The Down Days

by Ilze Hugo

  He was about to cross the road when the bang of the med cannon boomeranged through his gut like he’d been shot. Shit. It was time. A kid in gumboots had delivered his spanking-new medpass from Mickey Mouse first thing that morning. It looked real enough but he wasn’t ready to find out if it was legit.

  There was a postbox next to the laundry stall where this guy, Sailor, ironed clothes with a coal iron for fifty cents apiece. Sailor had a bad burn on his arm that wasn’t pretty to look at, but he was a nice enough guy with some pretty solid ironing skills. Sans nodded at him as he passed.

  “Hey, Sans, long time, no iron, bra. Have you found another guy? Is it that charlatan bastard in Loop Street who reads poetry and juggles while he irons? That guy is just a show-off, I tell you. You won’t get quality like I do it from that backstabbing verraaier, bra. Nobody beats the things I can do with an unruly crease or a difficult pleat.”

  “I know. I’ve been busy, is all. I’ll come around again next week.”

  Sans joined the queue in front of the postbox, his eyes scanning the street for Veeps. The queue petered out slowly. When his turn came, his hands were shaking so much that he almost dropped the card.

  “Move along, man, I don’t have all day,” growled the fat sweaty suit behind him. Sans fiddled with the plastic rectangle, turning it around and around in his fingers like he’d never done this before, didn’t know which way was up. Finally, by some kind of mother of a miracle, he calmed his hands enough to stick the thing into the slot. Thank God no Veeps were around, either, ’cause he was acting suspicious as fuck.

  Sans shoved his hands into his pockets to keep them still. The machine gave a low drawn-out hum. The seconds ticked by. Finally, the humming stopped. “Diamond pass,” flashed the letters on the screen. “No further corroboration needed for now.” Sans swallowed down the rising bile. The world was spinning slightly, and he put his hands on the frame of the machine to steady himself. “A healthy city is a happy city,” sang the voice before spitting out his card. Stilling an urge to kiss the plastic rectangle, he opted for sticking it into his pocket instead.

  He was walking along, breathing easy for a change, when in the window of a shop selling secondhand clothes he noticed the reflection of the man again. Blue-sports-bag man. He’d first noticed the guy on Tuesday. Then standing next to a street pole, reading a copy of the Truth. This morning, as he was strolling down Long Street past the one-armed bleach seller with the patchy buzz cut and bushy brows, he saw the guy again, bending forward to tie a stray shoelace. He had that bag slung across his shoulder. Sans could only imagine what was waiting in there. Was the guy following him? Had the gangsters hired someone to take him out? Or was it the paranoia getting to him?

  There was a betting shop down the street. He knew the dude who ran the place. Knew about the back door leading into the side alley, too, so he slipped in there hoping to lose his tail. It was a cardboard box of a place. Real small. With a couple of punters huddled around, placing bets. They had a dead pool going for local celebs. There was a list of names above the counter and, next to it, their odds of catching the Joke. Screw it. Sans took out his wallet and emptied the contents onto the counter. Bet his last R100 note on that soccer player with the smug mug. Who knew? Maybe the guy would kick the bucket for real and his money troubles would be sorted out.

  “Aweh, brother,” he said to the owner. “Busy day?”

  “Always, man, always.” The owner was a Zimbabwean, real friendly, named Choose. Apparently Choose’s dad had made two cherries pregnant way back when Choose was nothing but a fertilized egg inside his mom’s recently impregnated belly. Choose’s mom was pretty pissed with the egg’s soon-to-be dad and stressed to the nines to boot about how she was going to raise this kid on her own if Daddy Dearest decided to make a run for it. So she told him enough was enough, it was crunch time—time to choose between them and the other pregnant chick. His dad chose Choose, and his mom christened Choose accordingly. True story, or at least according to Choose.

  “Mind if I slip out through the back?” asked Sans after placing his bet. “I have a new friend out front who’s getting real clingy.”

  “Sure,” said Choose, lifting up the hinged counter.

  “Maita basa, brother.”

