Apartheid, Superstrings, and Mordecai Thubana

 

MICHAEL BISHOP

 

 

THE TRANSVAAL, 1988

 

A

N ELEPHANT blossomed in his headlamps. At two-thirty in the morning, on the highveld between Pretoria and the northeastern Transvaal, a doddering bull elephant—which had not been there—suddenly was there; and Gerrit Myburgh, a thirty-eight-year-old banker, knew that his imported cranberry Cadillac was going to hit it.

 

As hard as he could, Myburgh began braking.

 

The Cadillac, hydroplaning on his astonishment, slid into the elephant. Its rusks flashed like scimitars. Glass shattered. A bewildered, trumpeting bleat echoed over the landscape, and so much plastic, chrome, and steel crumpled around Myburgh that he knew the world had ended.

 

Well, fine. He was already in his coffin, the flashiest coffin a success-driven Afrikaner could ever want.

 

* * * *

 

Eventually, Myburgh untangled himself, crawled through a broken window, and got to his feet on the debris-strewn asphalt.

 

It was July, the torso of winter, as clammy-cold as it ever got in this part of the highveld, and his tailored suit was a drafty ruin. His forehead was bleeding, there were bruises on his upper thighs, his left shoe had disappeared. Traffic on this stretch of roadway was seldom heavy, and at this hour his hopes for a quick rescue were laughable.

 

Myburgh turned about, searching for the elephant. “I hope you’re happy!” he shouted in Afrikaans, his words muting themselves in the drizzle. “You’ve turned my car into a pile of goddamned slag!” Even worse, he realized, his insurance assessor would never believe that he had hit… an elephant.

 

What the hell was happening? There weren’t any elephants in this part of South Africa. You had to go to a national park to see them. Out here, where a few bittereinder Boers resisted both state and corporate attempts to buy their land (the government to feed it into black “closer settlements,” industry to turn it into another hideous factory site), wildlife consisted of stray chickens, stray dogs, stray cattle.

 

But he had run into it, an elephant. Surely, it had suffered as much damage as—if not more than—the Eldorado. He had heard it bellow its agony. Still, it had managed to totter away from the accident scene. Even when he made a painful circuit of his Caddy, stooping to search for blood or other spoor, nothing on the paving or in the nearby bush reassured him that what he knew had happened had actually happened.

 

At least it wasn’t pink, Myburgh thought. At least the damned thing wasn’t flying, like Dumbo.

 

The elephant may have been a phantom, but the gash on his head was real. So were his battered thighs, his lacerated jacket, his blood-smeared trousers. He stood like a scarecrow in the center of the road, guarding the wrecked vehicle and peering about for some sign of a farmhouse, a police van, or a besotted Ndebele tramp who could be bribed to help him.

 

He took a monogrammed handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket and touched his brow. This simple act made him flinch, but he held the handkerchief to the wound, determined both to halt the bleeding and to restore some clarity to his thoughts.

 

Should he walk back toward his brother’s farm or on toward the Pretoria suburb in which he had a condominium flat? Onward, of course. Nothing but wintry veld lay behind him, whereas a hike southwestward would carry him into populated areas, white or black, where he could buy or beg assistance.

 

God help me, Myburgh thought, calculating—for a quick glance at the mileage counter on the Eldorado’s caved-in dashboard told him that Pretoria was still eighty miles away. It would take him days to walk home. He felt too weak to start hiking.

 

Holding his handkerchief to his temple, Gerrit Myburgh began to cry. He sat down on the wet pavement and hugged himself as if he were his own lost child.

 

* * * *

 

He heard it before he saw it, a raw chugging from the alley of Boer farmland dividing the eastern boundary of KwaNdebele from the western boundary of Bophuthatswana.

 

It was coming down the road toward him, a blunt-grilled Putco “commuter” bus, one of the armada of state-subsidized motorized argosies that hauled residents of the homelands to and from work in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Witbank, and Middleburg. They ran morning and evening, Myburgh knew, but he was surprised to hear one coming so early. It wasn’t yet three o’clock, and surely no one would be riding at this godforsaken hour. Myburgh himself usually arose at seven-thirty, took a leisurely Continental breakfast, and got to the bank by nine. It was an accident that he was still up tonight, the result of his journey to see Kiewit and of his mulish brother’s mulish disdain for reason. Otherwise, he’d be safe in his bed in Pretoria.

 

Myburgh got up off the road, spread his arms, and began waving his clotted handkerchief. Then, seeing that the bus would have to stop or slow down for the wreck of his Caddy, he realized that maybe he didn’t want to be rescued—not by a bus full of kaffirs on their way to grinding dead-end jobs paying them just enough to get potted in a shebeen and to listen in ale-beclouded sullenness to rabble-rousing ANC shortwave broadcasts from Lusaka, Zambia. No, he didn’t want that at all.

 

But just as it had been too late to brake for the elephant, it was too late to sidestep the bus. Its wan headlamps picked him out of the darkness, and it squealed to an eardrum-puncturing halt a few meters away, then rocked back and forth on its shocks like a melancholy elephant. Its driver remained invisible, hidden by the tocking blade of a lone windshield wiper and the fuzzy glare of the headlamps.

 

All right, then. He’d assert himself. He’d force the pathetic kaffirs to help him.

 

Myburgh limped over to the bus’s door. The bus itself, he saw, was painted a chalky blue. A legend in English on its dented flank read grim boy’s toe. That, Myburgh supposed, was its name—the way wealthy tycoons named their yachts. Whether Grim Boy’s Toe carried a full allotment of passengers, he couldn’t tell, for the bus’s windows were smeared with dried mud and its rear third tailed off into mist and darkness.

 

The hinged passenger door creaked open. Myburgh peered up and in. He saw—in the wash of a single bulb in a crimson globe—that the bus’s driver was a heavyset African with a face etched of ruby shadows. The driver gazed impudently out, as if Myburgh meant less to him than a crippled plowhorse.

 

Myburgh began to regret not jumping into the roadside donga and cowering there until the bus had chugged on by. Its passengers, he suddenly understood, could kill him with impunity, bludgeoning him to a ruddy paste and sticking his body under the collapsed steering column as if he’d died in the accident.

 

“Go find me help,” he said in English, expanding his chest even as he took a half step back. (Afrikaans, his own tongue, wouldn’t do—he didn’t trust it here.)

 

The insolent driver merely stared at him.

 

“Get me help!” Myburgh shouted. “Understand?”

 

At this, the driver’s eyes widened—in astonishment, it seemed, to Myburgh. He leaned toward the door, as if to make sure that his eyes weren’t playing tricks.

 

“Didn’t you hear me?” Myburgh said. “Find me help.”

 

“No can do, nkosi.”

 

“Of course you can. Can’t you see I’ve had an accident? Can’t you see” —blotting his forehead—”I’ve been hurt?”

 

“Nkosi, number 496 has run late three times this week. I can’t afford to run late again. There are men in Tweefontein E and other closer settlements who’d kill for my job.”

 

“Why do you run late? Are you a bad driver?”

 

The driver glanced at Myburgh’s wrecked Caddy. “I do as well as many,” he said. His expression grew conspiratorily earnest. “A blowout one night, sir. Two nights later, a dope-fiend trucker ran me off the road. And last night—with all the unexpected rain, you see—well, we got stuck.”

 

“Look,” Myburgh said, feeling both exposed and ridiculous, “I’m in trouble.”

 

“Yes, and I will help you. But not by going off my route. No, sir. You must climb aboard and ride into Belle Ombre station with the rest of my passengers.”

 

“How long will that take?” Belle Ombre was in the Marabastad neighborhood of Pretoria, once an Indian enclave.

 

“Three hours. No. Two hours, forty-five minutes.”

 

“That’s absurd. You ought to be able to make it in an hour and a half. Two at the most.”

 

The driver laughed, shrugging his bearish shoulders and holding out his hands to indicate the ramshackle condition of number 496. “Not possible, my baas. We have more pickups and a Putco checkoff still to do. Really.”

 

“Don’t you have a two-way?”

 

“No, nkosi. And no landing gear, either.”

 

Myburgh heard laughter—not obnoxious or general laughter, but the weary guffaws of a few riders near enough to overhear.

 

“Take me to the Putco checkoff.” He gritted his teeth against their amusement. “Somebody there will help me.”

 

“Maybe. Not to get your car towed, though. You should go all the way into Pretoria with us.”

 

Myburgh considered. “Very well—let me on.” He climbed aboard and turned to limp down the aisle.

 

The driver put out a hand. “My name is Ernest Kabini, nkosi. Sorry to say so, but you must pay.”

 

“Pay?” Should he also introduce himself, as Kabini had just done? Damned if he’d do it.

 

“Your fare. Everyone must pay, you know. Sixty cents to town, sixty cents back.”

 

“Sixty cents?”

 

Kabini hesitated. “Half a rand, okay? Ten cents off. Putco doesn’t want to screw a fellow down on his luck.”

 

Myburgh dug into his pocket and handed over the fare—the full fare. He was a paying passenger on number 496. He turned again to face the kaffirs with whom he was going to be riding for the next three hours and found himself staring as into an immense shotgun bore that seemed to extend all the way to the Transvaal’s border with Zimbabwe. The faces peering back were devoid of distinctiveness or personality—like a grainy group photograph of skin-headed National Defense Force recruits. A bulb in a green globe threw sickly khaki shadows over the bodies slumped in the bus’s middle rows, while, at the back, a bulb in a yellow globe jaundiced the half-dozen riders napping beneath its pale sheen.

 

If hell had bus service, Myburgh told himself, this is what the inside of one of its buses would look like. He grabbed a seat back for support and silently cursed the inconsiderate elephant that had brought him here.

 

* * * *

 

At this point on its route, Myburgh could have chosen any of a number of seats behind Kabini, but, more angry than grateful, he limped down the center aisle.

 

His wet sock slapped the metal floor. The twelve to fifteen riders inhabiting the bus seemed to shift from one seat to another without getting up and physically moving.

 

Meanwhile, Grim Boy’s Toe leapt into gear and growled around the abstract sculpture of his Eldorado. Myburgh stumbled, caught himself, shakily tottered on.

 

You’ve had a blow to the head, he reminded himself. It’s not so unusual that you should be seeing things.

 

But it was troubling. Why wouldn’t these seat-hopping kaffirs settle down? No, that was wrong. Why wouldn’t his dizziness go away so that he could see things as they really were?

 

He stopped again. The black faces watching him were no longer popping up in different seats with the same annoying frequency. Maybe he was beginning to get a grip on himself. Maybe the world—or this incapsulated portion of it—was finally beginning to come into focus.

 

“Sit here, sir.”

 

He looked. The voice belonged to a slender man in a trenchcoat ridiculously at odds with the filthy woolen cap he was wearing; the coat might have belonged to a movie star, but the cap you could see on any street cleaner or garbage man at work in the city from June through August. This bloke, his thin face almost cadaverous in the dark, scooted over and patted that part of the cracked seat cushion that his skinny bottom had already warmed.

 

An invitation. A friendly invitation.

 

Myburgh spurned it. Unfamiliar people—strangers—didn’t sit next to each other when there were plenty of seats to choose from. It wasn’t racial; it was personal, a way to keep one’s identity intact, a means of securing a helpful modicum of privacy. And yet it wouldn’t do to stupidly insult the man, even if his pigmentation suggested purple spray paint under a sheen of preserving lacquer. Myburgh eased into the seat in front of the African’s, pointedly hugging the aisle.

 

“Excuse me, sir,” said the slender young man, leaning over the seat back as if Kabini had introduced them. “Did you really have an accident?”

 

What colossal cheek. Myburgh reined in his temper. “What do you think, I staged it?”

 

“Possibly.”

 

“Why in God’s name would I do something so stupid—not to say expensive—as that?”

 

“Forgive me,” the man said, placatingly touching Myburgh’s shoulder. “I thought you might be a member of—or, possibly, an advisor to—a Faking Club.”

 

“Faking Club?”

 

“Yes, sir. A few years ago, until caught without my stinker”—his pass, he meant—”and endorsed out, I lived near Cape Town. At the universities there, students staged accidents—bloody ones—to test public awareness of first aid. Faking Clubs.”

 

“I’m not a member of—or an advisor to—any Faking Club. Why, out here, would you even assume that?”

 

“So queer an accident. Your car was smashed, but with no sign of any other banged-up vehicle to have caused such damage.”

 

“I hit an elephant.”

 

The man—to Myburgh’s relief—withdrew his hand, then simply gazed at the banker sidelong. “My name is Mordecai Thubana, sir. Glad to meet you.”

 

Myburgh grunted. But Mordecai Thubana’s gaze was so implacable that he glanced away and began rubbing his thigh as if a pain there had distracted him.

 

“The blow to your head,” Thubana said, nodding at him, “is it bad? Did it make you delirious?”

 

“Who are you to question me?” Myburgh snapped. “Who are you to imply I’m lying?”

 

“Mordecai Thubana, sir. And I’m not meaning to be questioning or implying anything.”

 

“If you don’t mean to, don’t do it.”

 

“No, sir, I won’t. Except, you know, courtesy would hint that maybe you should—forgive me—tell me your name.”

 

“Because you’ve told me yours?”

 

Thubana grinned. He had strong, straight teeth. His grin was almost fetching. “One man, one name.” He leaned nearer. “When I was in Cape Town, I attended university. I’m not just an ignorant construction worker, sir.”

 

Myburgh pursed his lips. His own name would reveal more than he wanted. Grim Boy’s Toe was hardly the nave of a Dutch Reformed Church, and its passengers certainly weren’t Voortrekkers. But why not tell? Did fear or shame restrain him?

 

“My name is Gerrit Myburgh,” he said defiantly. “My family had a huge farm out here once, on a healthy remnant of which my brother Kiewit continues to live. Three Ndebele families—more than twenty people—still work for him.”

 

“Ah,” said Thubana. “But now the government wants it?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“To make the Ndebele ‘homeland’ bigger?”

 

“I suppose.”

 

“And you and your brother are fighting the government’s plans to take your land?”

 

“Kiewit is. I’m not. I think we should sell.”

 

“For the sake of Grand Apartheid?”

 

“Because we’re not likely to get a better offer, and they’ll end up taking it anyway. Kiewit’s a stubborn ass.”

 

“Ah. You argued.”

 

“Would I be out here in the goddamn bundu at such an hour if we hadn’t?” He meant, as they both knew, Would I be on this Putco bus with all you kaffirs if there weren’t a damned good reason?

 

“No, Mr. Myburgh. I guess not.”

 

Conversation lapsed. Myburgh was grateful. He didn’t know why he’d indulged Thubana as far as he had. Under most circumstances, he would have ignored the man or fixed upon him a withering, mind-your-own-business stare. But Thubana’s interest in his plight had seduced him into talking. Weak. Shamefully weak.

 

Myburgh faced front, clutching his own upper arms. Grim Boy’s Toe was a real kidney bouncer, even on asphalt, and now the bus was bumping down a dirt track among enkeldoring trees to another pickup point.

 

His bruises had bruises. During the accident, he’d apparently bitten a chunk of mucus-coated flesh from the inside of his mouth, and now that slimy flap of skin was overlapping his tongue. He bit down on it and swallowed. His facial muscles tightened.

 

Twelve people came aboard at this pickup. All gave him the eye as they bumped down the aisle; all made a point of not sitting next to or across from him. The bus chugged off again. A hubbub of African dialects led Myburgh to suspect that some of these people were talking about him. He refused to turn around. Why give them the satisfaction?

 

* * * *

 

Grim Boy’s Toe made three more stops.

 

At the last one, rows and rows of scrap-wood and corrugated-tin bodoks—shanties—grew like crooked architectural cancers. Smoke from Primus stoves billowed into the sky, mistily visible, while a throat-scalding stench eeled into the bus through window cracks and holes in the floorboard.

 

Although Kabini kept telling the new passengers to move back, move back, several of them bunched at Myburgh’s seat. He realized that he would either have to stand, as two dozen other people were already doing, or scoot over and share his seat with one of the intimidating construction workers or mechanics waiting for him to make room.

 

“Hey, my baas,” said a man in an overcoat, tapping Myburgh’s knee, “you saving that spot for your lady?”

 

“Maybe he’s got a disease,” said someone else.

 

“You may have this seat,” Mordecai Thubana told the man. He came forward and levered Myburgh over against the window with his hip. The man in the overcoat grunted approval and sat down. The logjam of bodies broke. Myburgh watched as several people placed folded newspapers on the floor, dropped down cross-legged, and gave in, almost instantly, to sleep.

 

One man in particular drew Myburgh’s attention, for, although still young, he was as bald as a stone. Moreover, he held in his lap what appeared to be half a rubber volleyball.

 

“Hey, Mpandhlani,” Thubana greeted the bald-headed man. “How goes it?”

 

“No reception,” said Mpandhlani cryptically. “No reception. A relief, Mordecai. I’m almost grateful.” He held the volleyball-half in his lap like a vulcanized begging bowl.

 

The bus jounced off again, through the midnight bush.

 

Although there were now at least ninety passengers, a third of them in the aisle, conversation had ceased; most were dozing or staring numbly into the Transvaal wastes. One man had affixed a large sponge, or rectangle of foam rubber, to the seat back in front of him, lowered his forehead to its padding, and fallen asleep. Perhaps he was also snoring lightly; the bus’s unceasing rattle made it hard to tell.

 

Damn Kiewit, anyway. With just half the money they’d realize from selling Huilbloom (as their great-grandparents had dubbed the family farm), they could emigrate to Australia or Texas and begin life anew, in a place free of the threat of Armageddon.

 

Suddenly, Myburgh noticed that Thubana had taken a book from a coat pocket and begun to read it with a penlight balanced over his ear and aimed downward. Clever. Or semiclever. Thubana probably hoped Myburgh would ask what he was reading. Africans sometimes liked to impress whites with a show of educability, a demonstration of their debatable love of learning.

 

Well, the clap on that. If Thubana was reading something, it was probably ANC or PAC propaganda or a book of trumped-up stories about oppression in the townships or an old copy of Drum, and he’d be damned if he’d rise to the kaffir’s bait. Let him pretend to read all the way to Marabastad.

 

Thubana spoiled this plan by lifting the book off his lap and holding it up so that Myburgh could see its cover—including title and whimsical three-color illustration.

