The Down Days

by Ilze Hugo

  “Ha, ha. Always the comedian, aren’t you?”

  “Yup,” said the dead collector, but her eyes weren’t laughing.

  “Come on. Aren’t you curious? Aren’t you? Just a bit?”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.” He took his phone out of his pocket. Showed her the pics he’d taken of the first two pages of the diary.

  “What’s this?” she asked, her eyes coming alive.

  “Never mind that.” If the book really held a cure, it was valuable as fuck. The fewer people he told about a cash cow like that, the better. “Can you read it?”

  She glared at him. Looked at the image on the screen. Frowned.

  The dead collector took her hand out of her pocket and stroked the symbols on the screen with her fingers. “Well, the first pic is easy. It looks like a simple pigpen cipher. You just substitute each letter of the alphabet for a symbol.”

  “Cool. Great. What does it say?”

  “Do you have something to write with?”

  He signaled the waiter to ask for a pen. He appeared promptly with a black ballpoint.

  “Let’s see,” she said, smoothing out a serviette. She stuck the back of the pen under her mask, as if to bite on it, pulled it out again.

  “Stop that,” she said.

  “Stop what?”

  “You keep tapping your nails against the table. I can’t concentrate.”

  “Fine. I’ll stop,” said Sans, lifting his hand and putting it on his leg.

  “Say, what happened to it anyway, if I may ask? Your leg, I mean. Why the limp?”

  “Nothing. I mean, it was a long time ago.”

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

  “No. It’s fine. No big deal. I was bitten by a Rottweiler when I was three.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No worries.”

  The dead collector’s coffee grew cold as she worked. He was looking out the window, watching the OCD bleach vendor across the street stack and unstack his wares into perfect pyramids when she put the pen down and looked up: “All nature is merely a cipher and a secret writing.”

  “Say what?”

  “The cipher. I’ve cracked it. It reads: ‘All nature is merely a cipher and a secret writing. The great name and essence of God and His wonders—the very deeds, projects, words, actions, and demeanor of mankind—what are they, for the most part, but a cipher?’ It’s a quote by Blaise de Vigenère. My dad told me about him. He was a sixteenth-century French cryptographer.”

  He was so happy he could kiss her. Maybe things were finally coming together. Maybe he was going to be all right. “Great,” he said. Feigning nonchalance. “Show me how to do the rest and I’ll get out of your hair.”

  “Not so fast. After this, the cipher changes.”

  He swore under his breath, sighed. “Can you decipher it?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “There’s more.”

  “More what?”

  “More messages. A whole book of them.”

  The dead collector sighed, stuck her hand back into the pocket of her coat. She’d been sticking that damn hand in and out of that pocket like it was a jack-in-the-box all morning. A nervous tic?

  “I thought you liked puzzles?” he tried. “Come on. It’ll be fun.”

  “Where’s the book?” she said, sighing again. This time louder.

  “I’d rather keep it with me, thanks. It’s got . . . sentimental value. Can’t I just text you all the images?”

  “My phone’s out of juice. And the reception at my house sucks. What time is it? I have to get to work.”

  “Fine,” he said, folding his arms like the cliché he was. “Will you copy the first two pages from my phone at least? I’ll give you the rest tomorrow at the square.”

  “Fine,” said the dead collector. She gulped down the dregs of her tepid coffee and reached into her bag for a notebook, while Sans wondered why the hell she hadn’t taken the thing out in the first place instead of bothering with the flimsy serviette. “But you owe me for this, Pony Boy. You know that, don’t you?”

  - 67 - FAITH

  “Flowers for the dead, flowers for the living, a ruiker to meet your maker, a bouquet to make your day. Flowers for the dead, flowers for the living . . .”

  Outside the station in Adderley Street, the flower sellers were punting their wares to mourners boarding the trains in black dresses and suits. The monochromatic funeral-wear struck an odd contrast with the bright blooms, like someone had scanned in an old photograph and gone to town on it with a Paint Bucket tool. A portrait in black, white, and gray, interspersed with bright spots of rose red, chrysanthemum pink, gerbera yellow, carnation white, and creamy red streaks of Double Delight.

