said, from the medication he’d prescribed to me when I was 12. It meant I couldn’t express my emotional responses as well as most people. It wasn’t an uncommon side-effect, he said, and lots of patients could live with it. The pills he gave me, Celexa and Paxil, were treating me well for the insomnia that had brought me to his office, and he suggested we keep to the regimen. I couldn’t remember how I’d been before. I sat in his office and agreed.
It’s now been five years.
Picking a dandelion seed off my school uniform today, Part says she knows a bad joke and then she tells it to us. “The thing with reality,” she says, “people used to have the sense for it, but now they don’t buy it.” Pausing for a moment, she says she means “cents.”
The three of us laugh. It’s the end of May, a month before our winter break, and I’ve just got out of detention, my second one since I stopped being a student monitor in junior high.
Litha bends down to loosen his laces and sighs. “Maybe heaven is dead,” he says.
Later, at home with my earphones on, I try to sleep, but I don’t.
Instead, I find myself standing in front of our bathroom mirror at 1 a.m.
I weigh 99 pounds from having had rails on both of my jaws for an underbite, and the mirror reflects my cheekbones, my neck, my lips, my hair. It needs to be braided again, I think, although it’s still neat.
In the living room, I switch on the TV and find an infomercial for a range of pans—an old man in a chef’s tunic uses a nonstick casserole to caramelize sugar over a low flame; he pours it into a cereal bowl and his audience claps. I switch it off.
In my bedroom, I open a drawer and take out a makeup mirror and magnifying glass. I tilt the vanity mirror on its base until it fills up with a reflection of the moon through the parted curtains. Angling the lens over the rock’s surface, I count the craters that mark its damage until I fall asleep.
October 5, 1999
The following morning, after he’d returned coughing from peering into our mailbox, Tata proposed a trip to a Pentecostal herbalist from out of town. A month before, he’d been laid off from his new job as manager of a fleet of vans that delivered amasi from a farm in Stutterheim, and he’d written a note for me to miss school so we could make it in time before the lines. My presence on the trip was for good luck, he said.
We set out at noon, Tata’s retrenchment letter on the console between us. Tata’s double cab crossed the rail bridge at the edge of our town and entered Ginsberg, where he parked next to a sleeping German shepherd with patches of pale skin showing through its fur. It was shivering from flea bites, and I moved away, careful not to step on its tail.
We walked through a grid of one-room houses with rusting roofs, to a house with a grassy yard and long line outside the door. Tata sighed. For an hour and a half, we shuffled in line. One woman collapsed, having reached the front of the line a moment too late. It took a while before a stooped man came over and carried her away. To pass the time, I looked around. The grass grew in sparse patches over the yard, disturbed in the middle by large angular rocks that marked a path; the porch smelt of enough ammonia to cause a headache, I thought—and then got one.
Tata got to the front of the line and disappeared into a room without windows, built onto the side of a house that was larger than the rest. When he returned, without his retrenchment letter, he was holding two clear, unlabeled bottles. One was for health and the other would assure us wealth, he said, hefting them at his sides. He was to drink three times from each bottle. When we got to the car, the dog had vanished along with its leash.
Tata and I were silent as we crossed back over the rail tracks.
“Tell me what you want to do with your life,” he said.
I thought about it. “I don’t know. Maybe take care of you.”
Tata sighed, shifting into first gear. “Just like your mother,” he said. “You can’t think for yourself, either?”
I thought for myself. “I want to be a scientist,” I said.
He didn’t respond. It was only when we got home that I realized I could never tell him what I knew.
That I wanted to look for her through the longest telescope I could find.
Later that afternoon, after we’d eaten our porridge in silence and he’d drunk from each of his bottles, Tata went back to bed. I waited for his door to lock, then went to my bedroom too. I turned over my pillow and looked at the bloodstains, now turned yellow, on his old pillowcase.
This was in the spring of 1999. I’d been cured of acne. Nelson Mandela had announced his retirement, forfeiting a shoo-in for a second term, and the world was ending because of a computer bug.
We never spoke about Mama. Tata tried to keep her memory outside our walls, minimizing her in conversation, and I’d gone along with that until I couldn’t. Until I no longer had the choice.
The first time I saw the machine, for example, I thought of the word canard, which I’d learned from a crossword puzzle Mama completed with me when I was nine. I didn’t know to call it the machine, then; nor did I tell Tata about it.
Instead, the following morning, I heated up and served us two bowls of oats. Then I sat down and thought about the word again.
Myth.
“Rumor,” Mama had said, guiding my hand over the squares.
“Falsehood?”
“That’s close.”
“How close?”
She smiled.
I looked up from my porridge bowl, now, and saw Tata in his worn diplomat’s bathrobe—the one with the old Ciskei insignia—poring over the classifieds section of The Daily Dispatch. His tea had gone cold.
Ever since the abolition of apartheid, he’d been unable to find regular work. Tata and his ex-colleagues had all dropped an economic class and retreated from the public, avoiding the glares that awaited them in schools and supermarkets. In Bhisho, he’d served as a financial officer in the Department of Agriculture, working through the Ciskeian Agricultural Bank to develop “released areas,” or clusters of previously white-owned farms which had been absorbed into the homeland. Men who’d been doing their duty weren’t the same as the ones who’d had their boots on our necks, he said.
I sat back in the kitchen chair and spoke without expecting an answer. “I thought you had a position lined up with those new Renewable Energy people,” I said. “Last week, you told me they had a logo and everything.”
Tata scoffed, folding his broadsheet in half. He pinched its spine and closed his eyes. “They’re all amateurs,” he said. “Lawrence is the worst of them, too. He’s never worked a day in his life.”
I looked at the headline obscuring his face. It was about how many children were illiterate in the province. I stirred my oats and cleared my throat. “I don’t believe we have an 86 percent literacy rate in the Eastern Cape. I’ve been to our schools.”
“Come again?”
“Especially
