Zoo City

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: ‹no-one›

Date: Sun, 27 March 2011 21:51:59 +0200

To: ‹no-one›

Subject: ‹no 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 Cafe 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. Seance flambe!

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.