetry. It ruins everything."
"I'm sorry." This was all that Myburgh could think to say, but he meant it. (G.o.d, his eyelids were growing heavy.) Then the African changed tacks. "You whites, Mr. Myburgh, are gravity. Blacks, Asians, and our so-called Coloreds are like the other three forces: magnetism, weak force, strong force. In these cases, though, it doesn't matter much which group
Now he's talking trash, Myburgh thought, fighting drowsiness. Has the weird engine of his brain thrown a rod?
Thubana's voice droned on, almost like a lullaby: "Africans, Asians, Coloreds-it's easy to unify those groups, just as one may construct theories, equations without anomalies, that bring together every major physical force except gravity. Gravity's the hangup. Meanwhile, societally speaking, whites are the biggest obstacle to harmony among peoples. You are gravity, Gerrit Myburgh. You pull everything down. You monkey-wrench the equations."
Before Myburgh could protest this slander, many of the bus's pa.s.sengers began to second Thubana's remarks.
Incongruously, they did so by singing, a capella, in syncopated rhythms that reminded Myburgh of ancient tribal chants and modern street-corner sing-offs in Soweto, Nigel, Alexandro, and other black towns.h.i.+ps: Whites are gravity- They bring us down.
Down, down, down.
Down, down, down.
Whites are gravity- They bring us down.
Down, down, down.
Down, down, down.
The purity of the laborers' voices-the spine-tingling richness of their harmonies-gave Myburgh a chill. But their voices didn't entirely mask the bankruptcy of the ideas set forth in their stupid little song; and Myburgh, back from the trance into which Thubana's monologue had lulled him, turned around and shouted above the bus's maddening rattle: "Whites aren't gravity! We don't bring you down!"
"You act on us over great distances," said Thubana. "You cause us to travel miles. Light-years, so to speak."
"Are you puppets, then?" Myburgh asked. "Is that how you see yourselves?"
"Down, down, down," chanted a host of pa.s.sengers.
"Shut up!" Myburgh cried. "SHUT UP!"
As gently as possible, Thubana pulled Myburgh back down to his seat. "Everyone on this bus-every soul on our planet-is a puppet of super-strings, Mr. Myburgh, for superstrings is a TOE, a Theory of Everything. It explains-it will explain-the physical universe to all its living and breathing puppets."
"There's no such thing as your Theory of Everything!" Myburgh replied, shaking off Thubana's hand. "Theories, perhaps. A dozen different theories-but not just one comprehensive Theory that can explain everything!"
"Tell him to shut up," a hefty woman in a checkered doek told Thubana. "He's giving me the nerves."
"Do you want to be Kentuckied?" Thubana whispered. "You know, necklaced? Is that what you wish?"
Of course he didn't. What life-loving person in his right mind would want a used tire lowered over his head, doused in petrol, and cruelly set aflame? Fear rippled in Myburgh's bowels like a school of rapidly finning minnows.
But, bracing himself, he repeated that no one set of equations-no matter how elegant-could offer insight into every interaction in the cosmos.
"Of course not," said Thubana, patting his knee.
Suspicious, Myburgh stared at him.
"Now please apply that principle to the TOE by which the South African state tries to order relations among people."
It suddenly occurred to Myburgh that Grim Boy's Toe was really Grim Boy's TOE.
Putco bus number 496 carried a monicker that wickedly mocked both the race-obsessed Afrikaners who had devised apartheid and the grim policy itself, a policy on which his ancestors had ingeniously jury-rigged a system of taboos, customs, mores, and laws unlike those anywhere else on the planet.
d.a.m.n these kaffirs. d.a.m.n them all to the most painful Ndebele h.e.l.l they can imagine.
"How much longer, Kabini?" Myburgh shouted at the bearish Putco driver.
"Three hours," called Ernest Kabini, over his shoulder. "No. Two hours, forty-five minutes."
"Don't be impertinent." c.o.o.n, he wanted to add.
"Sorry, nkosi."
Thubana clasped Myburgh's wrist, twisting it around to reveal his watch. Myburgh was dumbfounded to see that its stark crimson readout -which winked as if adequately powered-hadn't advanced beyond... 3:15 a.m.
Christ Almighty. Was he dreaming?
Then he gazed past the laborers in front of him and saw through the streaked windscreen another Putco bus swerve into 496's headlamps. Immediately, hands braced on the seat back, knuckles whitening, he was on his feet again, shouting at Kabini to hit the brakes before they were all seriously injured...
