“Tell him to shut up,” a hefty woman in a checkered doek told Thubana. “He’s giving me the nerves.”
“Do you want to be Kentuckied?” Thubana whispered. “You know, necklaced? Is that what you wish?”
Of course he didn’t. What life-loving person in his right mind would want a used tire lowered over his head, doused in petrol, and cruelly set aflame? Fear rippled in Myburgh’s bowels like a school of rapidly finning minnows.
But, bracing himself, he repeated that no one set of equations—no matter how elegant—could offer insight into every interaction in the cosmos.
“Of course not,” said Thubana, patting his knee.
Suspicious, Myburgh stared at him.
“Now please apply that principle to the TOE by which the South African state tries to order relations among people.”
It suddenly occurred to Myburgh that Grim Boy’s Toe was really Grim Boy’s TOE.
Putco bus number 496 carried a monicker that wickedly mocked both the race-obsessed Afrikaners who had devised apartheid and the grim policy itself, a policy on which his ancestors had ingeniously jury-rigged a system of taboos, customs, mores, and laws unlike those anywhere else on the planet.
Damn these kaffirs. Damn them all to the most painful Ndebele hell they can imagine.
* * * *
“How much longer, Kabini?” Myburgh shouted at the bearish Putco driver.
“Three hours,” called Ernest Kabini, over his shoulder. “No. Two hours, forty-five minutes.”
“Don’t be impertinent.” Coon, he wanted to add.
“Sorry, nkosi.”
Thubana clasped Myburgh’s wrist, twisting it around to reveal his watch. Myburgh was dumbfounded to see that its stark crimson readout —which winked as if adequately powered—hadn’t advanced beyond… 3:15 a.m.
Christ Almighty. Was he dreaming?
Then he gazed past the laborers in front of him and saw through the streaked windscreen another Putco bus swerve into 496’s headlamps. Immediately, hands braced on the seat back, knuckles whitening, he was on his feet again, shouting at Kabini to hit the brakes before they were all seriously injured…
“Shadow matter,” Thubana said, trying to pull him back down by his coat. “Just like us. It can’t hurt you, Mr. Myburgh, please believe me.”
Shadow matter?
What nonsense! What high-flown, self-deluding claptrap, just like everything else Thubana had told him.
Number 496, as Kabini futilely braked, collided with the other vehicle, striking it resoundingly. Windscreens shattered. Engines anviled together. Bodies flew past one another like players in an avant-garde production of Peter Pan. Indeed, Thubana rocketed past Myburgh in the gemmy chaos, clutching his copy of Superstrings and smiling as if to say, None of this matters; believe me, sir, not a jot of this means anything at all.
You’re lying, Myburgh’s dream self thought. You’re lying.
And he was hurled through the broken windscreen of Grim Boy’s Toe into an endless, entrapping darkness.
* * * *
When Putco bus 496 pulled up behind the stalled Cadillac (which was blocking the way to Pretoria), driver Ernest Kabini called back to one of his passengers, Mordecai Thubana.
Thubana, shaking himself awake, accompanied Kabini off the bus, and they offered their aid to the policemen in glistening boots and macintoshes walking around the shiny cranberry-colored car.
“Go on about your business,” one of the policemen told them in Afrikaans. “There’s nothing you can do.”
Thubana peered in the Caddy’s window at the man slumped behind its steering wheel: a sandy-haired bloke nearing forty. It looked, tonight, as if he would never get there.
Said Kabini, “What happened, my baas?”
“A heart attack, we think,” the policeman said. He nodded at the road. “Those skid marks show he knew what was happening and fought the car to keep it from going into the ditch. Pretty cool, for a fellow staring disaster in the eye.”
Yes, thought Thubana. He saved his deliciously lekker car, but he also gave himself a chance—a thin one—to survive the terrible crack-up threatening everything he valued.
