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If your job is to hunt down chaos, you become familiar with noise. And squalor. Crowds. The middle of nowhere. If you report the news long enough, sooner or later you’ll end up in a place where you think no one can survive and nothing ever happens. But you’ll be wrong. People carry on with their business, and nowhere is just another place to do exactly that. Maybe it’s even easier, because there are fewer people who see. Who remember.
A few miles north of Port Nolloth, just before you reach South Africa’s border with Namibia, if you keep the sea on your left, fixed west—everything else gradually disappears, until there’s only you and the silence.
Of course there is a bar. The middle of nowhere always has a watering hole.
It’s the kind of day when time doesn’t matter.
“A photo?” “A story. Same thing, isn’t it?”
Fall in love, I would write. With the country. With the people. Maybe even with someone extraordinary. Never expect it to be like home. Home will never be the same again.
There are many ways to fall in love. Suddenly. Slowly. Patiently. Excessively. Destructively. Obsessively. Love has more sides than any other emotion. More shapes and facets. More deaths, apparitions, and resurrections. It reaches farther forward and farther back than any other emotion. It has more history and future woven into it than hatred, fury, and insanity combined. It always wants more. Demands to remember more. Insists on digging up things that belong to the past. Yet it also wants to forget. Forgive. Ignore. You know more about it than about any other emotion, yet you also know less.
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I know I’m supposed to still be angry at her for being inconsiderate, but am I? Or am I more upset because she didn’t confide in me? Because there may be someone else in her life?
As usual, the voice of chaos drowns out every other, saner answer.
There are piles of papers and books everywhere, threatening to topple over. I estimate that there are two thousand books or more. They’re stacked against the walls, next to the TV, and behind the couch. Hardcover spines stand in double rows in two bookcases in the living room. I crouch beside the tower closest to me, scanning the titles. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The Secret Life of Bees. Advanced Quantum Physics. Domestic Violence: How to Survive. Interesting topics, especially the last one. I stand up straight. Where does she find so much time to read? Has she truly read all
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In here, there’s a lot of talk, as if you could sidestep death by devising a three-point plan.
Along with the smell of sweat and last night’s alcohol and moldy suits specially dusted off for today’s event, there’s something else in the air. Somewhere in the midst of everything, only barely discernible. If you lift your nose slightly, like an eager predator, you’ll be able to identify it as the smell of anticipation. Of something about to happen.
I drive off without looking back. I’m hardly in second gear before the first butterflies land under my windshield wipers like crumpled bits of paper, just like discarded love letters.
You’re starting to write about people, not names. How long have you been there?
But the truth doesn’t always need a voice. Sometimes it waits where you left it, without anyone having to acknowledge it. Quietly and indisputably. And, above all, patiently.
There are large and small books, thick and thin ones, philosophy textbooks, detective novels, travelogues, sci-fi, and photo books. There seem to be even more than I recall. In the kitchen, even the salt, pepper, and other spices stand on stacks of books.
I point the beer at the disorganized library around us. If there is some order to how the books are stacked, I can’t see it. “How do you travel with all these books? Do you pack them every time you move? Or do you simply start a new collection?” “They go along. All of them. They’re like my children. I’m on eight crates now. I use the same movers every time. I think they have a standing bet on how many crates it’ll be the next time.” She shakes her head. “My mother tells me to buy a Kindle, but I don’t know. There’s something about paper, you know? Stories and photos that can’t be removed or
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Drink my beer slowly and stare at the bare walls. Ranna the photographer’s walls are white and stark and empty.
And here I am again. Water. Too much water. Life repeats itself relentlessly.
her body was hard and stiff, like lovers’ rigor mortis.
She takes her car keys from her pocket. “Is everything always black or white with you?” “There’s very little in between. And what there is is man-made.” “That’s where you’re wrong, Alex. There’s an entire universe in between. A fucking abyss. And one day someone is going to push you off the cliff.” “I’ll refuse to jump.” “Good luck.”
She has a tattoo that begins at the bend of her leg, traveling all the way up her left side. She, the picture maker, has chosen to adorn her body with words. The flowing black lines of verse climb up her supple skin, circle her left breast, and lead to her heart. “Vroegherfs,” by the well-known Afrikaans poet N. P. van Wyk Louw, is a lyrical lament about the change of season from summer to autumn. To the credit of my high school teachers I vaguely remember it being an intimate prayer for spiritual awakening. About stripping down to the bare minimum as time steadily moves by. Ranna says it
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success lies in repeating the performance. Not in a single fireworks display.”
I wonder if something is troubling her, but she looks strangely happy. As if nighttime agrees with her.
Chaos can become boring. What recurs often eventually loses its impact, diminishes in perceived size and importance, even if it continues unabated. Shock, like love, can ebb away. What once moved the earth can become normal. Routine and predictable. Boring.
In every good story there’s always a touch of irony, after all.
I can’t help thinking how he’s part of this place. How it seems as if he belongs here. I always feel like the outsider, the unwelcome visitor, even at home. Maybe it’s time to ask for a transfer. Or look for a new job. Chaos lives everywhere, after all.
That’s why I like butterflies. I know what it means to leave everything you know and love behind, just as I understand how one thing—one person—can change all your carefully laid plans. That’s why I’m alone again, after all.
Hamisi shows no surprise at the sight of all the books—unlike Alex, who couldn’t stop staring. The books are one reason why I don’t allow people into my personal space. That, and the fact that my home is the one place where I can still exercise a degree of control.
Sometimes I miss my life. What my life could have been.
I’ve known violence for long enough to know that it comes in every shape and form. The world is a crazy place, full of crazy people doing crazy things, and that’s never going to change.”
Never make peace with violence to your person, I hear my mother say. Or to your soul.
Finally get into bed. Maybe I’ll fall asleep if I try hard enough. A few hours under the covers and I may be able to think rationally again. But it’s no use. The green hands on my alarm clock move on to midnight, and I hear every second as it ticks by. In the dark the sound is almost earsplitting. I roll over for the umpteenth time and stare at the clear night outside the window.
If my heart was a place, it would be full. Messy, yes. Noisy, certainly. But alive.
“If no one is willing to help, you learn to solve your own problems.”
Can’t I simply be happy for once? Have a life consisting of more than books and empty beds?
Last night I dreamed I was in the desert. A dream like my photos—bright and overpowering, the images drenched in color. I was running knee-deep through thick sand until I was completely out of breath. Until I melted away in the sun and seeped into the sand.
Maybe you never escape your past. You try and subdue it. Force it into a corner. And just when you think you’ve put a leash on it, you fuck up. And history repeats itself.
I eat a final meal at a small restaurant in Kommetjie. The sea is the same color as the clear blue sky—calm and peaceful. The beach is a brilliant white, a single trail of footsteps disappearing into the distance.
It’s eleven, which means I’m an hour early, exactly as I planned.
People who plan ahead live longer.
His hands look as if they once knew how to fix things. And break them. A long time ago, before he began to move like cold syrup.
He smells of old tobacco and gasoline.
One of his comrades gets up from his barstool. He’s even older, probably pushing seventy. What is this place? A retirement club for alcoholic bikers and ex-convicts? “Stop this nonsense.” The gravelly voice cuts through the din in the room.
I lean down to kiss her cheek. She smells of sugar, smoke, and the faint whiff of gardenias.
