Читать книгу Triangulum - Masande Ntshanga - Страница 11

I

THE MACHINE

October 4, 1999

I was 14 when I first lingered in front of the mirror next to our home computer, and touched myself, coming twice, so I wouldn’t think about Mama’s abduction.

I’d never done that in front of a mirror before, and I’d never gone beyond that number, but I told myself to stop when Tata woke up coughing. I snuck back to my room, and listened to him as he left the house. Later I’d learn that he’d gone to the clinic.

That night, close to midnight, our front door unlocked again and Tata walked back in, bringing his illness with him.

I opened his bedroom door to let out smoke. “You’re doing it again,” I said.

Tata told me to go to sleep.

“I don’t feel well.”

I could tell he wasn’t sure if it was me or Mama. “It’s me,” I said.

“Tell me what’s wrong with you.”

“I don’t know what it is.”

“Then go back to sleep.”

I turned and went to bed.

I could still smell the cigarette smoke seeping out from his room. I sat up in bed, measuring my breathing so he wouldn’t know I was awake, waiting for him to fall asleep.

Lying back, I looked up at the ceiling and thought about how, 42 years ago, the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite, into orbit. Not that Tata would’ve cared. Although he had a degree, it was in agriculture, from a farming college in the mid-’70s.

I closed my eyes, feeling cold as the bedsheets bunched up behind me. I remembered the time I’d felt a pain similar to his. In magnitude, at least.

I was nine years old when I fell off a creaking swing in a corner of Bhisho Park. I’d seen a column of rain clouds racing toward me, and moments later, I’d flipped over and hit the ground with the left side of my head. After a minute, I couldn’t see.

It was a condition the doctor at our local hospital described as corneal sunburn. It happened when I was lying on my back in the park, unable to move, staring directly into the sun before my head rolled over and everything went dark.

That was in 1994.

Afterward, Tata often told this story to his friends, pausing to mention that I never cried—a fact the doctor attributed to shock. I still remember standing in the bathroom that morning, trembling as Mama cleaned the cut on my brow and tried to dress it with an old t-shirt from Tata’s closet. Then the two of them drove me to our local hospital and walked me down a long corridor that blinked under a malfunctioning fluorescent light. I got stitched seven times, prescribed 500 milligrams of paracetamol, and given a week off school.

I wasn’t concussed, but for the first few days, being home felt different. My parents tottered around the house, silhouetted against the ceiling light, their shadows providing me with care, Vick’s VapoRub, minestrone soup, continental pillows. Through all their efforts and between fevers, I lay on my back, hearing their voices as if from the inside of a bunker—a booming echo that preceded each one’s presence inside the bedroom or the lounge, where I either slept or sat absorbing a blur of television without sound.

Mama, a counselor at the University of Fort Hare, had been a communications officer for the homeland government, and liked to leave our TV turned to the news. That Saturday, when my vision healed, I spent the afternoon drifting in and out of sleep in front of different news reports, waking up to broadcasts of conflicts in countries whose names I couldn’t pronounce. At one point, Mama joined me on the sofa, stroked my neck and felt my forehead, then settled back to watch the explosions flicker into clouds of dust and fire with me, the two of us silenced.

The following summer, she went missing, and four years later, Tata returned coughing from a different hospital in a different town. I’d often wonder what connected us that afternoon as we watched the bloodshed in Mogadishu together—if that was when I inherited the machine, as one doctor would later suggest, although he didn’t seem to know much about it—but feeling her touch on the wound had soothed it.

Later, I’d try to evoke this moment with Mama again, calling her back into the living room with news reports on the disasters she’d left behind with us on Earth.

I opened my eyes and breathed out again, absorbing the newfound warmth in my sheets. I could hear Tata coughing again, our house having grown still, as if the two of us had been interred inside a capsule and sent out into deep space to freeze.

Maybe on a mission to find her, I thought; but how would he know that?

As abruptly as it had started, his coughing stopped, and I could tell he was asleep.

Soon, I drifted off, too, thinking about how Sputnik had persisted for three weeks after its batteries gave out. It floated alone in the dark for two months before falling back to Earth. I took this as evidence that things came back down in the end. Including Mama.

Regression Therapy Recording (RTR): 001

Date of Recollection: 05.28.2002

Date of Recording: 06.20.2035

Duration: 4 min

Format: Monologue

Ever since I got put on medication, I’ve been thought of as defective. That’s what people decide about me. In the 8th grade, at my last school, I was asked to join the debate team after I saw a speech coach. My grades were good, but I needed self-confidence. I didn’t speak enough, and when I did, it was hard to discern how I felt. That’s what my English teacher said.

The speech coach taught me how to gesture, maintain eye contact, correct my posture, and project my voice, but I didn’t join the team in the end.

I was diagnosed with reduced affect display, or emotional blunting, my doctor said, from the medication he’d prescribed to me when I was 12. It meant I couldn’t express my emotional responses as well as most people. It wasn’t an uncommon side-effect, he said, and lots of patients could live with it. The pills he gave me, Celexa and Paxil, were treating me well for the insomnia that had brought me to his office, and he suggested we keep to the regimen. I couldn’t remember how I’d been before. I sat in his office and agreed.

It’s now been five years.

Picking a dandelion seed off my school uniform today, Part says she knows a bad joke and then she tells it to us. “The thing with reality,” she says, “people used to have the sense for it, but now they don’t buy it.” Pausing for a moment, she says she means “cents.”

The three of us laugh. It’s the end of May, a month before our winter break, and I’ve just got out of detention, my second one since I stopped being a student monitor in junior high.

Litha bends down to loosen his laces and sighs. “Maybe heaven is dead,” he says.

Later, at home with my earphones on, I try to sleep, but I don’t.

Instead, I find myself standing in front of our bathroom mirror at 1 a.m.

I weigh 99 pounds from having had rails on both of my jaws for an underbite, and the mirror reflects my cheekbones, my neck, my lips, my hair. It needs to be braided again, I think, although it’s still neat.

In the living room, I switch on the TV and find an infomercial for a range of pans—an old man in a chef’s tunic uses a nonstick casserole to caramelize sugar over a low flame; he pours it into a cereal bowl and his audience claps. I switch it off.

In my bedroom, I open a drawer and take out a makeup mirror and magnifying glass. I tilt the vanity mirror on its base until it fills up with a reflection of the moon through the parted curtains. Angling the lens over the rock’s surface, I count the craters that mark its damage until I fall asleep.

October 5, 1999

The following morning, after he’d returned coughing from peering into our mailbox, Tata proposed a trip to a Pentecostal herbalist from out of town. A month before, he’d been laid off from his new job as manager of a fleet of vans that delivered amasi from a farm in Stutterheim, and he’d written a note for me to miss school so we could make it in time before the lines. My presence on the trip was for good luck, he said.

We set out at noon, Tata’s retrenchment letter on the console between us. Tata’s double cab crossed the rail bridge at the edge of our town and entered Ginsberg, where he parked next to a sleeping German shepherd with patches of pale skin showing through its fur. It was shivering from flea bites, and I moved away, careful not to step on its tail.

We walked through a grid of one-room houses with rusting roofs, to a house with a grassy yard and long line outside the door. Tata sighed. For an hour and a half, we shuffled in line. One woman collapsed, having reached the front of the line a moment too late. It took a while before a stooped man came over and carried her away. To pass the time, I looked around. The grass grew in sparse patches over the yard, disturbed in the middle by large angular rocks that marked a path; the porch smelt of enough ammonia to cause a headache, I thought—and then got one.

Tata got to the front of the line and disappeared into a room without windows, built onto the side of a house that was larger than the rest. When he returned, without his retrenchment letter, he was holding two clear, unlabeled bottles. One was for health and the other would assure us wealth, he said, hefting them at his sides. He was to drink three times from each bottle. When we got to the car, the dog had vanished along with its leash.

Tata and I were silent as we crossed back over the rail tracks.

“Tell me what you want to do with your life,” he said.

I thought about it. “I don’t know. Maybe take care of you.”

Tata sighed, shifting into first gear. “Just like your mother,” he said. “You can’t think for yourself, either?”

I thought for myself. “I want to be a scientist,” I said.

He didn’t respond. It was only when we got home that I realized I could never tell him what I knew.

That I wanted to look for her through the longest telescope I could find.

Later that afternoon, after we’d eaten our porridge in silence and he’d drunk from each of his bottles, Tata went back to bed. I waited for his door to lock, then went to my bedroom too. I turned over my pillow and looked at the bloodstains, now turned yellow, on his old pillowcase.

This was in the spring of 1999. I’d been cured of acne. Nelson Mandela had announced his retirement, forfeiting a shoo-in for a second term, and the world was ending because of a computer bug.

We never spoke about Mama. Tata tried to keep her memory outside our walls, minimizing her in conversation, and I’d gone along with that until I couldn’t. Until I no longer had the choice.

The first time I saw the machine, for example, I thought of the word canard, which I’d learned from a crossword puzzle Mama completed with me when I was nine. I didn’t know to call it the machine, then; nor did I tell Tata about it.

Instead, the following morning, I heated up and served us two bowls of oats. Then I sat down and thought about the word again.

Myth.

“Rumor,” Mama had said, guiding my hand over the squares.

“Falsehood?”

“That’s close.”

“How close?”

She smiled.

I looked up from my porridge bowl, now, and saw Tata in his worn diplomat’s bathrobe—the one with the old Ciskei insignia—poring over the classifieds section of The Daily Dispatch. His tea had gone cold.

Ever since the abolition of apartheid, he’d been unable to find regular work. Tata and his ex-colleagues had all dropped an economic class and retreated from the public, avoiding the glares that awaited them in schools and supermarkets. In Bhisho, he’d served as a financial officer in the Department of Agriculture, working through the Ciskeian Agricultural Bank to develop “released areas,” or clusters of previously white-owned farms which had been absorbed into the homeland. Men who’d been doing their duty weren’t the same as the ones who’d had their boots on our necks, he said.

