Triangulum E-Book

Masande Ntshanga

• Herausgeber: Jacaranda Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 451

Beschreibung

From the award-winning writer of The Reactive, Triangulum is an ambitious, often philosophical and genre-bending novel that covers a period of over 40 years in South Africa's recent past and near future -- starting from the collapse of the apartheid homeland system in the early 1990s, to the economic corrosion of the 2010s, and on to the looming, large-scale ecological disasters of the 2040s. In 2040, the South African National Space Agency receives a mysterious package containing a memoir and a set of digital recordings from an unnamed woman who claims the world will end in ten years. Assigned to the case, Dr. Naomi Buthelezi, a retired professor and science-fiction writer, is hired to investigate the veracity of the materials, and whether or not the woman's claim to have heard from a "force more powerful than humankind" is genuine. Thus begins Triangulum, a found manuscript composed of the mysterious woman's memoir and her recordings. Haunted by visions of a mysterious machine, the narrator is a seemingly adrift 17-year-old girl, whose father never recovered from the shock of losing his wife. She struggles to navigate school, sexual experimentation, and friendship across racial barriers in post-Apartheid South Africa. With extraordinary aplomb and breathtaking prose, Ntshanga has crafted an inventive and marvelous novel.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR TRIANGULUM

"The violent and fascinating history of South Africa—from colonialism to apartheid, and the recent struggles to come to terms with this past—serves as a rich backdrop for this unsettling, enrapturing novel that brings to mind Roberto Bolano’s 2666... a novel of incredible imagination that gradually unfurls into a wonderfully realized meditation on growing up, heritage, and the effects of technological progress on the world around us."

—Alexander Moran, Booklist

"In this modern coming-of-age tale, Masande Nsthanga... takes us on dystopic journey into the most suprising places, and also on a journey into the human soul haunted by the past, revolted by injustice and hungry for freedom."

—Ioana Danaila, The African Book Review

"Ntshanga has written a wonder of speculative fiction, with much to say about oppression, the onward march of technology and corporations, and the fate of the earth in the hands of human civilization. Grounded in a coming-of-age story and compelled by masterfully deployed elements of both history and science fiction, this novel is in a genre all its own. Triangulum is an astonishing puzzle of a book, one that I immediately wanted to reread in order to marvel at all of the interlocking pieces with a sharper eye."

—Kelsey O'Rourke, Literati Bookstore

"I think this was one of the best science fiction epics I've read in a while."

—Jacob Hoefer via Goodreads, bookseller at Labyrinth Books

"This new genre-bending novel with elements of science fiction covers a period of 40 years past and present in South Africa. In 2040, the South African National Space Agency receives a mysterious package containing a memoir and a set of digital recordings from an unnamed woman who claims the world will end in ten years."

—Layla Haidrani, Cosmopolitan, '32 new books by people of colour to get excited about in 2019'

"An inventive novel."

—Jennifer Platt, Sunday Times (South Africa), 'A look at the literature 2019 has in store'

A "Most Anticipated Book of 2019"

—John Madera, Big Other

PRAISE FOR MASANDE NTSHANGA'S DEBUT NOVEL, THE REACTIVE:

Winner of The Betty Trask Award, 2018

Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize Finalist

Etisalat Prize for Literature Longlist

A "Must-Read Book for June 2016."

—Flavorwire

A "Best Book of June 2016."

—Michael Schaub, Men's Journal

"The Reactive is not only a beautiful novel, as fierce and formally innovative as it is lyrical and moving, but also a call to inhabit as well as to critique the symbolic structures of our world that can both empower and betray us."

—Nathan Goldman, Full Stop

"[The Reactive is] a searing, gorgeously written account of life, love, illness, and death in South Africa. With exquisite prose, formal innovation, and a masterful command of storytelling, Ntshanga illustrates how some young people navigated the dusk that followed the dawn of freedom in South Africa and humanizes the casualties of the Mbeki government's fatal policies on HIV & AIDS."

