Moxyland

Kendra

‘Don’t.’

I try to break away, but they won’t let go. I can’t stand the proximity, the heat of their bodies is too close, too tight; it makes me feel nauseous. Until I was about three, I couldn’t handle anyone touching me, I’d scream if they tried. It’s common with premature babies, my parents said, but maybe they got it wrong, maybe it was my brother or another baby entirely. Maybe I never felt anything like this before.

They ignore me, and it’s easier to go along with them, because the stairs abruptly seem too steep, laborious, like someone overtilted the axis into an Escher painting.

The emergency exit doors start howling an alarm as we push through them and into the night. It’s drizzling. The wind is as cold as teeth. I don’t know what I’ve done with my bag. I try to look back for it over my shoulder.

One of them, the smaller one, yelps, ‘Hey! She’s going to kotch again.’

I feel vaguely insulted, but then I’m distracted by swathes of blue light strobing the side of the building. The lights seem warm. I’m drawn to them, but we go in the opposite direction instead, and then there is a car, and I am leaning with my head out the window and a hand on my back and cold air and rain stinging against my mouth and I’m getting wet, but they won’t let me back inside. And then there is shouting and we’re all bundled out and the car screeches away and we have to walk.

And then I wake up.

‘Well hello, sunshine.’

I close my eyes again as fast as I can. But it’s too late, I’ve already let in the light and, with it, sparking dazzles of pain.

‘Hey? Hell-o? Eugh. Shit, Eddie. Didn’t I tell you to clean this up?’

There is a moist dabbing at my chest and I open my eyes, to see Toby – who else would it be? – working at the front of my dress with a dishcloth. It smells distinctly of vomit. The couch I’m lying on is damp with sweat. And I would feel miserably humiliated if the pain didn’t override everything.

‘Easy, tiger,’ Toby says. ‘Take it you’re feeling better?’

I touch my face, feel a sullen welt on my jaw, where the cop got me with his baton. He would have got me again if his partner hadn’t intervened, so his second blow was only a glancing lash across the kidneys as I scrambled past him.

Toby gives me the cloth. ‘What were you doing, baby girl?’

‘Going to Rep…’ I say it again, because the first time it comes out as a malformed croak. ‘Going to Replica. For the party? I was meeting friends for a sundowner.’ Realisation hits. ‘Oh God, they must think I stood them up. Where’s my phone, I have to call…’

‘It’s almost three in the a.m., sweet.’

‘Up and about?’ An overweight man with a shaven head pokes his face into the negative space between the door and the wall. ‘Good. Okay. Then you need to get out.’

‘Would you just chill, Unathi?’

‘Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. You said till she’s conscious. And now she is. You have to vamos. Andelay.’

‘I want to go home,’ someone whines, and I notice, now that I’m able to focus, that the sshhssshhs sound in the background is a kid with bad posture and a worse haircut, ensconced in the depths of a beanbag, rubbing his palms down his corduroy thighs, over and over.

‘At least let me upload my video,’ says Toby.

‘Forget it, china. They’re not tracing that shit back to me.’

‘Can I use your bathroom?’ I sway slightly when I stand up, or rather the world does, taking an unnerving dip that forces me to blink, hard, to get it to realign. The lights are way too bright, flattening out everything into planes of colour. Or maybe it’s just me.

‘No. No ways.’

‘I have to pee.’

‘You’ll just have to wait.’

‘Dude.’ Toby chips in, reproachful.

‘Is it through here?’

‘No, you can’t. You have to leave. Right now.’

‘Or I could pee on your rug.’

I push open the door into a dingy room overloaded with consoles and projectas playing unique content on every wall. Games, I think, and a vid chat sesh going, with dozens of little faces squawking at each other. I pick my way over empty boxes of instant tofu meals bleeding what I can only hope is miso into the carpet, and stagger into the bathroom.

There’s no lock, or at least, no key, so I shove the laundry bin against the door. I wash my face without looking at it, avoiding my eyes in the mirror. My mouth is fucking sore. The bastard split my lip, where the edge of the baton caught me.

I shrug off my dress, step into the bath and turn on the shower full blast without waiting for the temperature to adjust. The pressure is stinging and the cold comes so brutal, it snaps something in my chest, but I refuse to cry. Not here. I lean my head against my arms and let the water surge over me until it turns hot.

‘Hey, K. You okay?’ Toby raps on the door.

‘Is she coming out?’

‘Yeah, she’s coming out. Just relax.’

‘I didn’t say she could use the shower, man.’ The door shifts but jams against the laundry bin. ‘Just chuck her out. Shit.’

‘I’ll pay for the fucking water,’ I shout. There’s no shampoo, not surprising for a bald guy, so I use the sludgy bar of green anti-bacterial soap on my hair. I scoop the dress from the floor and try to deal with the stain. The bile and blood are too thoroughly bonded with it, though, and there is a faintly chemical odour too, reminding me of the overwhelming hysteria that came over me at the station, when the dogs surged forward. I couldn’t help it. I had to go with them. I scrub and scrub at the stain, but all I’m doing is rubbing it in.