The second policeman, his ruddy face shining from his rain hood like a lacquered gargoyle’s, approached the Africans. “Situation’s under control,” he growled. “Get out of here.”
Thubana started to reply, but Kabini shook his head.
The two men reboarded number 496, and Kabini wrestled it around the dead man’s car on the weather-gouged road.
Finding his seat taken by another man, Thubana slumped to the floor with a book and a penlight. Beside him, a fellow nicknamed Mpandhlani asked him if he thought the dead driver of the expensive American car had gone to heaven or hell. With his steel plate and his unenviable ability to pick up out-of-country radio broadcasts, Mpandhlani often seemed more like a disembodied spirit than any visiting angel would have. In fact, he sometimes gave Thubana the creeps.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I feel like three people got on when you and Kabini came back.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Someone else is riding with us, Mordecai.”
“Then it’s cut-and-dried. The dead man is shadow matter, like you and me and all these others.” He nodded at the fatigued bodies all around them. “Get it?”
“Sure,” said Mpandhlani “Shadow matter.”
“Down, down, down,” sang many of their fellow riders. “Down, down, down.”
It was true of all of them, Thubana thought, but the longer the dead man stayed aboard, the more likely he was to reach Belle Ombre station in the company of his countrymen. The more likely he was to see that the universe’s four major forces needed to be unified, tied up with super-strings, and rendered beautiful forever by a TOE equation with no anomalies. The more likely he was to find his own substance again.
Meanwhile, Thubana, his compatriots, and the heartsore ghost of Gerrit Myburgh jounced together across the highveld. And it seemed to Thubana, glancing out the mud-streaked windows, that the eastern sky was beginning to redden…
* * * *
“No!” Myburgh shouted.
The shout jerked him awake. He was sitting next to Mordecai Thubana on the bus called Grim Boy’s Toe. Although the bus had not wrecked, it was no longer moving. It was parked on a muddy turnout in the middle of nowhere. Glancing down, Myburgh saw that Thubana had draped his trenchcoat, lined with synthetic fur, over Myburgh’s chest and knees.
“Welcome back, Mr. Myburgh. You had a nice nap?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“But you slept. You nodded off while I was trying to explain to you how whites are like gravity.”
“I dreamed we had an accident.”
“You had an accident—earlier. In your lovely, lekker car, you hit an elephant.”
Myburgh blinked. That collision had happened. This latest one—running crash! into another Putco bus—had not. Odd. Very odd. A conundrum inside an enigma.
“I dreamed other things, too.”
“Good dreams?”
Myburgh started. “Why are we stopped?”
“Never mind that. Tell me what you dreamed.”
“For one thing, I’d… died. Heart attack. In my car. But somehow I was you in my dream, Mr. Thubana, and I looked into the window of my car to see me lying in it dead. Then I got on the bus with you and Kabini again. I was a ghost. I was dead, but at the same time I was you seeing me dead and seeing my ghost here on Grim Boy’s Toe, just another passenger.”
“Ah,” Thubana said. “Fascinating. You being me and you being your own ghost at the same time.”
Myburgh shot Thubana a pleading look. How to tell him that he had taken a weird sort of comfort from hearing Thubana’s comrades mock him with their chant? Even from seeing a dream picture of himself in his car, where death had relieved him of both responsibility and culpability? Such things were unsayable.
Myburgh looked down. “You gave me y
our coat.”
“Of course. Your suit’s all torn. And I have a sweater.” He did: an ugly, ribbed, reddish-brown sweater with more pills than a discount pharmacy.
Myburgh tried to remove the coat and thrust it back at Thubana, but Thubana held it to him with a hard, heavy-veined hand. “Keep it, Mr. Myburgh. Shortly, I fear, you will need it even more than you do now.”
What was going on? Myburgh glanced around. Other riders were peering uneasily into the relentless drizzle. Kabini wasn’t in his driver’s cage. Further, some sort of armor-clad paddy wagon had parked in front of the bus, blocking its way. Africans called such vans “nylons,” because of the mesh in their windows. Several men—Myburgh couldn’t tell how many— stalked the asphalt and the boggish shoulder. A confusion of moving silhouettes.