I sat back in the kitchen chair and spoke without expecting an answer. “I thought you had a position lined up with those new Renewable Energy people,” I said. “Last week, you told me they had a logo and everything.”

Tata scoffed, folding his broadsheet in half. He pinched its spine and closed his eyes. “They’re all amateurs,” he said. “Lawrence is the worst of them, too. He’s never worked a day in his life.”

I looked at the headline obscuring his face. It was about how many children were illiterate in the province. I stirred my oats and cleared my throat. “I don’t believe we have an 86 percent literacy rate in the Eastern Cape. I’ve been to our schools.”

“Come again?”

“Especially amongst the males.” I raised my spoon and pointed at the headline.

•••

Tata looked at it too, and laughed. “No, you’re right. It isn’t just Lawrence. Everyone’s books are cooked.”

We laughed together until he broke into a cough. Changing the subject, I told him how the previous afternoon I’d asked a teacher if it was true that in the year 1500, there were only half a billion Homo sapiens on the planet. “I told him I knew it was over six billion now, but I wanted to know if it was possible to feed that rise in population without fossil fuels.”

“Using what, instead?”

“Using biofuel. Like with the Renewable Energy people.”

“Then you were looking at my papers?”

I nodded. “They were there.”

“Did you get an answer from your teacher?”

“I don’t know. He said he likes to keep an open mind.”

“Meaning?”

“That some people believe the Earth is 2000 years old.”

Tata laughed again. I watched him get up, knowing I couldn’t tell him about the machine, because I didn’t know how to. He put the newspaper on the table, fastened his robe, yawned, and left the kitchen.

I carried his cup to the basin and emptied it, watching the cold rooibos sluice into the drain. I ran the water for the dishes. It was warm outside. The air was placid, pierced through with the sounds of birdsong and children. In a short while, parents would expect their cars to be washed by their teenage sons. Their lawns trimmed. I ran the water over my palms. Then I began on the plates, the cold water paling the tips of my fingers until each looked like a small cylinder of powder. After drying my hands, I fell asleep for half an hour in front of a muted rerun of Noot vir Noot. When I woke, I took the house keys from the rack.

In the garage, although the air was humid, dust powdered all the surfaces except for the treadmill in the corner, where I’d balanced my bike. The treadmill didn’t work, but the belt moved when I rode over it, and that’s what I’d been doing for the past month, ever since Tata drove me to Farrer’s Sports to get me a mountain bike for scoring the top grade in my class. Tata couldn’t cycle himself. I’d convinced him that I’d learn to do it on the go, but I hadn’t.

The lights in the garage had malfunctioned; I had to remove a large cardboard box from the window to let in some light. I balanced my bike on the treadmill and began to pedal—it was flat and long enough to hold both tires. Every time I tipped sideways, instead of spilling off, I’d clutch one of the handles on the treadmill. It was a 16-gear bike, and I wasn’t tall enough to plant my feet on the ground when I lost my balance. This way, I could practice until I got tired.

That night, the machine returned.

Like the night before, as soon as I closed my eyes, the parts came out of the opposite ends of the wall, coming together to form a hole in the middle of the ceiling. The room filled up with a mechanical hum. Then I looked around and found I couldn’t see.

The following morning, I woke up on my stomach with my vision blurred.

I unlocked our garage, dragged the bike off the treadmill and rode around the block as the morning air cooled my sweat. I could tell it had taught me how to ride, and that this was the beginning of things between us. As I rode further up Wodehouse, I couldn’t keep myself from blinking, the world filled with a vividness that felt capable of blinding me.

RTR: 002 / Date of Recollection: 05.29.2002 / 17 min

Today is Mom’s birthday, although I forgot to watch the morning news like we used to do.

That was our ritual for the 29th. Dad couldn’t understand it, he said, but it’s what Mama and I chose to do. After we were done, he’d call us over for slices of sponge cake, her favorite, which he ordered at the Shoprite the night before.

For a while, after she was gone, he still went out and bought one on her birthday; but over time, without discussing it, we both stopped touching it.

I get to school late this morning, around 8:30, a minute before Mrs Robinson locks the front gate. She tells me latecomers are liable for four-week suspension. It’s drizzling. I cup a palm over my forehead, another over my braids as she shuffles me to the chapel. I follow her instructions in irritation, but silence. This is what passes for a truce, since the two of us will never get along. Mrs Robinson’s hair is an auburn loofah, flaking off into freckles all over her cheeks. I used to have her in 9th grade for choir; she’d teach our class without projecting the sheet lyrics on the wall. This was to punish us, I used to think, for getting the words to her hymns wrong. Not thinking, once, I made the mistake of telling her she was bleeding through the back of her skirt. It was true, but the class ended and she didn’t return to us for choir that week.

I unshoulder my bag and join my grade at the back. I feel relieved chapel’s close to ending; a moment later, the seniors get up and we all leave the church again, taking the gravel path to our first period in the admin block on Huberta Square, a brick courtyard named after a famous dead hippo from our district. I excuse myself and walk to the bathroom.

There’s a text message from Litha: I have more hockey practice.

I tell him we’ll live. I pack the cellphone back in my bag, take out two capsules of Celexa and Paxil, swallow them over the sink, and go to class.

I walk past the results of our math test from last week, the printouts pinned up in the corridor outside Mr Costello’s physics classroom. Settling down at my desk toward the back, I close my eyes and listen as the pills clatter inside my backpack, the plastic tapping against a pencil case that used to belong to Dad.

Then I breathe out, and open my eyes.

Make another go of it, I think to myself.

I don’t often talk about class or how good I am at school, because I don’t think there’s much to talk about. I know that most people here aren’t, and that’s fine, too.

Three years ago, sequestered at a different school—an old diocesan prison on the outskirts of East London—on a scholarship, I was awarded the Dux Litterarum. The headmistress, Mrs Primrose, cried as she patted me on the shoulder, and then apologized for her sloppiness. It was untoward of her, she explained. I took her apology, although I didn’t care enough to respond. I waited for the moment to pass, pretending I didn’t know about Marissa, her daughter, who was upset at losing the cup. The check went to my aunt.

A year later, I fell sick. I’d wake up in a fever, shaking at the thought of having to walk through the school grounds again. My mouth grew parched and I suffered from migraines on the benches at break. I couldn’t sleep, either. I was convinced it had to do with me being there. That’s what I told the counselors. Then I got passed on to new and different counselors. I did that until the school ran out of them and Dad unenrolled me.

Now I’m here.

•••

I drop my backpack, pull out the pencil case, and stretch.

“Let me guess. Not much sleep.”

Lerato’s sitting next to me, and as usual her legs are shaved and shining—slathered with enough moisturizer to give a person cataracts. Gleaming on the basin behind her, I notice a beaker I could tip over to stop her smiling; but I don’t.

“Thanks,” I say.

“No, seriously. Hey, have you heard? Kiran was meant to come back today, but he hasn’t pitched.”

I hadn’t heard. Two weeks after our Easter break, Kiran took a month off school after his dad, an ENT with a practice in East London, was reported missing in the dailies. This was the week after I’d asked him to lend me his MiniDisc recorder and he’d agreed, telling me he’d do it if I let him neck me at the fields outside Hudson Park.

I’d agreed to let him think I would.

It’s not that he’s the worst looking guy here. He’s tall, with thick curls and faint sideburns, but he also thinks leaving his school shirt untucked undermines the staff. I could do without that. Last year, he’d spent most of our prep squinting at me. That’s when I’d come up with the idea to record the machine with the MD.

Hence us having to make out.

I turn back to my desk. “Maybe I’m still the new girl.”

Lerato laughs and I take a moment to look at her. Her face is long and faultless.

For something else to do, I open and close the pencil case my dad gave me. At the front of the class, Mr Costello tells us to settle down. He’s chewing on his lip—a habit I hate, since it keeps the skin chapped.

Not that he’s awful. Mr Costello’s middle-aged, soft around the middle, and more bearable than most of them, here. His shoulders are often hunched, shortening his neck, and he’s always blinking behind thick, tinted glasses. Today, he’s holding a stack of tests close to his chest; if our class average drops below 60, he likes to make us all do the test over. It’s only fair, he explains, and I guess I’ve never minded him for that.

I like fairness.

Most times, Part and I meet at the intersection of Queens and Joubert Roads, then head down to the park—just the two of us, if Litha’s at hockey. We’re all at different schools.

This town, once a mission station, was named after a monarch whose general turned natives into settlers—offering the Mfengu British citizenship in exchange for each other’s blood. It spreads under us like a green tomb, its rolling hills dipping into spaces abandoned to waste. The grass is always warm, as if a giant had curled itself around the borders of Buffalo City and lain down to die, before evaporating into the atmosphere. Part and I often take shelter in the shade of a stone alcove under an elm.

Part likes to argue with me over whose life we’d grade worse, hers or mine. It’s my job to tell Part to be fairer to her mom— to remind her that her mother has a vascular disease, and she should stop picking a fight with her every day of the week. Litha tells her that too.

Not that he doesn’t have ideas of his own. For example, he says even adoption isn’t a merciful act; it’s a lucky draw. It gets to the point where you’re afraid of your parents and they don’t remember your name. He’s lost faith in parenting, he says; these days, he loses himself in internet fantasies where the way to kill a monster is to give it a tonic of health or a life potion. He tells me to imagine a re-routed reality where life is not only the mirror of death, but also its catalyst.

I tell him I’m not sure. Most of the time we agree, though. It’s been that way for two years now. Litha and I are Xhosa, while Part’s grandparents are from Madeira. The three of us met one afternoon at the Master Math office on Alexandra Road, down the road from Grey Hospital and De Vos Malan High School. We were looking for tutor jobs—a week of free lessons was being provided by the state to primary students from Ginsberg and Dimbaza—and we’d settled into the waiting room, where the air conditioning spat flakes of rust over the linoleum and potted plants. It made me shiver when it almost got in my hair. I didn’t like that. I yawned. I was tired, having skipped my last three meals. Part leaned back on the bench and made it creak. Next, two red-haired women greeted us, offered us a jug of water, and told us none of us had the job. I wasn’t surprised; I’d suspected there’d be a school background check.