"Shadow matter," Thubana said, trying to pull him back down by his coat. "Just like us. It can't hurt you, Mr. Myburgh, please believe me."
Shadow matter?
What nonsense! What high-flown, self-deluding claptrap, just like everything else Thubana had told him.
Number 496, as Kabini futilely braked, collided with the other vehicle, striking it resoundingly. Windscreens shattered. Engines anviled together. Bodies flew past one another like players in an avant-garde production of Peter Pan. Indeed, Thubana rocketed past Myburgh in the gemmy chaos, clutching his copy of Superstrings and smiling as if to say, None of this matters; believe me, sir, not a jot of this means anything at all.
You're lying, Myburgh's dream self thought. You're lying.
And he was hurled through the broken windscreen of Grim Boy's Toe into an endless, entrapping darkness.
When Putco bus 496 pulled up behind the stalled Cadillac (which was blocking the way to Pretoria), driver Ernest Kabini called back to one of his pa.s.sengers, Mordecai Thubana.
Thubana, shaking himself awake, accompanied Kabini off the bus, and they offered their aid to the policemen in glistening boots and macintoshes walking around the s.h.i.+ny cranberry-colored car.
"Go on about your business," one of the policemen told them in Afrikaans. "There's nothing you can do."
Thubana peered in the Caddy's window at the man slumped behind its steering wheel: a sandy-haired bloke nearing forty. It looked, tonight, as if he would never get there.
Said Kabini, "What happened, my baas?"
"A heart attack, we think," the policeman said. He nodded at the road. "Those skid marks show he knew what was happening and fought the car to keep it from going into the ditch. Pretty cool, for a fellow staring disaster in the eye."
Yes, thought Thubana. He saved his deliciously lekker car, but he also gave himself a chance-a thin one-to survive the terrible crack-up threatening everything he valued.
The second policeman, his ruddy face s.h.i.+ning from his rain hood like a lacquered gargoyle's, approached the Africans. "Situation's under control," he growled. "Get out of here."
Thubana started to reply, but Kabini shook his head.
The two men reboarded number 496, and Kabini wrestled it around the dead man's car on the weather-gouged road.
Finding his seat taken by another man, Thubana slumped to the floor with a book and a penlight. Beside him, a fellow nicknamed Mpandhlani asked him if he thought the dead driver of the expensive American car had gone to heaven or h.e.l.l. With his steel plate and his unenviable ability to pick up out-of-country radio broadcasts, Mpandhlani often seemed more like a disembodied spirit than any visiting angel would have. In fact, he sometimes gave Thubana the creeps.
"Why do you ask?"
"Because I feel like three people got on when you and Kabini came back."
"Really?"
"Yes. Someone else is riding with us, Mordecai."
"Then it's cut-and-dried. The dead man is shadow matter, like you and me and all these others." He nodded at the fatigued bodies all around them. "Get it?"
"Sure," said Mpandhlani "Shadow matter."
"Down, down, down," sang many of their fellow riders. "Down, down, down."
It was true of all of them, Thubana thought, but the longer the dead man stayed aboard, the more likely he was to reach Belle Ombre station in the company of his countrymen. The more likely he was to see that the universe's four major forces needed to be unified, tied up with super-strings, and rendered beautiful forever by a TOE equation with no anomalies. The more likely he was to find his own substance again.
Meanwhile, Thubana, his compatriots, and the heartsore ghost of Gerrit Myburgh jounced together across the highveld. And it seemed to Thubana, glancing out the mud-streaked windows, that the eastern sky was beginning to redden...
"No!" Myburgh shouted.
The shout jerked him awake. He was sitting next to Mordecai Thubana on the bus called Grim Boy's Toe. Although the bus had not wrecked, it was no longer moving. It was parked on a muddy turnout in the middle of nowhere. Glancing down, Myburgh saw that Thubana had draped his trenchcoat, lined with synthetic fur, over Myburgh's chest and knees.
"Welcome back, Mr. Myburgh. You had a nice nap?"
"No. I don't think so."
"But you slept. You nodded off while I was trying to explain to you how whites are like gravity."
"I dreamed we had an accident."
"You had an accident-earlier. In your lovely, lekker car, you hit an elephant."
Myburgh blinked. That collision had happened. This latest one-running cras.h.!.+ into another Putco bus-had not. Odd. Very odd. A conundrum inside an enigma.