“The police?”
“From BOSS,” Thubana said. The Bureau of State Security, he meant. Ordinarily, Myburgh would have felt—what?—a frisson of ambiguous pride thinking on these dedicated state functionaries, but this morning, right now, he experienced their presence as all the others on Grim Boy’s Toe must have—as an ominous interruption, a clamp slowly tightening on the heart. But why? These were men who could help him. Myburgh rapped on his window.
“In here!” he called in Afrikaans. “I’m in here!”
“They’re not looking for you,” Thubana said. “Best not to call attention to yourself.”
“That’s crazy. I have to talk to them.” Hindered by the seat back in front of him and Thubana’s unyielding presence to his left, he tried to stand.
“It will do no good, Mr. Myburgh.”
“Nonsense. I’ll tell them about my accident. They’ll see that I get home.” At last, he had allies again. But Thubana would not budge; the only way to reach the aisle would be to shove past him—a distasteful, maybe even a dangerous, option to pursue.
* * * *
A plainclothes security police agent in a trenchcoat similar to Thubana’s, and a dove-gray fedora, stepped up into the bus. Facing the passengers, he spoke in Afrikaans in a high-pitched voice that unexpectedly conveyed an intimidating authority: “Everyone off the bus! And be orderly about it!”
“Who are you?” said the woman in the checkered head scarf. She spoke in English.
“Major Henning Jeppe,” the man said. And again in Afrikaans, “Off the bus, please. Step quickly.”
Myburgh pulled himself up and said, “Gerrit Myburgh here. I’ve had an accident, Major Jeppe. Please help me.”
But Jeppe had already gone back down the steps into the night, and the passengers on 496, cursing and grumbling, rose from their seats or their newsprint mats and began shuffling toward the front of the bus. Thubana also rose. He took Myburgh by the arm (not so much patronizingly as custodially, as if Myburgh were an expensive polo horse belonging to a doting employer) and introduced him into the sluggish stream of bodies. Well, so be it. The sooner he got outside and reported his accident, the sooner he could forsake the company of these cattlelike Africans and go back to the steady and uneventful life he’d built for himself at the financial institution called Jacobus & Roux.
On the desolate bundu’s edge (Myburgh’s digital now read 4:38, about two hours till sunup), he heard Kabini begging a uniformed policeman not to detain his bus:
“It will be my neck. I’m late as it is. The weather—you see what it’s like. Don’t be so cruel, nkosi.”
The policeman muttered something unintelligible, shoved Kabini around the bonnet of the bus, and disappeared with him behind the scattershot parade of the passengers. Myburgh began searching for Jeppe or some other member of State Security upon whom to dump his story, but all the white policemen had moved to the edges of the shadowy field into which they were herding everyone, depriving him of any chance to make his case. Thubana, settling his coat on Myburgh’s shoulders from behind, helped him step over muddy earth toward a stubble-spiked piece of ground so exposed and barren that it stank of its own infertile clay.
“Hullo! My name is Gerrit Myburgh! I’m here by mistake!” In dry weather, his cry would have echoed resoundingly; this morning, it had no more impact on the indifferent Transvaal than a muffled cough.
“Shhhhh,” Thubana said, “Save your breath.”
Soon, all ninety passengers had shaped three sides of a square in the field beyond the bus. The fourth edge was the bus itself. Major Henning Jeppe reappeared from behind Grim Boy’s Toe, where he and two or three policemen in rainslicks had been pumping Kabini for information. To speak to the detained, Jeppe stood in front of 496’s tall, inward-pleated door.
“Most of you are honest workers,” he said in his stentorian squeak. “But, this morning, at least one terrorist-traitor has ridden from KwaNdebele with you. If the law-abiding residents of your homeland help us identify this person or persons, we will let you reboard and go on to your jobs.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, as if his head ached.