  The flower sellers sat hunched over plastic crates that served as makeshift tables on which they sorted the blooms into bunches or wove wreaths. A large tarp was spun over the stalls to keep out the rain, the poles of this makeshift tent stuck into plastic jerry cans filled with sand.

  “A rose is a beautiful thing, lady.” The vendor had one of those faces kneaded so heavily by time it looked like it was folding in on itself. “Don’t you want to buy one to brighten your day? Three lovely proteas, a few daisies, some baby’s breath. Bunch it all up together, put it in a vase, and it’ll take the blues right away, I promise you.”

  “No thanks,” said Faith. “Not today.” Her hand strayed back to the vial in the pocket of her coat. She gripped it tight and stroked it with her thumb. Then pulled it out to stare at it again. Hoping.

  There was a funeral procession crossing the street up ahead. They were singing: Amazing grace, how sweet the sound . . .

  Porters in station suits ran up to the van with squeaking trolleys. Ash unlocked the back and together they lifted the grinners out, one by one, packing the body bags onto the trolleys. The grinners all had tickets on this morning’s mortuary train. They were on their way to Death City—a huge neighborhood of ash factories, cemeteries, funeral parlors, coroners’ offices, and sanatoriums on the Cape Flats. Before the Laughter, the Group Areas Act and gentrification meant the rich moved into the inner city and almost everyone who wasn’t lily white and moneyed was booted out, but the Down Days switched things up again. When most of the rich fled or died a lot of people living on the outskirts moved into the city center (including those whose families had previously been forced out by the Group Areas Act). As a result one of the world’s most segregated cities finally became a bit more integrated again (call it a silver lining if you will).

  Most of the outlying hoods became wastelands. Until some bright star in government got the idea to use these empty areas as burial and quarantine space. And Death City was built. A weird place. Faith had only been there once, and she hoped she wouldn’t have to visit again.

  Next door to Death City was the seaside suburb of Muizenberg, where a necklace of Art Deco death hotels hugged the shoreline. This was where the more affluent mourners could sleep over, should they want to make a weekend of saying goodbye. With a funeral director on call so you could plan the whole thing from the comfort of your room. Room-service menus for picking out flowers, preachers, urns, hymns, and videography packages for Facebook mourners. (Not really Facebook, of course, what with the firewall and all. The government had come up with their own version. Trying to be cute, they’d called it Factbook, but most people still called it Facebook—old habits and all that.)

  She was sitting in the van, waiting for Ash, with the pages Sans had let her copy spread out on the steering wheel, one hand glued to her coat pocket. She’d been thinking about those orbs all night, sitting awake, staring at the little glass bottle she’d stolen from the convent until the sun came up, turning it around, examining it from every angle until it felt like both her brain and heart were going to burst. The same went for this morning. Every second of every minute of every hexed hour. She couldn’t stop.

  She’d taken the pages out of her bag as a last resort. As a way of s
hutting down her spiraling thoughts.

  The first page had been easy. Almost as if the person who wrote it wanted it to be read. Page two started off easy, too. On the top of the second page, she found a line of seemingly random letters: L DP D FKLOG RI IDLWK. She started with the two single-letter words, tried A, I, and O (the only one-letter words in the English language), and after that the rest came easily. A simple Caesar cipher with each letter of the alphabet removed thrice, so that the L became A and so on until you got to I am a child of faith.

  Than a paragraph break followed by what looked to be a much more complex cipher. A Vigenère, if she had to hazard a guess.

  She tapped the pencil against her thigh, wondering about the juxtaposition of the two pieces of code. Maybe the first cipher was some kind of riddle? A clue to the key for the next cipher? She stopped tapping and stuck the pencil underneath her mask, biting into the soft wooden shell.

  I am a child of faith. I am a child of faith . . .