  “Hey, wait a second. Want to have a beer or two before you go? Catch up? I feel like closing up early.”

  Who was he to turn down a drink? He had sorrows to drown by the bucketload.

  Four beers later—or was it five?—he slipped out the back door and walked to the square. The sun was sliding behind the mountain and most of the vendors had already packed up and gone. But he stuck around for a while. Hoping, as always, to catch a glimpse of his unicorn. He could have sworn he’d seen her here yesterday, fingering a string of crimson-colored beads, but when he got closer to talk to her, two street rats cornered him, hassling him for loose change. When he looked up again, she was gone. He’d gone up to the bead seller anyway, tried asking her about the girl, but the bead seller didn’t speak any English or didn’t want to, and he wasn’t in the mood to play charades. So he gave up. Left.

  Now he was back, but the bead seller wasn’t. And there was no sign of his unicorn or the India ink strands of her hip-length hair that seemed to glow and change shade with the light—from blue black to purple black to midnight blue to charcoal, carbon black, gray black, jade black, jet black, grease black, oil black, crow black, ebony, onyx, liquorice, raven, sable, eggplant, obsidian, peacock, wine black, and back to midnight-blue black.

  - 52 - FAITH

  The sea-green couch in the lobby of the Cosy Sleeps Hotel had stuffing flowering from its armrests. Tonight, just after eight, it was occupied by a trio of working girls. At least two of the girls were high as kites, their glassy eyes tuned in to another frequency. The third was hunched over her toenails, a bottle of nail polish in one hand.

  Flickering oil lamps lined the windowsill. A little boy, sitting cross-legged on the floor, was conjuring shadow puppets onto the wall with his fingers. A bunny first. Then his stubby fingers readjusted themselves and the shadow became a big black dog. “Woof, woof,” said the boy to the shadow. Then he pulled in his lips and growled.

  At the front desk, Raul, the night manager, was reading a well-thumbed book on permaculture. “Hey, Faith,” he said, closing the book. “Guess what? I got a new tattoo. Wanna see?”

  “Yes, sure.”

  Raul rolled up his sleeve.

  “Nice, Raul! Who’s the girl?”

  “It’s Hecate.”

  “Huh?”

  “She’s a Greek goddess. She’s real woke, man. Real woke. She’s like a liminal goddess, so that means she holds sway over the in-between. You, know—crossroads, borders, doorways, city walls . . . all the liminal spaces between life and death. She helps ferry the dead to the afterlife and protects her followers from them. You know, from restless spirits.”

  Faith examined the image more closely. “Why does she have those big dogs on either side of her?”

  “Oh, yeah. She has these two ghost dogs who follow her around all the time. Kind of like a calling card and her welcome party rolled into one. If she’s around or expected to arrive somewhere soon, you’re supposed to hear dogs howling and barking and kicking up a fuss. Cool, right?”

  “Very.”

  Raul grinned at Faith. There was a window all along the reception desk, so he wasn’t wearing his mask and she couldn’t help staring at his mouth. The Cupid’s bow, the deep dimples enfolding it in parentheses. His teeth, Colgate white.

  He rolled down his sleeve and slid the keycard through the hole in the window. “Here you go. Room seventeen.”

  “Cheers, Raul.”

  “Sure thing, Faith. Later.”

  Faith made her way up the stairs and followed the elephants down the corridor. When she got to the last door on the left, she slid the keycard into the lock.

  - 53 - SANS

  The only stick of furniture in the lobby of the seedy hote
l was a puke-green couch. Three glassy-eyed hookers were sitting on it. One of the hookers was painting her toenails the same green as the couch while her bare, bruised knees kissed her chin.

  “I’d like to get a room,” Sans said to the night manager, a tall Rastafarian with a Moses beard and a leather top hat resting on his natty dreads.

  “Any particular room?”

  “Yeah. Room seventeen.”

  The manager felt around underneath the counter. He produced an electronic keycard. There was a number printed on it: 17. Below that was a drawing of a court jester, like the ones you get on playing cards, with black hole eyes and a wicked grin.