 

SUPERSTRINGS, said the yellow caps above the illustration. And below the title, in more compact upper- and lower-case letters, A Theory of Everything? The book was in English, a smooth-skinned paperback, already visibly creased and battered. Myburgh recoiled from it as if from a contraband AK-47.

 

“Have you read this yet, sir?”

 

“What are superstrings?” Myburgh said. “Ordinary strings with impossible ambitions?” Perhaps this subtle insult would sink into the kaffir’s pretentious brain, stymieing further talk.

 

“No, sir. It’s physics, Mr. Myburgh. Very deep, fundamental physics. It answers deep questions about how the universe is, and why, and what we may expect of it.”

 

“So you’re a physicist, Mr. Thubana?”

 

“No, sir. I’m a—”

 

“Every day, you do physics at the university, writing equations with which to solve colossal mysteries.”

 

“Nowadays, Mr. Myburgh, I’m a roofer. At a housing site west of the city. After number 496, I must catch another bus.”

 

“A roofer?”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

“Then where did you get this book?” Myburgh rapped it with his knuckles. “And what makes you think you can understand it?”

 

“I understand it,” Thubana said mildly. “Under a different set of circumstances, maybe I would be a physicist.”

 

“And if I weren’t an Afrikaner,” Myburgh said, “perhaps I’d be traveling on the next Soviet Mars flight.”

 

Thubana explained that his immediate boss, an Englishman named Godfrey, had given him the book—as well as the upscale trenchcoat— and that he had been reading and thinking hard about superstrings for over a month now.

 

“All right, then,” Myburgh said. “Tell me what you know.”

 

“Superstring theory,” Thubana said, taking Myburgh at his word, “holds that the building blocks of the universe are not atoms, but tiny strings—tiny strings that twitch and twitch.” To illustrate their twitching, Thubana repeatedly crooked a finger.

 

“Why? To what end?” Myburgh asked only because it was more amusing than staring out the window.

 

“I don’t know, exactly. But the twitching generates matter and energy at the submicroscopic Planck scale. It does this throughout the entire cosmos.”

 

These terms and explanations were unintelligible to Myburgh, as hard to untangle, as indigestible, as a platter of cold spaghetti. “What complete rot. You’d do better to have Mr. Godfrey give you books on bricklaying, tilework, vehicle repair. It’s criminal he’s encouraging you in this… this nonsense.”

 

“Because my mind is too dim?”

 

“Because it’s useless, young man. Because it’s castle-in-the-air elitism.”

 

“No, Mr. Myburgh. It isn’t. It’s elegant physics. If it’s open to attack, it’s only on the grounds that experiments haven’t yet been able to back it up. Also, the mathematics of the theory require that one suppose ten rather than four dimensions—nine of space and one of time.”

 

Myburgh snorted. He couldn’t believe that Thubana had fallen under the spell of such stuff.

 

“Listen, sir. Six of the spatial dimensions must be curled up—’compactified,” my book says—into a geometrical object called the ‘Calabi-Yau manifold.” Otherwise, you see, the mathematics of superstring theory, and its ability to make predictions about the world we live in, fall apart.”

 

“You’re giving yourself to utter claptrap, Mr. Thubana. Does it make you feel superior to”—nodding at the other riders on Grim Boy’s Toe— “your sleepy comrades?”

 

Thubana turned so that the penlight over his ear shone directly into Myburgh’s eyes. “It makes me sorry, sir. And—forgive me for saying so— angry. Quite angry.”

 

“At yourself, I hope,” Myburgh muttered, turning his face to the window. Outside, the landscape was graying, quivering like a cloudy aspic in a huge inverted bowl.

 

Thubana, to Myburgh’s surprise, dropped one hand to his knee, his grip like a lobster’s claw.

 

“Let go, kaffir,” Myburgh whispered. He took the penlight from behind Thubana’s ear and dropped it to the floor.

 

Thubana released him and picked up the penlight; then he leaned into Myburgh as if they were old chums at a sporting event. But when he turned the penlight on again, no beam shot forth. “That’s all right,” Thubana hissed. “Darkness is exactly what you want for us, isn’t it?”

 

“Leave me alone.”

 

“Okay. No need for light. I’m not an unintelligent man, and I remember my reading. All of it.”

 

He’s crazy, thought Myburgh. A woolhead twice over.

 

“A superstring expert at Princeton in America—a theorist named Edward Witten—said something profound, sir. He said, “To have the energy to face a difficult problem day after day, one needs the attitude that victory is just around the corner. But probably it isn’t.” Light isn’t necessary to remember that. I can remember it just as well in the dark.”

 

“Leave me alone.” Myburgh hated the weakness in his voice. It sounded as if he were whistling in Thubana’s shadow.

 

“ “The attitude,” “ Thubana grimly repeated, “ ‘that victory is just around the corner. But probably it isn’t.” “

 

* * * *

 

Suddenly, from the vicinity of the center aisle, a barrage of martial music poured forth. This music—drums, bells, trumpets—was so loud that it easily overpowered the continuous rattling of the Putco vehicle. Everyone noticed. Men and women, a moment past slumped and dozing, straightened and looked around: the man who’d rested his forehead on a sponge, the newspaper yogis, a woman who’d scrolled her turtleneck up over her eyes. Everyone—every dead-to-the-world-passenger—was instantly resurrected.

 

Then the music ceased, and a nasal English-speaking voice, made both tinny and scratchy by atmospheric conditions, said, “This is Radio Freedom, broadcasting to our comrades in Azania from a site we are not at liberty to divulge.”

 

“Mpandhlani!” cried someone far to the rear. “Mpandhlani, for God’s sake, close your mouth!”

 

“Tonight, we address the issue of education. The policies of the apartheid regime not only deny our people their inalienable rights but also access to universal education. Therefore, hundreds of thousands have left the country just to seek education abroad. The Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, in order to cater for the students and refugees, established the department of education and manpower training so that—”

 

“Your hat, Mpandhlani! Put it on!”

 

“Close your mouth! Have pity! Close it!”

 

Myburgh was at a loss. First the music, then the pontifical radio voice, and finally the shouts of various passengers that the man called Mpandhlani do something—shouts that seemed to have no relation to these other events. Looking past Thubana, Myburgh saw that the bald passenger, crumpled in the lotus position not far from Thubana’s aisle-side knee, had his eyes closed and his mouth wide open. Nothing bizarre about that. The poor fellow was trying to sleep. In fact, he was succeeding in the effort, the only wretch aboard number 496 managing to do so.

 

And then Myburgh realized that the voice of the announcer on Radio Freedom was issuing from the toothless cavity of Mpandhlani’s mouth: “… conscious rejection of the indoctrinated inferiority complex that sparked the Soweto uprising of 1976 when our students said no to the imposition of the oppressor’s language. This fight developed into a rejection of an entire system—’Bantu education’—deliberately designed to keep our people in perpetual subjugation. Therefore, we must enforce a perpetual rainy Monday on every school using these ‘techniques of control’ and make ourselves—”

 

Thubana leaned out into the aisle, put his fist under the bald man’s chin, and gently closed his mouth. The harangue from the PAC spokesman continued, but mutedly, as if leaking out of Mpandhlani’s earholes and nostrils. Mpandhlani woke up and looked at Thubana in groggy bewilderment.

 

“What’s happening, Mordecai?” His words bled into the report on Radio Freedom like a spooky sort of overdubbing. “Oh no,” he said, pressing the palms of his hands to his temples. He glanced apologetically at several of the other passengers. “Forgive me, my friends. Please, everybody, forgive.”

 

“It’s okay,” Thubana told him. “Put on your cap.” He took the volleyball-half from Mpandhlani and crammed it down on his naked and— Myburgh finally saw—grotesquely stitched-up pate. There was silence again, a vacuum quickly filled by the incessant rattling of Grim Boy’s Toe. Riders fore and aft relapsed into self-protective comas, as if, having survived a crisis, they needed to recuperate. Myburgh felt even more isolated than before.

 

“Mr. Thubana, I don’t understand.”

 

“Perhaps your mind is too dim. —Forgive me. It’s just that Mpandhlani—his real name is Winston Skosana—has a metal plate in his head. Sometimes, he picks up radio broadcasts, usually illegal ones from Zambia or Botswana. This is dangerous, especially when he’s on a loading platform at the rusks factory. That volleyball—he found it in a KwaNdebele midden—saves him from embarrassment. A matter of physics.”

 

“Dunderheaded physics, surely.”

 

“No, Mr. Myburgh. It works.”

 

“It’s nonsense. It’s impossible.”

 

Thubana shrugged. He nodded at Mpandhlani—Winston Skosana— who’d already dozed off again.

 

“Why does he have a plate in his skull?”

 

“He was arrested by security police ten years ago and detained without charge for thirty-two months. Then, one day, while taking him from his cell to an interrogation room, his keepers shoved him down a flight of metal stairs. Suicide attempt, said the security police. But Winston didn’t die, and some determined ladies from the Black Sash had him released and operated on.”

 

“He was a terrorist, a guerrilla-in-training.”

 

“I suppose.” Thubana appeared bored by the possibility. “He could have been a poet.”

 

“Or a physicist?”

 

Thubana turned back to Myburgh as if he’d reopened an important area of discussion—but, astonishingly, he said, “Mpandhlani once told me that we have no word in our Nguni dialect for orgy.”

 

“I beg your pardon.”

 

“African languages are not made to talk about Western mores or contemporary physics. Bantu education—carried out in our tribal tongues—has made it very hard for us to understand the discoveries of men like Einstein and Planck.”

 

“What has that to do with not having a word for orgy?”

 

“If the Ndebele, the Sotho, the Zulu, and others have no word for this human activity, how may we—speaking only Afrikaans and our tribal tongues—grasp interactions among submicroscopic particles called fermions, hadrons, baryons, quarks? Impossible!”

 

“Forget it,” Myburgh said. “It’s all a lot of horsefeathers.”

 

“And now they’re saying that these tiny points aren’t points at all, but the ends of very small strings—closed strings, probably. Only by viewing them as strings may we construct a workable Theory of Everything.”

 

“Theory of Everything?” Thubana’s talk was all over the map, an obstacle course of jargon.

 

“A series of formulae bringing together the four major forces of the universe.”

 

“Right. Given ten dimensions, six of them ‘curled up.” Study architecture, man. Study mechanical drawing.”

 

Thubana thumbed through his book. “Gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force, the strong force. Until this theory, Mr. Myburgh, no one was able to prove that these four forces were all separate aspects of one underlying force. That’s important. We must prove it. I want to help prove it.”

 

Myburgh found that the passion with which Thubana was speaking had touched him. “Not everyone can aid in such discoveries. I can’t, for instance. But I won’t lose sleep over it. I’ve other interests, other talents.”

 

It seemed a kind of hubris, Thubana’s megalomaniacal desire to put himself in the company of Einstein and Planck. Laughable. But Myburgh couldn’t laugh. Perhaps—given Thubana’s passion—all this superstring business wasn’t mere crackpottery.

 

Thubana said, “Gravity is the most powerful force. It works at a distance even on the macroscopic scale, and it has always been the problem. Various quantum theories have unified the other three forces, the ones working at subatomic levels, but gravity—damn it most emphatically!— always knocks each potential new TOE, Theory of Everything, out of symmetry. It ruins everything.”

 

“I’m sorry.” This was all that Myburgh could think to say, but he meant it. (God, his eyelids were growing heavy.)

 

Then the African changed tacks. “You whites, Mr. Myburgh, are gravity. Blacks, Asians, and our so-called Coloreds are like the other three forces: magnetism, weak force, strong force. In these cases, though, it doesn’t matter much which group I assign to which fundamental force.”

 

Now he’s talking trash, Myburgh thought, fighting drowsiness. Has the weird engine of his brain thrown a rod?

 

Thubana’s voice droned on, almost like a lullaby:

 

“Africans, Asians, Coloreds—it’s easy to unify those groups, just as one may construct theories, equations without anomalies, that bring together every major physical force except gravity. Gravity’s the hangup. Meanwhile, societally speaking, whites are the biggest obstacle to harmony among peoples. You are gravity, Gerrit Myburgh. You pull everything down. You monkey-wrench the equations.”

 

Before Myburgh could protest this slander, many of the bus’s passengers began to second Thubana’s remarks.

 

Incongruously, they did so by singing, a capella, in syncopated rhythms that reminded Myburgh of ancient tribal chants and modern street-corner sing-offs in Soweto, Nigel, Alexandro, and other black townships:

 

Whites are gravity—

They bring us down.

Down, down, down.

Down, down, down.

 

Whites are gravity—

They bring us down.

Down,             down,             down.

Down,

down,

down.

 

The purity of the laborers’ voices—the spine-tingling richness of their harmonies—gave Myburgh a chill. But their voices didn’t entirely mask the bankruptcy of the ideas set forth in their stupid little song; and Myburgh, back from the trance into which Thubana’s monologue had lulled him, turned around and shouted above the bus’s maddening rattle:

 

“Whites aren’t gravity! We don’t bring you down!”

 

“You act on us over great distances,” said Thubana. “You cause us to travel miles. Light-years, so to speak.”

 

“Are you puppets, then?” Myburgh asked. “Is that how you see yourselves?”

 

“Down, down, down,” chanted a host of passengers.

 

“Shut up!” Myburgh cried. “SHUT UP!”

 

As gently as possible, Thubana pulled Myburgh back down to his seat. “Everyone on this bus—every soul on our planet—is a puppet of super-strings, Mr. Myburgh, for superstrings is a TOE, a Theory of Everything. It explains—it will explain—the physical universe to all its living and breathing puppets.”

 

“There’s no such thing as your Theory of Everything!” Myburgh replied, shaking off Thubana’s hand. “Theories, perhaps. A dozen different theories—but not just one comprehensive Theory that can explain everything!”

 

“Tell him to shut up,” a hefty woman in a checkered doek told Thubana. “He’s giving me the nerves.”

 

“Do you want to be Kentuckied?” Thubana whispered. “You know, necklaced? Is that what you wish?”

 

Of course he didn’t. What life-loving person in his right mind would want a used tire lowered over his head, doused in petrol, and cruelly set aflame? Fear rippled in Myburgh’s bowels like a school of rapidly finning minnows.

 

But, bracing himself, he repeated that no one set of equations—no matter how elegant—could offer insight into every interaction in the cosmos.

 

“Of course not,” said Thubana, patting his knee.

 

Suspicious, Myburgh stared at him.

 

“Now please apply that principle to the TOE by which the South African state tries to order relations among people.”

 

It suddenly occurred to Myburgh that Grim Boy’s Toe was really Grim Boy’s TOE.

 

Putco bus number 496 carried a monicker that wickedly mocked both the race-obsessed Afrikaners who had devised apartheid and the grim policy itself, a policy on which his ancestors had ingeniously jury-rigged a system of taboos, customs, mores, and laws unlike those anywhere else on the planet.

 

Damn these kaffirs. Damn them all to the most painful Ndebele hell they can imagine.

 

* * * *

 

 

“How much longer, Kabini?” Myburgh shouted at the bearish Putco driver.

 

“Three hours,” called Ernest Kabini, over his shoulder. “No. Two hours, forty-five minutes.”

 

“Don’t be impertinent.” Coon, he wanted to add.

 

“Sorry, nkosi.”

 

Thubana clasped Myburgh’s wrist, twisting it around to reveal his watch. Myburgh was dumbfounded to see that its stark crimson readout —which winked as if adequately powered—hadn’t advanced beyond… 3:15 a.m.

 

Christ Almighty. Was he dreaming?

 

Then he gazed past the laborers in front of him and saw through the streaked windscreen another Putco bus swerve into 496’s headlamps. Immediately, hands braced on the seat back, knuckles whitening, he was on his feet again, shouting at Kabini to hit the brakes before they were all seriously injured…

 

“Shadow matter,” Thubana said, trying to pull him back down by his coat. “Just like us. It can’t hurt you, Mr. Myburgh, please believe me.”

 

Shadow matter?

 

What nonsense! What high-flown, self-deluding claptrap, just like everything else Thubana had told him.

 

Number 496, as Kabini futilely braked, collided with the other vehicle, striking it resoundingly. Windscreens shattered. Engines anviled together. Bodies flew past one another like players in an avant-garde production of Peter Pan. Indeed, Thubana rocketed past Myburgh in the gemmy chaos, clutching his copy of Superstrings and smiling as if to say, None of this matters; believe me, sir, not a jot of this means anything at all.

 

You’re lying, Myburgh’s dream self thought. You’re lying.

 

And he was hurled through the broken windscreen of Grim Boy’s Toe into an endless, entrapping darkness.

 

* * * *

 

When Putco bus 496 pulled up behind the stalled Cadillac (which was blocking the way to Pretoria), driver Ernest Kabini called back to one of his passengers, Mordecai Thubana.

 

Thubana, shaking himself awake, accompanied Kabini off the bus, and they offered their aid to the policemen in glistening boots and macintoshes walking around the shiny cranberry-colored car.

 

“Go on about your business,” one of the policemen told them in Afrikaans. “There’s nothing you can do.”

 

Thubana peered in the Caddy’s window at the man slumped behind its steering wheel: a sandy-haired bloke nearing forty. It looked, tonight, as if he would never get there.

 

Said Kabini, “What happened, my baas?”

 

“A heart attack, we think,” the policeman said. He nodded at the road. “Those skid marks show he knew what was happening and fought the car to keep it from going into the ditch. Pretty cool, for a fellow staring disaster in the eye.”

 

Yes, thought Thubana. He saved his deliciously lekker car, but he also gave himself a chance—a thin one—to survive the terrible crack-up threatening everything he valued.

 

The second policeman, his ruddy face shining from his rain hood like a lacquered gargoyle’s, approached the Africans. “Situation’s under control,” he growled. “Get out of here.”

 

Thubana started to reply, but Kabini shook his head.

 

The two men reboarded number 496, and Kabini wrestled it around the dead man’s car on the weather-gouged road.

 

Finding his seat taken by another man, Thubana slumped to the floor with a book and a penlight. Beside him, a fellow nicknamed Mpandhlani asked him if he thought the dead driver of the expensive American car had gone to heaven or hell. With his steel plate and his unenviable ability to pick up out-of-country radio broadcasts, Mpandhlani often seemed more like a disembodied spirit than any visiting angel would have. In fact, he sometimes gave Thubana the creeps.