I dry off with a musty blue towel, the only one I can find. Scratching around in the hamper, I find a green t-shirt that isn’t too stained. I wring out the dress and roll it down around my hips, tucking in the wet spots as best as I can, and pull the tee over it. It has a decal that says Ecco-5, which I think is a game. Or maybe a band. I avoid the mirror.

‘Finally!’ says jittery bald guy as I slide open the door. He pauses; the gears in his brain pop and grind. ‘Hey, that’s my shirt.’

‘Are we going to get out of here?’

‘I dunno.’ Toby is suddenly nervous. ‘Maybe it’s not a good idea. After, well.’

‘Hey. You absolutely cannot stay here. I am not kidding.’

‘I mean, have you thought about it?’ Toby asks.

‘What?’

He laughs, but it’s forced. ‘Whether we should go or not. Or wait. To see, you know?’

‘No, bullshit! You guys need to get to one of those vaccine places soon as.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, are we in your way, Unathi?’

‘This isn’t my problem, Tobias. You shouldn’t have come here.’

‘You were the one who hooked me up with the fucking mission! It’s exactly your problem.’

Their fighting is making the pain in my head worse. It’s like a flash-bulb popping, like the veins in my temples are threads of filament burning out.

‘Do you have any Ghost?’ The questions shuts them both up.

Baldy – Unathi – whatever, smirks. ‘There’s a spaza. On the corner. On the way out.’

The kid with the bad hair – I still don’t know his name – tramps sulkily after us through two sets of security doors, which buzz open in succession to let us out through an alley that backs onto the delivery entrance of the spaza, which is closed.

‘Tighter than a nun’s—’ Toby starts to say.

‘Okay. Just. I’m sure there’s another one.’

‘Not in this neighbourhood.’

We’re not exactly residential. It seems to be mainly warehouses and stacks of metal containers, which must mean we’re near the old docks, not too far removed from the station. It’s desolate, apart from a rat, loathsomely huge, perched on a mound of rotten tarpaulins. It stops to look at us, incuriously, and then resumes cleaning its face in little circular motions with both paws.

‘We’re never going to get a taxi now.’

‘Couldn’t pay for it anyway,’ Toby says.

‘What?’

I glance at my phone to check the time, but the screen is unnervingly blank. I hit the power, but the screen doesn’t light up reassuringly, my signature tune doesn’t kick in. I pop the battery, click it back in and thumb it again. But there’s nothing.

‘Yeah, they amped up the juice when the defusers weren’t working.’

‘Fried everything one time,’ the kid says with genuine admiration.

‘Even my illegit handset got toasted,’ Toby says. ‘How do you think we ended up here?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘No phone. No cash. The last taxi kicked us out.’

‘Does this mean I’m disconnect?’ It’s too much. I sink down heavily on the kerb, not even worried about the rat. ‘I don’t know. We’ll have to see.’

‘My mom’s going to butcher me if I’m disconnect,’ the kid says glumly, flicking a stompie at the rat, which only twitches its ropy tail and goes back to cleaning itself.

‘Hey, come on, baby girl. Don’t cry.’

‘I’m not fucking crying.’

The kid looks away embarrassed. Toby checks his watch. ‘Look, it’s 3.18. My place is nearby. Well, relatively nearby. It’s about six kays, we can walk it. And we’ll just go chill out until morning, maybe email some people. Persuade someone to make a call on our behalf.’

‘I’m going to an immunisation centre,’ blurts the kid. ‘You can’t stop me. Don’t even try and stop me.’ He’s holding a gun, his hand shaking.

‘That’s fine, Eddie. I don’t give a fuck what you do. All the better. Means you’re out of my fucking hair,’ Toby says.

‘There’s nothing you can do. I’m going.’

‘So fucking go already!’

The kid stands there trembling, his eyes wild, and then, with a little bounce on the balls of his feet, he turns and bolts away down the alley.

Toby shouts after him. ‘Oh, and Eddie! The guns aren’t real, remember? Fucking moron.’

It occurs to me that he’s terribly young to be alone and disconnect in this neighbourhood at night. But then it occurs to me, so are we.

‘So what happens after that, Toby?’

He yanks me to my feet. ‘We talk to my corporate friend. She might be able to sort us out. Or we go get ourselves a vaccine and we deal with whatever comes up along the way.’

Toby’s apartment is surprisingly immaculate. I know that was an unfair assumption. But when I comment on it, feeling awkward and sweaty after the walk, he laughs and drops a crumpled piece of paper onto the floor. Instantly, a VIMbot shoots out from under the couch, scoops it up, and then darts for cover.