Myburgh began waving an arm. “Major Jeppe! Major Jeppe!”
Jeppe ignored him. “If you refuse to help, if you stay silent in the misguided belief that you are observing a higher patriotism, we will detain you here until you piss yourselves or your bladders burst. One or the other. Understand?”
“Gaan kak in die mielies!” (Go shit in the corn) shouted a squat male passenger only a meter or two from Jeppe.
Myburgh was stunned by the black’s impertinence. What it would bring him, after all, was immediate notice and swifter punishment. In fact, two policemen in macintoshes rushed into the field, seized the man, and chivvied him back aboard the bus with their sjamboks and a series of hammerlike blows between the shoulder blades. A moment later, the man was bellowing inside 496’s tin shell, begging to be returned to his people in the field. In the rising twilight, his cries produced demoralizing echoes.
“Fool,” murmured Thubana, shaking his head.
“Major Jeppe, I don’t belong here!” Myburgh shouted. He wanted to walk manfully up to the major, but Thubana, sensing this intent, locked an arm through his elbow. “Damn you. Let go.”
One of the bus’s windows slid down: Kmrrrack! A policeman leaned out. “This isn’t the man, sir. We now know our terrorist is someone called Mpandhlani.”
Myburgh looked three people to his right and saw Mpandhlani, a raw-boned figure with a face like an inoffensive baboon’s, staring at the ground. Actually, his nose was pointing earthward, but his eyes seemed to be rolled back in his head, contemplating a dimension where a person could write poetry unmolested. He was wearing his volleyball cap, which made him look like an escapee from either an insane asylum or a circus train.
“Christ,” said Thubana.
“Aren’t you folks lucky?” Jeppe said, walking into the field in his new boots, unmindful of the mud. “One of you has already come to our assistance. Good. Excellent.” Abruptly, he turned back to the bus. “What was that name, Wessels?”
“Mpandhlani, sir. It’s a nickname. It means Baldhead.”
“Thank you, Wessels.” Jeppe did as neat a military pivot as he could manage on the sloppy ground, then strode toward the detainees in Myburgh’s crooked line. “Baldhead,” he murmured. “Baldhead.”
“Psssst, Winston,” Thubana said, softly hissing.
A woman beside Mpandhlani nudged him, and he looked at Thubana through glazed, beyond-the-pale eyes.
“Keep your cap on, Winston,” Thubana said. “Keep it on.”
Myburgh straightened his arm, breaking free of Thubana’s elbow lock. ‘Here he is, Major Jeppe! The terrorist you want is right here!” Myburgh stepped out of the line of detainees, leveled an accusing finger at Mpandhlani, and briefly held this stance as if posing for a new statue at the Voortrekker Monument.
“Bring that man out of the bus, Wessels,” Jeppe called over his shoulder. “He’ll point us to the filthy bugger.”
What the hell? Myburgh glanced at Jeppe, then at the policemen strong-arming the informant off Grim Boy’s Toe, and then at Thubana throwing him a stare of such
singeing, blast-furnace hate that his nape hairs crackled.
But Jeppe… was he deaf? Was he blind?
One of those who had informed on Mpandhlani (an African, thought Myburgh, not me) had a rugger’s body and a flat-cheeked face with a pair of big, liquid eyes. Jeppe’s policemen dragged him along each line of detainees until, head down, he stopped in front of Winston Skosana and stood there incriminatingly shamefaced.
“Ephraim,” Thubana said. “You shit.”
“They already knew,” Ephraim said. “Your friend”—nodding at Myburgh “—just fingered him.”
“No, he didn’t,” Thubana said. “He’s nothing to his own people this morning. Nothing, Ephraim. He could strip naked in front of these snakes, man. They’d never notice.”
Full Spectrum 3 - [Anthology] Page 55