Outside, Litha told me and Part he worked at the Mr Movie up the road. He invited us over and took us back to the storeroom, where he showed us an old tape of Debbie Does Dallas for an hour. It had laugh tracks dubbed over the dialogue, which Litha thought we’d find hilarious, and we did. I mean, I still do.

Mr Costello reaches our desk and drops our tests in front of us.

Lerato pulls at mine. “I knew it.”

I take the test back from her. My mark’s more or less what I expected.

“With grades like that, I don’t understand why you stopped being a monitor,” Lerato says.

“It wasn’t comfortable. Mr de Silva saw the report card I came in with from East London, and thought it was a Rorschach test and not just marks.” The two of us learned about the inkblot test in English last week. “Like it meant I’d naturally be good at following orders.”

Lerato shifts on her seat, grinning, before closing her test. “To be honest, it isn’t that bad. There’s the tuck shop thing, for one.” I know. Monitors like her get free apple pies.

“I don’t care about King Pie,” I say.

“Even apple King Pie?”

“Even apple King Pie.”

Lerato smiles, shaking her head, even though it’s true.

Toward the end of my last year of junior high—not long after I came here—I got my student monitor badge taken away from me. I got summoned to the principal’s office, where I watched our headmaster, Mr de Silva, sweating under his collar, while through the window mounds of rain clouds massed over the field the school rented for track. He was on the phone, looking down at his blotter, and I remembered how we hadn’t had any sports, that year. I looked at the mist on the windowpane behind Mr de Silva’s head.

He dropped the receiver and sighed, looking at his hands. “You fraternize too much,” he said. “You were trusted with leadership and discipline.”

I nodded, but I didn’t face him.

The world outside felt muted. Two old men pushed a wheelbarrow to a landfill across the field, thin curtains of smoke rising from a smoldering garbage fire before them, and I didn’t answer him, but walked to his desk when he told me to. He removed the pin from my school uniform and turned it over in his palm.

“You can go,” he told me, and I left.

Before class ends, an alarm goes off for a fire drill. We file out into Huberta Square. I’m surprised they’re still following regulations, even for safety; for the longest time, we’ve been told the school is just hanging on, on the verge of going broke. Joining the crowd at the back, I reach into my bag and feel for Kiran’s MD. I can’t see him anywhere.

Lerato sidles up to me. “Here’s to another waste of time.”

I nod and rub my hands together, feeling the onset of winter. The mist hangs low over the grounds, raking goosebumps from our skin. We get told to arrange ourselves in straight lines, slicing the courtyard into four perfect squares.

I never used to believe enough when Mom was still around.

I remember that.

The first time I told Part about the abduction, her hesitation didn’t surprise me.

We were in her kitchen, the first cul-de-sac off Head Drive on the other side of town; she was straining a cup of tea for her mom and telling me she’d promised herself not to spit in it. Not that I’d asked.

I sat back on the kitchen chair and watched her leaning over the basin. Part’s legs could be found in an old dentist’s waiting-room magazine, I thought, preserved from the ’80s, like the ones I’d seen in a box of Mom’s old things. Her Smashing Pumpkins t-shirt hung past her cut-offs. Her feet were slender, and if the tiles were cold, she didn’t show it.

“You mean extraterrestrials?” she asked.

“I didn’t see them, but yes.”

“I see.” Using two fingers, Part pulled the lid off the kettle, releasing steam.

I decided to try something else, before I lost my nerve. “Do you want a girlfriend?”

“I don’t know. Does that happen?”

“I learned about it in Life Orientation.”

Part laughed. “There’s also Litha.”

I sighed. Part liked to provoke me, I knew that, but I could also tell we were both scared. I dropped my head onto my forearms, reminding myself of all the ways I looked better than she did. I stopped when I reached the ones I’d made up. I breathed out.

Part stood and rinsed the strainer over the basin. Then she turned around and dried her hands down her sides. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said.

“Do you?” I looked up from my forearms and attempted a smile. “Then say yes to me.”

“Yes, I do,” she said, “and yes, yes to you, too.”

Then I got up.

That’s how Part and I first got together, that afternoon. The second time it happened, I told Part my theory of how my mom had been abducted.

The two of us headed down to the library on Alexandra Road behind the shut-down theater. We walked around the rusting cannons that sat baking on the lawn by the dried-up water fountain, ignoring the other students. I let Part walk in in front of me, absorbing the sunlight so I could savor the gust from the air conditioning in the lobby when we went inside.

We checked our bags and passed single-file through the glass doors into the main part of the library. The air was even colder here, which I liked. Under the flicking fluorescent lights, we curved into the adult section on the right, where I pulled out a hardcover with UFO Diaries embossed on the front.

I handed it to her. “I first found a copy of it when I was 12. It was in Mom’s things. I’d snuck into the guest room, where we kept her clothes before Dad packed them up.” Since then, I’d often come back here to read about people like me and Mom.

Part squinted at the cover. “These people could be insane.”

“I don’t know. Look.”

I opened the book and she leaned over my shoulder to look, close enough for me to inhale the aroma off her skin. Thinking of my own scent, I told her to wait; I tried not to blush as I walked to the bathroom, where I tamped my armpits with damp toilet paper. I pressed it over my eyelids and between my legs. Then I washed my hands with the sweet puke-like soap from the dispenser.

I found Part sitting cross-legged in the non-fiction aisle, the book open on her lap.

“I don’t know,” I said, “one night she was around and one night she wasn’t. The window in the living room was open. I mean, who vanishes like that?”

I sat down next to her and she looked up at me, the book’s cover sticking to the insides of her thighs. I didn’t mention the other connection I had to it. That I’d found the first copy at a time when I felt foreign inside, breasts aching for the first time, and with new underarm hair. I looked taller, too. I felt like there was an exit from being a child and alone. Feeling noticed, as well, and not having a pill prescription.

“Like, aliens?” Part smiled, and I felt more stung than I’d expected. She looked down and opened the book again, creasing her brow as she read.

“Like that, huh?” she said.

“Like that.”

I only met her father, the policeman, after I met his gun—an automatic 9mm.

Part’s dad was out that afternoon, somewhere in town. She had the gun between us on her mother’s bed.

Looking at me, Part laughed and said, “Put it in your mouth. It still has my saliva on it. It’ll be like a kiss. Or even better.”

Outside, the light was golden and had stuck itself to the windows, hiding behind the synthetic curtains, and there in her mother’s room, on her bed, we were two humming spirits in a movie about desolation, where life was two people and death was everything else.

“It would be even better with gingivitis,” Part said.

Taking the gun back, a stream of my saliva, our saliva, our kiss, fell on the bed, and then without warning me she stood in front of the dresser and raised the gun, pointing it at the wall.

I could hear her mom’s voice mumbling through the wall from the living room, talking and laughing to herself.

“Imagine how easy it would be,” Part said. “She wouldn’t know what happened. Her head should be here, somewhere.” Part aimed, made shooting noises with her mouth. Then her arms fell limp at her sides. “I’m done. We should listen to In Utero.” She opened the door to her room, still holding the gun in her hand. “We should do it loud, so she can hear.”

I got up.

“Now come closer.”

I went closer and her hand fell on my shoulder; her mom laughed again.

The next week, when I told her a third time about Mom’s abduction, Part looked up at me for a moment, then reached for my hand and told me she believed me. For the rest of the afternoon, we paged through UFO Diaries end to end, going through each sighting, taking special note of locations and dates. This was a day before Litha came back from an out-of-town trip. Part told me she suspected his fosters might be thinking of taking him back to the children’s home.

The two of us met him after school at the alcove in the park.

“Most of it was us driving around Hogsback,” he said. “My fosters and I were meant to meet my biological uncle, but he stopped calling when we got to town. It happened the same way with an aunt a few years ago. It’s about money.”

Part and I watched him push his fingers through his hair, his dreadlocks trimmed into a new mushroom bob.

“So what did you do?” asked Part.

“Not much, except drive to Hole in the Wall and eat ham sandwiches.”

“Did anything fun happen?”

Litha shook his head. “No. I wouldn’t call it that.”

Part patted him on the shoulder, half-joking and half-meaning it, like she often did. I looked across the field to the red roof of the public hospital, where they kept my dad under a plastic mask for two days one October, a dish the shape of a bean catching the yellow paste from his lungs.

•••

Mrs Robinson clears her throat and quiets us down. “Mr de Silva’s engaged today,” she says. “He’s had to attend an urgent funding meeting in East London, so I’ll be addressing you in his place.”

There’s a murmur before everyone goes quiet.

“Now, I take it most of you have seen the news. Yesterday, three local girls were abducted on their way home from netball practice. They’re local students, but the police are also investigating cases from neighboring towns. There could be more.”

The silence deepens over the courtyard.

“It’s devastating, of course, but we don’t want to encourage unnecessary panic. The school’s taking the required measures. Members of staff are putting together a committee to produce a memo for students. Evidence suggests the targets are girls, but there’ll be an update for everyone. For now, be discerning: avoid all strangers and don’t walk home alone. There’ll be information on how to use the buddy system in the memo.”

Then Mrs Robinson makes us file back to class in separate grades.

I pull my blazer over my shoulders, pushing through the cold as I climb the stairs to bio. It feels like there’s a threat hanging over the school; I imagine it covering us like a blanket, turning the world dim and silent.

October 7, 1999

I didn’t harp on about the machine, which is what I started calling it. Most of my family was already openly suspicious of me, appalled at stories of how, when I was 12, I’d convinced Tata, a man still grieving his wife, to move me from three schools in the space of 10 months. And how I’d continued to trouble him until he took me to a doctor in town—at which point I’d been awake for four days. I was diagnosed with dysthymia, which my family didn’t know about, and which Tata and I found foreign too.

