"Your brother's case is rare, but not unique." Doctor Chandhar's voice was pitched in the telltale dealing with difficult family members mode. "There have been—and are—other children who have fallen into this sort of comatose state without apparent cause. Some of them have spontaneously recovered, just woke up one day and asked for something to drink or eat."
"And the others? The ones who didn't just sit up and demand icecream?"
The doctor removed her hand from Renie's shoulder. "We are doing our best, Ms. Sulaweyo. And there is nothing you can do except what you are doing—coming here so that Stephen can feel your touch and hear your familiar voice."
"I know, you told me. Which means I should be talking to Stephen instead of haranguing you." Renie took a shaky breath. The tears had stopped flowing, but her faceplate was still steamy. "I don't mean to take it out on you. Doctor. I know you've got a lot to worry about"
"This has not been a particularly good time, these past few months. I wonder sometimes why I picked a career with so much sadness in it." Doctor Chandhar turned at the doorway. "But it is good to make a difference, and sometimes I do. And sometimes, Ms. Sulaweyo, there are wonderful moments of happiness. I hope you and I can share one of those when Stephen comes back to us."
Renie watched the dim white form shuffle out into the corridor. The door slid closed again. The maddening thing was, although she was aching for someone to fight with, for someone to accuse, there was no one. The doctors were doing their best. The hospital, despite its limitations, had given Stephen almost every test that might help explain what had struck him down. None had. There were no answers. There was truly no one to blame.
Except God, she thought. Perhaps. But that had never done anyone much good. And perhaps Long Joseph Sulaweyo was not entirely without responsibility in the matter either.
Renie touched Stephen's face again. She hoped that somewhere deep inside that unresponsive body he could feel and hear her, even through two layers of quarantine.
"I have a book, Stephen. Not one of my favorites this time, but one of yours." She smiled sadly. She was always trying to get him to read African things—stories, history, folktales from the mixed tribal legacy of their family. She wanted him to be proud of his heritage in a world where such holdovers were fast disappearing, crushed in the inexorable, glacial flow of First World culture. But Stephen's tastes had never run that way.
She thumbed on her pad, then increased the size of the text so she could see it through brimming eyes. She blanked the pictures. She didn't want to see them, and Stephen couldn't "It's Netsurfer Detectives," she said, and began to read.
" 'Malibu Hyperblock is completely sealed,' shouted Masker as he crashed through the door, letting his skim-board zoom off into the other room with none of his usual care. The Zingray 220 knocked several other boards loose as it tried to fit itself back into the rack. Masker ignored the clatter, more concerned with his news. 'They've got bigmama Recognizers on every flowpoint.'
" 'That's some vicious-bad wanton!' said Scoop. He left his holo-striped pad floating in midair as he turned to his excited friend, 'I mean, there must be major trouble—double-sampled!'. . . ."
If you would just go and see him!"
Long Joseph put his hands to his head as though to shut out the noise. "I did go, didn't I?"
"Twice! You've been twice—the day after I took him there and when the doctor made you come down for a conference,"
"What more you want? He's sick. You think I should go down every day like you do, look at him? He's still sick. Visit him all you want, it don't make him better."
Renie seethed. How could anyone be so impossible? "He's your son, Papa. He's just a kid. He's all by himself in that hospital."
"And he don't know nothing! I went and talk to him, be don't know nothing. What good is all your talking, talking. . . ? You even read him books!"
"Because a familiar voice might help him find his way back." She paused and prayed for strength to the God of her trusting childhood—a kinder God than any she could summon belief for these days. "And maybe it's your voice he needs to hear most, Papa. The doctor said so."
His look became vulpine, his eyes darting to the side as though seeking escape. "What's that nonsense mean?"
"He had a fight with you. You were angry with him—told him not to come back. Now something has happened to him and maybe, somewhere down deep like a dream, he's scared to come back. Maybe he thinks you're mad at him and so he's staying away."
