The Down Days

by Ilze Hugo

  The lounge, with an ocean view like you wouldn’t believe, was now a dormitory where bedrolls in every color lay stacked in rows like a marching band. So, too, the master bedroom. The walk-in closet served as another apartment for a trio of Zimbabwean blood hawkers Faith played soccer with sometimes.

  In another room, a pool table with a mattress on top served as a bed while three toddlers played with toy cars underneath it. Someone had painted a road onto the marble floor with pink spray paint and the little moppets were birring and beeping their cars while navigating the painted bends, with lots of crashing and banging along the way. A couple of green plastic soldiers lay on their backs in a neat line next to the road, and a little white minivan seemed to be the most popular toy of the day. An argument was brewing amongst the trio. “Mine! Mine!” the youngest, a boy, was shouting while hugging the van to his chest.

  “No! I’m the dead collector,” his sister, about four or so, scolded. “You can be my guardjie.”

  “No, you’re the guardjie!” screamed the boy. Faith saw him stomp off to find his mother, who was peeling potatoes in one corner while her eldest stood behind her, braiding her hair.

  Faith turned a corner and came to a hallway. Its floor was all glass. And below it, rows and rows of fancy cars. Serious petrolhead stuff. Lamborghinis, Porsches, Jaguars, you name it. The kids upstairs had come up with all sorts of schemes for breaking in there over the years, but no luck yet. The owner had gone all Pollsmoor on his babies before he fled. Installed the kind of security system you only see in prisons and bank vaults. Battling the vertigo, Faith put one foot on the glass. Then another, and so on. Like that crazy French tightrope walker she’d once watched a documentary about, who’d balanced his way one foot at a time across the Twin Towers in New York. One last step and she’d reached the other side. Her fists slackened. Shoulders unwound.

  At last. Standing in front of her door, she was digging in her bag for her keys when the door across the way opened and her neighbor, Ateri, emerged. He was hugging a bucket full of laundry to his chest. He lifted his face in a nod and she tried not to stare at the thick pink scar that wormed its way down from his eyes to his jawline, twisting sideways as he smiled. Behind him, Faith glimpsed Jamis, his hyena, sitting stoically in front of the TV set. Her next-door neighbor wasn’t much of a talker, but she’d spent more than a few hot summer evenings with him over the last few years, drinking quarts on the roof, the hyena always close by, often resting his head on Ateri’s knee while they talked. Ateri had a big thing for stand-up comedy—he had all these banned DVDs in his room with hours of stand-up sets on them, and sometimes he’d invite Faith out with him to this seriously dodgy, illegal comedy spot in town. In a city with a prohibition on Laughter, this was a dangerous hobby—some might call it downright stupid—but Ateri had a passion he couldn’t shake, and with a job like hers, Faith was always desperate to let off steam.

  When the Laughter first hit Africa and its southern tip was still considered a safe zone, Ateri and Jamis had traveled all the way from Nigeria—on foot and hitching rides whenever they could find them. (Most people didn’t warm easily to riding shotgun with a hyena.) Back home in Nigeria, Ateri and his brothers had made a living in the family trade as Gadawan Kura—hyena handlers—entertaining crowds with tricks for Nigerian naira. Bystanders would gape as Jamis spun around on his hind legs and jumped into Ateri’s arms. A strange way to make a living, sure, but Ateri was born into it. When he was a baby, still weaning, his mother would feed him the traditional medicine of their trade, potions to protect him from harm from the animals they lived with. Now his brothers, his wife, and his daughter were nothing but memories and ash in a shoebox under his bed.

  Inside her apartment, Faith felt around for a candle to light and a match to light it. Cupping the flickering flame with her other hand, she carried it to the kitchenette. The fridge was empty and silent, but there was a half-full bottle of warm, flat beer standing in the sink. She picked it up, brought it to her lips, then carried it across to the chair by the window—one of those floor-to-ceiling affairs, all waves and no walls, so big it made her feel small, inconsequential, strangely safe.

