23:27 h. The streets are empty now. I have not painted in years. The concrete pavement is erasing millimetres of the same rubber soles. My silence, a victim to my own staling thoughts that never experience the flight of being voiced. All these years of crippled conversations have been devoid of a strip of thought open enough to accommodate the girth of my radical ideals and, with no shame in my defeat, I have resorted to silence- a metamorphosis stunted into a stage of perpetual cocoon. My shoulders push forth with mechanic consistency the threadbare backpack of cult-classics that nobody wants to hear about at the dinners of wine and whine hosted by fellow quasi-intellectuals.
The Johannesburg wind is a snake in July, it finds its way through the hems of my mustard chinos, coiling itself around my flaky legs until it reaches the hot breath of my loins. I imagine that my penis enjoys this attention. its different from the embrace it receives from the half-hearted hands of strangers being tipped over by the intoxicating stench of their own desires. The reaction remains the same though: my testicles wrinkle themselves into a foetal position and my protruding head retracts into the moist petals of my foreskin. And it is over. I am cold. Walking.
23: 49. The streets are emptier now. I walk hostage to an uprising of suppressed thoughts. They lead me nowhere, I just walk in the amber glow of the fading street lights, remembering to pace through the shadows. I take occasional glances of envy at the ballet of floating plastic bags that dance in whirlwinds for an audience of ghosts. You have not painted in years!” screams the uprising. “you don’t know where you are going.” whispers my worn out panic muscles. I walk. I have been doing this ever since Sipho left me seven months ago. I turned out to be the centimetres he aimed to shed around his waist as a new year’s resolution. His sudden vanishing made it very easy for me and I thanked him for that even as I watched crystals of caked tears ice my bare chest. My gratitude was audible even through the vibrato of sobs absorbed by my damp pillow during cold evenings. The painful part is that I have felt homeless ever since. My apartment has transformed into a shelter for me to get an hour or two of interrupted sleep and maybe a shower before I go to work where I will analyse this and that, choosing to emphasise it or them until all of the story is watered down into a thin headline to be smeared across the sunday paper. From work I resume. I listen to the sadness that urges me to walk and, without a glimmer of defiant hope, I obey. Everyday, these streets are alive with the plastic ballet and the orchestra of ghosts accompanying me. I have learned to trust my sorrow, even tonight as it thrusts me further and further away. It is very cold.
23:57. The streets are still empty. The Johannesburg wind is a symphony in July. It is amplified by the alleys that reverberate my sadness ever so harmoniously. I am a 27 year old man, swimming gracefully in a pool of melancholy as putrid as the swamp of urine around the pillars of the bridge I am now walking under. All of a sudden I feel at ease, newfound peace tranquillises the guards of self pity. A warm arm engulfs my neck, the elbow crevice pushes hard against my jaw, my teeth drill into one another. My feet, floating a centimetre above the damp pavement, have stopped walking. An orange segment of sharp silver is flashed in my face, held by a hand with as many shades of black as a crow. “do you see this?” the voice behind me asked. “yes” replied the uprising but only an exhale of anticipation resonated against my locked teeth. I am 27 years old and I will never paint again.
“you see this? It will find a pore in your neck. It will seduce the sweet tender skin around it. The tip of this knife will penetrate your pore ever so gently until the inner walls relax themselves just like my morals. You will like it. You will beg for more and I will push it in some more until you scream like a pitching whore. I will bury the whole thing in your pore and I will give you the last show your dying eyes will ever see- a fountain of your own blood ejaculating. That will be your reward for not doing what I tell you to. A lot of people think they are cleverer than me, you are not like that are you?”
The grip around my nick is now loose enough for my life saving “No” to be uttered. “Too bad” he says, “I really enjoyed holding you”. Is that desperation springing on the surface of his voice? I desperately need to know. My feet are one with the pee drenched pavement ,once again. I am lending an ear to my sadness, this once again. It wills me to stay.
