The Reactive Read Online Free Page B

case about four years ago. She told me that she’d fallen into her line of work owing to a compulsion she had to assist the frail. She’d grown tired of her nursing job at Baragwanath, however, of all the men, women and children that got swept into the intensive care unit on her watch, most of them broken into soft and wet pieces.
    This introduction left a reluctant mark on me. On occasion, I still think of her as existing between then and now, and of the number of people she had to witness turning into powder. Maybe this makes it easier for me to stomach her: that she has this knowledge of loss beneath the protocol. I even told her, once, how I’d got my virus by accident. I remember her silence that day. The two of us stayed on the line for a while, and in the end, she only said: okay. Then she coughed and we carried on. To this day, I doubt she thinks it prudent to believe anything I say. Not that I’d want that from her. This suits the two of us just fine.
    On the line now, I tell her, okay.
    Okay what?
    I’ve got a meeting scheduled.
    You have a meeting scheduled, she says. When is this?
    It’s today.
    Well, that’s good then, Lindanathi. Take yourself to that meeting today, and then fax us a proof of attendance with your CD4 count sheet. We’ve approved the latest shipment of your medications, but now you have to do your part for us and make the program work. Do you understand?
    I do. I tell her that.
    You have a good care package here, she tells me. Don’t let it go to waste over foolishness.
    I won’t.
    Right.
    I tell her again that I won’t.
    Look, it’s in your hands, isn’t it?
    It is.
    Well then, she says. We’ve added benefits for you Silver members. We could move you up in a few months’ time if you fixed up your file. We’ve had to scale back on the Platinum option, though, so I would suggest a Gold membership for now.
    I nod. I can hear Sis’ Thobeka pecking on her keyboard as I consider the options. Voices murmur in her office, and I begin to drift off as she details the premiums.
    She lets a minute pass in silence before she asks me if I’m doing fine in any case, if I’m okay despite everything else that’s the matter with me.
    I blink, and I’m about to answer her when she says she has another call coming in. I wait for her when she tells me to wait, and I’m still doing that when her voice turns into a dial tone.
    Later, when I open my eyes, I find Ruan and Cissie staring down at me. Their brows crease as they edge towards my place on the floor, their outlines melting into the walls stained and cracked behind them.
    Cissie says, Nathi, are you okay?
    My mouth feels blow-dried, packed thick with stiff clouds of cotton wool.
    I look up and ask them the same. I say, are you okay?
    In response, Cissie points a finger at her ear. Then she gets on her knees, takes my hand, and says, Nathi, your phone’s dead.
    + + +
    The way I got to know them, by the way, my two closest friends here, is that we met at one of the new HIV and drug-counseling sessions cropping up all over the city. We were in the basement parking lot of the free clinic in Wynberg. The seminar room upstairs had been locked up and taped shut, there’d been a mercury spill, and our group couldn’t meet in there on account of the vapors being toxic to human tissue. Instead, they arranged us in the basement parking lot, and in two weeks we got used to not being sent upstairs for meetings. I did, in any case, and that was enough for me in the beginning.
    In those days, I attended the meetings alone. I’d catch a taxi from Obs over to Wynberg for an afternoon’s worth of counseling. By the end of my first month, when the seminar room had been swept once, and then twice, and then three times by a short man who wore a blue contamination meter over his chest, each time checking out clean, everyone decided they preferred it down below, and so