  The day she’d found this place had felt like winning the lottery. The ad wasn’t very descriptive. Just two or three lines. Its poster, a retired chemistry teacher, if she remembered correctly, hadn’t been one for words. There were no photos, either. But she went to have a look anyway. Call it a hunch. When she crossed all those cars and stepped in here the first time her head had felt like it might just explode. The place was massive. The rich stockbroker who’d owned the place pre-Laughter had built a special wing for his teenage daughter and pulled out all the stops. There was a mini-kitchen with a built-in stove. A Godzilla-sized bathroom with a freestanding bath. Marble floors. And the view. That ocean view. To make your jaw dislocate.

  Faith took the Daily Truth out of her backpack, opened it with care. Her fingers stroked the sooty newsprint like it breathed. The first page carried an article about a solar war brewing between the residents of Woodstock and Salt River. Each neighborhood’s solar panels were controlled by rival gangs, and the gangsters were always trying to find new ways to tip the scales in their favor on the city’s energy stock exchange. Now members of the Woodstock Boys had gone and blown up some inverters at a solar farm in an abandoned garment factory in Salt River. Two young boys, who were playing inside the factory at the time, were killed. The Salt side was rioting. They wanted their babies’ killers brought to justice. A Woodstock neighborhood watch member, who did not want to be named, said the suburb was holding its collective breath, fearing a bloodbath, and a family member of one of the slain boys, who also did not want to be named, told the Truth that a war was brewing and that “those Salt River bandiete had better watch their backs.”

  There was an anniversary spread about the Laughter on the second page. And underneath that an article on chimeras—human–animal hybrids the government was said to be breeding in their labs to experiment on in the hopes of finding a cure for the Laughter. The reporter claimed he had a source who’d been into one of these places. And that the creatures caged up in there went against all the laws of nature. Sentient sheep, intelligent rats . . .

  She turned another page. Scanned through the classifieds.

  Under services, there was an ad for a “freelance sin-eater, part-time ghost buster. Call Fred 078 555 5679.” Faith knew the guy in the ad, but not well. Just on a “Hello, how’s the weather?” kind of basis. She was always running into him on the job. They tended to end up at the same death scenes.

  Fred Mostert specialized in a kind of old-school Western magic that was passed down from father to son. Apparently his great-grandfather had brought it with him when he’d arrived here by ship from the old country, wherever that was. Faith didn’t know much about it except for what Fred had told her in his odd, circular way, but the way she understood it, the dying paid him to absolve their sins on their deathbeds, and he did this by eating them (the sins, not the people). He also ate the sins of those already dead, he said. She wasn’t quite sure how that part worked, but anyway, he was a sweetie, Fred. Always polite. Always keen for some small talk. Ash didn’t care for him much. Called him the Oaf, the Fat Guy, Jabba the Hutt, or the Joke. Said he was a charlatan. That he should be ashamed of himself, making money from other people’s sorrows like that. Secretly, Faith thought that was the pot calling the kettle black, but she’d never say it to his face. When it came to some things, it was best to keep your mouth clamped. Pick your battles and whatnot.

  Next to Fred’s ad, in the BARTERING section, there was an ad offering fresh food and other grocery goods (meat, milk, coffee, toothpaste, etc.) for hair, provided it was virgin and of good quality, twenty-five centimeters or longer. And below that someone was looking for secondhand therapy-bar costumes: “The bloodier, the better. Call Andy. After hours only.”

  It made her think of Lawyer. She wondered if he was still angry with her. Should she ca
ll him? Maybe not. Faith hadn’t always been a fan of the Truth. Thought it was a bunch of sensationalist nonsense once. Some of Lawyer’s stories, they seemed downright crazy, didn’t they? But a lot had happened in the last seven years. She’d seen things. Things she couldn’t always explain away. Then she’d read this quote by John Lennon. Lawyer had shown it to her when they’d just met and things were still pink between them. (You know, the color of a freshly healed wound after the scab had fallen off?) “I believe in everything until it’s disproved.” But it was the other thing that he was to have said that stayed with her the most: “So, I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?”