 

“Why do you ask?”

 

“Because I feel like three people got on when you and Kabini came back.”

 

“Really?”

 

“Yes. Someone else is riding with us, Mordecai.”

 

“Then it’s cut-and-dried. The dead man is shadow matter, like you and me and all these others.” He nodded at the fatigued bodies all around them. “Get it?”

 

“Sure,” said Mpandhlani “Shadow matter.”

 

“Down, down, down,” sang many of their fellow riders. “Down, down, down.”

 

It was true of all of them, Thubana thought, but the longer the dead man stayed aboard, the more likely he was to reach Belle Ombre station in the company of his countrymen. The more likely he was to see that the universe’s four major forces needed to be unified, tied up with super-strings, and rendered beautiful forever by a TOE equation with no anomalies. The more likely he was to find his own substance again.

 

Meanwhile, Thubana, his compatriots, and the heartsore ghost of Gerrit Myburgh jounced together across the highveld. And it seemed to Thubana, glancing out the mud-streaked windows, that the eastern sky was beginning to redden…

 

* * * *

 

“No!” Myburgh shouted.

 

The shout jerked him awake. He was sitting next to Mordecai Thubana on the bus called Grim Boy’s Toe. Although the bus had not wrecked, it was no longer moving. It was parked on a muddy turnout in the middle of nowhere. Glancing down, Myburgh saw that Thubana had draped his trenchcoat, lined with synthetic fur, over Myburgh’s chest and knees.

 

“Welcome back, Mr. Myburgh. You had a nice nap?”

 

“No. I don’t think so.”

 

“But you slept. You nodded off while I was trying to explain to you how whites are like gravity.”

 

“I dreamed we had an accident.”

 

“You had an accident—earlier. In your lovely, lekker car, you hit an elephant.”

 

Myburgh blinked. That collision had happened. This latest one—running crash! into another Putco bus—had not. Odd. Very odd. A conundrum inside an enigma.

 

“I dreamed other things, too.”

 

“Good dreams?”

 

Myburgh started. “Why are we stopped?”

 

“Never mind that. Tell me what you dreamed.”

 

“For one thing, I’d… died. Heart attack. In my car. But somehow I was you in my dream, Mr. Thubana, and I looked into the window of my car to see me lying in it dead. Then I got on the bus with you and Kabini again. I was a ghost. I was dead, but at the same time I was you seeing me dead and seeing my ghost here on Grim Boy’s Toe, just another passenger.”

 

“Ah,” Thubana said. “Fascinating. You being me and you being your own ghost at the same time.”

 

Myburgh shot Thubana a pleading look. How to tell him that he had taken a weird sort of comfort from hearing Thubana’s comrades mock him with their chant? Even from seeing a dream picture of himself in his car, where death had relieved him of both responsibility and culpability? Such things were unsayable.

 

Myburgh looked down. “You gave me your coat.”

 

“Of course. Your suit’s all torn. And I have a sweater.” He did: an ugly, ribbed, reddish-brown sweater with more pills than a discount pharmacy.

 

Myburgh tried to remove the coat and thrust it back at Thubana, but Thubana held it to him with a hard, heavy-veined hand. “Keep it, Mr. Myburgh. Shortly, I fear, you will need it even more than you do now.”

 

What was going on? Myburgh glanced around. Other riders were peering uneasily into the relentless drizzle. Kabini wasn’t in his driver’s cage. Further, some sort of armor-clad paddy wagon had parked in front of the bus, blocking its way. Africans called such vans “nylons,” because of the mesh in their windows. Several men—Myburgh couldn’t tell how many— stalked the asphalt and the boggish shoulder. A confusion of moving silhouettes.

 

“The police?”

 

“From BOSS,” Thubana said. The Bureau of State Security, he meant. Ordinarily, Myburgh would have felt—what?—a frisson of ambiguous pride thinking on these dedicated state functionaries, but this morning, right now, he experienced their presence as all the others on Grim Boy’s Toe must have—as an ominous interruption, a clamp slowly tightening on the heart. But why? These were men who could help him. Myburgh rapped on his window.

 

“In here!” he called in Afrikaans. “I’m in here!”

 

“They’re not looking for you,” Thubana said. “Best not to call attention to yourself.”

 

“That’s crazy. I have to talk to them.” Hindered by the seat back in front of him and Thubana’s unyielding presence to his left, he tried to stand.

 

“It will do no good, Mr. Myburgh.”

 

“Nonsense. I’ll tell them about my accident. They’ll see that I get home.” At last, he had allies again. But Thubana would not budge; the only way to reach the aisle would be to shove past him—a distasteful, maybe even a dangerous, option to pursue.

 

* * * *

 

A plainclothes security police agent in a trenchcoat similar to Thubana’s, and a dove-gray fedora, stepped up into the bus. Facing the passengers, he spoke in Afrikaans in a high-pitched voice that unexpectedly conveyed an intimidating authority: “Everyone off the bus! And be orderly about it!”

 

“Who are you?” said the woman in the checkered head scarf. She spoke in English.

 

“Major Henning Jeppe,” the man said. And again in Afrikaans, “Off the bus, please. Step quickly.”

 

Myburgh pulled himself up and said, “Gerrit Myburgh here. I’ve had an accident, Major Jeppe. Please help me.”

 

But Jeppe had already gone back down the steps into the night, and the passengers on 496, cursing and grumbling, rose from their seats or their newsprint mats and began shuffling toward the front of the bus. Thubana also rose. He took Myburgh by the arm (not so much patronizingly as custodially, as if Myburgh were an expensive polo horse belonging to a doting employer) and introduced him into the sluggish stream of bodies. Well, so be it. The sooner he got outside and reported his accident, the sooner he could forsake the company of these cattlelike Africans and go back to the steady and uneventful life he’d built for himself at the financial institution called Jacobus & Roux.

 

On the desolate bundu’s edge (Myburgh’s digital now read 4:38, about two hours till sunup), he heard Kabini begging a uniformed policeman not to detain his bus:

 

“It will be my neck. I’m late as it is. The weather—you see what it’s like. Don’t be so cruel, nkosi.”

 

The policeman muttered something unintelligible, shoved Kabini around the bonnet of the bus, and disappeared with him behind the scattershot parade of the passengers. Myburgh began searching for Jeppe or some other member of State Security upon whom to dump his story, but all the white policemen had moved to the edges of the shadowy field into which they were herding everyone, depriving him of any chance to make his case. Thubana, settling his coat on Myburgh’s shoulders from behind, helped him step over muddy earth toward a stubble-spiked piece of ground so exposed and barren that it stank of its own infertile clay.

 

“Hullo! My name is Gerrit Myburgh! I’m here by mistake!” In dry weather, his cry would have echoed resoundingly; this morning, it had no more impact on the indifferent Transvaal than a muffled cough.

 

“Shhhhh,” Thubana said, “Save your breath.”

 

Soon, all ninety passengers had shaped three sides of a square in the field beyond the bus. The fourth edge was the bus itself. Major Henning Jeppe reappeared from behind Grim Boy’s Toe, where he and two or three policemen in rainslicks had been pumping Kabini for information. To speak to the detained, Jeppe stood in front of 496’s tall, inward-pleated door.

 

“Most of you are honest workers,” he said in his stentorian squeak. “But, this morning, at least one terrorist-traitor has ridden from KwaNdebele with you. If the law-abiding residents of your homeland help us identify this person or persons, we will let you reboard and go on to your jobs.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, as if his head ached.

 

Myburgh began waving an arm. “Major Jeppe! Major Jeppe!”

 

Jeppe ignored him. “If you refuse to help, if you stay silent in the misguided belief that you are observing a higher patriotism, we will detain you here until you piss yourselves or your bladders burst. One or the other. Understand?”

 

“Gaan kak in die mielies!” (Go shit in the corn) shouted a squat male passenger only a meter or two from Jeppe.

 

Myburgh was stunned by the black’s impertinence. What it would bring him, after all, was immediate notice and swifter punishment. In fact, two policemen in macintoshes rushed into the field, seized the man, and chivvied him back aboard the bus with their sjamboks and a series of hammerlike blows between the shoulder blades. A moment later, the man was bellowing inside 496’s tin shell, begging to be returned to his people in the field. In the rising twilight, his cries produced demoralizing echoes.

 

“Fool,” murmured Thubana, shaking his head.

 

“Major Jeppe, I don’t belong here!” Myburgh shouted. He wanted to walk manfully up to the major, but Thubana, sensing this intent, locked an arm through his elbow. “Damn you. Let go.”

 

One of the bus’s windows slid down: Kmrrrack! A policeman leaned out. “This isn’t the man, sir. We now know our terrorist is someone called Mpandhlani.”

 

Myburgh looked three people to his right and saw Mpandhlani, a raw-boned figure with a face like an inoffensive baboon’s, staring at the ground. Actually, his nose was pointing earthward, but his eyes seemed to be rolled back in his head, contemplating a dimension where a person could write poetry unmolested. He was wearing his volleyball cap, which made him look like an escapee from either an insane asylum or a circus train.

 

“Christ,” said Thubana.

 

“Aren’t you folks lucky?” Jeppe said, walking into the field in his new boots, unmindful of the mud. “One of you has already come to our assistance. Good. Excellent.” Abruptly, he turned back to the bus. “What was that name, Wessels?”

 

“Mpandhlani, sir. It’s a nickname. It means Baldhead.”

 

“Thank you, Wessels.” Jeppe did as neat a military pivot as he could manage on the sloppy ground, then strode toward the detainees in Myburgh’s crooked line. “Baldhead,” he murmured. “Baldhead.”

 

“Psssst, Winston,” Thubana said, softly hissing.

 

A woman beside Mpandhlani nudged him, and he looked at Thubana through glazed, beyond-the-pale eyes.

 

“Keep your cap on, Winston,” Thubana said. “Keep it on.”

 

Myburgh straightened his arm, breaking free of Thubana’s elbow lock. ‘Here he is, Major Jeppe! The terrorist you want is right here!” Myburgh stepped out of the line of detainees, leveled an accusing finger at Mpandhlani, and briefly held this stance as if posing for a new statue at the Voortrekker Monument.

 

“Bring that man out of the bus, Wessels,” Jeppe called over his shoulder. “He’ll point us to the filthy bugger.”

 

What the hell? Myburgh glanced at Jeppe, then at the policemen strong-arming the informant off Grim Boy’s Toe, and then at Thubana throwing him a stare of such singeing, blast-furnace hate that his nape hairs crackled.

 

But Jeppe… was he deaf? Was he blind?

 

One of those who had informed on Mpandhlani (an African, thought Myburgh, not me) had a rugger’s body and a flat-cheeked face with a pair of big, liquid eyes. Jeppe’s policemen dragged him along each line of detainees until, head down, he stopped in front of Winston Skosana and stood there incriminatingly shamefaced.

 

“Ephraim,” Thubana said. “You shit.”

 

“They already knew,” Ephraim said. “Your friend”—nodding at Myburgh “—just fingered him.”

 

“No, he didn’t,” Thubana said. “He’s nothing to his own people this morning. Nothing, Ephraim. He could strip naked in front of these snakes, man. They’d never notice.”

 

“In any case,” Ephraim said, “I wasn’t the only one who—”

 

“Watch that talk,” said Wessels, angry and puzzled. He slapped Thubana across his lips: a crisp, open-handed blow.

 

Myburgh turned around. Jeppe, Wessels, Wessels’s partner, and the man named Ephraim were all near enough to touch—as, of course, was Thubana. But Myburgh suddenly understood that he was a ghost to the Afrikaners: a nonentity, a person-shaped void. Those he’d expected to rescue him—fellow whites—could neither see nor hear him, while the blacks—Kabini, Mpandhlani, Ephraim, and so on—had no more interest in him than he had in them. The exception to this judgment, at least until he’d tried to betray Skosana, was Mordecai Thubana, who had given him his coat.

 

Why should I be ashamed? I’m being a good citizen, aren’t I? Standing up for stability and order?

 

Myburgh went to Jeppe and shouted into his pinched, bloodless face: “I’ve had an accident! My name’s Gerrit Myburgh. If you want proof, ring up my brother Kiewit—Kiewit Myburgh—on the farm called Huilbloom! He’ll vouch for me!”

 

Jeppe blinked. He recoiled imperceptibly. That was all. It was as if he’d suffered a mild pang of heartburn or caught a faint whiff of sewage from a settlement upwind. Then he turned about and piercingly commanded all the hangdog laborers from KwaNdebele to reboard their bus. He dispatched Wessels’s partner to assist in overseeing the boarding, then approached Mpandhlani with his hands jammed Humphrey Bogart-style in the pockets of his trenchcoat. All Myburgh could do was skip aside. Then, as 496’s riders straggled bemusedly back to the bus at the urging of Jeppe’s henchmen, Jeppe eyed Mpandhlani with a rote and clinical ill will.

 

Over his shoulder, he said, “Don’t let the bus go until we’ve questioned this gentleman.”

 

Myburgh heard Kabini, the driver, cry, “Please, nkosi, you’ve got your man! Let me finish my route!” This plea was followed by a thump, an outraged yell, and the sounds of argument as the police goosed Kabini up the steps to his driver’s cage. Myburgh could see only kaleidoscope pieces of their scuffle through the bobbing heads and shoulders of the people stumping back to Grim Boy’s Toe.

 

Thubana was not among their number. He stood out in the field with Mpandhlani, Major Jeppe, and the pumpkin-headed cop whom Jeppe called Wessels. Myburgh stood with them, of course, but he seemed not to count, having even less impact on the events now unraveling than would a beside-the-point memory or an unheard song. Should he go back to 496 with the others, strike out on foot for Pretoria, or stand here like an undressed department-store mannequin, humiliated and useless?

 

Jeppe took note of Thubana. “Go back to the bus, kaffir,” he said, abandoning all pretense at courtesy.

 

“If Winston’s a terrorist, I’m a terrorist, Major.”

 

“Then you are,” Myburgh said. “You told me Mpandhlani was held for almost three years for terrorist activity.”

 

Simultaneously, Jeppe said, “Very well. I believe you. Stay here with your bloody accomplice.”

 

Thubana replied to Myburgh: “I told you I supposed he’d been a guerrilla. Nothing more.”

 

“Guerrilla, terrorist—it’s all the same to us,” Jeppe said, squinting perplexedly at Thubana. He turned to Wessels. “Aren’t we lucky this fellow’s so talkative, though.”

 

“Yes, sir.” Wessels had three or four chins. Even in the mud, he seemed to be bouncing lightly on his toes, minutely jiggling his chins in anticipation of the fun he was soon going to be having at the two Africans’ expense.

 

“But no more out of you until we’ve talked to Mister Baldhead,” Jeppe told Thubana. “Understand?”

 

Thubana merely stared at the major.

 

Myburgh lifted his arms in exasperated disbelief, dropped them to his sides again. He was invisible to the very authority to whom he should be is lumpishly self-evident as a marshmallow in a mug of cocoa. And his words were as inaudible to Jeppe and Wessels as the high-pitched piping of certain kinds of dog whistles. Suddenly, he found himself—as he had been on the road right after that elephant demolished his Caddy—on the verge of tears.

 

Four men in an open field on a damp morning. From nowhere, it seemed, the fancy came to Myburgh that if only they had a folding table and chairs, they could sit down and play a few hands of bridge or canasta or hearts. Cards were plasticized, after all—they didn’t usually go soggy on you. He and the others could take partners and enjoy themselves. So what if it wasn’t quite cockcrow and he was missing a shoe… ?

 

Jeppe ended this absurd reverie by stepping up to Mpandhlani, his eyes level with Mpandhlani’s lips, and saying, “Take off that stupid cap, kaffir. When in the presence of a state official, you show respect.”

 

“We’re outdoors,” Myburgh blurted. “What the devil difference does it make, Major Jeppe?”

 

Mpandhlani’s spirit seemed to have left his body. It had flown away to a thatched Ndebele house with freehand-painted fences and exterior murals, frescoes of wild geometric designs in mint green, lemon yellow, concrete blue. Or that was what Mpandhlani’s fallen lower lip and fish-eyed gaze suggested to Myburgh, who thought the man looked catatonic, as if the mere arrival of the security police had irreversibly traumatized him. He was taking refuge in memory, in a fitful, private idyll of childhood.

 

“Take off your cap!”

 

“Leave him alone,” Thubana told Jeppe.

 

“Shut up!” Wessels said, and, wincing, he struck Thubana with his rhinoceros-hide whip.

 

Up, involuntarily, went Myburgh’s arms as he flinched away from the unexpected blow. When he looked again, a raw, triangular gash on Thubana’s cheek had begun busily leaking scarlet.

 

Mpandhlani’s spirit flew back from his boyhood home (probably only a few kilometers from the Myburgh family farm) and reanimated his upright corpse: He took off his cap.

 

Jeppe seized it from him, examined it with distaste (for, yes, it stank of both rubber and man sweat), then hurled it into the twilight with a contemptuous flip. The volleyball-half whistled through the air and landed wetly, a sound like two hippopotamuses kissing. Jeppe, noticing Mpandhlani’s naked, saddle-stitched pate, gave a squeaky guffaw. Perhaps his laugh embarrassed him, for he cut it off immediately.

 

“My,” he said. “What an ostrich egg. I’ll bet old Christiaan Wessels here would be glad to scramble it for you.”

 

Now Mpandhlani’s eyes were at least semialert. He looked at Jeppe, at Wessels, at Thubana, at Myburgh. It seemed to Myburgh that he started to speak. But, in fact, what came out of his mouth was a staticky tirade:

 

“… our express purpose to kill more and more South African security forces, especially the Boers, because unless whites are made to feel unsafe, and until they too are killed, they will yet feel safe to go on killing the Africans. And, in fact, although some whites are among the security forces killed by the Azanian People’s Liberation Army, time has almost come when—”

 

“Shut up, you bloody kaffir!” Jeppe cried.

 

“—for every African killed by the racist security forces, a white person must be killed. One racist, one bullet! Phambili Nomzabalazo Wabantu!”