  The head porter came up to the window and held out the book for her to sign. The singing mourners were passing by behind him now. She was taking the pen from his hand when she saw the back of the boy. And the world stopped spinning.

  Everything froze. Nothing moved. Nothing existed. The whole universe was a station she couldn’t tune in to. Like she was turning the knob of her consciousness, trying to connect. But all her brain could focus on was the boy.

  The porter. She knew he was talking to her. She could see his lips moving but she couldn’t hear the words coming out.

  The boy.

  The boy was walking in the heart of the singing crowd. His gait. His hair, the way he held his head cocked to the left. It was him. It had to be. Had to be . . .

  The one who gave her her stripes.

  The one who pushed himself into her world without asking, stretching her womb and her heart. Making it too big to bear. Then left her on her own with this monstrous bleeding pulsing thing. A pumping canticle of joy and hurt. Joy and hurt.

  But mostly hurt.

  Her boy. Her son.

  Her everything.

  It was him. She was sure of it. Whether he was real or a ghost or a postbox hallucination, she didn’t care.

  The crowd was entering the station. “Hey!” shouted the porter as she slammed the van door into his stomach, knocking the wind out of him and sending the book flying.

  But Faith was already too far away for her to hear him.

  The big white ticket hall was a looking glass. Beneath the glossy white floor was an upside-down world where people did upside-down things while thinking upside-down thoughts. But Faith’s eyes didn’t have time for this universe below. She was concentrating all her thoughts and steps and breaths on reaching the boy in the crowd.

  The mourners had already passed through the turnstile. Faith waved her pass at the security guard. She ran along the platform towards the singing throng. Above her head, white fluorescent tube lights shone in a row like arrows to the afterlife.

  The mourners in their Sunday best were boarding now, their voices swelling and falling as they sang: “Yea, when this flesh and heart shall fail, and mortal life shall cease, I shall possess, within the veil, a life of joy and peace. The world shall soon dissolve like snow, the sun refuse to shine, but God, who called me here below, shall be forever mine.”

  “Jacob!” she screamed. “Jacob!” But the singing crowd drowned out the sound.

  She was almost there now. A few more steps and she would be able to touch him. Within the folds of the crowd, the boy’s feet crossed the yellow line and he climbed onto and into the train. Before the doors encased the singing crowd, he turned around. His brown eyes locked onto hers. But his face was the face of a stranger.

  - 68 - SANS

  The busker with the bull ring and the black lines tracing his brown eyes strummed the blues, his fingers weaving a web across the strings like a spider on caffeine. Sans leaned against the cold wall and watched the web grow.

  The song stopped, the busker flexed his fingers and picked up a bottle lying next to him on the tar. “Hey, man,” said the busker, inching down his mask for a quick swig. “Long time.”

  They bumped elbows and the busker made a passing jab at the wind—how it was being a real howler today or something like that. Sans couldn’t quite catch it, but agreed anyway. The busker put the bottle down and narrowed his eyes. “Enough about the weather. I’m guessing this isn’t a social call?”

  Sans nodded, stepped closer, sat on the pavement. “You still in the business, Beno?”

  “How long’s a piece of string, man?” The busker grinned and pushed up to stand. “Just a minute,” he said, and he sauntered over to the coal-iron stall, poking his head behind the curtain of dancing shirts to stow his guitar, then beckoned for Sans to follow him.

  The doorbell of the Happy Happy Joy Noodle Bar spluttered as they entered. Beno stooped down to soak his hands in the plastic bucket of chlorine at the door. Sans sucked in his breath, hunched over, followed suit. No matter how many times he had to reenact this same ritual, he could never get used to the smell. He unfurled his spine and followed the busker, past the rows of pleather booths and through the swinging door into the kitchen with its clatter and sizzle of pots and pans, the tut, tut, tut of chopping knives and the shouts and yelps and background radio drones in a mangle of languages and dialects. Beno led him through this choreographed dance to another door at the back, unlocking it with a key he wore around his neck.