  “That’s the thing about the Daily Truth,” Lawyer had told her that night when she’d first brought him up here and they were looking out into the black sky over the ocean, with the waves muttering in the distance. He’d been freelancing at the Truth for a few years already. “The Truth entertains all these possibilities. You know that saying about innocent until proven guilty? That’s how we see it at the Truth. Everything’s possible until disproved. We keep an open mind. Because the world is stranger than most people care to admit and the truth is never as cut-and-dried as people want it to be. Nowadays it’s all science and facts and logic. People are scared. So they keep their blinkers on. But think about all the weird stuff, the stuff dubbed crazy conspiracy theories in the past, that have since been proven to be true as the truth.”

  “Like what?” she’d asked.

  “Like the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, Project MK-Ultra, the Nayiran testimony, Operation Paperclip, Operation Mockingbird, the FBI poisoning alcohol during Prohibition, Project Muizenberg, the Manhattan Project . . . Hell, Faith, take Galileo. When he told folks the Earth revolved around the sun, everyone thought the guy was a quack.”

  Faith took another sip of beer, thought about phoning Lawyer again, wondering if the stupid dolt had managed to get himself killed yet, then decided against it. Let sleeping dogs lie and all that. Putting down the now-empty beer bottle, she curled her feet up into a knot and watched the waves breaking on the black shore in a loop, running everything she’d just read through her head. Moving the data from mental compartment to mental compartment until she found a fit. She had a thing for finding patterns, like some people were drawn to singing in the shower or dropping bad puns. It was a compulsion. She couldn’t help herself. Apophenia. That’s what the psychologists called it. The word for people who saw patterns in random data. An error in cognition. A flaw.

  But it wasn’t. Not always. And she wasn’t crazy, either. It wasn’t like she went around every day seeing the face of the Virgin Mary in her morning toast. It was different than that. Different because sometimes, more than sometimes, she turned out to be right. Like that time. The time when her someone and her little someone else . . .

  * * *

  Her dad was a toymaker. Wooden stuff that he’d sell at markets mostly, as well as a few brick-and-mortar shops and online. But his real passion was puzzle boxes. He’d spend months designing them. Basing them on traditional Costa Rican, Japanese, Turkish, Moroccan, Chinese, Indian, or Polish designs. Complicated affairs, requiring up to sixty-five moves to open, some complete with wooden gears, levers, and interlocking moving parts, which he’d sell to collectors online.

  But it wasn’t just toys. Everything was a puzzle to him. “There’s a solution for everything, sweet pea,” he liked to tell her. “If you can’t find it, just adjust your angle.”

  So every day Faith read the Truth, adjusting her angle, and sometimes she’d see them. The patterns. Connecting across the pages like constellations. Like star maps. Some of these patterns she’d seen had really helped people. Like the time she’d figured out that a series of seemingly unrelated articles in the Truth about the unsolved murders of young women were connected—the work of a serial killer. Thanks to her efforts, the psycho had been caught and now spent his days behind bars. Thanks to the SAPS detective, too, who hadn’t dismissed her as a loon when she called him about her suspicions. Case closed. They’d had a heated fling that fizzled out fast. But there were no hard feelings. They were still in touch. Every few months he dropped by with a six-pack and a batch of cold cases for her to pore over, hoping she would see something, connect the dots.

  Lately, the cases had become weirder, as more and more people resorted to all sorts of ingenious and quite often downright illegal ways to make ends meet. Like a recent case she helped with—very Walter White—of a murdered orthodontist whose wife was convinced he was a stand-up guy. So vanilla, she’d told Faith, that he’d never even smoked a single cigarette in his life. After he died, it came out that nobody cared about having a perfect smile anymore, what with having to wear masks and all, so he’d become a laughing gas dealer on the side and was murdered by a rival drug lord because of a territorial dispute.

  The way Faith figured, the masks people wore these days weren’t just physical. And there were many of them. Somedays it felt to her like there wasn’t a single true soul left. Like every single person in this town was just a series of masks over masks over masks with nothing real left underneath. Not that there was anything anybody could do about it anymore. She couldn’t help wonder how much of who people were and who they became was really up to them? It was like the Laughter had flipped a switch. Even if you didn’t catch it, it changed you. Remade everyone. Faith couldn’t even remember who she was before all this . . .

