Moxyland

by Lauren Beukes

  'So, what about switching off the security on an adboard? I can get you the exact GPS. It's just temporary.'

  'Oh. I don't know. What's temporary?'

  'Long enough.'

  'For?'

  'A little outlaw smear campaign.'

  'What would you do if you didn't know me, Toby?'

  'I'm sure the world would be hugely improved.'

  'Whose board is it?'

  Toby sucks intently on the joint, all the better to avoid meeting my eye. 'Fuck knows. I don't keep track.'

  'Well, where is it?'

  'N2, near Roodebloem Road. Smack in the middle of the highway.'

  'You know that's a Communique board.'

  'Your employers would disapprove terribly.'

  'It's a serious offence, Toby.'

  'Worse than the tamper job you just did on this little guy?'

  'Oh, please. That's the equivalent of stealing stationery. Aiding and abetting a hack job on corporate property? That's a whole other category. That's goodbye plush apartment and cushy job. Firing offence, no written warning required.' I have to feed him the lines, cover up the snap of excitement. It's like finding the wall blocking your way in a dead-end alley is only made of cardboard, that you can push right through it. I know exactly how to use this.

  'You could have just come out with "no",' says Toby, pulling his shirt over his head. It clings to the damp on his back, so he is all elbows tangled in rumpled cotton.

  I yank the tee down to his chin, so he can see me, see how serious I am. His lanky arms are still caught in it, sticking stiffly above his head, like he's being robbed.

  'I didn't say I wouldn't do it, Toby. I just want you to appreciate the risk I'm taking on your behalf.'

  'Okay. Got it. Muchos graçias, scary intense girl. Can I have my t-shirt back?'

  I step back so he can finish getting dressed.

  'And speaking of dangerous favours…' I rummage in my suitcase for his present and toss it to him. He stashes the phone just in time, as the door cracks open.

  'Uh-oh,' Toby stage-whispers, 'evil housemate alert.'

  Jane pokes her head in, bearing gifts. 'Oh, hey, your food is here. What are you guys doing?'

  'Fucking,' Toby says brightly. 'You wanna join us?'

  Kendra

  As soon as I step out into Long Street and the warm sheet of rain that soaks through my clothes, I realise I can't face going back to the loft right now. Not because of the gaping holes in the walls where the builders have knocked through the kitchen, or the dust that the absorbent tarps are supposed to sponge up right out of the air, but because it's too weighed down with memories.

  The way your brain works it's always rewiring itself; the layers of association tangled up with different people and places recontextualised by new experiences. You can map out a whole city according to the weight of memory, like pins on the homicide board tracking the killer's movements. But the connections get thicker and denser and more complicated all the time.

  I feel like the tarps sop up emotional residue along with the dust drifting down to settle on the carpets, filming the walls; the shouting matches we degenerate into at two in the morning when he stops in for a 'chat' after a night out with his friends – and wants to leave straight after. Five months ago, I liked the glamour of being a kept woman. It made a change from being just another impoverished Michaelis student. But now it just seems stale and tired and terribly naïve.

  I walk down the steps to the underway, below the new deco curls of the signage that says 'Long' and 'D', and stand on the platform along with some kids who epitomise the Michaelis breed, with their overtly punky hair and ramshackle clothes, cultivating the ugly look for the shock value.

  The tunnels rumble and shush with far-off trains. It's 98 seconds till the next connecting train to Chiappini Street. If it wasn't so humid and soggy, I'd walk.

  The rumbling amps up and the train rides in, sending plumes of water skating up on either side of it. The plastech doors slide open and I push past the crowd to slide into a seat while there's still one going. The train rises slightly, hissing as the hover reinflates, and glides off, the neon lights on the tunnel walls slipping into blurred darts as we pick up speed towards Adderley Station.

  I've got several spools to drop off with Mr. Muller. It was a mission to find someone who still dabbled in oldschool processes like film. If I were a real artist, Jonathan teased me, I would have done it myself as a point of pride.

  Four Ghosts down, the sense of panicky urgency has eased up. Andile didn't tell me it would be like this. That I would have to placate it. Or maybe it's just the residual humiliation of Toby trying to kiss me. The pathetic truth is that Jonathan would probably encourage it.

  I take out my Leica Zion, my everyday filter on the world, and start clicking through the memchip, past the people framed in the window of the Afro Café and the unfinished graffiti on the Parade clustered between the adboards, past the pictures of bridges from the negative space binge I went on last week, until I come to the images of my wrist.

  Four thousand one hundred and twenty photographs over the time it took to develop, like film. Played back in timelapse the bruise blossoms and bursts, resolving like a Rorschach into the logo. It's the exact colour of the phosphorescent algae shimmering in the waves on the beach in Langkawi, where Jonathan took me after the agonising slow-mo months of my father's death.

  I spent an hour looking at my skin this morning, studying my wrist, my face. The cosmetic effects are the most obvious, but it's the stuff you can't see that counts; the nano attacking toxins, sopping up free radicals, releasing antioxidants by the bucketload. It's a marathon detox and a fine-tune all in one. And the nano's programmed to search and destroy any abnormal developments, so I'll never have to go through what Dad did, the cancer chewing its way through his stomach, consuming him from the inside out.

