There are 3,986 new emails in my inbox, unread. I set up an auto-reply to all of them.
This is a scam.
No one is going to give you millions of dollars for nothing.
Save your money.
Spend it on ice-cream.
Go out to dinner.
Take your loved ones away for the weekend.
Pay off your credit cards.
Have an adventure.
Blow it on skydiving lessons or drink or hookers or
gambling.
But please, don't send it to me or anyone else involved in this ugly little fiction.
And next time, don't be so fucking naive.
Vuyo is going to be pissed. But not pissed enough to have me killed. Not when he doesn't have an animal yet. And hey, there will be others. Moegoes are easier to come by than e.coli in a fast-food kitchen.
I add a final line, even though it's a petty revenge, far less than he deserves, even though it might implicate me, or at least my anonymous pseudonym, Kahlo999.
Questions? Please contact Giovanni Conte gio@ machmagazine.co.za
It takes a long time to send 3,986 emails, watching the status bar count them off. There is a deep satisfaction in this. A satisfaction that is dented when one of the addresses bounces. It takes a techno-naif to fall for a 419, but they're usually not so unsophisticated that they can't even get their return address right.
This is the mail system at host smtpauth01.mweb. co.za.
I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.
For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster.
If you do so, please include this problem report. You can delete your own text from the attached returned message.
The mail system
: Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=inventedzoocity.com type=A: Host not found
Reporting-MTA: dns; smtpauth01.mweb.co.za X-Postfix-Queue-ID: D4AF5A024B
X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822; [email protected] Arrival-Date: Sun, 27 March 2011 21:51:59 +0200 (SAST)
Final-Recipient: rfc822;
Original-Recipient: rfc822;[email protected]
Action: failed
Status: 5.4.4
Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name= type=A: Host not found
-----------
From: Kahlo999
Date: Sun, 27 March 2011 21:51:59 +0200
To:
Subject: RE:
This is a scam.
No one is going to give you millions of dollars for nothing. Save your money. Spend it on ice-cream. Go out to dinner. Take your loved ones away for the weekend. Pay off your credit cards. Have an adventure.
Blow it on skydiving lessons or drink or hookers or gambling.
But please, don't send it to me or anyone else involved in this ugly little fiction.
And next time, don't be so fucking naive.
Questions? Please contact Giovanni Conte gio@ machmagazine.co.za
======== From:
Date: Sun, 27 March 2011 21:51:59 +0200
To:
Subject:
I danced until my feet broke off. Until my shoes turned red with blood. I always wanted to be a girl in a storybook.
-----------
It's too strange, too poetical to be spam. I open up the Word doc and add it to my collection.
It bothers me, like a pubic hair between your teeth. Or a ghost in the machine.
Hey, it's not like I have anything else to do with my life right now. I take my laptop downstairs and four blocks over to the Nice Times Internet Café to print them out. The guy at the shop wraps the hard copies in a brown-paper bag for me, so it's only when I get home and spread them out over the floor that Sloth freaks the fuck out.
He's been resting on my back, half dozing, but when the pages are arranged on the linoleum, he starts hissing, tugging at my arms to pull me away.
"What's your problem? Is it this?" I pick up a page, and he hunches his shoulders and bats the page out of my hand. He scrambles off my back and backs into the far corner, behind the bed, bristling like the pages are possessed. Maybe Vuyo was right and this is bad muti, a hack spell from a rival syndicate. Maybe this is the cause of everything, the dark shadows over my life. I dig in my bag to see if I still have that bottle of muti the sangoma gave me. How hard can it be?
Sloth is not convinced this is a good idea. I'm kneeling in the middle of my apartment, burning imphepho in an incense holder, a spindle of fragrant smoke rising in the air. I've crumpled up the emails in a large empty pot. "Unless you have a better suggestion?"
He opens his mouth.
"A better suggestion that doesn't involve going back to Mai Mai," I add quickly.
His jaw snaps shut. And then he sneezes twice, abruptly.
"See? It's a sign."
Resigned, Sloth holds out his lanky arm and I take a pinprick of blood with a vintage brooch from my jewellery box and wipe it off on the most recent email.
I pour a liberal dose of paraffin over the crumple of papers in the pot, add a splash of the sangoma's cleansing muti from the cough-medicine bottle, and take a swig for good luck. Then I light the email streaked with Sloth's blood and drop it into the pot. Séance flambé!
What happens instead is that a two-foot-high flame shoots up from the pot, singeing my eyebrows. I fling myself away in surprise and my foot catches the pot. Flaming paraffin splashes over the floor. Sloth screams in alarm and starts crawling for his climbing post, moving amazingly speedily. He clambers up his pole, reaches out and hooks onto one of the loops of rope hanging from the ceiling and swings towards the front door, which is probably the smart option. If I had any sense, I'd be doing the same. Instead, I grab the first thing at hand, which just happens to be my yellow leather jacket, and start beating out the flames.
