"Try," Thubana said. "You must ... try."
Myburgh pulled himself up, backed away, and wandered through the maze of the upper floor.
Eventually, he located the door to a stairwell, pulled it open, and went through into a shaft as cold and forbidding as a mine stope. There were fluorescents on each landing, and the window overlooking the billboard proclaiming the "controlled strength" of Jik gleamed under anemic spotlights. It was night, the tag end of an endless day.
He went down, all the way down, and paused at the street-level door, expecting failure. His success at barging into the stairwell and coming down the steps was a fluke of physics. By all rights, he should have no more impact on the physical structures of this building than a shade-for he was a shade, a man-shaped confluence of shadow matter.
Myburgh gripped the push bar on the door. He pushed down on it. It resisted. It resisted as if it understood that his was a conjectural, a ghostly, pressure.
Myburgh examined his hands. The palms were still raw from his attempts to wrest the hosepipe from Goosen. If the hosepipe could do that to him, it seemed logical-in an inevitably symmetrical way-that he could exert some influence on the sort of matter that had scalded him. t.i.t for tat.
He pushed down again.
Surprise. This time the bar depressed, clicking open the door to which it was attached.
Myburgh stumbled outside, one hand still on the bar.
Traffic noises a.s.sailed him.
The air was brisk and somewhat damp-feeling, but an astonished glance at the sky, between the inward-leaning tops of the security police building and the office building opposite it, showed him an indigo road of stars. If you squinted, if you put your imagination into gear, you could believe that out there beyond those twinkling points of fire vibrated-majestically-a cosmic string light-years in length tying this very moment to the instant of creation. That string would be a stretched remnant of a tiny superstring that had blown clear of the Big Bang and escaped into the cosmos. It would be proof that everything on hand in the universe today had exploded from the same blazing Ur-furnace.
Or so Thubana believed. And so he had told Myburgh and Skosana on their not-so-smooth nylon ride into Pretoria.
Christ. Such thoughts.
It would take an hour to walk home from here, Myburgh decided. Or he could walk to Church"s Square and catch public transport to his condominium. If no one could see him, he wouldn"t even have to pay the bus driver...
The clap on that. Thubana was upstairs, naked and suffering. And if Myburgh stepped outside, letting go of this door, it would lock behind him. He could tug on it all he liked; it would never budge, no matter how strong his will, how mighty his arms. This door locked on people who were not shadow matter, and it would hold Myburgh out even if he rematerialized as a visible Afrikaner, with a thousand questions for Major Henning Jeppe.
So he went back in, let go of the push bar, and trudged back up the six flights of steps to Thubana.
Myburgh took off his coat, pushed it between the bars, spread it over Thubana"s shoulders and back. He straightened it as well as he could so that only Thubana"s legs and part of his handcuffed arm remained uncovered.
Then Myburgh curled up on the floor beside the comatose man and fumbled toward sleep.
In his dream, he was driving a bus-not a munic.i.p.al bus, but a Putco bus like the one Kabini drove from KwaNdebele every morning and back again every night. His riders were plainclothes security policemen from this very building; the bus was packed with them-Jeppe, Wessels, Goosen, Steenkamp, and maybe ninety more, every one standing or sitting ramrod straight as Myburgh drove them through a teeming closer settlement.
The streets were unpaved and dusty. Angry blacks-many armed with rocks, many shaking their fists, some determined enough to leap in front of the bus and spit at the bus"s windshield-crowded in so grimly that it was hard to keep going. Either Myburgh could slow to a walk, letting more and more blacks approach the bus, lay hands on it, and rock it back and forth until it turned over; or he could jam the accelerator, wrestle the steering wheel, and harvest these agitated people like corn.
There seemed to be no other options, only death for his riders or blatant, cold-blooded vehicular homicide. He might have been able to resign himself to the first option if it had not required his own death. He might have been able to adjust to the second one if his pa.s.sengers had not been Jeppe & Company.
Soon, Myburgh was crying as he drove. He could not tell if his watery vision stemmed from his own frustrated tears or the dripping spittle on his windshield. He beeped his horn. He beeped it and beeped it. A rock shattered the windscreen, giving it the look of a weird, puzzle-piece spiderweb. His pa.s.sengers-outwardly calm-began sticking handguns through their windows and firing into the streets as if the closer settlement were a huge shooting gallery. Each time a black fell dead or wounded, a bell rang (Myburgh didn"t know from where), and Jeppe, sitting behind him, got up to reward the sharpshooter with a licorice whip or a stuffed animal: hyena, giraffe, ant bear, elephant. Jeppe extracted these animals from a duffel under his seat, and their supply, like that of the shouting Africans, seemed endless.