The doctor wrote me a prescription for a trial of SSRIs, which would change the chemical signals in my brain, he said— this was after he’d taken me alone to a separate room next to his dispensary and asked me about my period, and whether I was having sex yet, in which case I had to be warned against whoring—and which Tata pocketed but ignored. Instead, my father opted for a host of herbal remedies from friends and associates, receiving each one with what I thought was a premature sense of gratitude.

A month later, my symptoms hadn’t abated and we had to drive down to town again for a second prescription. That’s when I decided to tell the doctor about the machine—a mistake, I could tell. He summoned Tata into his office and told him that, aside from the dysthymia, it was possible I was suffering from severe hypnagogic hallucinations, not uncommon in epileptic patients who’d suffered brain trauma from a head injury. Though in my case, he added, it was hard to diagnose me as epileptic without the visible seizures. He leaned back in his seat and shook his head. “The hallucinations will disappear over time,” he said. “The key issue is treating the dysthymia.”

Tata was quiet for most of the drive home. At last he said, “I understand your injury, but now you’re also unhappy with your life. Even at your age. This is what all this is about.”

He creased his brow, the way he did whenever someone mentioned Mama. I knew he wouldn’t face me for the rest of the trip.

I took in the sky with its thick cumulus clouds; it seemed impossible that there was no permanence to the blue that spread itself outside the windows. That from the vantage point of the universe, where light didn’t refract, the only permanence we could know was darkness—or what I’d come to think of as Mama’s home. I didn’t tell Tata that, though. Instead, when we drove into our neighborhood, I turned to him and explained I’d never liked my teeth.

“Teeth?”

I nodded and opened my mouth at my reflection in the sunshade. My teeth were crowded and uneven. I told him that since losing my baby teeth, I’d found it difficult to talk. I was struck, most of the time, with the fear of having an audience.

Tata shrugged, but I could sense his relief. “You want to be even more beautiful than you already are,” he said. “Your grandmother was the same.”

Two weeks into the next month, we drove out to a maxillofacial surgeon in East London—a booming old Indian man who stooped over me and took X-rays of my skull, before presenting Tata with a sheet of paper marked with a vast sum.

“It won’t be impossible to save,” he said on our drive back. “The doctor said we could do the braces in a year, so why don’t you give your father some time?”

I gave it to him, and he was right. I went for surgery toward the end of that year, on his insurance. By the time I got my braces fitted, I was told that my face, always described to me as earnest and severe, had improved fivefold. The pain in my jaws changed my relationship with meat, though. It gave me a diet that trimmed my reflection to that of a stranger’s.

“No more new schools.”

That’s what Tata would say whenever he found me observing my reflection in the bathroom mirror; he detected vanity, where I felt curiosity. Not that he was far off. I’d smile back at him, not knowing how else to respond.

When I started lifting banknotes from the wallet he kept in his bedroom, hoarding full-priced halter tops in a stack at the bottom of my closet, he pretended not to notice. Tata knew the prescription for my SSRIs had gone from trial to regimen, but he’d never come with me to the pharmacy, claiming to be engaged. Only when he’d been drinking, which happened on occasion, would he call me to his room and tell me he’d been reading about what was happening with me.

“Do you still feel anything?” he’d ask, and in those moments, I would. There were times Tata dismissed me if I couldn’t tell him in terms he understood what was wrong with me, but this was different. “Can you tell me what you’re feeling now?” he’d say, and I’d be ready to play my part too.

I’d tell him, “Yes.”

I’d tell him, “I’m happy you’re my father.”

RTR: 003 / Date of Recollection: 05.29.2002 / 1.5 min

I think about the missing girls until it’s almost break, knowing I’m not the only one. The world still feels dim, but I hear our teachers murmuring in the corridors.

In the bio lab, we set out petri dishes to test for photosynthesis in the leaves we were told to gather from home. It’s an experiment to prove the formula on the board:

6CO2 + 6H2O → C6H12O6 + 6O2.

At our stations, we push the leaves inside test tubes using thin glass rods, then watch them boil in ethanol. The room starts to smell like iodine. We test each tube for starch. Before I hand in my answer sheet to Mrs Matten, I look down at what I’ve written on the page and cross it out.

It’s Mom’s birth date. Followed by three question marks.

I look for Kiran during break, and what Lerato said turns out to be true. He’s absent. I find her instead, sitting on the benches at the front of the school with three other girls I know from choir. They sit stretched out to absorb the meager sunlight, in knee-high socks and polished Toughees, and they’re talking about them, the missing girls, I can tell.

I greet and walk past them to the library, where I browse through the few interesting books I haven’t read yet. Then the bell rings and I get up to walk to class, but when I reach the threshold of the library, I feel faint and lean against the door-frame; which is when I see the machine and pass out.

October 9, 1999

That week, Tata coughed so much I could hear him down the corridor, and he didn’t stop until I’d pulled my fist back from the paneling. I was waiting for him to die. I didn’t want him to.

He opened the door a crack. “Do you ever stop talking? No boy will ever kiss you,” he said before I could speak. Then he got back under the covers, blowing his nose.

I drew the door closed. Whenever he was in a good mood, Tata spoke to me with this kind of impatient teasing. Ever since Mama disappeared and I’d had my braces fitted, it had been his way of cheering us up; I couldn’t blame him for it. Most of the time.

I went to school, came back. I cooked for him when he felt too tired to stand for more than half an hour. Sometimes he did the same for me; often, he was the one who made sure there was something warm for us to eat, even if it meant we had to peel sardines out of a tin and spit their spines out onto a side plate.

It was difficult for him to find work. The following week, when his cough had subsided, he came home with a box of weight-loss kits to sell in our neighborhood. They contained a cream you applied to the skin before wrapping it tight with cellophane, he explained, digging through one of the boxes. “Your mother…” But he didn’t finish the thought.

I went to the kitchen and served us two bowls of samp.

Mama, I thought.

I remembered how she wouldn’t speak to me if I came home with less than 95 percent on a test. How she wanted to arrange me into a shape she approved of. How little I’d resisted.

Mama could intimidate me with a glance. As far back as I can remember, even when we still lived in the two-bedroom house in Bhisho, I often felt timid and slow around her. Like the rest of her, Mama’s shoulders were thin but strong; from girlhood, she’d had scars on her shins. Her skin was fair; her face angular and stern, with cheekbones that would’ve been severe if her smile didn’t feel like a window flung open.

I remember one evening when she didn’t seem to care about my grades. I helped her make macaroni and cheese that night, and we both laughed when it came out lopsided from the microwave.

“Too many white things at once,” she said, and we laughed until we had to sit down.

That was a part of it, too, I thought.

The two of us laughing.

I took the bowls of samp out of the oven and spooned up the beans from the bottom to see if they were heated. I almost burnt my fingers on the bars of the grill, but the bases of both bowls were still warm. Not hot.

RTR: 004 / Date of Recollection: 05.29.2002 / 7.5 min

The world is black and infinite. Footsteps thud on the floor, like something’s pounding on the hull of a ship. I wake up lying under a bright ceiling light. Mrs Linden’s at her desk, scratching ink into a notepad. Her clock radio crackles in front of her, dialed down to a hiss. The sick bay curtains are drawn and the door’s closed.

“You were raving,” she says. She turns in her chair and closes the notepad. “I don’t approve, but Mr de Silva insisted on us using a sedative.”

I blink back a blur, and she pulls into focus. Her hair’s an auburn bob streaked with silver from the front to the back. She polishes her bifocals and perches them back on her nose.

“Raving?”

“Something about a machine.”

I try to get up, but a headache pulses.

“Don’t.” Mrs Linden pushes her chair out. “Here, lie on your back.”

She comes over to the bed, leaning in for a closer look. “You’re epileptic, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must be. Do you take medication?”

“For something else. Celexa and Paxil.”

“I see. That could explain it. I’ve read about the side-effects.”

“Side-effects?”

“You were seeing things. You should see your doctor. And one more thing—did you have anything to eat today?”

I shake my head.

“I thought so,” she says, retrieving a small pamphlet from her desk. “I know it isn’t easy being a teen. You get saddled with more pressure than you know what to do with. I have three daughters at home.”

“I’m not anorexic.” I push the pamphlet aside.

“I’m not saying you are, but it’s nothing to be ashamed of, either way. If anything, you should have something to eat before taking medication.”

“I will.”

“Trust me.”

I tell her that I do trust her, since it’s what she wants to hear. I thank her as she helps me up.

I get a permission slip to leave school early, although it doesn’t cover scholar patrol—a punishment for talking in class last week. Mrs Linden tells me to go past reception first, because Ms Isaacs wants to see me.

There’s a delivery man sweating on the couch next to the front desk. Ms Isaacs tells me to take a seat on a leather chair under the air conditioning. Her office is cramped: aside from two chairs and her desk, there’s a filing cabinet and a small bookshelf behind her. There’s a cut-out The Far Side comic stuck to the side of her monitor: a woman is telling her warrior husband to be more assertive, that she’s tired of people calling him Alexander the Pretty-Good.

Ms Isaacs sees me reading it. “I know it’s silly,” she sighs, “but it’s the only thing I could find.”

“It isn’t that bad.”

“It is, but it doesn’t matter,” she says, waving her hand. “Everyone’s worried sick about those girls. It’s our staff agenda, this week. How are you doing?”

“I’m fine.”

“That isn’t convincing. Promise me you’ll be safe.”

“I promise.”

Ms Isaacs’ hair is tied in a bun above a polo neck of the same black. Most of us like her, since she’s beautiful and young.

“Right, now listen,” she says. “You and Kiran are on the Olympiad team together, right? I know you’ll be required to prep with him.”

I shift on the leather seat. “I haven’t seen him around.”

“Neither have we, and as far as we know, he hasn’t been deregistered,” she says. “The school’s in a panic, of course, because of what happened with his father, but they don’t want to alarm the other parents. The staff thinks there’s a connection with the girls. That it might be a kidnapping syndicate.”

She places the package on the table top—a white box wrapped in plastic and Sellotape.

“I looked up the return address and it’s Kiran’s. He sent it to himself, I suspect to keep it out of the house. He might be on those postage-stamp drugs.”

“LSD?”

Ms Isaacs nods.