  No promises, said Andile, before he made me sign the contradicting waiver: 'The applicant understands that any claims made by Inatec staff regarding medical or health benefits are based on preliminary findings from testing in animals. The applicant understands that the Inatec nanotechnology is still in the prototype phase of development and, based on this information and understanding, accepts full responsibility for all the risks inherent, etc, etc.'

  I don't mean to be dismissive of the etceteras or the risks inherent. I know exactly what I'm in for, despite what that freakshow from the bar might think. Or my shrink, who believes I'm just doing this as a way of asserting myself in the whole bang shebang with Jonathan.

  I'm a demo model for their demographic. An angel of aspiration. A guinea pig for an appropriate alliterative beginning with g. Ghost, I guess. Only once removed on the food chain from the kids who sell space on their chamo, adblips playing out on the plastivinyl of tees and jackets like walking projectaboards, only with more 'risks inherent'.

  And my skin does look amazing, like it's been buffed and scrubbed and moisturised within an inch of its life, all velvaglow and radiant, even though the only cosmetic in the apartment is Jonathan's aftershave. It's been almost six days now with no side effects, or only good ones, apart from the first few miserable days when the flu and achiness hit. But then maybe that was self-induced. Maybe all of it is.

  It's a shock to find Jonathan at the gallery, but really, what did I expect? He and Sanjay are examining my prints, laid out on Propeller's floor in a blunt mosaic. They weren't supposed to start the selection without me. Sanjay is squatting, shuffling like a crab between the prints. He's already set two aside. He flashes a smile at me when I come in, slightly strained at the edges.

  'Hey, sweetness.' Jonathan gives me the fullbody up-down, like he does to the models in castings. It's an old habit, he's told me, from the job. As in, don't take everything so personally, Kendra.

  On any other day, the cigarette dangling off his lips would have annoyed the hell out of me, when he's supposed to have quit again, but my secret makes me feel smug and secure, counterbal
ancing the elation, like a fish jumping in my chest, that I can't keep down at seeing him.

  'You shouldn't be smoking over the prints.'

  'Don't be so tense, baby. It's not going to hurt them.' He starts to reach for my shoulder, to knead the knots in my neck, but I brush his hand away, irritated.

  There are to be three of us in the group exhibition: Johannes Michael, who does intricate paperwork mobiles on a massive scale, taking up Propeller's entire second floor; and Khanyi Nkosi, a legend at twenty-six. I am either privileged to be sharing a space with her, or at a serious disadvantage because no one is going to pay the slightest bit of attention to my work with her audio animal installation in the room. She's only bringing the thing in at the last minute, because of all the controversy around it.

  It's the first time I've seen all the prints laid out together and, despite my anxieties about coexhibiting with Khanyi Nkosi, I'm deliriously happy about how they've come out. I've already made my final selection, although I'm glad to see Sanjay and Jonathan have picked out the portrait of the drag queen, caught bumming a light from a garage attendant at 3 am. I've blown it up, so that her face is all texture, the make-up caked in the lines around her pursed mouth, lit up by the flame cupped in her hands. It came out surprisingly perfect considering no one knows how to use film anymore.

  The others have not, and Sanjay is still wary about the whole thing. The over- and under-exposed, bleached, washed out, over-saturated with colour, blotches and speckles and stains like coffee-cup rings, or arcs of white on white where the canister has cracked and let the light slip inside.

  My shrink tells me I'm co-dependencing; my father's death means I'm paralysed, afraid to make my own decisions, so I defer to Jonathan because it's easy, and this is my core problem. Well, actually, he didn't; he let me figure that out for myself, which cost a little more, a few months more of therapay, more wasted time, when apparently he had the answer all along.

  What he does tell me of his own accord, after this revelation, is that I should move out and cut Jonathan off, get some distance to regain my equilibrium, to recover a sense of self. He uses a lot of shrink-speak that doesn't translate, like it's only applicable to someone else's ordered

  life, where the rules work.

  So I'm still speaking to Jonathan, still hanging out with him, still sleeping with him – when he comes round. Still deferring to him on the important stuff. Because he's the guy orchestrating all the moves. Because I don't have his pull or his contacts, like Sanjay, for example. Sanjay is a major name on the international art scene, responsible for launching the trajectories of people like Susu Ngubane or Cameron Sterling, whose sculptures now sell for in the region of seven hundred grand. Jonathan deals with Sanjay on all of the details of the exhibition. Or should that be exhibitionism? Because isn't it my soul being laid bare here?

  I know he's been seeing at least two other women in the times between, when we are off, on, off. Because we are just 'casual', as he calls it, because quantifying something puts it in its place. But sometimes I feel like he's reminding himself rather than me. Maybe that's just wishful thinking.