  Once inside, he knitted his body through the maze of cardboard stalagmites stacked every which way to a dark mahogany antique desk at the back. He switched on an expensive-looking brass desk lamp and slid into a plush leather chair like some kind of don.

  Like Sans, Beno was a self-made man. A kind of modern-day pirate. Back when the Down Days first swept the city into a whirl, Beno cashed in on the chaos by raiding the mansions of fleeing foreigners and selling the loot, mostly paintings and antiques, to overseas collectors. That was before the borders snapped shut and the wall went up. Nowadays he traded in anything hard to come by—if it was difficult to find and you needed it, Beno was your man. The guy had an encyclopedic knowledge of arcane objects and their worth. The busking was a cover and a passion rolled into one. The blues was his baby.

  When he got drunk, he’d always swear he sold his soul to play like that. At a crossroads in the dunes somewhere out in the Flats, close to Macassar, when he was a kid. Said the devil had yellow fingers and smoke billowing from his nostrils, and in his hands he carried a big black pipe.

  “So how about these protests we’ve been having?” said Beno. “Do you think there’s any truth to it?”

  “To what?”

  “To the rumors that the meds inside the postboxes are making some people hallucinate.”

  “Uh. No. I mean . . . have you been seeing anything? Hallucinating, I mean?”

  “Nah, man. You?”

  “No. ’Course not.”

  Beno folded his hands in front of his face and tucked both thumbs underneath his chin. Above his head hung a big-ass framed drawing of a hyena. The beast was standing atop an abandoned car in a winding city street crammed with abandoned vehicles, empty of all life except for this scavenging beast who was glaring at the viewer, its eyes piercing the glass of the frame accusingly. As the third act in a triptych by William Kentridge—The Conservationists Ball—the drawing was worth a mint, but Beno had grown a liking to it and refused to sell.

  “So, what’s up, brother? Are you here to buy, sell, or barter?” asked Beno.

  “Sell.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I know you have a thing for Laughter objects. Magical objects and rare items that are supposedly Laughter cures?”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in all that stuff. That you were a skeptic through and through. I only believe in what I can feel and touch, wasn’t that what you told me once? That you’re a man of logic and reason and truth and facts?” The pirate gave an Ol
ympic grin—and for the first time, Sans noticed the symbol tattooed on one of his capped canines, a maze-type thing. Where had he seen that before? “Science. A crock of rubbish, if you ask me, just another colonial belief system, another lie we tell ourselves to sleep at night. But to each his own. I’m all for freedom of religion and all of that.”

  Sans remembered why he hadn’t been here in such a long time. The guy was an idiot. But never mind. He was the idiot he needed right now. “It’s a book. I’ve got sources saying it was written by a seventeeth-century seer, Anna de Koningh. And that it contains a cure.”

  Beno raised his tattooed eyebrows. “The mythical diary of Anna de Koningh. You must be kidding me. Are you sure? Have you read it?”

  “No. It’s written in some kind of code. But I have someone on it. Someone who has already deciphered parts of it. She says she thinks she can crack the whole thing. That it’s only a matter of time.”

  “Can I see it?”

  He was about to say yes, but his gut told him to hold back. “If I’m right about this thing, it’s valuable as fuck. Do you think I’d be stupid enough to carry a thing like that in my backpack?”

  “How about a few photos, then? Can I at least have that?”

  “All right.”

  “Let me pass the photos around, line up a few buyers, get a bidding war going, then I’ll phone you tomorrow to arrange a viewing, okay?”

  - 69 - FAITH

  She met the sin-eater in Woodstock, the city’s edgy enclave for designers and artists, where a grungy forgotten factory now housed sexy glass-fronted apartments for moneyed hipsters. A bald doorman was sitting behind a sleek stainless-steel counter.

  “We’re here to see Pinky,” said Fred.

  They signed in. The doorman picked up the phone and did his thing. “Tenth floor,” he said. “Good luck.”