“Are you going to open it?” I ask.

“No. I don’t know what he’s involved with, but I don’t want to scare him off. If he finds out it’s been tampered with by a member of staff, he might not come forward.”

“I still don’t know what this has to do with me.”

Ms Isaacs looks down at the box. “I want to give you this package. Judging from the trouble he’s gone to, it must mean something to him. When he contacts you, you can tell him you have something that’s his.”

I nod, even though I don’t understand.

“You can organize to meet with him, and then let us know how he is, and whether he’s coming back. If you ask me, the school should be alerting people as we speak, but they’re planning to sit on their hands until the funding meetings conclude. They don’t want to scare off funders, especially with the three girls, and most of them think he moved to a different school because of his father. I don’t think they’re making sufficient effort, but as a member of staff, I can’t act on my own. I need you to ask around about him. The administration thinks he’s left the school, but I need to know he’s all right.”

“I don’t know if he’ll trust me, either.”

“I’ve seen you with his recorder. Lord knows, I’ve confiscated the thing enough.”

“I don’t see how that’s connected.”

“Look, I know the two of you used to be Olympiad rivals before you enrolled here. It’s clear the boy is smitten. It would be sweet, if I wasn’t frightened for him. Kiran’s a bright boy, but scattered.” I clear my throat, but she holds up a hand. “I know I’m asking a big favor.”

I look at the package. Then I tell her it’s fine.

“You’ll do it?”

“I’ll do it.”

I leave her office hefting Kiran’s package. His MD recorder, which hasn’t helped me, weighs down on me like something I should toss.

Kiran’s a senior, and like most seniors he usually spends his lunch break skulking and sharing cigarettes behind the chapel, where the yard opens up between the tennis courts and the principal’s house. That’s where I’d gone looking for him a week ago, to learn how to set the recorder. There’s an upended boat splintering under a gumtree at the end of the yard. A few of his friends were sitting on the hull, knocking their heels against its sides and chipping powder-blue paint onto the grass. As I walked toward them, Jonathan approached me. He had a scratched Fanta yo-yo spinning at his feet.

“You’ve strayed far from the flock,” he said.

“I don’t care.”

“To what do we owe it?”

“I’m looking for Kiran.”

He grinned, revealing a crowd of butter-colored teeth. “I wish I knew where he was,” he shrugged, somehow managing the truth. That was a week ago.

I walk up Queens Road and head down Galloway Street. It’s a different route from school to the one I’m used to. Kiran’s parents own a house in Kaffrarian Heights, the wealthiest part of town, named after the word the British used to describe the natives. That’s what it says at the museum in town, anyway. Now their lawns lie manicured next to their driveways, their yard walls raised high and rimmed at the top with electric fencing. The roads are vacant, except for SUVs and sprinklers that hiss out moisture even in winter.

As I get to Kiran’s block, I get a text message from Part: There’s another bazaar at Central tonight. I have prefect duties as usual. Let’s put Litha in the dunk tank and drown him with our sorrows.

I close the message and stand in front of Kiran’s house. I can tell the place is abandoned, with the windows and the garage doors hanging open. I’m not sure what to make of it, but I decide to keep a record. I take out the exercise book with Mom’s birthdate and start sketching the façade.

I hear a car approaching and turn. The driver of the white SUV, an old woman wearing dark glasses and a rose-gold necklace, tells me to keep off the street. That it isn’t safe.

October 16, 1999

My cousins, Nandi and Lihle, visited us later that October, after Tata stabilized again. Lihle and I helped Nandi unpack her suitcase in the room down the hallway, where the matron used to sleep before she died. Then the three of us spent the night eating crinkle-cut chips and watching music videos in the dark. The next day, we split our chores at 9 a.m., as soon as we got up. Around noon, I walked down to the library to page through a hardcover book on UFOs that I’d found, but it was loaned out. It hadn’t been returned for a week. I bought a Coke, used the change on the Ms Pac-Man machine at Parbhoo’s, and walked back home, where we warmed up leftovers and ate them in front of the TV again. Then there were more music videos.

Nandi fell asleep. When I closed my eyes to fall asleep too, laying my head on the armrest of the couch, I felt Lihle’s hand on my face. His cold lips brushed against mine, and I breathed in to let his hand slip below my belt. Later, he came in my mouth.

The next morning, Lihle led me to the pool in our back yard and dared me to push my head under the water, which was green and had scummed the steps in the shallow end. He said he’d do it after me.

His father had downed two bottles of Autumn Harvest and drowned at Orient Beach the previous summer. My own had been going to the hospital twice a week, gargling his own water in his throat. I nodded.

I stood on the edge of the pool and took my shirt off, leaving my bra on. “I’ll do it for something to do,” I said.

One night the following week, the machine filled the entire ceiling with the number “3”—which I interpreted as a sign from Mama. That she hadn’t forgotten about us. Me and her and Tata.

After that, I stopped seeing it.

RTR: 005 / Date of Recollection: 05.29.2002 / 6 min

I get home and walk past my aunt, who’s fallen asleep with The Daily Dispatch on her lap. This has been her daily M.O. since going on leave earlier this month. I make out the photos of the three missing girls on the front page.

In my room I draw the curtains, take Celexa and Paxil, fit in my earphones and try to sleep. But when I hear Doris closing the door to her room, and then the bed springs creaking under her weight, I get up.

Out in the garage, boxes of Mom’s old newspapers sit stacked in the corner. She never could toss them, even after Dad told her they were a fire hazard. I used to think the reason she kept them was because she was in them, but after she was gone, when I read through a pile of the papers, I realized there was more to it. Mom believed they’d be useful again one day, and that there was no expiration date on what was wrong with the world.

I open a box and take out a bundle. I’m looking for other cases of missing girls, but I don’t find them. Instead, I read about dead bodies. Most of them are women and children from the region.

In Qumbu, a mother of four was shot, the bullet passing through her and into the forehead of her daughter, who was four and strapped to her back.

In Peddie, a mother and daughter on a fishing trip were thrown into the trunk of a car; the mother was raped and killed and the girl escaped.

I pack the papers back into the box, the world feeling dimmer.

•••

In the living room, I switch on the VHS and push in the dub I got from Litha. In Where Have All the People Gone?, a middle-aged woman walks into the ocean, unable to live in a world without humans, the global population incinerated into heaps of powder. It was released in 1974 to a US TV audience, and never recouped its production costs. Litha, Part, and I have watched it together twice now.

The first time I saw it, I’d walked into Mr Movie to look for Litha after school, and found him watching it on the TV hung above the Returns Box. He looked tired, leaning against the counter with a cup of tea.

“I don’t get it,” I said, after a moment. “How did the vegetation survive?”

Litha dipped behind the counter and pulled up the tape’s cover. “The solar flare didn’t burn them,” he said. “It activated a viral outbreak. A percentage of the population is immune.”

Then Tom, his colleague, walked in and dropped his backpack behind the counter. “The mother of all hangovers,” he announced, opening a can of Coke.

I didn’t like him. Tom always stared at me like I was a coin at the bottom of a pond, a habit that made me want him covered in paper cuts, but I knew Litha admired him for his videogaming talent. In fact, I knew too much about that. Litha could never quit talking about how Tom had locked himself in his room one weekend, not leaving until he’d solved the piano puzzle in Silent Hill. He’d also shown Litha that the frequency for Meryl’s codec in Metal Gear Solid was printed at the back of the jewel CD case, over the Konami logo, which the rental customers couldn’t take home with them. Tom found that hilarious. He was 23 with a nursing diploma from UKZN, and had moved back in with his parents. His blond hair grew out in a mullet at the back, and his prominent Adam’s apple rolled whenever he gulped one of his countless sodas.

I turned to Litha. “I have to go, but I’d like to watch more of it.”

“The movie?”

“It’s calming.”

“I’ll make a dub of it when I get home.”

“Thanks.”

Now my vegetable soup’s gone cold and the film hasn’t worked.

I let the credits roll until the end, then text Litha that I need to see him: It’s urgent.

Later, we sit watching TV in the one-bedroom flat his new foster parents rent in Alexandra. Part’s still on a field-trip to the aquarium in East London. I tell him about the articles with the murders and the rapes and he winces.

“I don’t know how you read the news.”

The two of us go quiet for a bit. Then I turn to him again. “The machine’s back.”

It takes him a while to nod. Then I tell him how the school thinks Kiran’s on acid.

“He might’ve been ratted out by a senior he sold a cap to, I don’t know,” I say. “Now he’s on the run and the school doesn’t care. I think it’s because he’s not a girl.”

Litha sighs. “I think so, too.” Then he asks me to describe the machine.

“It’s still the same.”

“The same?”

“Except for one thing.” I tell him about the triangle.

“You think the three are connected? Kiran, the girls, the machine?”

I pause, relieved—at least he doesn’t think I’m insane.

Then he asks to see my exercise book. He turns to a sketch of the machine and one of Kiran’s house. “Let’s talk to Part about it at the bazaar.” Then he hands me a dubbed tape of 2010 and tells me the same thing as always—that TV’s not a pollutant, it’s the inflation of our realities.

There’s rap music on the TV now, and the way I feel is that my inflated reality is sexual ambiguity. Next, there’s a sitcom and the characters get introduced one by one. Mom, dad, daughter, son, baby—a nucleus.

“The dad looks like my one father, the lawyer,” Litha says. “I can’t remember the year, but that foster beat me so hard I had to chew with my left molars for a week. They sent me back to Syringa Road after that, remember, next to Phakamisa Clinic, and gave me that bunk bed with Mongezi, who wanted to burn the place down?”

I nod. It happened in 1999—a year before we met. Litha’s told us.

I rest my head on the couch and listen to him talk. At night, Litha says the TV illuminates the whole flat, making it hard to sleep, but now, the daylight from the windows makes it look as if it’s off.

Litha says when you’re a child, what you think is that you can eat anything, and when you’re a parent, what you think is that you can teach anything. Leaning back on the sofa, with the light flooding in from Alexandra, he says when you’re a kid, everything you see is real. There are people inside your TV and plastic fruit is edible. “That’s the world you’re given.”