  I met the one, Stacy, at a party. One of those awful media blitzes, hanging off him like she was his handbag. Old bag. Cos she was – thirtyeight at least. An editor at one of the pushmags he works for occasionally. One of the perks of the job, fraternising with the help. Of course, Jonathan is thirty-eight, so he's right up there

  with her. Closer to her than me.

  I asked to take her picture, to Jonathan's delight. 'You cunning little fox,' he whispered, kissing my shoulder, as if we were all supposed to pretend I didn't know they were fucking. 'You just guaranteed yourself a publicity splash, sweetheart. We'll have to make the event worthy of the write-up.'

  But, really I was more interested in reducing her to planes of colour, the hard sculptural bones offsetting the flicker of pity in her eyes.

  The print I went with was an accident, a misfire while I was adjusting the light settings. It shows her sitting on the edge of the fire escape stair, on the balcony outside the apartment. The focus is on the shapely knot of her knee, one hand resting in the dark fall of her skirt, a black blur. You can only see the angle of her jaw tilted out of frame. It makes her look vulnerable.

  When I confronted him about her later, sitting in the window of his loft, the night bitter cold against my naked back and the traffic streaming below, he ducked and evaded. But I know I am cast in the role of Poor Thing. The doomed unrequited who can't quite let go. And it is my fault that we still fall into bed. His mercy fuck. But really, I think the word should be mercenary, for all the benefits I score: the loft, the career guidance, this show.

  'Do you love him?' my shrink asks, and I feel angry because it's so obvious, and is this really what I'm paying for? But I don't have a coherent response. I love his ferocious confidence, the way he charms strangers, so they flock to him like tame little birds to peck at the compliments that drop from his lips. And the way you know it's only crumbs, and long for more.

  But I have a greater sense of his physicality. The image I have of Jonathan, one of the first, which I have tried to document on film countless times, but also keep in my head, are the lines that crease the corners of his eyes in bright sunlight when he smiles. Why this and not any of the other details – the triumvirate of moles in the crook of his arm; his lips, slightly too plump, too voluptuous for a man; his giant hands with knuckles like the knobbly skulls of little animals – or the whole, I don't know. But then Jonathan says that's just like me, to take in the partials rather than the composite.

  The shrink doesn't even bother to make notes. When he gives me the bill, I include it in my expenses, and Jonathan pays it without comment.

  'Hey, dreamy girl,' Jonathan waves impatiently from the other side of the room. 'This is your exhibition, you want to pay attention?' I set down the print and drift across the room. Not telling him about the branding feels like my counter to the Stacys, to all the times he doesn't answer his phone. An amulet of protection.

  'Babes, you can't be serious about this,' he says, tapping one of the photographs, already mounted and leaning against the wall.

  It is my favourite.

  'It's really childish.'

  They are both waiting for my reaction, Jonathan irritable and Sanjay polite, but evaluating at the same time, like he already has the measure of my work, but not yet of me.

  'What do you think?' I ask him.

  'No ways. You're deluded if you're making that the centrepiece, sweetheart. It's not right.' Jonathan interjects, but Sanjay gives me a little nod of approval.

  It's like the night dive Jonathan and I went on in Malaysia. It was only my eighth dive, and I wasn't qualified for it, but for five hundred bucks, qualifications can mysteriously be overlooked. In the boat, over the nasal whine of the engine and the oxygen tanks clanking against their restraints, Jonathan teased me about being scared, winding me up about how claustrophobic, how suffocating it would be.

  And it was terrifying when I rolled off the boat backwards, and the shock of water engulfed me, but not because the darkness closed in. Because it made the sea wide open.

  Visibility limits your imagination of the ocean only as far as you can see, ten metres, fifteen at a stretch. But it's only in the utter black that you can feel the true scale, the volume and weight of that gaping unknowable drift between continents.

  The photograph is called Self-Portrait. It is a print from a rotten piece of film. Two metres by three and a half.

  It came out entirely black.

  Toby

  I'm stoked with my stash, kids: new illicit phone that's immune to defusings and capable of reading illegal downloads (let's try not to spread that around too much), and a spiffing VIMbot to restore my swivel to the state of superclean it hasn't seen since my old lady first picked it out of the catalogue. Not that I've ever been especially bothered about fighting the good fight against creeping entropy, but it'll make for a change.


  I spill the VIMbot out of my pack onto the bed and it goes zooting between my Pumas, breaking for the corridor and nearly gets away. Luckily the door has already started to rotate away. A lot of people don't like this whole cog system of floors, the entire building like a gyroscope in perpetual motion, but, hey, it saves space on doors and it just saved my VIMbot from bolting.

  The little fucker just misses the gap and thwacks off the wall, tipping itself over and lying with its legs twitching frantically, a fantastic dirty sound emanating from its inner devicings. If a robot could grind its teeth, assuming they had teeth, that's what it would sound like. It's the kind of sound that's eminently sampleable.

  I like to mix it up eclectic, got over 150,000 songs on my phone, ready to download to the decks and about nine and a half thou records in the mix. Everything from spectro to new bliss jazz, and some oldtime stuff too. And my brand spanking handset will double that capacity, now I'm free to loot and plunder without the digital rights malware blowing up in my face.