—Naomi Jackson, Poets & Writers

"Woozy, touching... a novel that delivers an unexpected love letter to Cape Town, painting it as a place of frustrated glory. The Reactive often teems with a beauty that seems to carry on in front of its glue-huffing wasters despite themselves."

—Marian Ryan, Slate

"One of South Africa’s most promising new voices... Ntshanga weaves a rollercoaster ride of a story that will leave you questioning the meaning of family, despair, and hope."

—Ayiba Magazine

"[The Reactive] takes place during a period of social and political tumult that mirrors that mental turmoil of the lead character, and it makes for an extremely sharp, challenging read. This is not a book about a fast-paced, compelling plot. It's a character study, an emotional journey, and right from the opening line, it's a brutal indictment"

—XOJane.com

"Sharp and affecting... [Ntshanga] directs the story with an amazing precision of language that few writers can achieve in a lifetime of work. With a style all his own, Ntshanga animates despair and agitation in a collage of moments, memories and landscapes that speak volumes of a exigent moment in South African history. Ntshanga grapples with the past and the too-real present with grace, but not clemency, with hope, but not too much."

—Alibi

"With The Reactive, [Ntshanga] has created an immersive and powerful portrait of drug use, community, and health issues by exploring what it was like to be young, black, South African, and HIV positive in the early aughts."

—VICE

"[The Reactive] is an affecting, slow-burning novel that gives a fantastic sense of a particular place and time, and of the haunted inner life of its protagonist."

—Tobias Carroll, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"This novel about an HIV+ man who mourns the death of his brother in Cape Town is shaping up to be one of the best debuts of 2016."

—Jonathon Sturgeon, Flavorwire

"Hailed as a fresh and fearless portrait of contemporary South African life, The Reactive marks Ntshanga as a global talent to watch."

—Librairie Drawn & Quarterly, Largehearted Boy

"A book that sucks us like vapor through the streets of Cape Town. [Ntshanga] has a sympathetic ear for the particular rhythms of young friendship, the banter, the petty arguments, the sticky and fleeting fun."

—David Schuman, The Rumpus

"[The Reactive] is a seriously powerful book set in a place I know little about, featuring people dealing with things I know little about; but somehow, the amazing themes of redemption, struggle, and the attempt to find meaning in life made it possible to connect in a compelling way with these characters."

—Kelsey Westenberg, Roscoe Books

"Ntshanga deftly illustrates the growing pains of a new country through three friends who seem intent on obliterating their minds, but who nevertheless cling to their dreams."

—Dmitry Samarov, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

"Gritty and revealing, Ntshanga's debut novel offers a brazen portrait of present-day South Africa. This is an eye-opening, ambitious novel."

—Publishers Weekly

"Ntshanga offers a devastating story yet tells it with noteworthy glow and flow that keeps pages turning until the glimmer-of-hope ending."

—Library Journal

"A powerful, compassionate story that refuses to rest or shuffle off into the murk of the mind. It exists so that we never forget."

—Benjamin Woodard, Numero Cinq Magazine

"Electrifying... [Ntshanga] succeeds at exploring major themes—illness, family, and, most effectively, class—while keeping readers in suspense. Ntshanga's promising debut is both moving and satisfyingly complex."

—Kirkus Reviews

"[The Reactive is] one of this year’s most startling novels."

—Mail & Guardian

"From time to time a novel comes along that is so strange, yet so utterly fresh and compelling, that it feels tuned into a reality with which you are not yet familiar."

—Aerodrome

"One of [Ntshanga's] best qualities as a writer is to defamiliarize aspects of South African existence, which through our habits of speaking and writing, have boiled down to bland indifference... The Reactive will probably remain, along with Imraan Coovadia's High Low In-between and Jonny Steinberg's Three Letter Plague, as a seminal work confronting [a] period in our country's history."