I get up and put on my scholar-patrol vest, and Litha opens the front door for me.

“The thing is,” he says, “when your father has his hands clenched around your neck and your mother’s screaming, trying to pull him off, what he wants everyone to think is that you’ve swallowed a plastic grape. He wants everyone to think you’re a child, and to you, plastic is another type of fruit,” he says. “That’s the world we’re given.”

I take the stairs. Outside, the glare from the sun is blinding. I remember how my urine smelled metallic yesterday, so I stop over at Parbhoo’s for tampons, but it’s closed.

October 23, 1999

That summer, when Tata hadn’t sold any of the weight-loss kits and his cough had worsened, my aunt arrived as his caretaker and my guardian.

I’d offered to work part-time to help him—to send out the boxes, even model the product—but Tata hadn’t answered me. Instead, one day when I returned from school, I found the boxes, still full, stacked in a heap on the curb with the rubbish we’d left for collection. They’d be gone before morning. Tata went to sleep before us that night.

“You’ll have to work from now on,” my aunt said. “I’ve heard how he lets you loaf.”

I turned from her and walked to my room, not bothering to hide my contempt. My aunt came from the Transkei, the poorer half of our province, and I’d never seen much of her. From the beginning, the two of us knew we wouldn’t get along, and we didn’t make much of it.

RTR: 006 / Date of Recollection: 05.29.2002 / 4 min

The talk with Litha calms me, and after I’ve said goodbye to him, I take the long way back to school. I stand on the side of the road, serving out my punishment—the lone interloper in the scholar patrol’s regular afternoon troop. The rest of them are volunteers: Candice, Gareth, and Phiwe. For the time being, the four of us are shackled to the same cause—to wait for the last of the detention class to be carted out at four, facilitating the zebra crossing while we wait, monitoring the stream of traffic outside the chapel.

I heard them talking about the girls, too, when I arrived, but now it’s quiet.

On opposite sides of the road, Phiwe and I raise and drop our steel beams for a maroon Corolla, followed by a white Mazda. The sunlight gets in my eyes and makes me squint, and I tell Candice, our team captain, that I need a break. I watch her smiling at me from across the road, her pale gums showing, before she blows on her whistle and walks over.

“I can only give you a minute. I’m sorry, but you’ll get used to it.”

“I can’t. If I stand in the sun for too long my nose bleeds.”

“The shift’s almost done.”

“It isn’t. There’s half an hour left.”

“Fine, but please be quick.”

I take a walk around the school grounds with the MD switched to record, hoping to pick up a sound from the machine. In the toilet, I kick the door closed, making sure it bangs. Folding toilet paper, I savor the shade and feel of plastic beneath my skin. I don’t bother turning the recorder off when my piss breaks the surface of the water.

I arrive home before dark, having stopped at the mall. In my room, I drop off my bag and fit a tampon. In the kitchen, I make myself a bowl of Froot Loops, eating it standing up with a teaspoon over the basin. Then I lie on my bed with the door locked.

I’m looking forward to seeing Part at the bazaar.

I remember the first time I went to her house. Her mom was in the living room, alone and giggling at a blank TV screen. Part and I were standing by the door, and I was reminded of an old tomb, or an incubator; like the light didn’t enter the room, but was painted onto the windows instead.

Part started toward her room, but her mom motioned for me to sit. “How old are you?” she said. Her brow creased, but the shadows on her face didn’t.

“Seventeen.”

“Excuse me?”

I said it again.

I watched her edge in closer to squint at me. Then she glanced at an empty sofa, taking a moment before turning back. “Did you forget to grow?”

I told her I was born premature and that all my life, I’d been trying to catch up, but she wasn’t listening. Part’s mom was counting 17 with her fingers, and when she got to 10, she paused and craned her neck. Then she looked back at the sofa as if she’d left someone there, waiting to continue a conversation. I looked over, too, even though I knew Part’s mom had vascular dementia—a side-effect from a mini-stroke.

“Part’s turning 17, next month,” she said. Then, raising her voice, she asked Part why she wasn’t at school.

From her room, Part’s voice carried down the corridor, saying she didn’t feel like it. Then Part was at the door in her underwear, arms hanging at her sides, asking why her mom wasn’t taking her medication.

Part’s mom cast another glance at the sofa, then looked down at her knitted hands. “I am taking my medication,” she said.

I didn’t speak. The two of them fell silent, too, and the light still refused, and Part said, “Bullshit,” and turned away. Then over and over again, still standing at the door and shaking her head each time: bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

I stretch my arms out. It’s a minute after 5 and the bazaar’s at 7. Like most nights, I know there’s a dinner plate waiting for me in the microwave—to eat from, and then wash with the rest of the dishes.

I pull out Kiran’s MD, place it on the pillow next to my head and switch it on. I think about the machine—about it being a message from Mom. I wait for it to arrive, but it doesn’t. I count up to 10,000. Moments before I drift off to sleep, I think of the Olympiad again, and tell myself it’s 104.

Or (102) (102).

Or √108.

Or lim (x2 + 2x + 5) if it’s rounded down.

x→9

October 31, 1999

Late one evening, during one of Tata’s sudden bouts, I knocked on his door until two of my right knuckles went numb and almost split. I waited for a bit, then opened the door to the room that had been my grandmother’s, where my aunt was lying on her back. I could tell she was awake, and that this was evidence of her being an awful person; but she was here for him, too, I thought, and here maybe for both of us.

I walked to the bathroom, where I took off my clothes and stood in front of the mirror, the tiles cold beneath my feet.

I’ve never been fucked, I thought, looking at the reflection in the mirror, parting my lips and taking in the gleam of my braces. I ran a finger over each wire.

My breasts were small, but showing. My hair was long and thick. My lower stomach caved in tight against the muscle, making my hip bones push out. There was a gap between my thighs and my shoulders were straight, my arms trim. My skin was bright and clear.

I drew closer to the mirror.

I’m beautiful, I thought.

RTR: 007 / Date of Recollection: 05.29.2002 / 5 min

Pulling a pair of black jeans from my wardrobe, I find a black halter top and a jacket that used to belong to Mom. Then I knock on my aunt’s door.

“I’m going to a school thing,” I tell her, “a bazaar. To raise funds.”

I can’t tell if she’s sleeping or not, and I make it down the hallway before I hear her tell me it’s fine. That I should make sure I’m safe.

Leaning against a streetlight two blocks up, I wait for Part’s older sister, Iris, who’s home on a week-long break from Rhodes, to pick me up in her black Corsa.

Part’s in the passenger seat when I get in, staring at the ceiling.

“I can’t believe you’re dragging me to this,” I tell her, climbing in.

Iris catches my eye in the rear-view mirror. “Is it that bad?”

“Think Vengaboys,” Part tells her.

“Think Daddy DJ,” I add.

“Think Eiffel 65.”

“Think Bloodhound Gang.”

“Think Planet Funk.”

“Think Hit’n’Hide.”

Iris slows down at the intersection on Alexandra and Maitland, indicating left. “So pretentious,” she says. “You’re teenage girls. You adore MTV.” Then she sighs. “People at the bazaar will be talking about those girls, won’t they?”

The three of us go quiet.

Then Part and I step out of the Corsa, say goodbye, and watch Iris drive to the BP gas station. For reasons I’ve never asked about, Iris never stays for more than a few days when she’s back from campus. I watch her sink into the dark. Then Part and I start walking up the hill.

“It’s warmer here,” she says.

“I know.”

I pull on my jacket, undoing the zip. In the distance, in between cheers, I make out the dull bassline of an ’NSync song.

“I feel like I haven’t seen you, this week,” she says.

“It’s everything that’s happening at school.”

“Lots?”

“It involves Kiran now.”

Up the hill, Part bends to pick up a paper plate smeared with tomato sauce and crusted mustard, dropping it in a blue bin. “Listen, do you want to make out before we go up there and listen to Space Invaders? I meant it about it being a while.”

I laugh. “I’m amenable.”

I fix my hair in the bathroom mirror afterward. Then I ask Part for her lip gloss and zip up my jacket and we head back out to the grounds, holding hands until we reach the stalls. I cough at the sharp smell of smoke from the braais.

“Is Litha here?” I ask.

“He should be. He said he’d drop in after his shift.”

“I take it you have prefect duties.”

“I won’t be long.”

“I’ll survive.”

Part smiles and leaves for the admin block. I turn and take in the stalls and the people milling under a blanket of smoke in the congested courtyard. Most of the items on sale are pastries, baked in parental kitchens and made to be displayed. Next to them, arranged in neat, sealed rows under the gleam of floodlights, are jars of fig jam, sugared plums, and peaches, while different species of animal, now turned to chorizo and now to biltong, hang on sharp hooks suspended above the stalls.

I weave through the crowd, walking on quiche crumbs, a crosshatch of skid marks, crunched paper cups. Placing a palm over my mouth, I wonder if what happened to me at school was a visit from the machine or if the doctors were right.

Litha waves at me from the back of the courtyard. The two of us hug next to a stall stacked with ceramic dwarfs.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, pointing at my mouth.

“It’s the smoke. It’s also full in here.”

“Do you want to go somewhere else? Hold on.” He returns with two cans of Coke. “I can get cigarettes, too.”

“There’s enough smoke here.”

Litha laughs. “I didn’t know you were allergic to smoke. Or if that was possible.”

I punch him on the shoulder, but let my palm linger on him as a truce.

We leave the courtyard and enter the fringes of the grounds, where the floodlights taper off, and hang our legs over a short wall behind the bleachers.

Litha sighs. “I don’t have a plan.”

“I’m not sure what to do, either.”

“Have you opened it?”

“No.”

“Maybe we can do it together.”

I look up at the night sky, unable to make out the constellations through the smoke.

“Listen, do you want to lean back for a bit?” he asks.

I do. The two of us lie on our backs, taking in the pale smoke coiling against the dark.

Later, when I get home at 9:35 p.m., I see the machine again.

