MONDAY
- 1 - THE DAILY TRUTH
WE REMEMBER
By Lawyer Tshabalala
It started with a tremor, small and unassuming, as these things generally do, my broe. Just a few words on page seven (by yours truly) about three tween girls stuck in a giggle loop.
The school called in a bunch of experts, who gave the thing a fancy label. And this put the parents’ worries to rest. Because who doesn’t like a good label to help them sleep at night?
Mass psychogenic illness. Also known as mass hysteria. Just a couple of tweens with their hormones running riot. Nothing to worry about.
It had happened once before. In the sixties, in Tanzania. Remember the Tanganyika laughter epidemic? And that story turned out fine. No need to panic, run tests, stick needles into anyone.
The experts took the Tanganyika epidemic as a blueprint and ordered the girls to be isolated from their peers. So, the school sent the girls home to ride out this wave of runaway emotion somewhere else. Case closed, problem solved, job well done.
Only thing was, it didn’t work. The girls didn’t stop laughing.
Four days passed and the girls were burning fevers now. Struggling to breathe, eat, sleep. One by one they were rushed to the emergency room. Test after test was run while they lay shackled to their beds to stop them from falling off. Fed through tubes, attached to breathing apparatuses, and monitored around the clock.
Seventeen days. One day longer than the worst of the cases reported in the Tanzanian epidemic. And the girls were still laughing. Eyes tearing, voices broken, mouths salivating like mutts, faces contorted in the most horrific grins, knees jerking, arms flailing, bodies forever convulsing like crash test dummies.
Meanwhile, the “joke” was catching. The girls’ families started laughing first, then their friends, their coworkers. The nurse with the heart tattoo on her ankle who came in quick to change the IV drip. The car guard holding out his hand for tips.
At first the guys upstairs clung to the mass hysteria diagnosis and tried to stem the tide by closing all channels of information. Lawyers were hired to file DMCAs to stop people from streaming all those YouTube clips or posting images in their feeds on social media. This was the Information Age, after all, and the tide couldn’t be turned. So, the government pulled rank, imitated their chums in China, and orchestrated a total web blackout. Our city became data dark. But like Adam and Eve, we couldn’t go back after tasting from the tree. Social media addicts were up in arms, their trigger fingers were itching and twitching, and a new kind of violence, dubbed “withdrawal rage,” swept the masses. Addicts would snap and bring out their fists for as much as a skew look in a queue, and violence stats soared.
And along the way, more and more people were cracking up. It’s psychological, it has to be, the experts proclaimed: an extreme response to Third World stressors.
But the girls, the ones the Laughter had chosen first, were now showing other symptoms, too. Their bones disintegrating, their organs turning into soup. And this thing, this mass collective joke, was blowing up in everyone’s faces, with laughter resonating on every street corner, and death following suit.
Today, exactly seven years on, we remember the day that changed our sick city forever. Dorothy, Jennilee, and Andiswa: may you rest in peace. Along with every single soul who followed after. And God, Allah, Vishnu, the government, our ancestors (or whoever we choose to believe in) help us. May we one day find a cure for this curse.
- 2 - SANS
Sans was a weasel. A wheeler. A dealer. A scavenging DIY schemer. A once sweet arrow-on-the-narrow turned small-fry ponyjacker, and now also a proper, serious, eye-on-the-prize pony dealer. As a pony man—the best, mind you, in this Sick City—he made a living dealing in real, 100 percent human hair, which a network of street kids and a convent of swindling sisters procured for him by all manner of means. It was the Down Days, sure, and Sick City was worse off than most, but chicks still dug their weaves, and a full head of hair cost a pretty penny.
It had been seven years since the Laughter turned the tip of Africa topsy-turvy. And Sans was doing fine. That was, until he met his unicorn.
He was wasting away his morning in Greenmarket Square playing cards with a bunch of dead collectors. On most days this patch of cobbled earth was a petri dish of industry, but today the air was dissonantly quiet and the traders who called these stones home looked bored and forlorn as they leaned against tables or sat around on plastic crates. It was one of those faux-sham-phony-bogus charlatan days that life sometimes coughed up: when every soul on the planet seemed down and out—like today wasn’t a wise day to get out of bed and face the world—and the streets felt like a film set after most of the cast and crew had gone home.
But this particular set was as old as the city itself. Before the Down Days, the square was a heaving mass of bodies and colorful stalls, with migrants pressing curios from all across Africa on fat-walleted tourists with fanny packs bulging over Gore-Tex shorts. Long before that, barefooted slaves hawked fruit and veg on these same smooth stones.
The city’s tourists had long since gone the way of the quagga, and the slaves, well, their bones salted the earth underneath these same streets. But the vendors remained, now hawking or bartering everything from petrol, Jik, and paraffin to chicken feet. One stall was doing a roaring trade in cooler boxes packed with survivors’ blood. Their sales pitch went that the blood was rife with antibodies that could cure the Laughter. Another vendor was charging his customers’ cell phones using some kind of contraption that he powered by pedaling like a madman on an exercise bike. If you had enough cash, most traders also delivered. That way, those rich saps who hadn’t flown the coop before the borders closed could wait out the Down Days without coming into contact with another breathing, sweating soul.
Sans was chucking cards onto the hood of a car. It was the middle of May, although you wouldn’t think it. The sun was searing hot and his mask was soaked in sweat. But he was winning—so he didn’t care—when he saw her. His unicorn. One strand of strong virgin hair uncurling from the scarf fashioned over her scalp. Perfect arms tattooed with dark freckles like a map of the Milky Way. Real-girl hips. And those eyes—one green, one brown.
She walked right up to him and asked him for the time. A seemingly innocent question requiring a seemingly straightforward answer. If only he could have foreseen the path this meeting would take, traced the conjecture with a pen, connecting the dots, maybe everything would have turned out fine. But he couldn’t. So he gave the answer that any man without sufficient foreknowledge of his imminent future would say.
Three words.
“Quarter past eight.”
And with this, his troubles started.
- 3 - FAITH
Faith September sat waiting behind the wheel, staring through the windshield. Outside the wind was playing tennis with an empty crisps packet. A mottled seagull dipped and dived, trying to nip at it.
As the number one driver for the Hanover Lazy Boys Corpse Collection Association, Faith spent her shifts on the streets of Sick City. Her guardjie and general sidekick, Ash, was a stringy white boy with a mullet who was in the habit of spinning tall tales and called his 9mm his baby.