Then a bomb exploded in the road, a bomb made out of a knot of blacks banished from South Africa"s cities. When it went off, body parts and clothing sc.r.a.ps flew up into the sky. (Suddenly, it was night. The Coalsack nebula, near the Jewel Box cl.u.s.ter, opened up like a hungry pit.) Myburgh tumbled into the whirlpools created by the explosion. Not knowing what else to do, he grabbed the strands of the puzzle-piece web in his windscreen and pulled himself along them to its center.
When absolutely clear of the driver"s cage, Myburgh looked down and saw his bus on fire, five or six kilometers below. Meanwhile, the strands of the web in which he was swinging-it was a hammock now, a hammock attached to the four stars of the Southern Cross-started reeling at high speed, as if a vacuum cleaner light-years away were cracking him apart atom by atom and sucking him into its bag. It wanted him and his galaxy-sized fears to fly into the bag without tearing it. Myburgh turned over in the hammock, clutching at its lengthening, ever-thinning strings.
The hole of the Coalsack (Kiewit had always called it the Soot Bag) got bigger and bigger. It was like a black widow; no, a black window. And what Myburgh saw through it was the body of a stuffed elephant, slowly rumbling. A minute ago, it had been in the lap of one of Jeppe"s boys, a prize for marksmanship. Now the beast was growing at the same high speed as the Coalsack, and he could see that no matter what he did, he was going to hit it, and hitting the elephant (a doddering bull with fractured tusks, not a stuffed toy) would probably destroy him...
"Wake up, man. Wake up."
Myburgh roused; his nightmare had disoriented him. Then he saw Wessels-a.k.a. Pampoenkop-glowering down on him, and he began to suspect that his real nightmare was about to start. It seemed that Wessels could see him.
"Who are you? What are you doing here?"
Myburgh blinked. Wessels"s head-its size, its slanted brows, its crooked teeth, its mounded chins-did resemble a pumpkin. Was it rational to fear a talking jack-o"-lantern?
"Answer me, please."
"What time is it?" Myburgh said in Afrikaans. (Wait. He had a watch. He checked it: 3:45 a.m.) "Time you answered me," Wessels said. "You"re up to your chin, brother-man."
Myburgh did not stand. He rolled over and scooted up against Thubana"s cell. Thubana was asleep or comatose. In sleep, he had dislodged Myburgh"s coat, exposing most of his back.
"You can see me," Myburgh said.
"I"m not blind. How did you get in?"
Myburgh shook his head to clear it of some confusing images and swallowed to make his ears pop. His left foot stuck out toward the policeman like a big, mottled sausage. Wessels aimed a kick at it, and the back of Myburgh"s head banged metal.
A warning. Only a warning.
"I am Gerrit Myburgh, a special-accounts executive at Jacobus and Roux. On the road back from Huilbloom, our family farm, I had an accident. I"ve come here to report it."
"You need the city police, Meneer Myburgh."
"My accident occurred in the country."
"You are still in the wrong place. This is the special branch, Meneer Myburgh. You have no business here."
Myburgh nodded at Thubana. "That man has clearly been through h.e.l.l. Why is he naked?"
"Did you give him that coat?"
"He looked cold. He still looks cold."
Wessels was trying hard not to erupt. Maybe he suspected that Myburgh was a member of some kind of governmental Faking Club, sent out to test the humanity of security agents.
Finally, Wessels allowed the dam to burst: "You are a foolish G.o.dd.a.m.ned kaffirboetie, Meneer Myburgh."
"This man needs medical attention."
"You have many questions to answer. Stand up, please, and come with me."
Myburgh stared insolently at Wessels. He ma.s.saged the sole of his naked foot. Perhaps it would have been better to remain shadow matter to his compatriots until he had thought of a way to rescue-if that were possible-both himself and the two innocent Africans now in custody.
"You gave him a coat," Wessels said. "Maybe you gave him other things as well? Instructions, for example?"
"Telephone my brother. Telephone my superiors at Jacobus and Roux. Dozens of people can vouch for me."
"At this hour?" Wessels turned and called down the corridor to an office seemingly kilometers away: "Major van Rhyn. Major van Rhyn, we have a problem."
Major W. K. van Rhyn worked on him all that morning. Wessels a.s.sisted, and it was a relief-a surprise and a relief-that they only questioned him. The wallet from inside his jacket (which an unseen policeman brought to van Rhyn"s office from Thubana"s cell) contained materials identifying Myburgh.
Then a plainclothes agent named Lieutenant Cuyler came in to report that the South African Police had found a Cadillac stalled on the KwaNdebele Road. The car was badly banged up. Plates and serial numbers proved, though, that it belonged to one Gerrit Jozua Myburgh of Pretoria.
"I hit an elephant," Myburgh said.
"Meneer Myburgh," van Rhyn said, shaking his head.