Its hum sounds louder than I remember.

I watch it expand to cover the ceiling, its silver parts blinking, rolling inside the darkness. From the mattress, I turn the recorder on. As I drift off, I make out the triangle again, before it sinks back into the murk.

November 2, 1999

That summer, in what would be the last year of Tata’s life, we drove out to see another herb specialist in East London.

At least, that’s what my aunt told him as we got in the car, but when we entered the city, she turned up Oxford Road and drove us to the office of a GP she knew from university. The car went silent then. I didn’t turn to look at his face when we stopped.

Inside, my aunt cut past the line in the waiting room and forewent a greeting: “Smilo, you should be able to do something for him,” she told the doctor. “This is my brother.”

The GP’s plaque read Dr Khathide. He was a short man with a salt-and-pepper goatee. He sat behind his desk and listened to her. His thick glasses were tinted in the glare that came in through a picture window above his desk, and he appeared calm. He smiled at my aunt and held out his arms, dappling them in sunlight. “That’s the reason I’m here,” he said.

Tata was silent on our trip back to King William’s Town. Each time my aunt tried to speak to him, he closed his eyes and shifted in his seat, ignoring her until she gave up. As we drove past the BP gas station in Berlin, just outside East London, he turned on the radio and dialed up the volume.

From the back seat, I watched as the two of them rode in silence. I opened a water bottle and swallowed my latest regimen, Faverin and Zoloft, and looked out of the window, thinking of Mama and what she could’ve done for us, if anything.

Tata’s silence hung over us until we reached the driveway. Doris killed the engine and leaned back against her headrest with a sigh, taking a moment before getting out and opening the passenger door for him. She extended her hand, but as expected he waved her away, refusing to look at either of us.

My aunt stood back and watched him undo his seatbelt, taking his time. Then she went ’round to the trunk and retrieved the groceries we’d picked up on the way. “Take these inside.”

I carried the bags into the kitchen and dropped them on the counter. I could hear the car door slamming—Tata’s footsteps down the corridor—and then his bedroom door doing the same.

My aunt came into the kitchen and sat at the table, her palms kneading her eyes as she sighed for the umpteenth time. “Do you know how to cook?”

“I do.”

“He used to like lamb stew and dumplings.”

“He still does.”

“That’s what we’ll make for him tonight then, but first go lock the front door and take his medication to him.”

I didn’t lock. I took the bag of pills from her and went down the hallway, where I knocked and received what I expected from him, too. His silence. When I knocked a second time, the door opened and I found him sitting at the foot of his bed. The curtains were drawn on all of the windows but one. I found the stillness of the room hard to absorb; I’d grown used to his rasping.

“I have your medication,” I told him.

Raising his left palm, Tata motioned me toward his bedside table, where I put the plastic bag next to a sealed box of menthols and an empty tumbler. I filled the water glass from the faucet in his bathroom and set it back on the table.

On my way out, Tata cleared his throat and asked me to wait. He was bending down to undo his laces, taking his time to liberate each foot. “How much better do you think this is,” he said, waving a hand at the table, “than the tonics I got in Ginsberg?”

“The tonics?”

“From the out-of-towner.”

I knew which tonics he meant, but I’d wanted more time to think of an answer. I didn’t know what to tell him. I’d never shared his belief in herbal medicine.

“I don’t know, Tata,” I said, and I didn’t.

RTR: 008 / Date of Recollection: 05.30.2002 / 5.5 min

My aunt’s engine stalls this morning just before we reach the school turn-off, which shouldn’t be embarrassing, but is. Through her windshield, I watch the scholar-patrol team holding up rusting steel beams, shifting old traffic cones through the drizzle.

“This again,” I say.

“Quiet.” Doris sighs. “This car has its problems and that’s not a new thing. You know that. Dumisani said he’d look at it, of course, but does he ever listen when a woman talks?”

“I don’t know.”

“He never listens when a woman talks.”

I pick up a newspaper lying near my feet. The Eastern Cape Premier’s office wants credit for the release of 33 political prisoners, says the front page, but the national government’s refusing. Most of the inmates were attached to the ANC. I turn the page, and see a headline about how the police are still seeking help with the missing girls.

My aunt clears her throat. “Don’t bother reading about the premier,” she says, twisting the ignition and causing the car to cough. “Even if it was Stofile and not Mbeki who released those men, what difference does it make? He’s still building the biggest house we’ve seen for blacks in this town.”

“Is it true that 57 percent of them were convicted of murder?”

“I don’t know. They would’ve done what they had to do.”

“Tony Leon says they’re criminals.”

“How would he know?” My aunt laughs and shakes her head. “You know, I never understood what it was about these Model C schools that we have to send all our children to, except for the wonderful accents we hear from the learners.”

I nod, since it’s true. When she speaks English, my aunt’s vowels are wider than mine and her r’s are rough, etching out her enunciation. It was the same with Mom and Dad.

“I don’t know,” I tell her. “It’s school.”

Then the car starts and we cross the intersection, parking opposite the school entrance. Most of my grade’s still milling outside, sharing homework and waiting for the bell to ring. I look for Lerato.

“I’m driving to Port Elizabeth,” Doris says. “I won’t be back until late.”

“Today?”

“It’s for a regional meeting,” she sighs. “It won’t be long”

“I thought you were on leave.”

“I also did. Make sure to keep safe.”

“I will.”

“I’m serious. No strangers and keep the doors locked.”

“I will.”

I walk through the front gate as the bell rings, and join the others as we chart a line toward the chapel. My socks have started to fray, and I can feel the cold through the thin leather of my Toughees. Taking a seat at the back, I take out two pills from my bag and hold them in my palm, Celexa and Paxil, thinking about last night. Then I swallow them and spend the rest of chapel half-asleep.

My phone vibrates on the way back to class, and I don’t have to open it to know what it is or who it’s from. Last night, the three of us agreed to try and meet at the park; Part said she’d text me if she’d managed to cut class. I sit through three classes and wait until we’ve had our first break, before I ask to be excused from geography and walk up to the sick bay.

“What’s wrong with you?” Mrs Linden asks.

I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

“Let me have a look.” She sits me down on the cot and takes my temperature with her palm and a thermometer. “How’s the head?”

“Dull and painful.”

“It isn’t a concussion, but you had a hard knock.”

“I also feel nauseated.” I look at the clock and remember to lie about eating. “I had a bowl of cereal this morning and now it wants to come up.”

“I see.” Mrs Linden creases her brow. “Listen. This is what we’ll do. I’ll write you a note to spend the rest of the afternoon at home, but only if you promise me you’ll go to the doctor before coming in tomorrow. That you’ll go tonight at the latest.”

I promise.

I walk home, watch a rerun of Cavegirl, and then meet Litha and Part at the Munchies in Metlife Mall, the weather too damp for the park. Litha places three orders of hot chocolate and I take out Kiran’s package.

Part leans forward. “Is that it?”

“I’ll be honest. I don’t know what to do with it.”

Part nods. “Kiran used to be your idea of a thing, right?”

“Please kill yourself.”

“I’ll consider it. Did something happen?”

“I’m not sure. The teachers think he’s on acid.”

Part points at the box on the table. “I have to see what’s inside that thing.”

“I also do.”

As the server lowers the tray with our hot chocolates on it, I get up for a closer look at the newspapers on the counter next to the pies and pizzas. I bring one back to our table to show Litha and Part. The front page says there’s no progress on the missing girls. There’s also an article about where my aunt works. I tell them about it—how 15 computers were stolen from HR at the Department of Education in Port Elizabeth, interrupting an ongoing investigation on the director. How my aunt might lose her job.

Then the place starts to fill up for the lunchtime slot and I fold the paper. “I’ve changed my mind. I think it’s better if we look through the package at home. My aunt won’t be back until late.”

November 9, 1999

Tata came out of his room for breakfast the following Saturday, which surprised me and my aunt, although she was careful not to draw attention to that surprise. The three of us gathered in the kitchen, where she ladled sour porridge into his bowl and scrambled us eggs with Bisto and bell peppers. Tata seemed stronger that day, even sociable—willing to talk.

“I’ve been taking the medicine,” he smiled, as Doris placed a mug of tea next to his plate. “Haven’t you heard how quiet it’s been?”

It hadn’t been quiet. Tata couldn’t remember his coughing anymore.

The fits now took a different course, assaulting him an hour or two into sleep. Last night he’d woken me up again, but the coughing stopped before I’d had the time to knock on his door. My aunt had slept through it.

I watched her pull on the sleeves of her bathrobe. “I’m full,” I said.

“No, you’re not.” Her back was turned to us. “Ever since I got here, all I’ve seen you do is pick at whatever we eat. There’s bread you’ve left moldering in that cupboard.”

“I don’t like porridge.”

“Have your eggs, then.” Doris dropped a plate of toast in front of me. Then she lifted my wrist and circled it with her thumb and middle finger. “Have you seen yourself? You’re a stick.”

“Leave her be.” Tata was bent over his tea and quieter now. He didn’t look up. “The child said she’s not hungry. Why don’t you let her eat when she wants?”

My aunt didn’t release me. She drew in a breath, but didn’t concede. “You’re telling me this is normal, Lumkile? This child is underfed.”

Tata shrugged, seeming to lose his strength again. “Her mother was the same. The two of them, built like birds.” Then he turned to me, pushing his tea aside. “Have as much as you can and then you can go out.”

I pulled my arm back from my aunt and made a sandwich with the toast and eggs, biting into it without taste.

I took my SSRIs in the bathroom, using warm water from the basin, pulled on my backpack, and left.

I held back tears as I weaved through the library aisles, a heat at the base of my throat, my eyes gliding across the spines without reading them. I found a seat at the desks with the newspapers, resting my head on my arms until my eyes dried. It was close to midday when I got up again. In the aisle with the hardcover book on UFOs, I closed my eyes and felt for it, hoping I could be drawn in and lost in whatever lived inside it. The library closed at 1 p.m. on Saturday. I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering in town, wanting to be alone, waiting until I knew that Tata was in his room and Doris was visiting her friends in Club View.