—The Sunday Independent

"Masande Ntshanga’s debut novel The Reactive follows an HIV-positive young man who is dealing with the long-lasting trauma of his brother’s death by selling his antiretroviral drugs, chewing a lot of khat and drifting around suburban Cape Town with his friends. Describing the novel baldly, though, ignores its immense thematic depth. [The Reactive is] one of this year’s most startling novels."

—Mail & Guardian

"Elegiac... an astoundingly brilliant novel, radiating with understanding and compassion. It fulfills William Faulkner’s injunction that 'the poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man; it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.'"

—City Press

"With a fine lyricism of style Ntshanga weaves a story both filled with ennui and weird purpose. And if that sounds unlikely, it is a feat he pulls off with brilliance... The shining point of this novel is the author's ability to create the confusion and changes young South Africans have to deal with. In a modern state there are calls and cries from the past that still make claims on them. They face uncertainty with their loud music, their counter-cultural lifestyles, but beneath the veneer they are all likeable characters who are searching for authenticity. Never preachy or pretentious, this book is a breath of fresh air in an often fetid landscape. Read it, savor the beauty of the writing, and you will find yourself drawn into a dreamscape you may recognize."

—The New Age

First published in Great Britain 2019 by

Jacaranda Books Art Music Ltd

27 Old Gloucester Street,

London WC1N 3AX

www.jacarandabooksartmusic.co.uk

Triangulum © Masande Ntshanga, 2018

By Agreement with Pontas Literary & Film Agency

The right of Masande Ntshanga to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This is a work of fiction and all characters and incidents described in this book are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Back cover image from the NASA Image and Video Library, NASA ID: GSFC_20171208_Archive_e000883

ISBN: 9781909762954

eISBN: 9781913090005

Cover Design: Mickey Mason @schnip.schnips

Typeset by Kamillah Brandes

For my parents

“Memory itself is an internal rumour.”George Santayana,The Life of Reason: Human Understanding

“The future is forever a projection of the present.”Kōbō Abe, Inter Ice Age 4

“some like to imagine a cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars”Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars

“To administer the laws of apartheid, the bureaucracy grew enormously. By 1977, about 540,000 Whites were employed in the public sector […] and Afrikaners occupied more than 90 percent of the top positions. The vast majority of the white bureaucrats were ardent supporters of apartheid. Most of the black bureaucrats, numbering around 820,000, were reliable servants of the regime on which they depended for their livelihood.”Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa

Table of Contents

1. Foreword

2. Triangulum

I. The Machine

II. Five Weeks in the Plague

Part A

Part B

III. Triangulum

FOREWORD

I am a woman acting of her own will and desire. Do not attempt to contact me after this communication. In all likelihood, I am no longer here.

These lines mark the beginning of the note my colleague Dr Joseph Hessler presented me with three years ago, along with the other materials I was tasked to compile into a dossier meant to inform a State Defence Report. I didn’t inform the State Defence Report. Instead, the materials became the following manuscript, which, with the now late Dr Hessler’s assistance, I have prepared for the public as triangulum.

At the time of writing, the sender of these materials remains unknown. We have at our disposal the note, as well as a cover letter, detailing further instructions. Then the materials themselves: a written record in the form of a memoir, followed by what appears to be a work of autofiction, as well as a set of digital recordings.

Under all circumstances, these testimonies are to be presented as a single communication. It is not possible to make sense of one without the rest. This condition is non-negotiable. For the sake of truthfulness, as well as detail—and at personal risk—I have undergone hypnotic regression therapy in order to recall the information I wish to provide this office, but I am still human, or I was human, and to understand me one must understand the life I’ve lived, and I require that this be an accompaniment to the text.

Herewith, then, in preparation for its tri-continental publication, is an accurate representation of the sender’s findings. It is a document announcing the end of our world in 2050.

