Chapter 53
Kabini, sporting a badly swollen eye, waved at Myburgh from his driver's cage on the Putco bus. Although Myburgh thought seriously about boarding 496 again, he decided that, being invisible to the Afrikaners, he'd do better sticking with Thubana, who, however mad, had at least some small insight into the clunkily ratcheting gears of this nightmare.
So Myburgh leapt into the BOSS van just as Wessels was pus.h.i.+ng its doors to. The hem of Thubana's coat got caught in the closing doors. Myburgh yanked the hem free and toppled backward. Wessels, cursing, slammed the doors a second time, harder, so hard that the metal walls and loadbed of the bakkie's holding cell vibrated like fettered gongs.
Mpandhlani and Thubana sat on narrow benches on either side of this four-wheeled cell.
"Are you all right, Mr. Myburgh?" Thubana said.
"No," Myburgh said. "Of course I'm not."
For added to the trauma of his selective invisibility was the fact that he had lost a stocking: His muddy left foot ached with the pitiless July cold.
Wessels, whom Thubana ridiculed in Afrikaans as Pampoenkop- Pumpkinhead-had taken Mpandhlani's coat, leaving his upper body clothed only in a threadbare T-s.h.i.+rt. Meanwhile, Mpandhlani's steel plate was broadcasting, even inside the nylon, an ANC report on forced removals to impoverished Bantustans. Their little cell buzzed with the transmission, a crazily garbled mix of news, exhortation, and music.
"Give him his cap," Thubana said, his naked hand on the sjambok cut on his cheek.
"Gladly." Myburgh flipped Mpandhlani the volleyball-half and, lying in the center of the floor, watched him settle it on his head like a housewife twisting half an orange onto the fluted reamer of a citrus juicer. At first, it seemed to hurt Mpandhlani to cover his skull, but then the cap muted the transmission, turning it into sounds like voices heard faintly through a heating vent. The bald man's eyes brightened, his lips relaxed. But he still looked cold, hugging himself and hunching forward like someone straining against electrocution.
"May I give him your coat, too?" Myburgh said. "I'm fine now. Well, not fine, exactly. Numb."
"Sure," Thubana said. "Go ahead."
Myburgh rolled out of Thubana's expensive coat and handed it up to Mpandhlani, who nodded his curt thanks and shrugged himself into it. As he put it on, Myburgh saw that neither he nor Thubana had belts now. Wessels had undoubtedly taken them too, on the grounds that the kaffirs could use them as makes.h.i.+ft weapons, their buckles serving as nasty flails. Well, that seemed smart. A policeman had to watch himself. Wessels would surely have taken their shoes too, if they hadn't been wearing ratty takkies.
"What's going to happen to us?" Myburgh said.
"To Winston and me?"
"Of course."
"Interrogation. Detention. Torture. One of us may fall out a window. One of us may strangle himself."
"Strangle? Strangle yourself?"
"It's hard to say, Mr. Myburgh. I don't know what Winston's supposed to have done. Or what kind of stuff Jeppe and Pumpkinhead will be looking for."
"Someone exploded a bomb near the Armscor factory," Mpandhlani said. "I'm getting a report on it now." He listened to the voices tunneling his gray matter like so many ethereal brain worms. "The blast-a car bomb-did heavy damage to the plant itself."
Myburgh blinked. Armscor was the weapons-manufacturing arm of the South African Defense Force and a profit-making enterprise of the first water. Its plants were among the most heavily fortified in the country. If it had suffered a crippling bomb blast, no place and n.o.body-no white place and no white person, rather-could rest secure again. So far as that went, though, Myburgh could not recall any time that he had really rested secure. Living in South Africa had always seemed to him like walking through a plush hotel suite past hundreds of whirring electric fans with frayed cords and no safety baskets...
"You didn't have anything to do with that, did you, Winston?" Thubana said.
Mpandhlani-no, better to call him Skosana: Winston Skosana, a man with both a baptismal name and a Ndebele surname, not merely a patronizing Bantu joke name-Skosana tilted his volleyball-capped head against the van's wall and laughed in the ba.s.so profundo registers of earthquake.
"Don't I wish. Oh, don't I wish, Mordecai."
Thubana grinned sheepishly. "That's what I thought. But... hey, man, you know."
"I know. But I'm just an oke at a Simba Quix chips-and-rusks factory, loading trucks and carrying out trash. Oliver Tambo never tells me nothing."
He laughed again. His laughter overwhelmed the hisses and pops still seeping through his earholes, nostrils, and eyes from Lusaka and other points north-several points north, Myburgh figured, for occasionally Skosana picked up ANC broadcasts, and sometimes PAC patter, and, more rarely, the revolutionary threats of the Azanian People's Liberation Army. Indeed, Skosana's skull was a broadcast clearinghouse for a variety of antiapartheid, anti-imperialist voices. Myburgh couldn't look at the man-lean, weathered, battle-scarred-without twinges of both awe and fear. On Grim Boy's Toe, he had seemed comic. Here in the nylon's holding cell, though, he suddenly and unaccountably radiated a good-humored self-confidence and strength. Myburgh did not think it was all owing to Thubana's trenchcoat.
Painfully, Myburgh got up and limped to one of the mesh-covered windows on the nylon's rear doors. He was surprised to see Putco bus number 496 chugging down the highway behind them, its headlamps jittering in the pale light, losing distinctiveness, like fish eyes vanis.h.i.+ng into clear water, as the sky reddened through a gauze of blowing clouds and spread out vividly over the Transvaal.
Pretty. Very pretty.
With no closer settlements or factories blighting this part of the Putco route, the land was lovely, an exhilarating desolation. Soon the nylon would enter the outskirts of Pretoria, cruise past the jacaranda trees on its wide boulevards, and he... well, he would be home.
Bracing himself against any sudden lurches, Myburgh said, "What in G.o.d's name happened to me out there?"
"You became shadow matter to them," Thubana said.
"I was shadow
"You look real to me," Skosana said.
"Thank you." Nearly slipping, Myburgh turned back around.
Thubana's hand was blood-streaked from the ragged sjambok wound that Wessels had inflicted. Myburgh found the handkerchief he had used to staunch his own bleeding and pa.s.sed it to Thubana, who took it with no qualms and held it against his cheek.
"I don't get it," Myburgh resumed. "Why didn't I mean anything to those men? What's going on?"
"Winston," Thubana said, gesturing with his free hand, "is my book in one of those pockets?"
Skosana patted the side pockets of the borrowed coat, raised a telltale thump, and pulled out the copy of Superstrings. He hefted it as if it were a hand grenade.
"Turn to page eighty," Thubana said.
His eyebrows lifted, Skosana began riffling. When he found the specified page, he bent the book back in his lap.
"Up at the top," Thubana said. "John Schwarz is talking about 'E sub-eight' symmetries. Do you see it?"
"E sub-eight? Christ, Mordecai, did you memorize this whole crazy book?" He waved it. Again, like a hand grenade.
"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 a.n.a.logy to explain a point. Now I'm making another one."
"There's nothing metaphorical about my situation! d.a.m.n 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 f.u.c.king Boers." He nodded at the bakkie's cab.
"How? Why?"
"Ask G.o.d. That's what I do. I ask him every day: 'Dear G.o.d, 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 poppyc.o.c.k. 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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-cla.s.s Afrikaner.
Sweet Christ, what weakness. Or what bra.s.s. 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 s.a.d.i.s.tic 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned 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 f.u.c.k 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 b.u.g.g.e.r."
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."