Cuyler came to Myburgh"s aid: "That may be true, sir."
"How?" van Rhyn said.
"A Colored from Durban has a fleabite circus: Motilal Pra.s.sad"s Travelling Big Top. He carts it around to the Bantustans and makes a few rand entertaining the stay-behinds while their wage-earners are at work. Three days ago, he was in Bophusthatswana. Seems he lost an elephant there."
"I found it," Myburgh said. "I hit it."
"Not unlikely," Cuyler told van Rhyn.
"What happened to it?"
Both van Rhyn and Cuyler looked at Myburgh as if he had asked a very troublesome question.
"What happened to it?" Myburgh said again.
"We don"t know," Cuyler said. "It disappeared."
"An elephant?" van Rhyn said. "To where?"
"If we knew, we wouldn"t be saying it"s disappeared. Maybe to the proverbial elephants" graveyard."
Myburgh wondered if his Cadillac"s collision with the elephant had rendered it shadow matter, a kind of premonitory ghost from an era and a system long since doomed to perish.
But he had no time to mull the issue, for Cuyler had to leave, and van Rhyn and Wessels began questioning him relentlessly. What did he know about the Armscor bombing? About ANC plans to sabotage the Rietvlei dam? Questions that Jeppe and his henchmen had already put repeatedly to Mordecai Thubana.
Myburgh replied to all these questions in the negative (for he knew nothing, nothing at all), but he was also careful to tell his interrogators what an outrage his detention was and how deeply he resented the slanders implicit in their questions. He was a decent Afrikaner, a patriotic Vaalpens. They should ring up his brother Kiewit. Or the manager of his condominium. Or his secretary, Pia Delfos.
On the other hand, he railed at van Rhyn, what could he expect of a group of officers who had beaten one of their charges within a fingernail of his life and left him naked in a cold cell? The sort of men who would deny an injured countryman medical help? The sort who would bully that countryman with stupid innuendos about treason and terrorist collaboration?
"What we do," said van Rhyn coldly, "we do to protect."
Van Rhyn went off duty. Myburgh sat in van Rhyn"s office, all alone, for a long time. Exactly how long he couldn"t say, for Wessels had taken his watch-plus his keys and pocket change-and retreated to another part of the building.
Longer than an hour, though. Possibly two.
When Major Jeppe came on duty (whey-faced, thin, and struggling with the sniffles and watery eyes), he spoke with Cuyler, Wessels, and one or two others.
Then he left too, and Myburgh was escorted to a holding room where he stewed for another two or three hours, growing more and more frustrated and impatient.
Why the delay? Did they really think him an ANC collaborator? Apparently, they did. For that reason, they had not released him. For that reason, they had done nothing to see about his cuts or to replace his tattered clothes. Section Six of the Terrorism Act-that was the inappropriate statute they were using to detain him.
At last, Jeppe came back. Goosen, Steenkamp, and Schoeman came with him, and these four men surrounded the table at which Myburgh was slumped.
"How did you get to Pretoria from your wreck?" Jeppe said.
"I walked," Myburgh said. (A lie, but better than admitting the hard-to-swallow truth.) "How did you get into the building?"
"Through a street-level door."
"Except for our entrance on the park, our street-level doors are all locked, Meneer Myburgh."
"Not the one I used."
The four men stared at him as if they had reached an impa.s.se; obviously, they had.
"If I can"t go home," Myburgh said, "I want some clean clothes and something to eat."
They brought him a plate of food: sausages, rice, and a poached egg. They also brought him a pair of corduroy trousers, a flannel shirt, some heavy brown socks, and a pair of takkies that looked as if they had been bleached. Myburgh suspected that this outfit-except for the store-bought socks-had once belonged to a black man detained for political reasons. Where was that man now? In a jail cell? In a township cemetery? In the bundu, hiding?
"The man I gave my coat to," Myburgh said: "He needs clothes and food too. And medical attention."
"Kaffirboetie," Goosen said, turning away.
"How do you happen to know him?" Jeppe said.
"I came up the stairs, onto this floor, and I saw him naked and unconscious in that cell down there." He nodded vaguely.
"The man"s a terrorist," Jeppe said. "You want nothing to do with him. Nothing. Leave him to us."
When Myburgh finished eating, only Jeppe and Goosen were still in the interrogation room with him. Goosen cleared his plate away, returned, and laid the book Superstrings on the table exactly where the plate had been.
"What do you know about this?" Jeppe said. "The man you saw up here was carrying it when we captured him."
"Why should I know anything about it?"
"We had a tip, Meneer Myburgh. Our informant told us to take a man or two off a commuter bus from KwaNdebele."
"So?"
"Major van Rhyn"s report says you had your accident-hitting that elephant-on the same stretch of road."