  “Here” said the natty dread, handing Sans the card. “Remember to bring it back when you’re done.”

  Sans nodded, glanced at the card again as he pocketed it—at the jester holding a stick in his palm with a little face on the tip that mirrored his own. Same hat. Same eyes. Same creepy grin.

  He made his way up the stairs and down the dimly lit corridor. So dim, you could barely make out the army of happy elephants, lined up slurp to tail, marching along the skirting. (In a previous life, the place had been a day-care center.) His footsteps printed into the pliable shag carpet as he passed rows of cloned yellow doors. At number seventeen, he stopped and slid the card into the slot. Waited for the click.

  Inside the candlelit room twenty-odd people sat huddled around a smattering of tables, laughing. None of them was wearing gloves or masks. On the stage in front, a comedian was well into his act, which for some reason involved a live chicken. The chicken was clucking across the stage and the comedian was pretending to corner it. The audience was tearing up big-time. Some almost frantically, desperately, like their lives depended on it.

  Sans nodded to Konishiki, the manager, who tilted his triple chin back at Sans. He knew his regulars. Konishiki used to be a sumo wrestler in his youth, and he still had the body to prove it. His suit jacket clasped his stomach like a possessive lover, fabric zebra-striping across his waist, pulling at the buttons. Sans made his way to an empty table at the back. Took a seat.

  When he was a student, he’d once read an article about how French aristocrats during the 1832 cholera epidemic had organized elaborate masquerade parties as a kind of big fat finger to death. They got dressed up as corpses and danced to cholera waltzes. Every once in a while, one of the revelers would rip off their mask and croak right there on the dance floor, mid-waltz. At the time, it seemed to him a weird thing to do (the dancing, not the dying), but now he finally got it—whoop whoop.

  This place was kind of like that. Somewhere to laugh in the face of the Laughter. Now that laughing was considered a private act, done in the dark between consenting individuals only, places like these had had to move underground. This one had been around for about three months. Not exactly illegal, but bordering on it, the chance always there for a bust by the Veeps.

  Probably not the best spot to be for someone in his condition, but he’d never been the kind of guy to do the right thing for the sake of self-preservation.

  Even as a kid. The more he’d gotten into trouble, the more he’d seemed to want to steep himself deeper. Like a gaping cut you were itching to get your finger into, tear open further. As if the pain would make everything better. His mother used to tell him how he’d been a breech baby. Or so she’d heard. That he’d been upside down from the start. So, there was no helping it, this urge to sink himself deeper into whatever muck he’d caught himself up in. To screw himself until he was so tight in he couldn’t untangle. It was all nature, no nurture, she’d said. A fault entirely of his own making. That they’d just have to learn to live with it, the two of them. Devil may care. That’s what she called it. His damn devil-may-care streak.

  He was sitting there, nursing a whiskey, straight, when he noticed the muscly guy with the crazy-ass scar at the table next to his. The guy was talking to a woman in tights and a short skirt. She had a hoodie pulled up over her head. That wasn’t the interesting part, though. What caught his eye was the big-ass chain at the guy’s feet. And attached to it, a damn hyena. Just lying there like a puppy, chewing on a rather large jawbone. A row of teeth lining the thing. He rubbed his eyes, in case it was another hallucination, but the scene stuck.

  Actually, he’d seen the guy and his hyena around before—word was that the pair had recently started working security at the museum market—but never up close. Then the woman in the hoodie turned to signal a waiter and their faces met. It was the dead collector, Faith, the one who had sent him to that lunatic sin-eater.

  “Pony Boy,” she said, her lips seeming to force a smile. “How are things?”

  “Great. Just great. You?”

  “Yes, sure.”

  “Hey, nice hyena.”

  The dead collector bent down a notch and patted the creature’s big blotchy head. “Pony Boy, meet Jamis. Jamis, meet Pony Boy.”

  The dead collector and the hyena man went back to their conversation and Sans ordered another whiskey. Better make it a double.