Δ

My name is Dr Naomi Buthelezi. The date is December 2, 2043. I am of sound mind and constitution and do not compose this account under duress. In a previous life, I worked as an author and writing instructor at the creative writing department of the University of Cape Town, where my career persisted on the strength of having once been awarded both the Hugo and Nebula. I was a once-known/now-obscure science fiction writer, in other words, and assigned to this case through the office of Dr Hessler—an admirer I didn’t know I had.

The two of us met at the beginning of 2040, at a quiet soiree on campus. The astronomers in the department next to ours had installed a new 16-inch telescope in the observatory north of the grounds, and a few of us in English had been invited to celebrate with them before their doors opened.

Dr Hessler, or Joseph, as I came to know him, was the night’s guest of honour. He served as the chair and director of the South African National Space Agency, and had been asked to prepare a page for the evening’s opening remarks. He was well-known. Having contributed to our space project for a decade and a half with mindful service, he’d earned a place among the nation’s leaders in the field.

The gathering was modest, owing to the closed invitation. As the night wore on, I drank champagne out of a flute fashioned from a test tube and listened to my colleagues complain about ceaseless departmental meetings. I felt the same, but that didn’t make it less dull. My daughter was spending the weekend at a friend’s and I had a husband who was out of town for work—our relationship now openly at an impasse.

The speech was brief. After a second round of applause, I turned from my colleagues and found him smiling over the stage lights. His photograph was projected onto the walls. Then his hand was shuffled from the Head of Department’s to the Dean’s.

As he dismounted the podium, I realised I hadn’t heard a word the man had said—which made it all the stranger when he tapped me on the shoulder and told me he was an admirer.

“It’s a remarkable oeuvre,”he said, refreshing my test tube.

Hessler asked me join him at his table. Sitting across from him, I took slow sips of champagne and tried to tell him what he wanted to know about the profession, about the novels I’d published and the ones I’d abandoned. The latter seemed to surprise him. The more we spoke, the more I understood that he viewed writers as both admirable and pitiful mammals, cubs that had been separated from the pack too soon and were now frail and prone to neurasthenia—feckless neurotics, to be blunt—ruined for a life among other people, but also, because of their wandering, gifted with more sights and smells and insights than was average.

Not that he was average. From the beginning, Hessler insisted on presenting himself as a strong and sensitive man—an adventurer, able to explore those same sights and smells and insights without the writer’s requisite softness; indeed, with hard science.

He told me he had one last question. “No, this one isn’t about writing,” he smiled. “It’s simpler. I want to know if life exists in other galaxies.”

I was caught off-guard by the question and told him as much.

“I suppose that’s fair,” he sighed. He allowed a moment to pass. Then he said, “Two months ago, at our office in Hermanus, we received an unmarked package at our front desk. It was delivered by an anonymous courier, and inside, there was a locked drive containing audio recordings and printed manuscripts.”

“Manuscripts?”

Hessler nodded. “Two of them. In the beginning, we tried to dismiss it, of course. There’s nothing unusual about finding an eccentric in our mail haul. But from the beginning, this felt different. For one, an enormous amount of effort had gone into the thing. That much was clear. That’s why I didn’t mind it making the rounds in our office. Each of us engaged with it at one point or another, swapping the pages for the recordings and vice versa. I indulged it—a harmless booster of morale, I thought.

“Then a narrative began to emerge and I paid closer attention. Right from the start, I’d been fascinated with how it presented itself as fact even as it veered into the fantastic.” Hessler paused to drain his test tube. “Until last week, that is, which is when it stopped being an entertainment.”

The room had grown louder. I leaned in.

“What happened?”

“It predicted the present,” he said. “Now it might be a threat.”

I asked him what it had predicted and he took a moment to answer.

“Last week’s bombing.”

I knew what he meant. An explosion had gone off on the face of Table Mountain, above the city bowl; that wide semi-oval that spread itself between Bo-Kaap and Devil’s Peak. The explosion had set off a minor two-day dust storm, powdering the streets in Tamboerskloof and Gardens below. So far, the authorities had no leads.

I decided to indulge him, and asked him to explain.