‘My secret sharer,’ he says, collapsing onto the couch and sliding off his boots with his heels. After the tense silence of the long walk for endless kays, surely more than six, to get here, and the mission at the entrance to convince the doorwatcher to let us in without the benefit of Toby’s SIM, it’s a relief to be inside, to be safe. Although safety is relative.

‘Is that a reference to something? Am I supposed to get that?’

‘Oh god, how pretentious. Sorry. It’s Conrad. I’m still registered for a literature degree. At least as far as my folks are concerned. Don’t ask me to recommend him, though. The book was boring as fuck, but all his stuff is. Total wank.’

‘I didn’t take you for the literati type.’

‘Well, between that and bioscience…’ he shrugs.

‘Or the studying type.’

‘There’s no reason to be rude. My darling mother’s probably stopped paying the tuition along with everything else. He shrugs, oneshouldered, ‘Hey, what was I going to do with a Master’s in lit, anyway? You want some sugar?’

‘Got any Ghost?’

‘You really don’t let up on that shit. Have some sugar, it’ll chill you out.’

‘No, I really don’t—’

‘Whatever you want to do, sweetness. Doesn’t affect me in the slightest.’

He stands up and disappears barefoot into the kitchen. A cupboard door bangs harder than necessary. I sit down on a folder chair at the dining-desk, so that he can’t sit next to me.

‘Maybe it’s not a good idea to take drugs on top of whatever we’ve been infected with.’ The desk is stacked with neat piles of epaper, the edges perfectly aligned.

‘Best time,’ he shouts back. Another bang disproportionate to whatever the hell he’s doing.

I start flipping through the pages, careful not to mar that perfectly aligned edge, even though I know he’s not the one who stacked it so anally in the first place. It looks like legal documents, contracts. A broadcast agreement. When I see my name near the head of a page, I drop it, burnt.

He stalks back in, carrying a silver cocktail shaker.

‘Hey, cut it out. Do I come to your domestic and go through your shit?’ He sits down in another folder chair, pulling it up so he’s right next to me, and unscrews the shaker, knocking a fair quantity of sticky white powder onto the surface of the desk.

‘You didn’t have to be so mean.’

‘In the streamcast? I wasn’t mean. To Khanyi, maybe, not you.’

I shove the chair back, stand up, and prowl to the other side of the room, checking his book

shelf while he sifts the powder for clumps.

‘Shouldn’t we contact your friend?’

‘When I’ve had a joint, okay? Besides. You may not have noticed, with all that beauty sleep you got in, but it’s really late.’

‘I said thanks.’

‘Don’t need your appreciation, baby girl.’ He sweeps the powder into a tidy line with a pencil and wraps it up with two short twists of Rizla.

‘Well, I appreciate it anyway.’

‘Noted duly.’ He seals the joint with the edge of his thumb.

‘Look, should I just go? If I’m an inconvenience to you? I was so stupid to come here. Shit.’ I’m ready to leave, walk another eight kays across town in this oversize shirt and my ruined dress and my broken heel, but I can’t find my damn bag.

‘Would you just sit down?’

And then I remember that it’s still at the station. With my camera. Jesus. I wonder if it’s still there, if anyone’s taken it, if the pumped-up defuser has fritzed the Zion. But then I start thinking about what’s on the memchip, what I’ve lost, what I can try and duplicate.

‘Hey.’ Toby takes my shoulders and presses me down into the couch. ‘Sit down and have some sugar with me. All right? And then we can do whatever the fuck you want. Get hold of Lerato or your dad or the cops or your boyfriend or whoever. Okay?’

‘I’ve left my camera behind.’

‘Least of our worries, sweet K. We could be dead in forty-eight.’

‘And he’s not my boyfriend. We broke up. Although it’s not like we were really together before, I mean—’ I’m rambling. ‘He was a prick.’

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Not thinking about it.’

‘I have a headache.’

‘Me too. Sugar will chase it. Here.’

He hands me the joint and squeezes in next to me.

‘I’m not supposed to. The nano. It was in the contract.’ On page sixteen, a list of non-standard chems and supplements that are absolutely prohibited, accompanied by dire warnings, long-term damage potential, unpredictable results, permanent health risk, possible heart failure.

‘Don’t fret it. They’re just covering their asses. They know all about you creative types. They would have tested it. They just don’t want some supersmack freak ODing and making bad publicity noises. What did you think they were going to say, “mix it up”?’

‘I haven’t done—’

‘I know. It’s cool. Hold it like this.’

He lights it for me, putting his arm around me to cup the flame. I take a deep breath, and instantly the room spins and the air takes on a puffy consistency, like we’re the centre of a candyfloss vortex.

Toby takes the joint from my mouth, his fingers brushing against my swollen lip, so that I flinch away. But I’ve already chosen what comes next, even before the air goes shimmery. Even though I know it’s only because we’re both afraid.