 

At that moment, Mpandhlani stopped broadcasting propaganda and began transmitting a medley of pompous marches. Jeppe and Wessels appeared nonplussed, uncomprehending. But Jeppe seized Mpandhlani by the arms, pulled him to him, and then brutally shoved him toward the roadway. Mpandhlani bent double, clutching his head as if to dam the symphonic battle hymns spilling out.

 

Headlamps and flashlights reflected off the windshield of Grim Boy’s Toe like strobes in a Joburg nightclub. Confusion reigned. Myburgh literally had no idea where, or to whom, to turn.

 

“Take this walking radio station to the van, Wessels. Get the filthy bugger out of my hearing.”

 

“Me, too,” Thubana said.

 

Jeppe nodded. “Of course. You, too.” He swept his hand after Wessels and Mpandhlani, a command and a dismissal.

 

“What about me?” Myburgh asked Thubana. “What am I supposed to do?”

 

“Go find Winston’s cap.”

 

“His cap?”

 

“I beg your pardon,” said Jeppe, glaring at Thubana.

 

“Sure. Otherwise, the broadcasts he’s picking up will drive us crazy before we reach security police headquarters.”

 

Myburgh hobbled deeper into the field, trying to find the spot where their comrade’s volleyball cap had made its obscene-sounding, sucking touchdown.

 

“Hurry!” Thubana yelled after him. “Or we may go off and leave you, Mr. Myburgh!”

 

“Shut up!” Jeppe said. He twisted Thubana’s arm, chivying the much taller man after Wessels. He appeared to believe that Thubana was playing mind games with him, maybe even communicating by means of code words and gestures with a squad of guerrillas farther out in the bundu. In fact, Jeppe was royally spooked. Myburgh would have sympathized with him more if his own predicament had not been so outré and ego-crippling. No one could feel as isolated as he did.

 

By what seemed pure luck, he found Mpandhlani’s volleyball cap, pried it out of the mud, then stumbled back to the roadway to the bakkie—the nylon—into which Wessels and two more security agents were herding Mpandhlani and Thubana.

 

Kabini, sporting a badly swollen eye, waved at Myburgh from his driver’s cage on the Putco bus. Although Myburgh thought seriously about boarding 496 again, he decided that, being invisible to the Afrikaners, he’d do better sticking with Thubana, who, however mad, had at least some small insight into the clunkily ratcheting gears of this nightmare.

 

So Myburgh leapt into the BOSS van just as Wessels was pushing its doors to. The hem of Thubana’s coat got caught in the closing doors. Myburgh yanked the hem free and toppled backward. Wessels, cursing, slammed the doors a second time, harder, so hard that the metal walls and loadbed of the bakkie’s holding cell vibrated like fettered gongs.

 

Mpandhlani and Thubana sat on narrow benches on either side of this four-wheeled cell.

 

“Are you all right, Mr. Myburgh?” Thubana said.

 

“No,” Myburgh said. “Of course I’m not.”

 

For added to the trauma of his selective invisibility was the fact that he had lost a stocking: His muddy left foot ached with the pitiless July cold.

 

* * * *

 

Wessels, whom Thubana ridiculed in Afrikaans as Pampoenkop— Pumpkinhead—had taken Mpandhlani’s coat, leaving his upper body clothed only in a threadbare T-shirt. Meanwhile, Mpandhlani’s steel plate was broadcasting, even inside the nylon, an ANC report on forced removals to impoverished Bantustans. Their little cell buzzed with the transmission, a crazily garbled mix of news, exhortation, and music.

 

“Give him his cap,” Thubana said, his naked hand on the sjambok cut on his cheek.

 

“Gladly.” Myburgh flipped Mpandhlani the volleyball-half and, lying in the center of the floor, watched him settle it on his head like a housewife twisting half an orange onto the fluted reamer of a citrus juicer. At first, it seemed to hurt Mpandhlani to cover his skull, but then the cap muted the transmission, turning it into sounds like voices heard faintly through a heating vent. The bald man’s eyes brightened, his lips relaxed. But he still looked cold, hugging himself and hunching forward like someone straining against electrocution.

 

“May I give him your coat, too?” Myburgh said. “I’m fine now. Well, not fine, exactly. Numb.”

 

“Sure,” Thubana said. “Go ahead.”

 

Myburgh rolled out of Thubana’s expensive coat and handed it up to Mpandhlani, who nodded his curt thanks and shrugged himself into it. As he put it on, Myburgh saw that neither he nor Thubana had belts now. Wessels had undoubtedly taken them too, on the grounds that the kaffirs could use them as makeshift weapons, their buckles serving as nasty flails. Well, that seemed smart. A policeman had to watch himself. Wessels would surely have taken their shoes too, if they hadn’t been wearing ratty takkies.

 

“What’s going to happen to us?” Myburgh said.

 

“To Winston and me?”

 

“Of course.”

 

“Interrogation. Detention. Torture. One of us may fall out a window. One of us may strangle himself.”

 

“Strangle? Strangle yourself?”

 

“It’s hard to say, Mr. Myburgh. I don’t know what Winston’s supposed to have done. Or what kind of stuff Jeppe and Pumpkinhead will be looking for.”

 

“Someone exploded a bomb near the Armscor factory,” Mpandhlani said. “I’m getting a report on it now.” He listened to the voices tunneling his gray matter like so many ethereal brain worms. “The blast—a car bomb—did heavy damage to the plant itself.”

 

Myburgh blinked. Armscor was the weapons-manufacturing arm of the South African Defense Force and a profit-making enterprise of the first water. Its plants were among the most heavily fortified in the country. If it had suffered a crippling bomb blast, no place and nobody—no white place and no white person, rather—could rest secure again. So far as that went, though, Myburgh could not recall any time that he had really rested secure. Living in South Africa had always seemed to him like walking through a plush hotel suite past hundreds of whirring electric fans with frayed cords and no safety baskets…

 

“You didn’t have anything to do with that, did you, Winston?” Thubana said.

 

Mpandhlani—no, better to call him Skosana: Winston Skosana, a man with both a baptismal name and a Ndebele surname, not merely a patronizing Bantu joke name—Skosana tilted his volleyball-capped head against the van’s wall and laughed in the basso profundo registers of earthquake.

 

“Don’t I wish. Oh, don’t I wish, Mordecai.”

 

Thubana grinned sheepishly. “That’s what I thought. But… hey, man, you know.”

 

“I know. But I’m just an oke at a Simba Quix chips-and-rusks factory, loading trucks and carrying out trash. Oliver Tambo never tells me nothing.”

 

He laughed again. His laughter overwhelmed the hisses and pops still seeping through his earholes, nostrils, and eyes from Lusaka and other points north—several points north, Myburgh figured, for occasionally Skosana picked up ANC broadcasts, and sometimes PAC patter, and, more rarely, the revolutionary threats of the Azanian People’s Liberation Army. Indeed, Skosana’s skull was a broadcast clearinghouse for a variety of antiapartheid, anti-imperialist voices. Myburgh couldn’t look at the man—lean, weathered, battle-scarred—without twinges of both awe and fear. On Grim Boy’s Toe, he had seemed comic. Here in the nylon’s holding cell, though, he suddenly and unaccountably radiated a good-humored self-confidence and strength. Myburgh did not think it was all owing to Thubana’s trenchcoat.

 

Painfully, Myburgh got up and limped to one of the mesh-covered windows on the nylon’s rear doors. He was surprised to see Putco bus number 496 chugging down the highway behind them, its headlamps jittering in the pale light, losing distinctiveness, like fish eyes vanishing into clear water, as the sky reddened through a gauze of blowing clouds and spread out vividly over the Transvaal.

 

Pretty. Very pretty.

 

With no closer settlements or factories blighting this part of the Putco route, the land was lovely, an exhilarating desolation. Soon the nylon would enter the outskirts of Pretoria, cruise past the jacaranda trees on its wide boulevards, and he… well, he would be home.

 

Bracing himself against any sudden lurches, Myburgh said, “What in God’s name happened to me out there?”

 

“You became shadow matter to them,” Thubana said.

 

“I was shadow matter in my dreams. When Kabini hit that other Putco bus. When I had a heart attack in my Cadillac and got on 496 as my dead self’s ghost. Damn it, this is real!”

 

“You look real to me,” Skosana said.

 

“Thank you.” Nearly slipping, Myburgh turned back around.

 

Thubana’s hand was blood-streaked from the ragged sjambok wound that Wessels had inflicted. Myburgh found the handkerchief he had used to staunch his own bleeding and passed it to Thubana, who took it with no qualms and held it against his cheek.

 

“I don’t get it,” Myburgh resumed. “Why didn’t I mean anything to those men? What’s going on?”

 

“Winston,” Thubana said, gesturing with his free hand, “is my book in one of those pockets?”

 

Skosana patted the side pockets of the borrowed coat, raised a telltale thump, and pulled out the copy of Superstrings. He hefted it as if it were a hand grenade.

 

“Turn to page eighty,” Thubana said.

 

His eyebrows lifted, Skosana began riffling. When he found the specified page, he bent the book back in his lap.

 

“Up at the top,” Thubana said. “John Schwarz is talking about ‘E sub-eight’ symmetries. Do you see it?”

 

“E sub-eight? Christ, Mordecai, did you memorize this whole crazy book?” He waved it. Again, like a hand grenade.

 

“I’ve been studying, hard. Find it and read it, okay? Right where Professor Schwarz first mentions shadow matter.”

 

Amused, Skosana shook his head and read: “ ‘… a new kind of matter, sometimes called shadow matter, that doesn’t interact, or only interacts extremely weakly, with the ordinary matter that we are familiar with. It you wanted to—’ “

 

“Skip down, Winston. Below where it says we can’t see shadow matter because it doesn’t interact with everyday light.”

 

Skosana grimaced. He ran a finger along the lines of print and finally read: “‘... it does interact with our kind of gravity—we share our gravity with shadow matter.” “

 

“Yes,” Thubana said. “Yes.”

 

“You called me gravity,” Myburgh said, annoyed that this highly complex guff had no guy lines to solid earth. “Now you’re calling me shadow matter. Make up your mind!”

 

“I called whites gravity,” Thubana said. “Not you. I was using analogy to explain a point. Now I’m making another one.”

 

“There’s nothing metaphorical about my situation! Damn it, I’m invisible to my own kind!”

 

“Shadow matter,” Thubana said smugly, as if he had just solved a devilishly abstruse equation.

 

“I can see you,” Skosana said. “Clearly.”

 

“Read,” Thubana commanded. “Read what the professor says about shadow matter and gravity.”

 

“There’s hardly anything, Mordecai. He only says we’d notice a shadow planet by its gravitational effects—but we wouldn’t see it with ordinary light.”

 

“I’m not a planet! I’m a person!”

 

“Person or planet,” Thubana said bitterly, removing Myburgh’s monogrammed handkerchief from his cheek and examining it, “you’re shadow matter to those fucking Boers.” He nodded at the bakkie’s cab.

 

“How? Why?”

 

“Ask God. That’s what I do. I ask him every day: ‘Dear God, Great Jehovah, how did my people get to be such thin shadows in our own country?” “

 

“What am I going to do?”

 

“What are we going to do?” Thubana said.

 

“I yelled in Jeppe’s face,” Myburgh said. “He didn’t hear me. He just leaned away—as if a soft breeze had touched him.” The memory of the major’s lack of reaction was painful. Humiliating.

 

“Gravitational effects,” Skosana said, sliding the book back into a coat pocket. “Mr. Myburgh has a gravitational effect on the stormjaers. They can’t see him, but he can—I don’t know—move them, maybe. Just a little.”

 

Silent tears traced Myburgh’s cheeks like liquid fuses; he sat down beside Skosana. When Wessels opened the nylon’s doors, he could dismount in front of Pretoria’s security police headquarters and walk the formidable distance to his condo or the much shorter distance to the offices of Jacobus & Roux. Even if no one his own color could see him, he could make it home, resume his life, and forget these past few disorienting hours.

 

But for how long? No one could hear him. He couldn’t make a living if the clients for whom he prepared loans, stock options, capital-outlay schemes, and Krugerrand investments could neither see nor hear him. He would have no real existence, he would be a walking cipher, a ghost of blood and bones.

 

“How did I get this way? When did it happen? I was all right when I left Huilbloom. Physically.”

 

“Hitting that elephant did it,” Thubana said. “There aren’t any elephants between Pretoria and KwaNdebele.”

 

“This morning, there was an elephant—I saw it, I hit it!”

 

“Okay, okay. But the elephant you hit was… a totem from the old times, shadow matter from yesterday. It changed you. It took Kabini a moment or two to pull you into focus when you came up to the bus. Remember? He saw your wrecked car, yes, but after he stopped and opened the door, what he first saw was only mist, night and mist, and then your ghost—which, of course, he couldn’t see—filled up with Africa, and he could see.”

 

“That’s poppycock. You’re trying to say I’m dead.”

 

“No. I know you’re not dead. I’m trying to explain something very hard to explain.”

 

“How do I change back? Explain that.”

 

“Back to what?” Skosana said, finding a packet of Rothman’s 30s and a book of matches in Thubana’s coat. “A dead man? Maybe you were dead —killed in your wreck—until number 496 came along. What do you think?” He tapped out, and lit, a cigarette.

 

Myburgh wiped the wet from his face with the torn sleeve of his jacket. He hated Rothman’s 30s. He hated any cigarette. To avoid the smoke slipping out of Skosana’s head (along with a faint radio speech about the Azanian victory over Armscor), he crossed over to Thubana’s bench.

 

“What I think is, number 496 couldn’t resurrect anyone. It can scarcely even go.”

 

“It’s still behind us,” Thubana said. “It’ll make it to Belle Ombre this morning, and back out to KwaNdebele tonight, and back in to Pretoria tomorrow. And so on.”

 

“But how do I change back, Professor Superstrings?”

 

Thubana, to Myburgh’s surprise, folded the bloody handkerchief he’d been using to clot his wound and stuffed it fastidiously into the breast rocket of Myburgh’s suit coat. “Right now, Mr. Myburgh, everything is so befok, I hardly care.”

 

Lifting his muddy foot up to the bench and arranging himself so that one haunch could warm it, Myburgh was unable to meet Thubana’s eyes. He’d got what he deserved. Thubana and Skosana were riding off to detention, interrogation, torture, possibly even (it was a filthy thing to contemplate, a filthier thing to admit) death; and he had badgered Thubana about restoring him to the lofty estate of an upper-middle-class Afrikaner.

 

Sweet Christ, what weakness. Or what brass. It was hard for him to know exactly how he had erred, but he had definitely erred. The chilly proof of it was Thubana’s silence.

 

* * * *

 

Traffic in Pretoria was beginning to thicken, but Jeppe and his driver had beaten the morning rush. From one of the nylon’s windows, Myburgh saw that they had lost Grim Boy’s Toe and that a great many familiar landmarks were kaleidoscoping past. Then they reached the headquarters of the security police, pulled off Potgieterstraat into a concealing side street, and slammed to a jolting halt. The laughter from the cab made Myburgh suspect that Wessels (or whoever was driving) had braked like that for the sadistic joy of shaking them up.

 

“Out! Out!”

 

The doors came open. Fists with billy clubs shook insistently at them. Pampoenkop—Lieutenant Christiaan Wessels—appeared among the men waiting to escort them inside. And when Skosana, squinting like a mole, stumbled out onto the pavement, Wessels grabbed him by the trenchcoat lapels and bullied him into the wall of the terraced security building.

 

“Where did you get this coat, kaffir?”

 

Skosana nodded at the nylon’s doors, through which Thubana was now warily coming. “Mordecai let me borrow it.”

 

“He wasn’t wearing a coat when we put him in.” Wessels looked at one of the agents. “Dedekind, did you leave a goddamned coat in there yesterday.”

 

“No, Lieutenant Wessels. Absolutely not.”

 

Myburgh had already dismounted. He stood between the tall gray building and the nylon, studying the situation.

 

Wessels, meantime, stuck his big round head, with its flat pink nose, into Skosana’s gaunt face. “Where in fuck did you get this, Baldhead? Tell me!”

 

“I had it in my trouser pocket,” Thubana said instead. “Folded up very small. “Compactified,” one could say.”

 

“It’s a coat in ten dimensions, six of them curled up,” Myburgh said, amazed to hear himself using back talk similar to Thubana’s. Of course, the difference-—the telling difference—was that Wessels couldn’t hear him.

 

Wessels shot a disbelieving look at Thubana. “Shut up. You’ll have your chance to sing.” Then, back to Skosana: “Take it off, kaffir! At once!”

 

Skosana got help. Two security agents hurried to yank the coat off him, grabbing down on its sleeves. So zealous were they, they almost unsocketed one of his arms. Myburgh heard a nauseating pop! and saw both agony and hate flare in Skosana’s eyes, with their immense pupils and muddy-yellow whites.

 

“Leave him alone!” Thubana cried.

 

A pretty-boy policeman menaced him with a sjambok. “You want a star on that other cheek too?”

 

“All of his cheeks, Goosen,” said Dedekind, a thirtyish fellow with close-set eyes. “He wants a star or two to sit down on.”

 

“Just as he wishes,” Wessels said. “The filthy bugger.”

 

As a policeman wrapped Thubana’s trenchcoat around his arm, Superstrings dropped out. So did the package of Rothman’s 30s and the match-book from an Indian restaurant in a condemned Asian neighborhood. One officer scooped up the book, another bent down for the cigarettes and matches.

 

Wessels turned aside to examine Superstrings. “Well, well,” he said. “This could be a find, Schoeman—a code book, maybe. Carry it in with you.”

 

Thubana barked a laugh. “Who’s going to decode it?”

 

This time, the policeman with the sjambok hit him, but Thubana deflected the blow by lifting a hand and hunching his shoulder. A second man made him pay by billying him in the groin. Thubana fell to his knees in front of the bakkie’s yawning doors.

 

I don’t have to watch this, Myburgh thought. I can walk home. Who’s going to stop me?

 

Suddenly, Wessels realized that Skosana was again wearing the volleyball cap that, on the road from KwaNdebele, Major Jeppe had hurled off into the night “What the hell is this?” He snatched the cap from Skosana’s head, dangled it from his fingers as if it were a scroll of sodden toilet tissue.