The fire resists valiantly, but I finally manage to whack the life out of the flames – and my jacket. The fire dies reluctantly, almost resentfully. Greasy, evil-smelling black smoke pours out of the pot and boils off the floor. Choking and gagging on the smell, I fumble to open the window. And then it hits me.
Dunes of powdery yellow sand. They swell and fall like ocean waves. Something you could drown in. Mounds erupt from the waves, spill termites onto the sand. They are swallowed up again. The waves roll on.
A king without his head. He holds it in his lap. The head rolls its eyes and grins with blood-stained teeth beneath its crown. Take me, take me, take me to your spider den. He is wearing a faded Oppikoppi t-shirt.
Birds circling in the sky, an aviary's worth, all different kinds, cranes, pigeons, hawks, vultures, sunbirds, sparrows.
A flash of an old movie. Soylent Green is people.
A barbed-wire fence. A bright yellow sign. Private property. Trespassers will be mutilated.
An artificial fingernail, half an inch long, ruby red with silver stars painted on it, lying in a gutter. A private galaxy in the dirt. There are faded letters stencilled on the kerb. Kotch. Kozy. Kotze.
A supermarket trolley brimming with white plastic forks. It catches on fire. The forks twist and melt.
A snowfall of feathers. Some of the tips are clotted with red gobs of flesh. It turns into a rain of frogs.
Snap! Snap out of it. Snap out–
I open my eyes to find Sloth shaking me by my shoulders and whining.
"Okay, it's okay. I'm fine." I sit up gingerly, rubbing the back of my head, where I seemed to have smashed it against the floor, possibly repeatedly. My heels ache, as if I have been drumming them in a seizure. I'm lucky I didn't bite off my tongue.
Or break a nail.
29.
"David Laslow," the voice on the phone drawls.
"Photographer Dave? This is Zinzi December. We met at the Biko?"
"I wondered if you'd call me," he sounds resigned. "You want to kak me
out, I understand. It was a job. Gio was paying me. He didn't tell me what was involved."
"Forget it. That's not why I'm calling. I want to do a story, a real one. I want you to take the photographs."
"Whoo boy, did you pick the wrong week. I've got the Mbuli court case, the premier's portrait, the Springbok press conference, some new clinic opening – and that's not counting whatever comes up during the course of the day."
"This just came up. And besides, you owe me."
"I thought that wasn't why you were calling?"
"It isn't. But that doesn't mean you don't. Come on, I'll be your fixer on the zoo stories. Isn't that what you wanted? An all-access pass to Zoo City. You want drugs, sex, vice, dog fights? I can get you in. But you have to do this for me."
"You don't let up, do you?"
"No."
Dave is waiting by the One-Stop shop when I pull into the petrol station under Ponte. Once a glitzy apartment block famed for its round design, it's turned from housing project with gangsters, squatters, drugs and prostitution, garbage and suicides piling up in the central well, back to reclaimed glitzy apartment block. I suspect it will go through its own revolving door soon enough.
"Get in." I pop the door lock for him. I still haven't got the window fixed. "My car is less likely to get us hijacked." He obliges with a dubious look.
"Where are we going?" he asks
"Did you pull the clips on the homeless guy killing I asked for?"
"Yep," he digs into his pocket and hauls out a slim bundle of photocopies. "Poor guy didn't get much in the way of column space. Here's The Star."
The Star 23 March 2011
Homeless Man Burned Alive
[Ellis Park] The badly burned body of Patrick Serfontein, 53, was found under a bridge in Troyeville on Tuesday, Gauteng Police said. Captain Louis du Plessis said the homeless man was apparently beaten before his attackers set him alight. The man was identified by his South African ID, found on the scene. The police have opened a murder investigation and appealed for witnesses to come forward. – Sapa.
"And here's my paper."
The copy features a grotesque photograph of a man's face, the skin black and bubbled, lips peeled back from the teeth, like he just got back from holiday in Pompeii.
The Daily Truth
POLICE FILE
Homefried Homeless.
I'm telling you straight. Some human scum burned a homeless ou to death on Tuesday. Patrick Serfontein lived under a Troyeville bridge in a cardboard box until he was beaten up and necklaced with a tyre over his head by one or more tsotsis who are still unidentified and walking around free and easy because no one saw anything.
The poor homeless ou's face was so badly burnt up that the cops had to identify him by what they hope is his ID book, which they found among some personal goeters in an old shopping trolley near the body. The SAPS refused to speculate on the motive behind the violent killing. Is this the first sign of another serial killer like Moses Sithole on the loose?