Long Joseph pushed himself up off the couch, frightened but trying to cover it with bluster. "That's . . . you can't talk to me like that, girl, and no doctor talks to me like that about my business either." He stamped his way into the kitchen and began to open cupboards. "A lot of craziness. Scared of me! I just set him straight. Didn't even lay no hand to him."
"There isn't any."
The cupboard-rifling noises stopped. "What?"
"There isn't any, I didn't buy you any wine."
"Don't tell me what I'm looking for!"
"Fine. Do what you like." Renie's head hurt, and she was so tired she didn't want to get out of her chair until the arrival of tomorrow morning forced her. Between working, commuting, and visiting Stephen, she was spending at least fourteen hours a day out of the house. So much for the Information Century—every time you turned around, you had to go somewhere, see someone, usually on aching feet because the bloody trains weren't running. The Cyber Age. What shit.
Long Joseph reappeared in the living room. "I'm going out. A man deserves some peace."
Renie decided to make one last try. "Listen, Papa, whatever you think, it would do Stephen good to hear your voice. Come with me to visit him."
He raised his hand as if to swing at something, then pressed it over his eyes for a long moment. When he took it away, his face was full of despair. "Go there," he said hoarsely. "So I should go there and watch my son die."
Renie was shocked. "He's not dying!"
"Oh? He jumping and running? He playing football?" Long Joseph stretched his arms wide; his jaw worked furiously. "No, he is lying in hospital just like his mama. You were with your grandmother, girl. You weren't there. I sat there for three weeks and watched your mama all burned up in that bed. Tried to give her water when she cried. Watched her die slowly." He blinked several times, then abruptly turned his back on her, his shoulders hunched as though against the blow of a sjambok. His voice, when it came, was almost a different person's. "I spent . . . plenty of time in that damn hospital."
Stunned, her own eyes abruptly welling, Renie could not speak for a moment. "Papa?"
He would not turn to face her. "Enough, girl. I'll go see him. I'm his father—you don't need to tell me my job."
"You will? Will you come with me tomorrow?"
He made an angry sound in his throat. "I've got things to do. I'll let you know when I'm coming."
She tried to be gentle. "Please make it soon, Papa. He needs you."
"I'll see him, damn you—put on that foolish suit again. But don't tell me when to go." Still unwilling or unable to meet her eyes, he thumbed the door open and went lurching out.
Drained of energy, full of confusion, Renie sat for a long time staring at the closed door. Something had just happened, but she wasn't quite sure what it had been or what it had meant. For a moment she had felt something like a connection with the father she had known—the man who had labored so hard to keep the family together after his wife died, who had worked extra jobs and encouraged her studies and even tried to help Renie and her grandmother, Uma' Bongela, with little Stephen. But after her Uma' had died and Renie had become a grown woman, he had just given up. The Long Joseph she had known seemed completely lost.
Renie sighed. Whether that was true or not, she just didn't have the strength to deal with it right now.
She slumped deeper in the chair, squinting against the throb of her headache. She had forgotten to buy more painblockers, of course, and if she didn't take care of something
, no one else was going to. She turned on the wallscreen and let the first thing she had cued up—a travelogue about holidays in Tasmania—wash over her, deadening her thoughts. For a brief moment she wished she had one of those expensive full sensory wraparounds, so she could go to that beach, smell the apple blossoms, feel the sand beneath her feet and the air of holiday freedom so expensively encoded into the program.
Anything to avoid the recursive memory of her father's hunched shoulders and of Stephen's sightless eyes.
When the beeping awoke her, Renie grabbed at her pad. Eight in the morning, but that wasn't her wake-up alarm. Was it the hospital?
"Answer!" she shouted. Nothing happened.
As she struggled into a sitting position, Renie finally realized that the noise was coming not from the phone but from the front door speaker. She pulled on a bathrobe and made her way groggily across the living room. Her chair was lying on its side like the dessicated corpse of some strange animal, victim of Long Joseph's late and drunken return. She leaned on the switch.
