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 a.s.saulting 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 t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es. 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 gla.s.s 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.
"d.a.m.n 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 b.u.t.tocks 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 p.r.i.c.kly 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 partic.i.p.ation 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 pa.s.sage 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 a.s.sault 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) a.s.sumed 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.
"b.a.s.t.a.r.ds!" Myburgh cursed. "b.a.s.t.a.r.ds!"
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... ?