Other uglinesses that happened yesterday: The body of a missing nine year-old in Ventersdorp has been discovered, drowned in a farm dam. At least his parents can make peace because his body has been found. The number of people who just sommer go missing in this city never to be seen again is just sad, mense.
The rest is ripped off. I raise an eyebrow. "That's some quality reporting."
Dave shrugs. "I just take the photographs."
"Nothing about his having an animal."
"Not every person living on the edge of society has to
have an animal. What's this all about?"
"Patrick Serfontein is a hunch. Let's just say his death coincides with an email. Is there a Before photograph?"
"Just his ID. I got a photocopy of it for you from Mandla. She says if we find anything good, it goes under her byline. You can have an "additional reporting by"."
"I don't know if 'good' is the word I'd use," I say grimly.
"Where are we going?"
"To photograph a body that coincides with another email."
The ruby acrylic fingernail I recovered from Kotze Street lies on the dashboard. The thread that leads away from it is black and withered, but still traceable, if a vision dream of yellow sand dunes gives you a hint about where to start.
"You got a killer sending you emails? Do you know him personally? Some kind of gloating thing? They do that, right? Serial killers?"
"I don't know who the killer is. I think it's his victims sending me messages."
"But they're dead?"
"Exactly."
"Okay, whatever." Dave slumps back into his seat, fiddling with his camera.
I drive out south to where the last of the mine dumps are – sulphur-coloured artificial hills, laid waste by the ravages of weather and reprocessing, shored up with scrubby grass and eucalyptus trees. Ugly valleys have been gouged out and trucked away by the ton to sift out the last scraps of gold the mining companies missed the first time round. Maybe it's appropriate that eGoli, place of gold, should be self-cannibalising.
I pull off onto a dirt road lined with straggly trees and drive for exactly 3.8 kays. I measured the distance on my way back. As we get out of the car, a vicious little wind kicks up gritty yellow dust and stirs the trees to a disquieting susurrus. I haul the heavy blanket off the back seat and throw it over the barbed-wire fence. This time, I've come prepared, after shredding my jeans on my earlier foray. It was only after I got home that I noticed the gash in my pants, the dried blood on my leg.
"This is trespassing," Dave says as I lift Sloth over the fence.
"Don't worry. I was here earlier. It doesn't count as trespassing the second time round." I hold the ruby fingernail gently cupped in my hand. The thread is thicker now. We're close.
We scramble up the slope of the dump, the fine sand swallowing our feet to the ankle with every step. Away from the shelter of the trees, the wind is even more capricious. Eddies of dust whip and spiral around us, sandblasting exposed skin. I pull my hoodie up over Sloth, but it offers only scant protection. He ducks his head behind my neck and squeezes his eyes shut.
"Shit," Dave says. "I don't have the right lens protection for this."
"Here." I was hoping it wouldn't feel as bad the second time round. But the same mix of nausea and dread rises in the back of my throat. Dave raises his camera automatically and then lowers it again without taking a shot. "How did you find this?"
"It sort of found me."
The Sparrow boy/girl is sprawled akimbo on the sand, looking blankly up at the sky. There is dust embedded in every hollow and fold of her body, in the scooped palm of her hand, banked up against her lower eyelids like unshed tears, encrusted in the bloody gashes over her arms and legs and stomach and head. Her nails are broken, as if she'd tried to defend herself. Acrylic. Ruby-red with sequins. They must have matched her shoes.
Dave opens his mouth and closes it again. There's nothing to say. He takes cover behind the lens. The wounds are approximately three inches long, gaping like red mouths. It's hard work to hack someone to death. Ask the Hutu. Whoever did this had a lot of enthusiasm for the job.
"Notice anything missing?" I say as he stops to switch to a new memory card.
"I– No. I don't know. Is there something missing? Wait. There's not much blood. Which might mean she was killed somewhere else."
"And her animal isn't here."
"How do you know she had an animal?"
"She worked my street. It was a Sparrow."
"A Sparrow? That's tiny. You could miss that easily."
"Trust me. It's not here." I know this because I have searched this dune sideways and backwards for the corpse of a small brown bird with matchstick legs clenched up under its breast. But also because I can feel it. "It's lost."
When the cops finally rock up, only an hour and a half after I call them, they are pissy. It's the dust and the wind and the dead boy/girl staring up into the sky as if she's cloud-watching. It's the paperwork. T
he evidence. It's the fact that I'm involved at all.
They send me up to the interrogation room for another two-hour session with the good Inspector Tshabalala. This time she cuts straight to the chase.
"How did you know where to find the body?"