"Hello?"
"Ms. Sulaweyo? It is !Xabbu speaking. I am sorry to disturb you."
"!Xabbu? What are you doing here?"
"I will explain—it is nothing bad or frightening."
She looked around at the apartment, messy at the best of times, but now showing the effects of her cumulative absences. Her father's snores rumbled from his bedroom. "I'll be down. Wait for me."
!Xabbu seemed perfectly normal, except that he was wearing a very clean white shirt. Renie looked him up and down, confused and a little off-balance.
"I hope I am not disturbing you too much," he said, smiling. "I was at school early this morning. I like it when it is quiet. But then there was a bomb."
"Another one? Oh, God."
"Not a real one—at least, I do not know. But a telephone warning. They emptied the Polytechnic. I thought you might not know, so I decided I would save you a useless trip."
"Thank you. Hang on for a moment." She took out her pad and browsed the college system for mail. There was a general message from the chancellor declaring the Poly closed until further notice, so !Xabbu had saved her a trip, but she suddenly wondered why he had not merely called her. She looked up; he was still smiling. It was almost impossible to imagine deception lurking behind those eyes—but why had he come all the way out to Pinetown?
She noted the ironed creases in the white shirt and had a sudden disorienting thought. Was this romance? Had the little tribesman come out here to take her on some kind of date? She didn't know quite how she felt about that, but the word "uncomfortable" sprang to mind.
"Well," she said slowly, "since the Poly is closed, I guess you have the day off." Her use of the singular pronoun was intentional.
"Then I would like to take my instructor out for a meal. Breakfast?" !Xabbu's smile wavered, then flickered out, replaced by a look of disconcerting intensity. "You have been very sad, Ms . . . Renie. You have been very sad, but you have been a good friend to me. I believe it is you who now needs a friend."
"I . . . think. . . ." She hesitated, but could think of no good reason not to go. It was just half eight in the morning and the apartment seemed poisonous. Her little brother was lying in an oxygen tent, as unreachable as if he were dead, and the thought of being in the same kitchen with her father when he floundered to consciousness in a few hours made her neck and shoulders tighten like a pulled knot. "Right," she said. "Let's go."
If there was romance on !Xabbu's mind, he certainly didn't show it. As they walked down into Pinetown's business section, he seemed to be looking at everything but Renie, his half-closed eyes that could so easily look shy or sleepy flitting across peeling paint and boarded up windows, watching rubbish blow down the wide streets like cartoon tumbleweeds.
"It's not a very nice part of town, I'm afraid."
"My landlady's house is in Chesterville," he replied. "This is a little more wealthy, although fewer people seem to be on the streets. But what astonishes me—and I must confess, Renie, horrifies me a little—is the human-ness of it all."
"What does that mean?"
"Is that not a word, 'human-ness'? 'Humanity,' perhaps? What I mean is that everything here—all of the city that I have seen since leaving my people—is built to block out the earth, to hide it from sight and mind. The rocks have been scoured away, the bush burned off, and everything has been covered with tar." He slapped his thong-soled foot against the cracked street "Even the few trees, like that sad fellow there, have been brought here and planted by people. Humans turn the places they live into great crowded piles of mud and stone, like the nests termites build—but what happens when in all the world there are only termite hills left but no bush?"
Renie shook her head. "What else should we do? If this were bush country, there would be too many of us to survive. We would starve. We would kill each other."
"So what will people do when they finally run out of bush to burn?" !Xabbu bent and picked up a plastic ring, an already unclassifiable remnant of the current civilization. He squeezed his fingers together and slipped it over his wrist, then held his new bangle up and examined it, a sour half-smile on his lips. "Starve then? Kill each other then? It will be the same problem, but first we will have covered everything with tar and stone and cement and . . . what is it called, 'fibramic'? Also, when the killing comes, there will be many more people to die."