Hessler reached into his jacket pocket for his cell phone and showed me an image of the explosion site: four gouges in the cliff face.

“This is a pattern,” he said. “The explosions were detonated to form an insignia that’s referred to in the text.”

I studied the photograph. “It could be a coincidence.”

“I know, but it goes one better. It describes when and where the explosives were planted.”

I searched his face and he didn’t falter. Which is how I got involved.

Joseph confessed to having insisted on my invitation to the telescope opening, having planned on the two of us meeting. Then more details followed.

I waited a week as he gathered the pages and the recordings. When he drove up to campus to deliver them to me in person, he looked older, I thought, and more stooped under the merciless sunlight on Jammie Plaza. He declined an offer to cool down in the Arts Block, citing exhaustion, which from the look of him I couldn’t argue with. I took the materials and drove home.

Δ

Here, I want to be clear. Joseph was not an unstable man. He was fastidious, almost to a fault. From the beginning, he exercised an extreme amount of caution in dealing with what he knew. In fact, he was still wary, all of eight months later, and despite the mounting evidence on our side, he held off on committing to belief. In his emails to me, he insisted that we still had too much room for error. That was wise, I thought, given the implications of the text; if we were right, then the threat was far greater than terrorism and its reach wider than our continent. We had one chance to convince the State Security Agency; if our dossier wasn’t foolproof, it would fall into a bureaucratic loop that would block all further inquiries.

My task, then, was to investigate the veracity of the materials in your hands; to extricate narrative allusions that might speak to a fictional grounding in the science-fiction genre. In other words, I had to be as sceptical as I could bear to be as a fiction writer—which is a significant amount, most authors will attest. I took the task on, in other words, not knowing that I was hoping against hope.

The two of us worked well together. Even as Joseph’s health began to decline, we never lost our temper with each other—which is rare for me. In our email correspondence, our insights often overlapped, and when his pancreas condition worsened, two years into our work, I visited him at the hospital. After we’d greeted, he’d tell me to pull up a chair and update him on our progress.

It was becoming clear to both of us that we’d have to reconsider what to do with the material. We spent weeks in discussion, before deciding that our reach would have to stretch further than the government. Then it took another week before we decided to release this book, which I now dedicate to the sender of these materials, in gratitude for her service to all of us, humankind.

I’d also like to confess that I felt a sense of loss as I approached the end of this project. Not because I went home to a vacant house (my husband and I had separated by then; my daughter was at boarding school), not even because I’d lost a friend who was dear to me. It was a different sensation from mourning in that I no longer knew who or what I was. I told this to Joseph one afternoon, two days before he died, and I still do not know. Not after what I have read in these pages. Except, perhaps, that I was never qualified to handle an assignment of this nature and magnitude. This despite its modest beginnings at the SANSA office in Hermanus, where the materials were first dispatched, out of naiveté or shrewdness I still cannot tell.

Now I’m here, with half a decade of my life given to it, and I hold neither regret nor doubt.

Δ

There are three things I should mention before we begin. The first is that I have left the material intact, with most of my input restricted to formatting the testimonies as per the sender’s instructions. I have indicated where the written record and the recordings diverge; the section titles are also mine.

It’s also worth noting that the middle of the book operates in a manner that is distinct from the rest. Though our research has led us to believe that this section, titled “Five Weeks in the Plague,” is indeed a work of autofiction, it lacks the form’s traditional transparency. It is coded more than usual, no doubt for the protection of the sender and her associates. For example, while we were able to discover that an eco-terrorist group did indeed plant the four explosives on the face of Table Mountain in 2026—each timed to detonate only two decades later—the connection to the arts and the artists mentioned was never unearthed. Nor did we confirm the existence of a publication titled Obelisk. Furthermore, while no evidence exists of the alien sightings alluded to throughout the text, the Department of Social Development’s collusion with Cash Paymaster Services against their grantees has been well documented, and the kidnapping of three teenage girls in King William’s Town gained national coverage in 2002.