 

“… King, Tutu and Boesak’s reformism has been endorsed by the imperialists worldwide. Both King and Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to restrict our liberation movements to nonviolent methods. However, their—”

 

“Shut up!” Wessels shouted.

 

“—timid political activity can only patch up a few of the more glaring injustices of their morally bankrupt societies. When the armed struggle is it low ebb, they condemn it outright, but when it intensifies and gathers -ass support, they cry, “Negotiate with us, or face them!” This is how they sell—”

 

“Shut up! Shut up!” Wessels struck Skosana, slapping him with open palms on both sides of the face, like a man playing cymbals in an orchestra.

 

“Don’t!” Myburgh stepped forward. But, as he knew it would, this heartfelt caution went unheeded.

 

Skosana, stung, gave Wessels a two-handed shove in the chest, knocking him into Goosen and Dedekind. Meanwhile, his steel plate continued to receive and transmit:

 

“… revolutionary organizations like the Black Panther Party and the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) in Detroit. It is this common history that unifies mass struggle in—”

 

Recovering, Wessels jumped back at Skosana with a sjambok taken from the agent named Schoeman. His face as red and bloated as a rising sun, he lifted the flail with all the kinetic fury of Christ going after the money changers.

 

From his knees, Thubana cried, “He can’t help it, you tsotsis! Give him back his cap!”

 

Goosen and Schoeman caught Wessels from behind.

 

“Not out here, Lieutenant,” Goosen said, trembling excitedly. “Save it. You’ll have your chance. All of us will.”

 

Hyperventilating, Wessels resembled an inflatable, horror-show van der Merwe, an editorial cartoon of the Bad Afrikaner. Myburgh was simultaneously repulsed and fascinated. When Wessels finally gained control of himself, though, he saw the cap in his left hand and slapped it punishingly into Skosana’s palm.

 

“Put it on!”

 

Glaring contempt, Skosana obeyed, rendering the broadcast from Zambia as thin and reedy as water trickling through the pipes in an adjoining hotel room.

 

Wessels appealed to Goosen: “Where did he get it? The major threw it away. I know he threw it away.”

 

“He probably had the other half crimped up in a pocket,” Goosen said. “That’s all.”

 

Myburgh bent down beside Thubana, gripped his elbow, put an arm around his waist, helped him stand.

 

“It’s muddy just like the one Major Jeppe threw away,” Wessels said. “He got it back somehow. The same way he got that coat.”

 

“How was that?” said Dedekind, nervously cutting his eyes.

 

“That old black magic,” Thubana whispered to Myburgh. “That I know so well.”

 

Hearing Thubana quote from an old pop song, in a street next to security police headquarters, tickled Myburgh; against his will, he smiled.

 

“Go home,” Thubana whispered. “It only gets worse now. Go on home, Mr. Myburgh.”

 

“No!” Skosana said.

 

Wessels looked up as if Skosana had spit in his face. “ ‘No’ is just what we don’t want to hear, kaffir. We’re in the business of manufacturing yeses.”

 

“Come inside with us,” Skosana said, speaking around Wessels to Myburgh.

 

“Never fear,” Wessels said. “Steenkamp!”

 

A policeman came to grasp Thubana’s arm. Myburgh tried to push him aside, to protect his own grip on Thubana, but his efforts only made Steenkamp stumble slightly. In fact, he glanced down at the street as if a stone or a bottle shard had tripped him, then went ahead and seized Thubana, incidentally brushing Myburgh’s arm away as if it were less than a spider’s thread.

 

“Come inside with us,” Skosana said again. “And stay, please, with Mordecai. He’s never been in before.”

 

Wessels said, “Neither of you kaffirs will be lonesome—don’t worry about that. And if your friend’s never been in before, it’s past time, isn’t it?”

 

“Please,” Skosana said. “Come inside.”

 

Myburgh looked at the man pleading with him with such dignity. He looked at Thubana, and at the security police—Wessels & Company— whose eagerness to escort his two comrades upstairs seemed akin to that of small boys on Christmas. Packages to unwrap. New toys to break in.

 

“All right,” he said.

 

* * * *

 

Getting in was easy. Myburgh squeezed through the street-level door beside Thubana and struggled up through the echoey stairwell behind Skosana.

 

Each prisoner was bookended by a pair of security agents, who had handcuffed Thubana and Skosana before bringing them in. Didn’t this mausoleum have elevators? If so, they weren’t for detainees, even in the off-limits parts reserved for suspected terrorists and other enemies of the state. So let the kaffirs climb the stairs to their inevitable comeuppance.

 

Myburgh could not clearly account for his lack of sympathy for Goosen, Steenkamp, Dedekind, and Schoeman. (Wessels had left them on the first landing, perhaps to check in with Jeppe.) After all, he’d grown up with such men. Men somewhat like them, anyway—the sons of farmers on the properties bordering Huilbloom. Freckled, sunburnt, sandy-haired toughs with callused hands and hard-edged laughs.

 

Several times, in fact, as a teenager, he had ventured out as a balaclava man with these fellows. Everyone wore a hood and rode in Anton Smoot’s tiny Renault, headlights off, to shoot out the streetlamps and robots— traffic lights—in the black areas near Nylstroom. They had carried real pistols (he and Kiewit juggled Papa Myburgh’s Ruger back and forth) and real bullets. And, to this day, Kiewit held that on one outing they had shot a pair of meths-drinking Ndebele drunks along with the streetlamps. Myburgh’s memory of these jaunts wasn’t as clear as his brother’s, nor could he see himself engaging in anything so wild and reckless today. But, once upon a time, he had definitely ridden balaclava…

 

Jeppe, Wessels, Goosen, Steenkamp, Dedekind, Schoeman, and the others were just doing their jobs. A hard job. A necessary job, albeit a dirty one. And they weren’t much applauded for the hard, dirty job they did. Folks didn’t want to think about them. Just as a man—a city man, at least—putting away a juicy steak doesn’t want to be told that the cow it came from died under the spattering thwack of a sledgehammer.

 

But Myburgh did know the reason for his animosity toward these men. Mordecai Thubana put roofs on houses and apartment buildings in the new white subdivisions in and around Pretoria; Skosana had paid for his crimes against the state long ago. They were kaffirs, sure, but neither of them belonged in this building. Myburgh knew that. A man who wanted to help the world’s finest physicists come up with a Grand Unified Theory of Everything, and another who made his living loading snack foods onto trucks.

 

Such reprobates. Such traitors.

 

Stop worrying, Gerrit. Despite Thubana’s fears (It only gets worse now), Jeppe and his men will see their error once they’ve asked a few questions.

 

Of course they will. They must.

 

At the third or fourth landing (during his reverie, Myburgh had lost track), the slightly overweight Schoeman, breathing raggedly, asked Dedekind, the ranking agent, if they could rest a while. His request was granted, and Thubana and Skosana positioned themselves at a rail fronting a narrow window looking down on a graveled roof; there, a peeling billboard glistened.

 

Skosana nudged Myburgh. Read the billboard, his nudge and his lifted eyebrows commanded.

 

Myburgh studied the sign. It was one he recognized from other venues —street bills, newspaper ads, magazine inserts. It showed a bottle of laundry bleach, with a slogan next to it that struck him this morning with a new, almost brutal, forcefulness: JIK, it said. (A brand-name.) And under that: WITH CONTROLLED STRENGTH, FOR THE WORLD’S WHITEST WASH.

 

“Oh, Lord, I’m feeling sick,” Skosana said, in a self-mocking lilt: “Here in the land of Jik.”

 

Thubana said nothing. The sight of the billboard, along with his friend’s doggerel, seemed to dispirit him. And Thubana’s funk clouded Myburgh’s efforts to regard the situation in an optimistic light. They were all in the land of Jik.

 

Must I keep on climbing these stairs? Myburgh wondered. Like Schoeman, he was winded. Trotting back down, after a short rest, seemed a more attractive option. At least, if he could get out again. Did the street-level door automatically lock? Did you have to have a key to go through it again?

 

Dedekind grabbed Skosana’s arm. “That’s it,” he said. “Let’s get moving.”

 

Myburgh, unsure of whether he was a man or a ghost, hurried along after the others. He feared that if they reached an upper floor before he could squeeze through too, he would be trapped in this claustrophobic stairwell for days…

 

* * * *

 

On the fifth or sixth floor (again, Myburgh was unsure), Goosen and Steenkamp strong-armed Thubana in one direction, while Dedekind and Schoeman pulled Skosana the other. Skosana set himself against their tugging and told Myburgh, “Go with Mordecai, man.”

 

“I said I would, didn’t I?”

 

“Shut up, kaffir,” Goosen said over Myburgh’s unheard reply. “We know what we’re doing.”

 

Steenkamp revolved his eyes to indicate that Skosana was off in the head and that Goosen should ignore him. Myburgh followed the two security agents with Mordecai Thubana. Dedekind and Schoeman took Skosana the other way, off into the well-lit but nightmarish warren of the upper floor.

 

What happened from that moment on, Myburgh received as if in a dream—a protracted hallucination that perfectly complemented his selective invisibility. Much of this experience did not seem real at all, while much of it was so hurtfully vivid that he almost ran from it. All of it caromed past at fast-forward speeds impossible to slow, or at crazy angles defying his efforts to find in them a coherent pattern.

 

In an interrogation room off a pair of nichelike halls giving onto the floor’s main corridor, Goosen, Steenkamp, and four more members of the security police—men Myburgh had not seen before—immediately began stripping Thubana.

 

They tore off his heavy, pilled sweater, revealing a light-gray T-shirt on which a complicated series of mathematical equations in red, blue, and yellow danced like thousands of printed footsteps on an impossible foxtrot diagram. A caption under all these symbols read, this explains everything.

 

As two men held Thubana’s arms and two others stood by in case he resisted, Steenkamp grabbed the T-shirt at the neck and started to rip it away.

 

“Pas op!” Goosen shouted. Then: “You nincompoop, take it off carefully. Carefully.”

 

“It stinks,” Steenkamp said. “And it’s”—he nodded at the math-symbol choreography—”nonsense.”

 

“You don’t know that, nor do I. Take it off carefully. Lay it over there.”

 

Steenkamp obeyed, pushing Thubana’s head forward, unrolling the T-shirt up his back, and spreading the T-shirt out on a metal desk in the corner. The six agents then hurried to strip Thubana of his rubber-soled takkies, pants, and baggy, tan undershorts.

 

“Stop that!” he cried, swatting at them. “Stop!”

 

Goosen cuffed him viciously. Soon, embarrassed and shivering, Thubana stood naked before them, his ribs touchingly prominent and his knobby-kneed legs like those of a muddy stork. Myburgh could tell at once that he hated this exposure, hated and resented it, even though he’d known from the start that this was the way things would go, for no African entering state custody as a crime suspect or as a political detainee could hope to come out unscathed, either physically or emotionally.

 

Even Myburgh knew that, but this morning, unable to intervene, he felt like a voyeur, a window peeper. It pained him that Thubana had to undergo not only the impersonal brutality of the policemen’s attentions, but the added humiliation of having a third party (the agents were one obsessive entity) see his helplessness. But each time Myburgh turned aside or drifted to a different corner of the room, a ghost forsaking its haunts, he felt that he had given in to a cowardly squeamishness.

 

At last he turned to Thubana and said, “What can I do?”

 

Thubana’s eyes fastened on him. “Don’t look at me. But don’t leave. That’s all.”

 

“We’re not leaving,” Goosen said, “but we’ll look at you all we damned well please.” (Lord, the pretty fellow was young!)

 

Myburgh started to speak, but stopped. He looked aside. Then he crossed to the desk upon which Steenkamp had spread Thubana’s this explains everything T-shirt, collapsed into a metal folding chair, and averted his face from Thubana’s interrogators.

 

Occasionally, of course, Myburgh had to look, for the sadistic imagination of the agents was a fertile one. In fact, to think of Goosen, Steenkamp, and their accomplices as state interrogators was to whitewash their activities. Call them, rather, torturers. They didn’t just ask questions. They did all they could to shame, hurt, and dehumanize their ward without quite knocking him unconscious—unconsciousness would have interfered with their efforts to crowbar the “truth” out of him.

 

“Praat, praat, praat!” (Talk, talk, talk!), the six men yelled at Thubana.

 

“Op die stene” (On the bricks.), Goosen said.

 

They made him balance on a pair of bricks placed at contrasting slants on the floor, one brick about a meter behind the other, so that Thubana resembled a circus performer walking a tightrope. In addition, they slipped a yellowish latex hood over his head so that when he let out a breath, the hood ballooned obscenely, and, when he inhaled, he sucked the suffocating rubber back into his mouth and nostrils.

 

The way he swung his elbows, his wrists tied behind him, showed his terror, as did his muffled pleas to take off the hood. He made this plea whenever any opportunity to reply to the agents’ stylized harassment arose—for, darting in and out, they were like hyenas worrying an injured springbok.

 

“Who prepared the car bomb at Armscor?”

 

“Who drove?”

 

“How did they get that bakkie past perimeter security?”

 

“Mpandhlani—your ‘friend’—says you were a contact for the ANC guerrillas who planned the attack.”

 

“Would you like to sire your own little pikkenien one day?”

 

“A statement, Mordecai. A statement!”

 

“List your contacts.”

 

“Everything you did these past six months.”

 

“The hiding places of your fellow terrorists.”

 

“What do you know about ANC plans to decommission the Pretoria Dam?

 

“When did you first hear of them?”

 

“This hood is nothing. Nothing. Wait until you’ve got a noose around your neck, kaffir.”

 

Seeing that brick-balancing and dogged verbal harassment were not doing the job, Goosen commanded a change in tactics. Steenkamp approached the desk and yanked the chair that Myburgh was sitting on out from under him. Myburgh only narrowly kept from splintering his tail-bone. Steenkamp took the chair to Thubana (still trussed in that urine-hued cowl, a baby in a placental membrane), slammed it down, unbound Thubana’s hands, and thrust the folding chair into them even as he was trying to rub the soreness from his wrists.

 

“Over your head,” Goosen said.

 

“What?” To counteract the possibility of smothering, Thubana kept puffing against the latex.

 

“I said, lift the chair over your head. Lift it and hold it. If you let it down, you’ll pay.”

 

Major Henning Jeppe and Lieutenant Christiaan Wessels entered the little room. They grinned when they saw what was going on; two of the four men who had been assisting Goosen and Steenkamp clicked their heels, nodded deferentially, and left. Myburgh, rubbing his hip, backed into the corner behind the desk. He watched from this cubbyhole as if standing aloof from the agents’ sins would absolve him of any complicity.

 

Thubana, when Steenkamp prodded him with a billy club, raised the open folding chair over his head. He held it by two legs, his elbows bent.

 

“All the way up, kaffir! All the way!”

 

Thubana strained, straightened his arms, and pushed the chair up as high as it would go. Its rounded back bumped the ceiling, and Thubana almost toppled from the bricks to which his feet awkwardly clung. As a warning, Steenkamp thrust his billy into the cleft of Thubana’s buttocks and jiggled it.

 

“Hold the chair sideways! Arms up! Up!”

 

Thubana stuck his chin out, as if to allow more air under the latex cowl, struggled for a fresh grip on the chair, and lifted it as high as it would go in this new position, missing the ceiling and so maintaining his balance. He looked like a monument to the patron saint of contortionists.

 

“Good,” Steenkamp said. “Good.”

 

Jeppe caught sight of the T-shirt spread atop the desk and came over to look at it. Wessels, his enormous head bobbing first to this side and then to that, sought to keep an eye on Thubana as he swaggered over too. At Jeppe’s bidding, he picked up the shirt, smoothed it out in front of him, then minced about clownishly, as if modeling it at a fashion show.

 

“Phew!” he said, sniffing the T-shirt.

 

“Be still,” Jeppe said in Afrikaans. Then he read the English words under the run-amok equations: “ “This explains everything.”“ He squinted. “Yes, I’d wager it does.”

 

Then, to Thubana: “What is this, kaffir? What kind of treason did you come in here wearing?”

 

“What is what, sir?” Thubana was hooded and blind. Naked and off balance and straining to keep a chair aloft. Myburgh could not believe that Jeppe actually expected him to deduce the specifics of his moronic question.

 

“Your T-shirt, kaffir. These equations.”

 

“That’s a GUT, sir.” His words were hard to make out, the hood muting and skewing them.

 

“A ‘gut’?”

 

“Yes, sir. Or a TOE. A T-shirt TOE.”

 

“Is it a ‘gut’ or a ‘toe,” kaffir? Don’t trifle with me today; I’m coming down with something.”

 

“A Grand Unified Theory, sir. A Theory of Everything. Except that it… it isn’t.”

 

Steenkamp jabbed Thubana with his billy again, and Thubana had to lift one foot from its brick to keep from falling and to prevent his interrogators from assaulting him. Indeed, he would never have found the brick again if the policemen hadn’t caught him and guided his wayward foot home.

 

Then, as if to show that this “kindness” had been provisional, Goosen used the end of his billy to lift and then lower Thubana’s testicles. Again and again. Gently but menacingly.

 

“A ‘gut,” a ‘toe,” or neither, kaffir?” Jeppe said. “Explain to me these scribbles”—flapping the T-shirt—”you claim explain everything!”

 

“A T-shirt TOE,” Thubana said. “A joke, my baas—just a joke.”

 

Myburgh was disappointed. Until just now, Thubana had avoided using any kind of kowtowing epithet.

 

“A joke? How is it a joke?”

 

“There’s no finished Theory of Everything yet, sir. So that’s a… well, it’s a just-pretend TOE.”

 

“What does it pretend to mean?”

 

“Nothing, sir. Nothing real, at least.”

 

Goosen lowered his billy, then rapped it upward into Thubana’s groin so fast that Myburgh was not sure he had actually done it. The chair in Thubana’s hands slipped and clattered down, striking both Goosen and another man; and Thubana, flailing one arm, toppled from the bricks, landed on his ribs, and rolled over like a man who hears gunfire on a busy street and tries to escape it. But Thubana could not escape.

 

“Jy wil baklei, jy wil baklei?” (You want to fight, you want to fight?) Goosen cried, wiping blood from his lip and dropping the billy. He hurried to a nearby file cabinet, removed a piece of green hosepipe whose tube glistened as if cored with glass dust or diamonds, and stalked back to Thubana. He began to pummel Thubana vigorously about the head and shoulders.