"We'll go into space." Renie gestured toward the gray sky. "We'll . . . I don't know, colonize other planets."
!Xabbu nodded. "Ah."
Johnny's Café was crowded. Most of the customers were truck drivers starting their hauling day on the Durban-Pretoria route, big friendly men in sunglasses and bright-colored shirts. Too friendly, some of them—in the time it took to squeeze through to an empty booth, Renie received a proposal of marriage and several less honorable offers. She clenched her teeth, refusing to smile at even the most harmless and respectful of the flirts. If you encouraged them, it just got worse.
But there were things Renie liked about Johnny's, and one of them was that you could get real food. So many of the small restaurants and coffee shops these days served nothing but American-style convenience food—waved beefburgers, sausages in rolls with gluey cheese sauce, and of course Coca-Cola and fries, the wafer and wine of the Western religion of commerce. But somebody in the kitchen here—perhaps Johnny himself, if there was such a person—actually cooked.
Besides the cup of strong, driver-fuel coffee, Renie decided on bread with butter and honey and a plate of fried plantains and rice. !Xabbu let her order him the same. When the wide platter came, he stared at it in apparent dismay.
"It is so large."
"It's mostly starch. Don't finish it if you don't feel comfortable."
"Will you eat it?"
She laughed. "Thanks, but this is plenty for me."
"Then what will happen to it?"
Renie paused. Distant stepchild to the culture of wealth, she had never thought much about her own patterns of consumption and waste. "I'm sure someone in the kitchen takes home whatever's left over," she offered at last, and felt guilty and shamed even as she said it. She had little doubt that the onetime masters of South Africa had made the same excuse as they watched the remains of another Caligulean feast being cleared away.
She was grateful that !Xabbu did not seem inclined to follow up the question. It was at moments like this that she realized how different his outlook truly was. He spoke better English than her father, and his intelligence and quick empathy aided him in understanding many very subtle things. But he was not like her, not at all—he might have dropped in from another planet. Renie, again with an obscure feeling of shame, realized that she shared more of her fundamental outlook with a rich white teenager living in England or America than with this young African man who had grown up a few hundred miles away.
After he had eaten a few mouthfuls of rice, !Xabbu looked up. "I have now been in two cafés," he said. "This, and the one in the L
ambda Mall."
"Which do you prefer?"
He grinned. "The food is better here." He took another bite, then poked at a glistening plantain with his fork, as if to make sure it was dead. "There is something else, too. You remember I asked about ghosts on the net? I see the life there, but I cannot feel it, which makes me uneasy in spirit. It is hard to explain. But I like this place much better."
Renie had been a net habitué for so long that she sometimes did indeed think of it as a place, a huge place, but just as geographically real as Europe or Australia. But !Xabbu was right—it wasn't. It was an agreement, something people pretended was real. In some ways, it was a country of ghosts . . . but all the ghosts were haunting each other.
"There is something to be said for RL." As if to prove it to herself, she lifted her mug of very good, very strong coffee "No question."
"Now please, Renie, tell me what is troubling you. You said to me that your brother was ill. Is that it, or have you other problems as well? I hope I am not intruding too much."
Awkwardly at first, she described her last visit to Stephen and the latest version of her ongoing argument with Long Joseph. Once she began, it grew easier to talk, to describe the hopeless frustration of visiting Stephen every day when nothing ever changed, of the increasingly painful spiral of her relationship with her father. !Xabbu listened, asking questions only when she hesitated on the brink of some painful admission, but each time she answered the questions and found herself moving farther into revelation. She was not used to opening herself, to exposing her secret fears; it felt dangerous. But, as they dawdled through breakfast and the morning crowd slowly drifted out of the coffee shop, she also felt relief at finally being able to speak.
She was putting sweetener into her third cup of coffee when !Xabbu suddenly asked: "Are you going to see him today? Your brother?"