Perhaps our most significant discovery, then, has been identifying and locating the records of the late Dr Marianne Dixon, who appears as herself in the text. Dixon earned her doctorate in cognitive neuroscience from Vassar in 1998. Her dissertation was on the topic of Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development as applied to the education models of apartheid South Africa. Dixon was unmarried and childless, which left us no descendants to contact for testimonies and, along with her colleagues in the field (now also deceased), she maintained a low profile. There are records, however, of her attempts to publish her findings in various journals over the years, and of her applying to secure audiences at conferences in Johannesburg, New Delhi and New York, all of which were met with rejections. Unable to prove their claims, including the existence of extra-terrestrial life, which would have required them to reveal their sources, Dixon and her colleagues were excommunicated from the field. This was on the heels of a scandal—enough to cement the damage—that alleged the researchers had misused a public grant to conduct unauthorised experiments on minors.

Dismissed by their peers, Dixon and her team continued as independent researchers. Their findings, disregarded by all established cognitive neuroscience journals, can now be found collated on their website, http://www.triangulum-earth.com, whose hosting has been paid up1, despite it not being updated in a decade. The text also explores the origins of the Zones, or Delta Labour Camps as most of us know them, which are proliferating in every province—and which remain the nation’s most divisive issue—bringing me to my second point, which is the setting of the manuscript.

The reader will notice that the bulk of this narrative takes place in the Eastern Cape, once known as the Ciskei2 homeland, an apparatus of conquest that was implemented here by Europeans in the second millennium. This is the sender’s lineage and it is also mine.

That little has changed isn’t a deterrent, but a motivation for publication in 2044, to commemorate the demise of the homelands, as well as to encourage those lobbying against the state’s current plan to make the North West a Zoned province, a marker of fifty years of progress, we’re told, since the abolition of apartheid. Which leads me to my third and final point.

I have not contacted the government. In the past, as related above, scientists and authorities have not heeded the message contained in this manuscript. It is also true that, in the end, Joseph and I concluded that the instruments of power could not be trusted with our future. Instead, our aim is to deliver our message to the population, even though we do not know how events will unfold; and whether or not we will survive. The choice is ours. In the end, the sender intended this work for humankind, and it is only fitting, then, that I close here with her own words.

The message I wish to pass on is not complicated.

There is indeed a force more powerful than humankind. I have assented and do not know much else.

Neither do I.

Dr Naomi ButheleziStellenboschDecember 2, 2043

__________________

1 The owner of the domain is hidden, but we have reason to believe the account was passed down to the sender.

2 A note for our foreign readers: the Ciskei homeland was a nominal independent state, symptomatic of the apartheid regime, that existed from 1981 to 1994. It was located in the south-east of the republic, taking up less than 10,000 square kilometres, and run as a dictatorship. It excluded the port of East London as well as economic centres such as King William’s Town—which would later become the sender’s home—and Queenstown, which belonged to the Europeans of the republic. To give the scheme a veneer of legitimacy, the land was assigned to isiXhosa speakers in two “self-governed territories.” The two homelands were divided by the Great Kei River and dissolved in 1994, at the arrival of our first democratic elections, leaving behind ethnic tensions that simmer into the present.

TRIANGULUM

I

THE MACHINE

4 October 1999

I was fourteen 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, instead, and listened to him leaving the house. Later, I’d learn that he’d gone to the hospital.

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.

“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.

“Then 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-seventies.

I closed my eyes, feeling cold as the bedsheets bunched up behind me, and I remembered a time when 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 and saw a column of rainclouds racing towards me. Moments later, I flipped over and hit the ground with the left side of my head. For a minute afterwards I couldn’t see, 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 as my head rolled over and everything went dark.

That was in 1994.

Afterwards, 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 fusing 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 and 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 blurs of television without sound.

Mama, a counsellor 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. In the evening, 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. Often, I’d 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, after she was gone, I’d try to evoke this same feeling with Mama again, calling her back into the living room with news reports on the disasters she’d left behind with us on Earth.