 

Thubana rolled from side to side under these blows and also the inescapable boots of Steenkamp and the two men whose names Myburgh still had not learned, for they stepped in and out to kick Thubana, like dancers in an intricate musical-comedy number.

 

“Stop it!” Myburgh shouted.

 

He rushed from his corner and grabbed Goosen’s hosepipe on its back-swing. But, after a brief hitch that made Goosen look back as if Wessels or even Jeppe were playing a trick on him, the hosepipe slipped from Myburgh’s grasp and crashed down on Thubana’s ear with a solid whumpf!

 

All Myburgh’s subsequent efforts to deflect the hosepipe were failures, leaving burns in his palm but only imperceptibly delaying the adrenaline-charged policeman.

 

“Damn it, Goosen,” Jeppe said, not even raising his voice. “Do you know what you’re about?”

 

Goosen and the three other men backed off. Jeppe walked over to Thubana’s huddled body, nudged him in the small of the back with his boot toe, and, letting the tail of the gray T-shirt dangle down mockingly on his shoulder, asked if he were now ready to explain—seriously explain —the formulae imprinted on it. Then, because he clearly wanted an audible reply, he yanked the hood off Thubana and flung it at Steenkamp.

 

“It’s nothing, my baas,” Thubana wheezed. “It only looks like it means something.”

 

“Where did you get it?”

 

“I had it made. I designed it.”

 

“Designed these equations?”

 

“Yes, sir.” Thubana lowered his arms, sculled backward on his skinny, bruised rump, and propped himself against a wall.

 

“Who else has seen them?”

 

“Only a shopkeeper in Marabastad. I gave him the equations on a paper bag, sir. He silk-screened the shirt.”

 

“What do they say?”

 

Thubana studied Jeppe with visible wariness, as if dealing with an idiot or a psychopath—an entire roomful of such creatures—and Myburgh suddenly feared that it was so.

 

“Gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force, the weak force.”

 

“Pardon me?”

 

“A man in America—at Fermilab in Chicago—says the final TOE will fit on a T-shirt. It will be that simple.”

 

“Fermilab?” Jeppe said.

 

“They have a particle accelerator there,” Thubana said.

 

“Nuclear stuff,” Wessels said. “Particle accelerators have to do with…you know, nuclear stuff.”

 

Jeppe stiffened. He flapped the shirt out, grasped it by its sleeves, pulled it taut before him, surveyed its just-pretend TOE. “Decode this, kaffir.”

 

“A big fish,” Steenkamp said. “We’ve caught a big fish.”

 

“A joke but not a joke,” Thubana said. “One day I hope we have a Grand Unified Theory, a Theory of Everything, but today it’s—” He stopped. “Today, my baas, it’s only a dream.”

 

“Explain!” Jeppe said.

 

When Thubana could not, they laid their bricks about two hand spans apart, prodded Thubana to remount them, forced him to hoist the chair aloft again, and walked around him like children around a maypole, asking questions and beating him with billies, hosepipes, their open hands. Although Steenkamp repeatedly slapped him across the buttocks with the hood, Myburgh noted that Thubana was doing a little better now: He could see the men tormenting him, he could breathe without fear of choking on rubber…

 

* * * *

 

Later, after beating Thubana again during an orgy of rushes and retreats, they pushed him into a shower just off the interrogation room and made him stand under a prickly spray of cold water. The pipes clanked noisily, and the shower head ratcheted like a Gatling gun. Typical. Tomorrow’s building, yesterday’s plumbing.

 

Myburgh accompanied Thubana to the shower room’s threshold, but two security agents, there to make sure Thubana didn’t duck out of the spray, kept him from coming nearer. So, like Thubana, he could do nothing but wait for the ordeal to end.

 

When Thubana finally did stumble out, his dark flesh appeared transparent: a fragile, oiled membrane of veins and welts, bruises and lacerations. It hurt to look at him.

 

“I’m cold,” Thubana said. “Give me my clothes.”

 

But they didn’t. They returned him to the room in which they had administered the beating, sat him down at the desk, encircled him menacingly. But the cold shower, rather than melting his will, had under-girded it. Unflinching, he looked square into the eyes of each of the men leaning over him.

 

“Give me my clothes.”

 

“Give us a statement,” Jeppe said.

 

“How?” Thubana said. He lifted his dripping arms to show them the obvious: no writing materials.

 

At a nod from Jeppe, Goosen went to the file cabinet, pulled out several sheets of paper and a ballpoint pen, and returned with these items to the desk.

 

“A towel,” Thubana said. “Or I’ll ruin whatever I write.”

 

Wessels disappeared into the room near the shower stall, banged around ill-temperedly, and returned with a towel.

 

A hand towel, not a bath towel.

 

But Thubana, grimacing, got up, patted down every part of his severely punished body, and, when no one asked for the towel back, spread it out on the seat of the lopsided chair and sat down on the damp cloth as if it were a cushion. He looked up at Jeppe and the others with a stare that the angry bulge next to one eyebrow made seem a hundred times more defiant and resentful.

 

“A statement,” Jeppe said.

 

“Of what?”

 

“The full extent of your knowledge of and participation in the Armscor bombing. All you know about ANC plans to knock out the dam at Rietvlei. Plus a full—”

 

“I don’t—”

 

“Quiet.”

 

“But I’m not—”

 

“And a full breakdown of the real meanings behind those T-shirt ‘equations.” “

 

Thubana hesitated. Then: “It will take some time.”

 

“An hour.”

 

“Two,” Thubana said.

 

“An hour. If your statement is helpful but you haven’t quite finished, then we’ll give you more. Understand?”

 

“I think so.”

 

Amazingly, they left Thubana alone in the interrogation room. They carried out their bricks, locked the file cabinet, blocked passage to the shower stall with a sliding metal grille, and set Steenkamp as a guard on the floor’s main corridor. But they left Thubana alone to draw up a statement, his first respite from their badgering since coming into the building.

 

Myburgh sat down atop the desk, facing away from Thubana as he believed the other man wished. “Sometimes, it’s impossible not to look, Mr. Thubana.”

 

“That depends on who you are.”

 

“What they did to you: terrible, barbaric. Mr. Thubana, it’s only because—”

 

“Please be quiet. I must write.”

 

Myburgh shut up, and Thubana began filling up the top sheet of white foolscap. For the next hour, the only sound in the room was the faint switching of his ballpoint.

 

* * * *

 

The statement was unsatisfactory. It denied any knowledge of the Armscor car bomb, it pretended not to have any awareness of the planned assault on the dam at Rietvlei, and it interpreted all the arcane mathematical symbols on Thubana’s T-shirt as attempts (phony attempts) to unify the four major forces of the universe in a grand Theory of Everything. Besides which, this TOE presupposed that the most basic units of matter were not atoms but tiny, twitchy strings that had sprung into being only seconds after the Big Bang. There was nothing about the ANC, the APLA, or any other leftist-supported revolutionary group.

 

And so the statement was unacceptable.

 

Jeppe took Thubana’s statement as a personal affront. Wessels acted as if Thubana had sodomized his grandmother.

 

Goosen, Steenkamp, Dedekind, Schoeman, and a group of men who seemed to live in closets on this floor (so readily did they pop out to do their commanders’ bidding) assumed Thubana’s questioning; soon enough, they had reduced Myburgh to impotent rage.

 

He learned the amusing names, and the sickening particulars, of four or five different “interrogation techniques.” Although he tried to help, grabbing one or another of the security policemen by the collar and yanking backward with all his strength, he lacked the somatic specific gravity to do anything but strain his back or herniate himself, so that as Thubana screamed, he screamed, and as Thubana begged his tormentors to stop, please stop, Myburgh begged them too, and the “airplane,” “Dr. Frankenstein,” the “helicopter,” and the “wet cap” rolled past him during that muzzy day like scenes from a half-dozen ineptly spliced horror movies.

 

“Bastards!” Myburgh cursed. “Bastards!”

 

When they were finished, and Thubana had told them nothing they wanted to hear (not even confessing that the symbol “Es” in the book Superstrings was mathematical code for a cadre of terrorists in Mozambique, or that “Lie algebras” were a secret means of rating military-aid shipments from Red China), they dragged Thubana from the interrogation room and hurled him into an isolation cell—with bars, a lidless toilet, and a stiff, reed sleeping mat—on the same nightmarish floor.

 

“Animals!” Myburgh shouted, hobbling after them.

 

The cry reverberated in his own ears, but Jeppe & Company were infuriatingly deaf to it. Worse, they locked Thubana into the cell and handcuffed him to the lower part of its grille (so that he was unable to use his sleeping mat) without leaving Myburgh enough room to edge into it too. Invisible to his countrymen, Myburgh was one of them again. Thubana was locked up, but he was free. Except that he was a prisoner too, in the same building containing a cell that contained Thubana. Boxes inside boxes. Cages within cages. Bantustans within the Fatherland…

 

And then the security agents were gone, and Myburgh, clinging to the bars, was alone with Thubana.

 

“Go home,” Thubana said. He didn’t raise his head; he mumbled into the pit of his handcuffed arm.

 

“I can’t.”

 

Thubana moaned, heedless of the misery escaping him.

 

“Mr. Thubana, I don’t think I can. I live, and move, but I don’t”— Myburgh searched for the word—”impinge on anything. How can I get out of here?”

 

Thubana did not reply.

 

Myburgh got down on his knees. He put a hand through the bars and rubbed a finger over Thubana’s woolly hair. Rivulets of blood had dried in the tiny gullies in this wool. The side of Thubana’s face resembled an inner-tube strip with an infestation of polyplike heat blisters. Myburgh wiped his eyes with a coat sleeve.

 

“Mr. Thubana—”

 

“Go home.”

 

Thubana lifted his head. His face called up images from battle photography and traffic-safety films. Was the poor man a member of a Faking Club… ?

 

“Try,” Thubana said. “You must … try.”

 

Myburgh pulled himself up, backed away, and wandered through the maze of the upper floor.

 

Eventually, he located the door to a stairwell, pulled it open, and went through into a shaft as cold and forbidding as a mine stope. There were fluorescents on each landing, and the window overlooking the billboard proclaiming the “controlled strength” of Jik gleamed under anemic spotlights. It was night, the tag end of an endless day.

 

He went down, all the way down, and paused at the street-level door, expecting failure. His success at barging into the stairwell and coming down the steps was a fluke of physics. By all rights, he should have no more impact on the physical structures of this building than a shade—for he was a shade, a man-shaped confluence of shadow matter.

 

Myburgh gripped the push bar on the door. He pushed down on it. It resisted. It resisted as if it understood that his was a conjectural, a ghostly, pressure.

 

Myburgh examined his hands. The palms were still raw from his attempts to wrest the hosepipe from Goosen. If the hosepipe could do that to him, it seemed logical—in an inevitably symmetrical way—that he could exert some influence on the sort of matter that had scalded him. Tit for tat.

 

He pushed down again.

 

Surprise. This time the bar depressed, clicking open the door to which it was attached.

 

Myburgh stumbled outside, one hand still on the bar.

 

Traffic noises assailed him.

 

The air was brisk and somewhat damp-feeling, but an astonished glance at the sky, between the inward-leaning tops of the security police building and the office building opposite it, showed him an indigo road of stars. If you squinted, if you put your imagination into gear, you could believe that out there beyond those twinkling points of fire vibrated—majestically—a cosmic string light-years in length tying this very moment to the instant of creation. That string would be a stretched remnant of a tiny superstring that had blown clear of the Big Bang and escaped into the cosmos. It would be proof that everything on hand in the universe today had exploded from the same blazing Ur-furnace.

 

Or so Thubana believed. And so he had told Myburgh and Skosana on their not-so-smooth nylon ride into Pretoria.

 

Christ. Such thoughts.

 

It would take an hour to walk home from here, Myburgh decided. Or he could walk to Church’s Square and catch public transport to his condominium. If no one could see him, he wouldn’t even have to pay the bus driver…

 

The clap on that. Thubana was upstairs, naked and suffering. And if Myburgh stepped outside, letting go of this door, it would lock behind him. He could tug on it all he liked; it would never budge, no matter how strong his will, how mighty his arms. This door locked on people who were not shadow matter, and it would hold Myburgh out even if he rematerialized as a visible Afrikaner, with a thousand questions for Major Henning Jeppe.

 

So he went back in, let go of the push bar, and trudged back up the six flights of steps to Thubana.

 

* * * *

 

Myburgh took off his coat, pushed it between the bars, spread it over Thubana’s shoulders and back. He straightened it as well as he could so that only Thubana’s legs and part of his handcuffed arm remained uncovered.

 

Then Myburgh curled up on the floor beside the comatose man and fumbled toward sleep.

 

In his dream, he was driving a bus—not a municipal bus, but a Putco bus like the one Kabini drove from KwaNdebele every morning and back again every night. His riders were plainclothes security policemen from this very building; the bus was packed with them—Jeppe, Wessels, Goosen, Steenkamp, and maybe ninety more, every one standing or sitting ramrod straight as Myburgh drove them through a teeming closer settlement.

 

The streets were unpaved and dusty. Angry blacks—many armed with rocks, many shaking their fists, some determined enough to leap in front of the bus and spit at the bus’s windshield—crowded in so grimly that it was hard to keep going. Either Myburgh could slow to a walk, letting more and more blacks approach the bus, lay hands on it, and rock it back and forth until it turned over; or he could jam the accelerator, wrestle the steering wheel, and harvest these agitated people like corn.

 

There seemed to be no other options, only death for his riders or blatant, cold-blooded vehicular homicide. He might have been able to resign himself to the first option if it had not required his own death. He might have been able to adjust to the second one if his passengers had not been Jeppe & Company.

 

Soon, Myburgh was crying as he drove. He could not tell if his watery vision stemmed from his own frustrated tears or the dripping spittle on his windshield. He beeped his horn. He beeped it and beeped it. A rock shattered the windscreen, giving it the look of a weird, puzzle-piece spiderweb. His passengers—outwardly calm—began sticking handguns through their windows and firing into the streets as if the closer settlement were a huge shooting gallery. Each time a black fell dead or wounded, a bell rang (Myburgh didn’t know from where), and Jeppe, sitting behind him, got up to reward the sharpshooter with a licorice whip or a stuffed animal: hyena, giraffe, ant bear, elephant. Jeppe extracted these animals from a duffel under his seat, and their supply, like that of the shouting Africans, seemed endless.

 

Then a bomb exploded in the road, a bomb made out of a knot of blacks banished from South Africa’s cities. When it went off, body parts and clothing scraps flew up into the sky. (Suddenly, it was night. The Coalsack nebula, near the Jewel Box cluster, opened up like a hungry pit.) Myburgh tumbled into the whirlpools created by the explosion. Not knowing what else to do, he grabbed the strands of the puzzle-piece web in his windscreen and pulled himself along them to its center.

 

When absolutely clear of the driver’s cage, Myburgh looked down and saw his bus on fire, five or six kilometers below. Meanwhile, the strands of the web in which he was swinging—it was a hammock now, a hammock attached to the four stars of the Southern Cross—started reeling at high speed, as if a vacuum cleaner light-years away were cracking him apart atom by atom and sucking him into its bag. It wanted him and his galaxy-sized fears to fly into the bag without tearing it. Myburgh turned over in the hammock, clutching at its lengthening, ever-thinning strings.

 

The hole of the Coalsack (Kiewit had always called it the Soot Bag) got bigger and bigger. It was like a black widow; no, a black window. And what Myburgh saw through it was the body of a stuffed elephant, slowly rumbling. A minute ago, it had been in the lap of one of Jeppe’s boys, a prize for marksmanship. Now the beast was growing at the same high speed as the Coalsack, and he could see that no matter what he did, he was going to hit it, and hitting the elephant (a doddering bull with fractured tusks, not a stuffed toy) would probably destroy him…

 

* * * *

 

“Wake up, man. Wake up.”

 

* * * *

 

Myburgh roused; his nightmare had disoriented him. Then he saw Wessels—a.k.a. Pampoenkop—glowering down on him, and he began to suspect that his real nightmare was about to start. It seemed that Wessels could see him.

 

“Who are you? What are you doing here?”

 

Myburgh blinked. Wessels’s head—its size, its slanted brows, its crooked teeth, its mounded chins—did resemble a pumpkin. Was it rational to fear a talking jack-o’-lantern?

 

“Answer me, please.”

 

“What time is it?” Myburgh said in Afrikaans. (Wait. He had a watch. He checked it: 3:45 a.m.)

 

“Time you answered me,” Wessels said. “You’re up to your chin, brother-man.”

 

Myburgh did not stand. He rolled over and scooted up against Thubana’s cell. Thubana was asleep or comatose. In sleep, he had dislodged Myburgh’s coat, exposing most of his back.

 

“You can see me,” Myburgh said.

 

“I’m not blind. How did you get in?”

 

Myburgh shook his head to clear it of some confusing images and swallowed to make his ears pop. His left foot stuck out toward the policeman like a big, mottled sausage. Wessels aimed a kick at it, and the back of Myburgh’s head banged metal.

 

A warning. Only a warning.

 

“I am Gerrit Myburgh, a special-accounts executive at Jacobus and Roux. On the road back from Huilbloom, our family farm, I had an accident. I’ve come here to report it.”

 

“You need the city police, Meneer Myburgh.”

 

“My accident occurred in the country.”

 

“You are still in the wrong place. This is the special branch, Meneer Myburgh. You have no business here.”

 

Myburgh nodded at Thubana. “That man has clearly been through hell. Why is he naked?”

 

“Did you give him that coat?”

 

“He looked cold. He still looks cold.”

 

Wessels was trying hard not to erupt. Maybe he suspected that Myburgh was a member of some kind of governmental Faking Club, sent out to test the humanity of security agents.

 

Finally, Wessels allowed the dam to burst: “You are a foolish goddamned kaffirboetie, Meneer Myburgh.”

 

“This man needs medical attention.”

 

“You have many questions to answer. Stand up, please, and come with me.”

 

Myburgh stared insolently at Wessels. He massaged the sole of his naked foot. Perhaps it would have been better to remain shadow matter to his compatriots until he had thought of a way to rescue—if that were possible—both himself and the two innocent Africans now in custody.