I thought of going to the Musica at the mall, but the bass from the loud gospel music made me feel nauseated, and the men behind the counter were known for pushing up against our school uniforms after school. I didn’t want that. I was alone and knew no one. So I went to the CNA store. The stationery shop wasn’t well stocked; nothing was well stocked in our town. To make it worthwhile, I had to have a look at everything in the aisles, including the dictionaries. I’d seen most of the glossy magazines. Doris read them—she’d brought along a thick stack with her when she moved in, and each night, she fell asleep with one of them open on her lap. I went to the newspapers instead.

There was a thin one lying sideways on the top shelf, a tabloid, which reported on a murder trial which had exposed the network of a minor drug syndicate in Cape Town. There was an article on Y2K, and another on how white babies were on sale for adoption at R50,000 a head. A woman said the ghost of her dead ex-husband had forced itself on her, and there was an article on The Phoenix Strangler, who’d been sentenced to more than 500 years for rape and murder.

I was still reading about him when one of the men from Musica walked in and came to stand next to me, humming. I could smell the sourness of his sweat under his deodorant, and he was smiling, looking down at me. I dropped the tabloid and walked out down another aisle.

I took a corner table at Munchies, where I ordered a Coke and waited for a slice. I was eating pizza to spite my aunt—the way she’d held my wrist between her fingers and called me a stick. I didn’t want her thinking she knew who I was, even if it made me ill.

Like this would.

I looked down at the ground beef. I pierced the lemon slice in the Coke with my straw, pushing it down to the bottom below the ice-cubes, and sucked on it hard enough to make my forehead numb. Then my vision doubled.

It was possible to forget about Tata, I thought with relief.

Then I made myself vomit in the public toilets, and walked home.

RTR: 009 / Date of Recollection: 05.30.2002 / 3 min

The garage feels like a cardboard box that’s been left out in the sun. The lights don’t work, so I’ve brought a flashlight. I let Part and Litha in, spread an old mattress on the floor, and open a window.

I drop the package between us, raising a cloud of dust, while the rain makes a soft patter against the panes. Hold on, I think. I find an old rusted cardboard cutter. Holding it close to the blade, I draw a line on the tape sealing the box, from the top to the bottom. It sighs open. There’s another, smaller box inside, with a different address. I open that, too, spilling the contents across the mattress.

There’s a smooth, rounded stone, and an exercise book with newspaper clippings jutting from the edges. Between Part’s knees lies a locket that’s snapped open, revealing a black-and-white photo of a middle-aged woman. I look at everything on the mattress.

“I don’t know what to make of this.”

Part reaches for the locket. “Me neither.”

I flip through the exercise book. Most of the clippings are still glued to the pages, but some have started to peel, the paper yellowed with time. Then I realize what the headlines all have in common. I look at Litha and Part. “It’s all missing persons.”

The book slips from my hands and opens to the middle, where I see four articles about the Yugoslav Wars. In one of them, a family credits a strange, glowing presence for its survival. Next to it, there’s an article on post-traumatic stress disorder.

The three of us go quiet. Litha reaches for the book. “Let me hold on to this.”

I pick up the smaller box again and look at the address.

Stanfel Petrović. 10 Jameson Street, Quigney, East London.

I stop to think. It seems possible.

I turn to Litha and Part and tell them this is it: “This is the sign I’ve been waiting for. There’s a connection between Kiran and the girls. And I know what to do. I’ll wait for the machine.”

“And then?” asks Part.

“If it comes back, then we should start looking for them.”

“The girls?”

“The girls.”

November 16, 1999

I didn’t expect what followed next. Things took a different course, that summer. It started with a fire in a small garment factory downtown, a blaze that left a hundred people out of work and colored our skies black for three days.

There were the PPMs, too, as reported in The Daily Dispatch— small prepaid power meters that were being rolled out in our neighborhoods that year. Most people were suspicious of the devices—imagining themselves trapped in blackouts until they got paid—but we were powerless against the change. The government had decided on installing the machines as far back as 1993. Tata wasn’t pleased; he spoke on it often. He liked to lament the government’s wasteful expenditure, and their eagerness to trammel their own people.

My aunt and I listened.

Having watched the smoke rising over our backyard that summer, the three of us were bound to spend the following weeks discussing the fire at breakfast. Or Tata was. He commiserated with the workers, he told us, given the negligence of upper management and how the government had failed to assist them. Then he’d move on to the prepaid meters, before my aunt and I could catch a breath.

Most of the time, we would follow his argument in silence, a familiar one-sidedness. I don’t doubt that Tata cared about the fire, and the power meters, and all the other things he talked about, but the complaining itself seemed to return his strength to him, I thought, and that’s what encouraged him to keep on with it.

For this reason, although we never spoke about it, my aunt and I stopped ourselves from showing impatience with his complaining. Each time Tata brought up a grievance, the two of us would begin our morning ritual, which was to absorb his unhappiness at the breakfast table.

RTR: 010 / Date of Recollection: 05.30.2002 / 3 min

I still need a sick note for Mrs Linden. I think of Rohan, who could help me with it, but whose number I’ve never dialed.

I remember when Litha introduced us. I’d headed to Mr Movie to find him. He was standing outside the entrance with a guy I didn’t know, pinching the tip of a dead cigarette. I crossed Alexandra to join them.

“This is Rohan.”

He was tall and stooped, with hair that grew down to his neck. He wore a white t-shirt with loose-fitting jeans, and thick, frameless glasses.

Litha flicked the cigarette on the road and watched it get chewed under the wheels of a flatbed. “Rohan was telling me about this new game he has. It’s on Game Boy. The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening.”

“I think I’ve heard of it.”

“I got it at a pawn shop in Maritzburg, but it’s the best one.”

Litha placed a hand on his shoulder. “Tell her about the plot.”

Rohan grinned. “It all starts with a shipwreck,” he said. “There’s a storm and Link, the lead character, washes onto an island called Koholint. He meets these characters, Tarin and his daughter Marin, who take him in. The daughter’s fascinated by Link, having spent all her life on the island; but Link has to set out to look for his sword. Then he meets up with an owl that tells him he must wake the Wind Fish if he wants to go home.”

“It sounds like most RPGs.” I knew that much from Litha and Tom.

“I know, but that isn’t the best part. The best part is that Koholint Island doesn’t exist. It’s all in Link’s dream. He’s still floating on a piece of driftwood in the ocean. That’s after 30 damn hours of game time.” He grinned, revealing his braces, and I laughed.

“Right? I sometimes think this town is Koholint Island,” he said.

“I like that.”

Rohan offered to lend me the game and we exchanged numbers. Later, Litha told me he was good at school, like I was, and that his dad was one of the doctors I’d been to. I nodded, but I never called.

Now I scroll through the contacts in my phone and text Rohan that I need his help. There’s no response, the message pending.

There’s no call from Kiran, no visit from the machine. I listen to music until I fall asleep.

When I wake up, hours later, I hear a bulletin about the missing girls on the radio, meaning my aunt’s back.

November 19, 1999

My grandmother, who we all called the matron, died without her right leg when I was too young to recall most of who she’d been. It was from diabetes. She was living with us then, but we drove back to Zeleni for her burial. I was nine years old.

The village was silent during the funeral. Walking back to the homestead from the burial grounds, we formed a wide procession that waded through the autumn mist in song.

Later, I couldn’t eat the meal we’d prepared to honor her; my throat closed up at each attempt at swallowing. Instead of greeting relatives who’d driven down from Gauteng, or joining the children who’d gathered from the neighboring huts, I volunteered to pass plates to the men sitting in the peaked tent. The plastic plates, worn enough to feel slicked with grease even after being washed, were stacked with samp that had been cooked over a wood fire in large three-legged pots.

But Mama first had to look for me. She found me staring at the ceiling in the matron’s room. She took a seat on the bed and touched my arm, smiling down, then stroked my forehead. Her mourning regalia was beautiful; I’d never seen her cry, I thought.

“Tell me if you know the answer to this one,” she said. “The year of your grandmother’s birth?”

I remembered it from the service.

“That’s correct. Now tell me how she got her name.”

“I don’t know.”

And so she told me.

•••

Three years after the matron, a teacher from the Transkei hinterland, followed her husband to settle on a plot he’d inherited from his father in Zeleni, she was promoted to the position of headmistress at the local school. That same year, two escaped convicts from St. Albans stalked into the region. They were feared. The villagers spoke of how the convicts walked with their knives on show—and how they paid shopkeepers with counterfeit money, grinning at them with lips burnt from spirits.

My grandmother, still an outsider in the village, didn’t share their caution. She concocted a plan to lure the bandits to a lakeside meadow, on the pretext of celebrating the return of a rich man’s son from ulwaluko. The two men caught wind of the news, and arrived at the meadow to exuberant singing, but no meat. Instead, they found a tall woman half-submerged in the lake, a Bible in one hand, beckoning with the other. The crowd fell silent, cleared a path.

The bandits complied and approached her, allowing her to baptize them as the village pastor gaped. It must’ve been her lack of fear—the men would attest to having known inmates of lesser mettle in the cages of St. Albans.

That afternoon, she enrolled them at the school, determined to teach them to read, and it was under these circumstances— in a room with two broken windows and one uneven, rocking desk—that the two convicts, in gratitude, first called her “the matron”; at which my grandmother, who was known for maintaining a stern exterior in her classes, looked up and smiled, indicating her acceptance.

RTR: 011 / Date of Recollection: 05.31.2002 / 11 min

Today drags. It’s casual day, which means we’re dressed in civvies, and after our first break, we get assembled in the courtyard for an apple-bobbing contest like we’re 12. Then there’s a presentation from a non-profit group that’s visiting our school to tell us about computers. I’m surprised it isn’t about condoms. It’s always about condoms.

In the courtyard, Lerato asks what’s happening with me. “You’ve had two half-days.”

“Nothing’s happening.”

“Is everything okay?”

“I’m tired, that’s all.” I turn away from her toward the makeshift platform.