With Tata asleep, I opened my eyes and breathed out again, absorbing the new-found warmth in my sheets. I could no longer hear him coughing, 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?

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

REGRESSION THERAPY RECORDING (RTR): 001

DATE OF RECOLLECTION: 28:05:2002

DATE OF RECORDING: 20:06:2035

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 eighth 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 twelve. It meant I couldn’t express my emotional responses as well as most people. It wasn’t an uncommon side effect, he said, with lots of patients learning to 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 gymslip 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.

At home later 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 forty-five kilograms 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 non-stick casserole to caramelise 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 mirror on its stand 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.

5 October 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 queues. 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. His double cab crossed the rail bridge at the edge of our town and entered Ginsberg, where he parked next to a sleeping Alsatian 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 queue outside the door. Tata sighed. For an hour and a half we shuffled in line, before 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 off. 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 stoep smelt of enough ammonia to cause a headache, I thought, before I got one.

Tata got to the front of the queue 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, unlabelled 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, he added, and 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. The rest of our trip was silent and it was only when we got home that I realised I could never tell him what I knew.

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

That afternoon, after we’d eaten our porridge 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 room. 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.

Tata and I never spoke about Mama. Tata tried to keep her memory outside our walls, minimising her in conversation, and I’d gone along with that until I couldn’t.

The first time I saw the machine, for example, I thought of the word “canard,” which I’d learnt 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.”

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

“Falsehood?”

“That’s close.”

“How close?”

“Think about it.”

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.

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 of us were illiterate in the province. I stirred my oats and cleared my throat.

“I don’t believe we have an eighty-six percent literacy rate in the Eastern Cape,” I said. “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 lying on your desk.”

“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. Then 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. He couldn’t cycle himself, but he wanted me to know how to. I’d convinced him that I’d learn to do it on the go, but I hadn’t.

The lights in the garage had fused; I had to remove a large cardboard box from the window to let in 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 sixteen-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, and looking around I found that 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 its visits to me. 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: 29:05:2002 / 17 MIN

Today’s 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 Mom and I chose to do. After we were done, he’d call us over for slices of sponge cake, her favourite, which he ordered at the Shoprite the night before.

For a while after she was gone, Dad 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 eight-thirty, a minute before Mrs Robinson locks the front gate. Latecomers are liable for four-week suspension, she tells me. 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, since the two of us won’t ever get along. Mrs Robinson’s hair is an auburn loofah, flaking off into freckles all over her cheeks. I used to have her in ninth 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 maths test from last week, the printouts pinned up in the corridor outside Mr Costello’s physics classroom. Settling down at my desk towards 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 apologised 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 cheque 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 counsellors. Then I got passed on to new and different counsellors. I did that until the school ran out of them and Dad unenrolled me.

Now I’m here.

I drop my backpack, pull out my pencil case, 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 moisturiser 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 father, 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 test scripts close to his chest; if our class average drops below sixty, 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 her 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 Maths office on Alexandra Road, down the road from Grey Hospital and Hoërskool De Vos Malan. 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-con spat flakes of rust over the lino and potted plants. It made me shiver when it almost got in my hair. I didn’t like that, but I was too tired to care, 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. Litha thought we’d find that 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.

“It’s never anything less than an A,” she says. “I don’t understand how you stopped being a monitor.”

“I didn’t like it. Mr de Silva saw the report card I came in with from East London and thought it was a Rorschach test and not a list of marks.”The two of us learnt about the inkblot test in English last week. “Like being good at maths meant I’d 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.

Towards 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 window-pane behind his head.

He dropped the receiver and sighed, looking at his hands.

“You fraternise 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, a thin curtain of smoke rising from a smouldering garbage fire before them, and I didn’t answer, but walked to his desk when he told me to. Then he removed the pin from my gymslip and turned it over in his palm.

“You can go,” he told me, and I left.