 

“You gave him a coat,” Wessels said. “Maybe you gave him other things as well? Instructions, for example?”

 

“Telephone my brother. Telephone my superiors at Jacobus and Roux. Dozens of people can vouch for me.”

 

“At this hour?” Wessels turned and called down the corridor to an office seemingly kilometers away: “Major van Rhyn. Major van Rhyn, we have a problem.”

 

* * * *

 

Major W. K. van Rhyn worked on him all that morning. Wessels assisted, and it was a relief—a surprise and a relief—that they only questioned him. The wallet from inside his jacket (which an unseen policeman brought to van Rhyn’s office from Thubana’s cell) contained materials identifying Myburgh.

 

Then a plainclothes agent named Lieutenant Cuyler came in to report that the South African Police had found a Cadillac stalled on the KwaNdebele Road. The car was badly banged up. Plates and serial numbers proved, though, that it belonged to one Gerrit Jozua Myburgh of Pretoria.

 

“I hit an elephant,” Myburgh said.

 

“Meneer Myburgh,” van Rhyn said, shaking his head.

 

Cuyler came to Myburgh’s aid: “That may be true, sir.”

 

“How?” van Rhyn said.

 

“A Colored from Durban has a fleabite circus: Motilal Prassad’s Travelling Big Top. He carts it around to the Bantustans and makes a few rand entertaining the stay-behinds while their wage-earners are at work. Three days ago, he was in Bophusthatswana. Seems he lost an elephant there.”

 

“I found it,” Myburgh said. “I hit it.”

 

“Not unlikely,” Cuyler told van Rhyn.

 

“What happened to it?”

 

Both van Rhyn and Cuyler looked at Myburgh as if he had asked a very troublesome question.

 

“What happened to it?” Myburgh said again.

 

“We don’t know,” Cuyler said. “It disappeared.”

 

“An elephant?” van Rhyn said. “To where?”

 

“If we knew, we wouldn’t be saying it’s disappeared. Maybe to the proverbial elephants’ graveyard.”

 

Myburgh wondered if his Cadillac’s collision with the elephant had rendered it shadow matter, a kind of premonitory ghost from an era and a system long since doomed to perish.

 

But he had no time to mull the issue, for Cuyler had to leave, and van Rhyn and Wessels began questioning him relentlessly. What did he know about the Armscor bombing? About ANC plans to sabotage the Rietvlei dam? Questions that Jeppe and his henchmen had already put repeatedly to Mordecai Thubana.

 

Myburgh replied to all these questions in the negative (for he knew nothing, nothing at all), but he was also careful to tell his interrogators what an outrage his detention was and how deeply he resented the slanders implicit in their questions. He was a decent Afrikaner, a patriotic Vaalpens. They should ring up his brother Kiewit. Or the manager of his condominium. Or his secretary, Pia Delfos.

 

On the other hand, he railed at van Rhyn, what could he expect of a group of officers who had beaten one of their charges within a fingernail of his life and left him naked in a cold cell? The sort of men who would deny an injured countryman medical help? The sort who would bully that countryman with stupid innuendos about treason and terrorist collaboration?

 

“What we do,” said van Rhyn coldly, “we do to protect.”

 

Van Rhyn went off duty. Myburgh sat in van Rhyn’s office, all alone, for a long time. Exactly how long he couldn’t say, for Wessels had taken his watch—plus his keys and pocket change—and retreated to another part of the building.

 

Longer than an hour, though. Possibly two.

 

When Major Jeppe came on duty (whey-faced, thin, and struggling with the sniffles and watery eyes), he spoke with Cuyler, Wessels, and one or two others.

 

Then he left too, and Myburgh was escorted to a holding room where he stewed for another two or three hours, growing more and more frustrated and impatient.

 

Why the delay? Did they really think him an ANC collaborator? Apparently, they did. For that reason, they had not released him. For that reason, they had done nothing to see about his cuts or to replace his tattered clothes. Section Six of the Terrorism Act—that was the inappropriate statute they were using to detain him.

 

At last, Jeppe came back. Goosen, Steenkamp, and Schoeman came with him, and these four men surrounded the table at which Myburgh was slumped.

 

“How did you get to Pretoria from your wreck?” Jeppe said.

 

“I walked,” Myburgh said. (A lie, but better than admitting the hard-to-swallow truth.)

 

“How did you get into the building?”

 

“Through a street-level door.”

 

“Except for our entrance on the park, our street-level doors are all locked, Meneer Myburgh.”

 

“Not the one I used.”

 

The four men stared at him as if they had reached an impasse; obviously, they had.

 

“If I can’t go home,” Myburgh said, “I want some clean clothes and something to eat.”

 

They brought him a plate of food: sausages, rice, and a poached egg. They also brought him a pair of corduroy trousers, a flannel shirt, some heavy brown socks, and a pair of takkies that looked as if they had been bleached. Myburgh suspected that this outfit—except for the store-bought socks—had once belonged to a black man detained for political reasons. Where was that man now? In a jail cell? In a township cemetery? In the bundu, hiding?

 

“The man I gave my coat to,” Myburgh said: “He needs clothes and food too. And medical attention.”

 

“Kaffirboetie,” Goosen said, turning away.

 

“How do you happen to know him?” Jeppe said.

 

“I came up the stairs, onto this floor, and I saw him naked and unconscious in that cell down there.” He nodded vaguely.

 

“The man’s a terrorist,” Jeppe said. “You want nothing to do with him. Nothing. Leave him to us.”

 

When Myburgh finished eating, only Jeppe and Goosen were still in the interrogation room with him. Goosen cleared his plate away, returned, and laid the book Superstrings on the table exactly where the plate had been.

 

“What do you know about this?” Jeppe said. “The man you saw up here was carrying it when we captured him.”

 

“Why should I know anything about it?”

 

“We had a tip, Meneer Myburgh. Our informant told us to take a man or two off a commuter bus from KwaNdebele.”

 

“So?”

 

“Major van Rhyn’s report says you had your accident—hitting that elephant—on the same stretch of road.”

 

Physically, Myburgh felt better, his hunger satisfied and his bruised body clad in snug, warm clothes. But now that Jeppe had made the connection between his wreck on the KwaNdebele Road and the stopping of Grim Boy’s Toe several miles beyond that roadblock, Myburgh feared that maybe these single-minded men were determined to link him to the same absurd scenario to which they had already linked Thubana and Skosana. If that happened—if they succeeded—his comfortable station in life would evaporate like mist and only his brother Kiewit, a lukewarm friend or two, and some of his more appreciative clients would care at all. He would vanish forever, a statistic of the state of emergency.

 

“Coincidence,” Myburgh said uneasily.

 

“You’ve never read this book?”

 

“No. Why?”

 

“Certain passages are underlined. We thought you could help us explain their encoded meanings.”

 

“I’m a financial advisor, not a cryptologist.”

 

“But if you were also a traitor and spy?” Jeppe said, smiling. Abruptly, he shouted: “Steenkamp!”

 

Steenkamp came into the room with Thubana’s T-shirt. He spread it out on the table next to the book.

 

“And this?” Jeppe said. “What about this?”

 

At that moment, Myburgh heard the familiar staticky tinniness of a resistance radio broadcast: “… and the Ten Point Program of the Unity Movement put forward in 1943. This advance reflected the awakening of the people and departed from a liberal democratic program by posing the issue of the ‘Land to the Tiller’ as being of paramount …”

 

Jeppe stood up. “Not again.” He went from the room, followed closely by Goosen and Schoeman. Steenkamp remained behind to guard both Myburgh and the seditious T-shirt TOE.

 

“… only one meaning amongst scientific socialists: seizure without compensation. Lenin in his Agrarian Program repeated this point again and again to distinguish it from…

 

“Skosana,” Myburgh whispered.

 

Over the staticky lecture, a scream: “MORDECAI-I-I-I-I-I!”

 

Myburgh stood up. Steenkamp laid a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back down.

 

“MORDECAI-I-I-I-I-I!”

 

Christ, what was going on? He could hear (over both the radio broadcast and Skosana’s screaming) the sounds of scuffling, grunts, billy clubs clattering, metal bars gonging.

 

“Steenkamp!” someone yelled. “Steenkamp, get out here!”

 

“Stay put,” Steenkamp said. He slipped around Myburgh’s chair, darted into the hall like a soccer wingman.

 

The uproar went on: shortwave screeches, screams, the muddled warring of iron and wood and boot leather. Myburgh’s heart pounded like a machine press stamping out badges. He told himself to obey Steenkamp’s warning and stay put, but when the hubbub persisted and no one returned to check on him, he crept to the door.

 

“Mordecai-i-i-i-i-i… !”

 

Six or seven men at the far end of the corridor were wrestling Winston Skosana around its dogleg, hurrying to get him out of sight and hearing. Myburgh could still hear him calling Thubana’s first name, but with less and less energy.

 

Then the long hall was empty: a bright tunnel of plasterboard, tilework, and staggered, ceiling-mounted smoke detectors. Myburgh could not believe the feeling he had. As if he had become shadow matter again, an invisible man in the near-invisible empery of the security police.

 

In his bleached takkies, Myburgh hobbled down the hall. Past van Rhyn’s office. Past a pair of closed—what?—storage rooms? Past a lavatory, another shakedown room, and two vertical strips of chrome suggesting that this end of the hall had a purpose different from that of the end he had just left, namely, imprisoning people who knew things that the state needed to know. And then, suddenly, Myburgh was at Thubana’s cell again.

 

Thubana’s naked feet hung half a meter off the floor. His body twisted from a light fixture in a noose made from a cracked leather belt.

 

Thubana’s belt was his only article of clothing. Why? Myburgh wondered. A man with no pants didn’t need a belt.

 

* * * *

 

Jeppe, blowing his nose into a handkerchief, marched around the corner with Goosen, Steenkamp, and Schoeman. When he saw Myburgh standing outside Thubana’s cell, he cursed, waved his handkerchief, and piped congestedly, “Get him!”

 

Before Myburgh could react, Goosen ran at him in a dutiful fury and flattened him with an expertly swung elbow. Steenkamp kicked him in the ribs. Goosen gave him an exasperated conk as he sought to roll away, for Myburgh was writhing—involuntarily from the pain and calculatedly to avoid further blows.

 

“Enough!” Jeppe cried.

 

Myburgh lay under the security men’s feet. There was blood on his clean flannel shirt. This angered him all out of proportion to the shirt’s value. Maybe because Thubana was dangling in his cell from his own belt.

 

“You murdered him,” Myburgh said.

 

“A lot of them commit suicide,” Jeppe said. “He’s just another goddamned kaffir who took the easy way out.”

 

“Where did he get the belt?”

 

“Perhaps his friend slipped it to him.”

 

“When? You confiscated their belts, didn’t you?”

 

Jeppe paused in his niggling attentions to his nose. “How did you know that?”

 

Myburgh hesitated. “A deduction. Procedure, isn’t it? Aren’t you supposed to take their belts?”

 

“Procedures vary.” Jeppe’s voice was as unforthcoming as that of a veteran government spokesman.

 

“You murdered him,” Myburgh said again.

 

Goosen cocked his billy threateningly.

 

“Don’t,” Jeppe told Goosen. “Get him back down the hall. He never should have been out here.”

 

“That wasn’t my—”

 

“Shut up.”

 

“I’m bleeding,” Myburgh said. “These men assaulted me.”

 

“A cut from your automobile accident,” Jeppe said.

 

“It’s a cut I received when that swine there tried to—”

 

“From your accident. From hitting Motalil Prassad’s runaway elephant. Please remember that.”

 

Myburgh was afraid to contradict Jeppe, who should have been at home, taking antihistamines and drinking healthful juices. More or less passively, Myburgh returned to the interrogation room in which Steenkamp had so precipitously abandoned him.

 

This time, Jeppe had Goosen stand watch. Myburgh studied his guard. Goosen was late twenties or early thirties, a dark-haired fellow who would have been handsome if his eyes hadn’t carried in them a perpetual look of unfocused shock, as if almost everything about life offended him. He was hair-trigger, a grenade with the pin pulled.

 

Or he gave that impression. Maybe it was the job. Maybe he had a wife and babies at home. Or maybe he had the job because something cankered and peeling in him had pointed him to it, and maybe he still had a wife and babies at home. So far as Myburgh knew, there was no law on the books against borderline psychopaths marrying and raising families…

 

Oddly, Myburgh felt fairly safe with the boy. Jeppe was going to let him go. Or else why caution him to remember that the cut on his head had come from an automobile accident, not the attentions of this duty-conscious pretty boy? Something—something beyond the barbarous lynching of Thubana—had happened, and so Jeppe & Company were on the brink of releasing him.

 

“What’s your name?”

 

Goosen looked at him with stupidly snobbish disdain. “Maybe I don’t care to tell you.”

 

“I know your family name. What’s your Christian name?”

 

“All you need to know is Warrant Officer Goosen.”

 

“You look like”—Myburgh pretended to consider possibilities—”a Hans, I think.”

 

Goosen was insulted. “Not a Hans. A Hugo. And you’re to keep your mouth shut.”

 

“A while ago you wanted me to talk.”

 

A glint of smug cunning sparked from Goosen’s eyes. “You have a statement to make?”

 

“Where did the hanged man’s belt come from?”

 

“You heard Major Jeppe. That other kaffir, probably.”

 

“From you, far more probably. Or from Wessels, or Steenkamp, or Schoeman.”

 

Goosen merely smiled. “Oh, Meneer Myburgh.”

 

“I think the ‘other kaffir’ told you his friend had nothing to do with the others you were investigating.”

 

“Why don’t you shut up?” Goosen said, leaning across the table; his breath reeked of cream cheese and beer.

 

Myburgh ignored the smell: “But you gentlemen had done such lovely hosepipe work on the man it would have been awkward to let him go.”

 

“Such a mind. What a detective. You should join the special branch yourself.”

 

“So you found his belt. And gave it to him. To help him hold up his appendectomy scar, I suppose.”

 

Goosen’s brow furrowed. “He had no appendectomy scar.”

 

“No, but you people hanged him naked, anyway. And with his own belt too.”

 

Goosen went to the room’s file cabinet. Did he plan to take a hosepipe from it?

 

Wham! Wham!

 

He kicked the file cabinet, then turned back to Myburgh with comets in his eyes, the red and yellow fallout of Voortrekker Day sparklers. The pupils shining inside these fireworks were those of a man high on his own ill-suppressed rage.

 

“You’d better stop, brother-man. You’d better just stop!”

 

“All right, Warrant Officer Goosen. All right.” Myburgh held up his hands placatingly.

 

Given everything that had happened, maybe the best course was to keep his mouth shut. To refrain from antagonizing Major Jeppe, Warrant

 

Officer Goosen, and all the other high-strung men of the special branch.

 

To maintain his composure. And, maybe hardest of all, simply to bide his time.

 

* * * *

 

He had not guessed wrong; they were releasing him. Lieutenant Cuyler, according to Major Jeppe, had done some telephoning and had learned that Myburgh was a clean case. Each reference, though, had needed cross-checking and confirmation. That was why, regrettably, they had held him so long.

 

“Not because you thought me a terrorist?” Myburgh said.

 

Jeppe swallowed a cold tablet with a gulp of water. “It isn’t often that a man who hits an elephant on the KwaNdebele Road comes into our building to report it”

 

A tactful way of confessing that they had grilled him because they had been suspicious of him. Thank God they hadn’t subjected him to the “refrigerator,” the “airplane,” “Dr. Frankenstein,” the “marionette,” and so on. Thank God.

 

Without warning, Jeppe started. “Meneer Myburgh! Where the hell did you go?” He dropped his glass and looked around the room as if Myburgh had left it. His glass, meanwhile, broke on the floor into a nebula of scattershot shards and chips.

 

“I’m right here.”

 

Jeppe recovered. “Ah, yes, there. You faded out on me. It’s this cold, I guess. My vision’s bollixed. My head aches. My nose feels like a cherry pepper.”

 

“You should go home,” Myburgh said.

 

But he was frightened. It wasn’t Jeppe’s cold that had caused him to fade; it was a brief reversion to shadow matter, the result of his again beginning to view things—a little, at least—from the pedestrian focus of Henning Jeppe. He had to cling to Thubana. If he did not, this entire nightmare would cease to signify.

 

“I should go home,” Jeppe said. “And so I will. Allow me to drive you to your own place, Meneer Myburgh.”

 

“I can’t. It wouldn’t—”

 

“The least I can do. For all the nasty inconvenience.”

 

In the end, Myburgh permitted Jeppe to chauffeur him along the tree-lined boulevards of Pretoria, past the monuments and parks and museums, to his condominium. A good ride. Last week’s clouds were only memories. The blue Transvaal sky—a dome of fragile porcelain—made him forget that it was winter, that the jacarandas would not blossom for another three months. Even Jeppe’s reminders not to speak of anything that had happened during his confinement seemed benign and sensible, for Myburgh had the odd feeling that his life was beginning anew.

 

* * * *

 

Back in his apartment, hanging his dry-cleaned but ruined suit in a closet, he realized that he had bought his mellow spirits with counterfeit coin. Thubana was dead, the victim of men hostile to the quixotic Grand Unified Theory toward which he had so touchingly—but ineffectively— pointed his dreams.

 

And Thubana, dead, was a living rebuke.

 

The dressing mirror on Myburgh’s closet door gave back an image that modulated in and out of visibility like the picture on a snow-afflicted TV set. He was there, then he wasn’t. He wasn’t there, then he was. The degree of reality he had was contingent on forces over which he had no direct control.

 

Or, at least, so it seemed at the moment.

 

Myburgh crossed his arms in front of his chest and clutched his shoulders. Stay put, he told himself; stay put. Arms crossed, he walked into his apartment’s living room—a studio decorated with opera posters, ferns, an aquarium with Chinese carp, and a wall of books, few of which he had opened since taking his degree from the University of Pretoria nearly twenty years ago. Today, his reading was almost all business related, with a smattering of international news to keep him abreast of fluctuating trends, and he did the bulk of it in his office at Jacobus & Roux.

 

Thubana was at the fish tank tapping nutritional dandruff out of a colorful box onto the water for Myburgh’s starving carp. The fish rose in pairs or trios, hit at the scaly food, then splashed away through the bottle-green water to allow another greedy pair or threesome to surface and feed.