The man is still behind me. He unzips my backpack. His hand dives into my treasured collection of books and it comes out with the first catch. “ Haw’ Bra Zakes!” he exclaims after removing Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying. I would be really sad if he took it from me, I have had it since I was eleven years old. It is of somewhat sentimental value to me. This man is giving my dried out panic muscles new power, “you know that voice” they tell me “yes you do” screams the uprising. “Toloki was one crazy bastard” says the voice behind me. I recognise those exact words. “Thoba?” I whisper in disbelief. The Johannesburg wind in July sings no more, it merely reminds us of our silence and the paralysing stillness that radiated behind me. It takes him about five minutes to walk around to face me. I see his face. The skin on his face is but a thin veil of brown paint on his skull. His lips look like they have been dribbled with candle wax that turned into flakes of grey upon contact with the wind. His narrow neck stems from a voluminous grey jacket whose scent tells me it carries more than what is in the pockets.
“Ntokozo” he says. Is that happiness flowing on the tonal hills of his voice? I need to know. He smiles the same smile that used to erase everything I was taught at home when i was a child. The same smile that convinced me to go to forbidden river banks in quest of clay when I was seven years old. We would sun-dry the precarious sculptures of cows and clay pots that cracked in the heat. We would roast the sparrows we had killed with rugged slings on the fires we lit in the privacy of the bushes. We would go home smelling like smoke and sometimes of each other’s bodies. We did everything together. We rotated clothes. We rotated homework. We rotated food. We rotated music. We rotated books. They knew him as Ntokozo’s Thoba and I as Thoba’s Ntokozo, testament to how inseparable we were. One day, on a hot summer’s day when we were thirteen, we rotated the words “i love you” in the same bush we rotated pleasure amongst our bodies. He was my gate to intimacy. My family moved away from eShowe when I was 14 , in pursuit of the riches Johannesburg promised but never delivered. I never saw him after that. How could I ever forget Ntokozo’s Thoba? He had the mountain lady’s sharp tongue that would bend itself for me. Good God! here he is, In front of me, holding the very same copy of the book he stole for me over a decade ago. “you dirty bastard,” I flirt “I should have known it was you when you recited that monologue filled with phallic metaphors. Is that how you lay all your victims to rest?”
“they are not MY victims” he smiles. “the prey chooses it’s predator, the predator couldn’t care less as long as it eats”
“are you saying I chose to be your prey tonight or are you saying you couldn’t care less that its me?”
He laughs. I attempt to join in on the laughter but all my face can forge is a frail smile to acknowledge the passing humour.
“what happened to your smile?” he asks with genuine concern “it used to unravel itself like a beautiful poem but now, now it feels as calculated as the smile I get from the world”
His words find a pore in my heart. I weep. He holds me. My tears seep into the collar of his jacket. I feel his get filtered by my afro till they reach my scalp. I don’t know where I am. I am warm. “I h’h’have not painted in years” I tell him, trying to neutralise my hiccupping sorrow. “I am alone, Thoba.”
“I found you” he says, almost inaudibly “I am not alone”.
I lift my head up to look at his polished eyes. “come home with me” I say. Is that desperation in my voice? I wonder.
“I like it here” that is the most polite refusal I have ever gotten out of Thoba. he should remember that I don’t swallow rejection as well as seminal fluid. My sadness speaks again. It tells me to stay with him and I gladly obey.
“then i will come with you” I replied. He looks directly into my eyes as if he were seeing me for the first time. “It is you” was the last thing that came out of those cracked lips before they glued against mine for the first time in 14 years. His right hand rests on the side of my face and the left is glued on my neck as he bends his sharp tongue in my wet mouth. “you deserve me, Ntokozo” he told me. “please don’t leave me again”
“what happened to you?” I asked.
“Your laughter made it tolerable to be whipped for nothing by that alcoholic rooster every night. As soon as you left, it became torturous again and I went looking for you about a month after your family had left. I knew I would not die without feeling your precious neck again. I thank the heavens hiding in the streets”
I follow him into a vacant building. We polish the concrete floor with our naked bodies that are flooding with sweat. The Johannesburg wind in July sings it’s song a meter away from our bodies that rotate heat amongst each other. I paint him with my tongue. His eyes, his ears, his navel, his warm crevice, I paint it all. He is the portrait of heaven that sent me here. I am happy!
I am woken up by the five o clock taxi hooting on the street. I lift my head off my lover’s chest. I notice that it does not move. I look at his still beautiful face. It is grey like the concrete floor. He is not breathing. His body as cold as the snake that squeezes the remnants of joy out of me. Sadness tells me to walk. I obey.
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