  Fast-forward two hours and he’d ended up at their table. Had he invited himself over or did they offer him a seat? All he knew was that he was drunk. Real drunk. So drunk that he was breaking the rules. He was talking about her. His unicorn. And he couldn’t get himself to stop. He was showing them the photos on his phone, the photos he’d taken of the girl on the wall of the Sad Facts Nights Café, the one who looked just like her.

  “Wait a sec,” the dead collector said. “I’ve seen that face before.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t think it will help, though. It was just a painting. A portrait, really. But the woman in it looked exactly like her.”

  “You sure?”

  “Well, I’d have to have another look, but I think so. Her hair was different, though. It was loose and long and way lusher.”

  “Where? Where did you see it? The painting, I mean?”

  “It was hanging in the library.”

  Sans knew where the public library was. If he wasn’t so drunk (and anyway, it would have been closed at this hour), he would have—

  “No. Not the public library.” The dead collector had read his thoughts. She looked shifty-eyed all of a sudden. “The library where I saw the painting isn’t open to the public. It’s kind of a members-only affair . . .”

  Something in his voice or eyes must have worried her, because she gave this weird frown. Don’t come on too strong or desperate like a lunatic, he chided himself. She probably thinks you’re a nut already. Just stay cool, stay calm. Dial down the crazy. Maybe make a joke. A joke, a joke . . . “Nice skirt. Very bright, though. Pity I forgot my sunglasses.” Idiot. Why did he just say that? Not funny, Sans, you moron.

  “Me, too. I can barely see the stage through the glare of those Nikes.”

  He held a fist to his chest and groaned. “Ah. Right through the heart. Ching-ching-ching—you win. Anyway, so what kind of library is members only?”

  “I can’t really talk about it.”

  “Then how do I get in to see this painting of yours? Can you hook me up, at least?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not really up to me. I’m kind of in the doghouse with these guys.”

  “Aw, come on, Faith, how long have we known each other?”

  “Not very long, in fact.”

  “True-true. But you know I’m good for it, right?”

  “Good for what, exactly?”

  “Everything.” He grinned.

  “Smooth. But, I don’t know . . .”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I suppose I know a guy I can call who might be able to help you. I’m not in his best books at the moment, but I’m willing to try. I need a favor, though. In exchange.”

  Of course. “You cockroaches are all the same, aren’t you? Bunch of bloody hyenas.”

  “Nothing wrong with hyenas,” said the guy with the crazy scar.

  “But you just said—” said the dead collector.

  “What e
xactly did I say? That I’m a good guy. Nothing more than that, I think.”

  “All right, Mr. Model Citizen, Good Samaritan, class-A guy,” said the dead collector. “Just tell me one thing before you ride off into the sunset on your very high horse. What does the ‘jack’ stand for in ponyjacker again? Or should I rather call you Mr. Pony-please-can-I-cut-your-hair-with-this-sharp-and-friendly-knife-of-mine-and-sell-it-for-profit-if-you-don’t-mind-madam-er?”

  “Fine,” Sans said, throwing his hands up like a flock of seagulls. “Spit it out, then. What do you need?”

  “I need all the dirt you have on the Sisters of Godiva.”

  “The who?”

  “Don’t try playing dumb with me. Rumor is they don’t just shave heads and offer the hair up for God knows what, which is a whole other type of scam, preying on the desperate. I heard they’re in the hair trade, too. That they’re selling the stuff. And if that’s true, I’m guessing you would be the one to know.”

  What the . . . ? Something wet and weird and sickening was happening on his bare ankle. He jumped and peered down at the floor in the dim light. The hyena grinned up at him with his slobbery tongue sticking out. Jesus. He glared at the muscly mofo holding the leash, but the guy just shrugged. Then he turned his attention back to the dead collector, whose eyes were laughing now.

  “Don’t be such a diva. A little bit of hyena slobber never killed anyone.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  The creases around her eyes deepened. “So what about it, Pony Boy?”

  - 54 - PIPER

  Funny how a person’s whole life can change in the span of one cigarette. One second Piper’s world was up and the next it was down. Only thing was, she thought it was down in the first place. But that was before she found out what down really meant.