 

—They’re hungry, Thubana said. —You were gone a long time, Mr. Myburgh.

 

—I left a key with the manager, Myburgh said. —He promised to take care of them for me.

 

—It appears he forgot.

 

Thubana looked exactly as he had hanging in his cell on the top floor of security police headquarters: naked, bruised, grotesquely cinched at the throat with his confiscated belt. Here, though, his body was relaxed, his manner courteous. The end of his belt hung straight down his chest like a tie instead of twisting stiffly away in a makeshift noose. Under the glances of Jeppe & Company, he had been humiliated. Here, he was at ease with his nakedness, relieved that an insufferable ordeal was over.

 

—Let me get you a robe. You must be cold.

 

—It’s all right, Mr. Myburgh. I can’t stay.

 

—No trouble, no trouble.

 

Myburgh returned to his closet (dismayed to find that there was nothing in the full-length mirror on its door but the framed poster for Die Götterdämmerung opposite it), rummaged distractedly among his hangups for a dressing gown, found one, and returned to Thubana with it. Thubana protested mildly, but at last took the gown and put it on—more to ease Myburgh’s embarrassment, Myburgh felt, than to satisfy propriety or to defeat the cold. Now, he looked a great deal like a lanky prizefighter, the undaunted loser of a bout with the world title holder.

 

—What are you doing here? Myburgh said.

 

—I must tell you something.

 

—Out with it, then.

 

—The challenge is to write one set of equations that will prove the four known basic forces to be separate showings of one even more basic force.

 

—You told me that on Grim Boy’s Toe.

 

—Reminders are necessary, I think. People keep forgetting how important this challenge is.

 

Myburgh raised and dropped his arms. —You’re not really here, Mr. Thubana. Maybe I’m not either.

 

Thubana ignored this. —Another thing.

 

—What?

 

—Someone narked on Winston.

 

—”Narked”? Do you mean that Skosana was actually involved in the Armscor bombing?

 

—Could be. Could be.

 

—I thought he was innocent, a victim.

 

—Few of us are innocent, Mr. Myburgh. Many are victims.

 

—A man who plants bombs, or who protects people who do, isn’t a victim. He’s a perpetrator.

 

Thubana, hands in pockets, shook his head disappointedly.

 

—Violence sickens me, Myburgh insisted.

 

—Sometimes it does. Sometimes. But Winston had a steel plate in his head. It broadcast to him almost continuously. The buzzing of one’s own bones is hard to set aside.

 

—I imagine it is.

 

—Another thing I wanted to tell you, Mr. Myburgh: Informers are everywhere.

 

—Who? Do you know who it was?

 

—Of course. It came to me while helicoptering under the blows of Pampoenkop and his goons.

 

—Tell me.

 

Thubana told.

 

* * * *

 

It was still daylight. Lightning bird (called by the Ndebele of Sebetiela masianoke a selwana and by Afrikaners the hammerkop) had done his work; he had brought the highveld rain. The coming summer drought would be easier to bear for his help in July. Now, though, the winter sun shone to the north again, and the people of Pretoria were enjoying both the freshness of the air and the brisk high rage of that rapidly westering sun.

 

In the same clothes he had worn home from police headquarters, Myburgh went downstairs and hailed a cab. The driver was a young Afrikaner who had probably never heard of the hammerkop. Myburgh felt an irrational resentment toward him even as the young man let him in and turned to receive his destination. (Or not irrational, Myburgh thought. Misplaced.)

 

“Marabastad,” he said.

 

“Are you sure? I don’t carry many of our kind there.”

 

“Do you carry any?”

 

“Yes, sir. Now and again.”

 

“Good. I’m another. Please take me there.”

 

“This is the rush hour. It’ll be slow going.”

 

Myburgh showed the cabbie a handful of rand notes. “More talk, young man, and it will affect my tip.”

 

“Yes, sir. Where in Marabastad?”

 

“Belle Ombre station.”

 

The cabbie started to speak again (Myburgh could see him in the rearview), but changed his mind and slid the cab into gear.

 

Because of traffic, the trip needed twenty minutes. During it, Myburgh recalled his final moment with Thubana: Nodding good-bye, Thubana had ascended through his apartment’s ceiling and beyond, carrying with him both Myburgh’s dressing gown and the self-pitying edges of his funk. Now, Belle Ombre station—a kind of soaring, concrete circus tent with attractive parterres and geometries of structural piping painted red, yellow, blue, and green—loomed out of the old Asian enclave like a Transvaaler’s Disneyworld.

 

This was the depot from which the architects of the homeland solution accepted the black “foreigners” from Bophuthatswana and KwaNdebele as day laborers, and from which they expelled them again every night. Bullet trains were the key both to white autonomy and economic self-sufficiency, and this afternoon, almost in spite of himself, Myburgh found himself admiring the sleek, high-tech trains that state planners had commissioned, and bought, to put their dear and preposterous scheme into action.

 

Unfortunately, not all the high-speed rail lines necessary to make this solution work were operating yet, and to make sure that no “foreigner” spent the night in the city, Putco had to continue to send commuter buses to KwaNdebele and some of the more distant corners of Bophuthatswana.

 

It was these grime-encrusted buses, not the sexy trains, that Myburgh had come to Belle Ombre to find; and when he saw the ramps leading to the passenger docks, he made his driver stop, gave him both his fare and an extravagant tip, and stepped out among milling armies of weary blacks, who looked at him (if they looked at him at all) with glazed, preoccupied eyes.

 

A ghostly twilight had begun to draw down.

 

What business did the white baas have here? His clothes didn’t identify him as a policeman, nor did they say that he was well off enough to be a bullet-train official or a Putco executive. He was, in fact, an intruder, and Myburgh became more and more aware of his status as an intruder the deeper into the crowd he walked, hurrying to reach Thubana’s bus before it filled and left for various closer settlements on its route to the Wolverkraal depot, three hours out of Marabastad.

 

“Bus four-nine-six,” he said, stopping a woman wearing a heavy, unbuttoned coat over a maid’s uniform. She merely stared. He said the same thing in English, and she gave him an I-couldn’t-tell-you shrug. Not hostile; indifferent.

 

He let her go, blundered on, asked others, got blank stares or confessions of ignorance, and finally approached a uniformed white policeman who wanted to know where he was going and why. Didn’t he know that, at this hour, Belle Ombre was no place for casual sight-seeing? Above the shuffling crowd, speakers piped a Mantovani-ized arrangement of the old Petula Clark hit “Downtown.”

 

Myburgh, putting his face in the policeman’s, explained that he had come to scold a Ndebele roofer for the shoddy work he had done on a Sunnyside housing project. The man had to return tomorrow and repair his labor, or he would forfeit his pay and any future chance to roof in the city’s white subdivisions.

 

“What bus is he riding, then?”

 

“Number four-nine-six,” Myburgh said.

 

The policeman sighed, as if being asked to find a diamond on a floor strewn with broken glass.

 

“It has a name too,” Myburgh said: “Grim Boy’s Toe.”

 

The policeman nodded. “Ah, yes, I know it.”

 

“You know it?”

 

“Of course. They’re not allowed names. Commercial buses with onetime passengers, yes. But not state-subsidized commuter buses run by good old Putco.”

 

“No? Why not?”

 

“Names on state-subsidized buses are disrespectful. Grim Boy’s Toe, for instance. Who’d want to ride that?”

 

Myburgh thought that even if it were called Bali Hi Express, he wouldn’t be pleased to ride it again (not so far as the Wolverkraal depot, anyway), but he bit his tongue.

 

“Over that way,” the policeman said, pointing across one of the esplanades to a down-sloping ramp. “Driver’s busy trying to bring his bus in line with Putco policy.”

 

“This way?” Myburgh said, already walking.

 

“Yes, sir. Right on over.”

 

Myburgh jogged across the esplanade. He found another nexus of ramps, looked around, selected the one he thought the policeman had meant, and, breathing raspily, jogged down it to the loading dock. People had not yet begun to queue here. Myburgh relaxed a little. He was no stranger in a crowd, and Ernest Kabini was standing next to his bus.

 

A closer look: Kabini was holding a small can of blue enamel and painting out the legend that had personalized number 496 for Myburgh on the drizzly highveld.

 

“Stop!” he cried.

 

Kabini glanced up at the white man coming irresistibly down the ramp, his heavy-heeled strut more the consequence of gravity than self-esteem. Myburgh, meanwhile, read confusion on Kabini’s face. Not guilt, not panic: confusion.

 

And then Kabini recognized him, knew him for the unlucky fellow who had wrecked his lekker Cadillac on the KwaNdebele Road. His confusion turned into something like both guilt and panic, and his eyes cut from side to side, looking for a way out.

 

“What are you doing, Kabini?” Myburgh put a hand on the mud-caked bus, almost as if he owned it.

 

Kabini lifted his brush and paint can. “Covering this unhappy name, nkosi.” He smiled. “Very good to see you again.”

 

“Don’t cover it.”

 

“Company regulation, my baas. Got to finish. Got to finish up before Mr. Krige comes back to check.”

 

“Leave it as it is.”

 

Kabini glowered at him. He had already glopped out most of the first two words, GRIM BOY—so that all that was visible now was ’s TOE (whatever that implied). Obviously, he could see no point in leaving only an orphaned possessive and the name of a rather lowly body part emblazoned on the bus’s side. Mr. Krige would not be pleased. His passengers would laugh.

 

“Forgive me, nkosi, but I must paint it out.”

 

“And I must tell your riders—” Myburgh climbed up into 496 and saw that maybe twenty people were already aboard, waiting for the rest of their fellow commuters to connect and climb on too. He came back down. “I must tell them you’re a paid police informant.”

 

Kabini’s puzzlement appeared to grow. “Why would you say that, my baas?”

 

“Because it’s true.”

 

Smiling, Kabini shook his head. “No. No, nkosi.”

 

“You had Ephraim turn in Winston Skosana. Skosana was a friend of young Mordecai Thubana’s. So Major Jeppe took him too.”

 

“Most unlucky.”

 

“Even unluckier, Kabini, is what happened to your ex-passengers while being detained.”

 

Kabini’s usual deference was giving way to guarded hostility. Lines clawed from his eyes. His mouth tightened, a piece of string pulled taut. He put his brush into the can of enamel and started to feather blue paint onto the ’s TOE. Myburgh shook his head in warning.

 

“You’re a government informer. Should I tell them?”

 

“Look at my eye. The police beat me.”

 

“For show. To protect you. But I have details. Details your passengers will believe. God’s truth.”

 

Kabini lowered his brush. He looked around. Possibly, he was imagining what it would be like for twenty to ninety outraged Putco customers to stomp him to death on a terminus ramp or maybe to wait until he had driven back to Tweefontein E, or Kameelrivier, to hang a petrol-drenched Firestone around his neck.

 

“What, my baas, do you want from me?”

 

Myburgh pointed. “Thubana gave your bus that name?”

 

“Only the word Toe. It was called Grim Boy even before I began to drive. Thubana made me add—” Kabini nodded at the apostrophe s and the three-letter word after it.

 

“Then leave it alone, please.”

 

Kabini stuck his brush into the can and threw the can down. It splattered blue on the passenger dock’s retaining wall and part of the bus’s undercarriage. Perplexity and distaste had fused to make Kabini surly.

 

“What else?” he said.

 

Myburgh wasn’t sure. He had to do something else. Wasn’t that why he had come out here?

 

“I want to drive your bus,” he said.

 

“What?” Kabini looked around for help. If he found a security agent who knew what services he had rendered the state, Myburgh was lost. Myburgh knew he had to act quickly. “Give me the keys to your bus.”

 

Kabini was hugely offended. “Surely not, nkosi.”

 

“I’ll blow the whistle on you. Loud.”

 

Kabini was at sea, a man in an unexpected gale. “The keys are in the goddamned ignition.”

 

“Thank you.”

 

“Why are you doing this? Are you crazy?”

 

“I want to take some people on a tour, Kabini. I want them to learn something of what I’ve learned.”

 

Myburgh climbed in and stood at the top of 496’s center aisle. He pulled the handle shutting the double-hinged door. He told his passengers —Kibini’s passengers—that although he intended to drive them back to KwaNdebele eventually, their trip this evening would take a little longer because he had an important errand to run in the heart of Pretoria.

 

All who wished to get off now and wait for Putco to rectify the terrible additional inconvenience he was going to inflict on them were welcome to do so. On the other hand, all who wished to ride with him into the city were welcome to stay on. If the authorities did not arrest him before he could carry out his pledge to finish the KwaNdebele run, he would (he swore) get them home an hour or so before midnight. At least.

 

“Who are you, my baas?” said a woman in a knit hat, like a pink and purple crown. “Some demon-taken drunk?”

 

“I’m the man who hit the elephant. I’m the friend of Mordecai Thubana. I’m your driver this evening.”

 

Out the window, he could see Ernest Kabini stalking up the ramp in the grainy dusk, bleakly intent.

 

“Drive us, then,” the woman said. “Drive us.”

 

Three or four others asked Myburgh to let them get off, but the rest acknowledged him as the man who had hit the elephant, numbly accepted him as Kabini’s stand-in, and allowed him to grind’s Toe into gear, leapfrog it out of the loading dock, and carry them out of Belle Ombre in a fit of backfires and roars muffled by a torrent of deadly Muzak and by the pipe-trimmed buttresses of the station’s colorful pavilion.

 

Myburgh drove badly, but he escaped Marabastad heading south on Eleventh Street, chugging through its intersections with Boomstraat and Strubenstraat, and eventually turning east on Vermeulenstraat, within hailing range of the Kruger House Museum, in order to make a rattletrap assault on Pretoria’s center. Double-decker municipal buses, as well as European, American, and Japanese passenger cars, jockeyed for position around him, their drivers eyeing him and his out-of-place riders as if the Putco bus had dropped into their town from another cosmos.

 

Myburgh cracked the window in the driver’s cage. “We’re going to KwaNdebele!” he shouted. “If you want to see that South African Shangri-la for yourself, meet us at Church’s Square!”

 

A moment later, he added, “By the Palace of Justice!”

 

(—Gravity, he heard Mordecai Thubana whispering, —is the only universal force. It acts between all particles without exception. Nowadays, though, it is the odd force out.)

 

“I know!” Myburgh said, shouting at his passengers.

 

(—Most matter in our universe, said Thubana, an unseen spirit in this driver’s cage, —is invisible.)

 

“Shadow matter. Dark matter.”

 

(—They’re not the same thing, Mr. Myburgh, but, yes, there is a truth of sorts in what you suppose.)

 

“Dark matter, then. Invisible matter.”

 

(—Yes. For years, astronomers have been studying, and calling real, only those parts of the universe defiled by light.)

 

“Defiled?”

 

(—Yes, Mr. Myburgh. Contaminated.)

 

Contaminated, Myburgh thought. Contaminated. Was his Pretoria less real than KwaNdebele? It unquestionably gave off more light, it was giving off light right now, the entire city was blazing, it was blazing with the lovely contamination of street lamps, electric lights, shiny clock faces, the headlamps of dozens of chrome-plated vehicles. And this blazing—this contamination—was a blow to the head, the kind that ignites fireworks, sparklers, glowing cascades of light, an outward/inward overload that blinds whoever decides to look no farther than the edges of this self-righteous blazing. And that person—every such person—is defiled by the loveliness of the contamination to which he has given his heart, and the night on the highveld contains for him no Southern Cross, no lightning bird, no Jewel Box cluster, but only the shadow-matter armies bivouacked in their shameful invisibility out there beyond the electric bonfires, and the cherished stench of his own high blindness. Contaminated by light…

 

“We’re going to KwaNdebele!” Myburgh shouted out the window of his cage. “Meet us at Church’s Square!”

 

(—Mr. Myburgh. Mr. Myburgh, come back.)

 

“Not yet! I’ve got to recruit some passengers!”

 

The claxon of a police cruiser sounded; lights flashed from the turret on its roof. It pulled speedily abreast of 496 and paced it around the immense, palm-dotted memorial park and traffic circle at the center of Church’s Square.

 

An officer was waving angrily, and futilely, at Myburgh, urging him to pull over. Myburgh wasn’t ready to do that. He waved back at the policeman. If the officer wanted to stop him before he was ready to stop, then let him call up a roadblock and clog the circle with barricades and police vehicles.

 

In fact, because that was the only option (other than shooting Myburgh dead and perhaps inflicting injury on bystanders and riders alike) that Myburgh had given the officer, he apparently did just that, for, soon enough, the traffic circle resembled a raceway, and Myburgh’s bus was slowing, slowing, as city cruisers surrounded it and nudged it toward the waist-high brick wall on the circumference of the park.

 

Around him were such familiar landmarks and competitors as the South African Reserve Bank, Standard Bank, and Barclays National Bank. Nearby, too, were the Raadsaal and the Transvaal Provincial Administration Building, every structure looming.

 

“This man is demon possessed,” Myburgh heard the woman in the knit crown tell her fellow riders. “Truly.”

 

He opened the door for the policemen pounding on it. One man stood in the traffic circle with a pistol pointed at him through the window of the driver’s cage. The officers on the sidewalk also leveled guns at him.

 

“Be a hands-upper for me, man,” one of them said.

 

Myburgh kept his hands on the steering wheel. The bus’s motor continued to sputter and bang.

 

“Hands up!”

 

“This bus is called Everybody’s Toe,” Myburgh said. “I’d like to give you a free ride to Tweefontein E in KwaNdebele, gentlemen. Please ask forty or fifty people to go with us. It shouldn’t be too crowded.”

 

Two policemen rushed up the bus’s steps, dragged him from his seat, and pulled him onto the sidewalk to cuff his hands and hold his face to the paving as they patted him down.

 

Myburgh was conscious of the riders on Everybody’s Toe creeping to its windows to observe his takedown. Their faces were shadowy, but not invisible; they seemed far more sympathetic toward him than did the washed-out faces of the policemen. It was night, but the city hurled off too much light for any stars to shine through, and Myburgh understood that the Theory of Everything for which Thubana had been looking was still twisting out there in the vacuum—beyond the contamination, cloaked in darkness, waiting.

 

“Mordecai,” Myburgh said, his cheek on the sidewalk, and he had the distinct sense that someone had heard him.