  - 16 - SANS

  He hadn’t always been a ponyjacker. There was a time, not too long ago, when Sans lived a shiny life safely ensconced in white electric-fenced walls and parental arms. His parents were serious, upstanding types with perfect teeth who sipped Malbec and talked politics and art at the dinner table. When he was a kid, his mother had a heavy book on Italian Renaissance art that gathered dust, wedged in between a potted plant and a Dogon fertility statue on a wooden side table next to the couch. While his parents where napping on Sundays and the house was quiet except for the tick-tock-tick-tock of the wall clock, he would kick off his shoes, climb onto the couch, extract the book from its dusty tomb, and marvel at the half-naked women watching him from beyond the pages, with nothing to cover their bits but a hand or a strand of golden hair. The locks themselves seemed magical—suspended in blue air, they dipped and twirled and tugged like marionette strings.

  After twelve mostly uneventful years at school, Sans went on to university on the slopes of the mountain to major in art history. For a while, all was good and well and bright and prosperous—there was even a girl, talk of marriage and mortgages. Until he lost the girl to greener pastures and graduated from that ivy-clad haven to realize that the whole world was suddenly going pear-shaped, and on top of all that, art historians had a hard time finding jobs in this new, dying reality.

  He got the ponyjacking idea while chatting to this chick one day about how difficult it was to get good weaves now that the borders were shut. A plan took shape. He’d always been blessed with a tenuous and pliable take on morality, and hustling seemed an easier way to pay the bills than writing cover letters and buying new ties for fantasy job interviews, all while trying to feign normalcy on double dates where everyone pretended everything was the same-same but different, spewing small talk about lame TV shows while wielding silver forks with latex gloves and trying to eat with their masks on. (The swankier joints handed out fans, packaged in paper pockets like chopsticks, to hold to your lips as you chewed.)

  Now his electric-fenced youth was nothing but a fuzzy memory. A coat that no longer fit. Most days Sans could barely remember any of it. Like a dream unraveling at the edges upon waking.

  His story up to now was a cliché, but that was fine. Sans had never met a cliché he didn’t like. Rags to riches, riches to rags—he was the kind of guy who appreciated the poetry of a well-trodden path.

  Talking about clichés, he couldn’t believe he’d truste
d Lucky with all that cash. What had he been thinking? He had been thinking with his pants, that’s what. And for what? The damn cherry went and pulled a disappearing act anyway.

  * * *

  He was stepping through the convent’s gate into the dark. It was 3:15 a.m., the Devil’s Hour, as his grandma used to call it. The air smelled of salt. The night was quiet. Just him, the road, and a lone wino leaning against a streetlight, hugging his date for the night, a small bottle of hooch that, guessing by the way the guy was swaying, packed one hell of a punch.

  Sans was walking along the empty pavement, cursing Lucky, the little rat, when he thought he saw something out of the corner of his eye. Stopping, he turned his head, and there she was. His unicorn. Just standing there, watching him. Her inky Klimt tresses glinting in the moonlight. Her eyes blank.

  He was about to talk to her when something brushed his arm. Breathed against his neck. Without thinking, his hand moved to his pants pocket, where he kept his knife.

  “Hey! Easy there, my laanie. Spare a few rands for some bread?” It was the wino. Holding out a cupped hand.

  When Sans turned his head back, his unicorn was gone.

  “Did you see that?” he asked the wino.

  “See what, my laanie?”

  “The girl. The girl with the hair. She was standing right there.”

  The wino frowned. Pulled his cupped hand back. “No girls here, my laanie. I’ll have what you’re smoking, please.”

  What the . . . ? Was the guy shitting him? He could have sworn he just saw . . . What kind of garage hooch did that cheapskate of a caretaker slip him? Or was he seeing things now, too? No. Fuck it. Today wasn’t the day to turn into his mother. He had no time for cracking up. He needed to focus. Find Lucky. Lucky, where are you, you little bastard?