Dub Steps Read online

  That sort of thing.

  Juniors spent productive time managing social chat. Agency legend said it would take a small lifetime, most of the rest of one’s twenties, to gain the privilege of writing. Until we had the wisdom necessary to write, we were to interact with the public According To The Brand Guidelines Supplied.

  I spent my first month tweeting for a dish-wash brand, posting pre-prepared competition content on Facebook and escalating all but the most basic interactions.

  Social media was our training ground for immersive VR – the true front line. The technology was scratchy, the resolution pixelated, the interface prone to breaks, but the kiddies couldn’t get enough. The holograms – big-breasted Disney ladies wrapped in cat suits and motherly smiles – beckoned and cajoled at the mall entrance. Moms dumped their kids at the pen, glasses already on, and they sunk straight into it.

  I eventually graduated to babysitter at a franchised mall holding pen for three- and four-year-olds, Barney’s. The interface was a simple fantasy forest. Castle at one end, playground at the other, rivers in between. The kids picked one of five available avatars and ran up and down from the castle to the jungle gym. Snow White took them all into her arms. Dwarves jumped and blew bubbles into the sky.

  The children loved it. But they would have loved anything. The real traction was created by the parents, who spent the bulk of their own time at the mall blinking wildly into their glasses, reaching for virtual specials, chatting and sharing. When they came back to the Barney’s virtual spectator deck – always stuffed to overflowing – their eyes thrummed at the site of their progeny.

  It wasn’t just the parents. We all thrilled. The suburbs reached and blinked and clicked and gawked. The holograms stood proud and fluid and sexy.

  And then it changed.

  They painted the bottom half of an under-maintenance cooling tower on the N4 to Mozambique and the Kruger Park. The video flashed from a hundred kilometres out, a crudely cut mash-up of squatter camps and mine workers going down the shaft. Gardeners in blue overalls walking dogs. Maids in pastel pink pushing prams, little white heads bobbing inside. Open Free State farmlands, rich with crops. Sandton parking lots, replete with luxury vehicles.

  Democracy is digital

  the text flashed. Then

  Land was taken

  … then

  People will not be quiet

  … then

  Reparation | return | revolution

  It took close to a full day for the cops to find the cellphone paired to the paint. It was buried in a bucket, underneath a mop, in the tower’s maintenance basement.

  Meanwhile, the press flocked. The public too. Land Rovers – carrying British and French and German and Japanese game viewers – parked on the highway verge, and then at the petrol-station lots. The khaki tour guides unfolded camping chairs and proffered coffee flasks. They pointed to the tower and its message. Tourists dunked rusks and refocused binoculars. Initially the cops pushed them away, but the scope of the cooling-tower broadcast was so extensive anyone could park on any road – primary or secondary – and enjoy the view. Eventually the scuffles settled and everyone watched it play out, together.

  They stayed long after the phone was turned off and the video stopped. They watched the paint being scraped away with wire brushes and solvent, hoses and solutions. The breathless reporters with swept-back hair, the tourists, the government officials, the cops. They all stayed.

  Transmission paint was cheap. And simple. Lash the dirty brown onto any surface. Wait for it to dry. Enter pin. Pair. Broadcast.

  Post-cooling-tower-show, transmission paint was sold out, restocked and sold out again. The rush was led by street protesters, red berets, political challengers. Behind them the rest: small-time advertisers, the floggers of products, remedies, solutions. The hawkers and preachers and tyre repairmen. If you had a wall you had a stage. If you had a phone you had a broadcast. All you needed was transmission paint.

  Back in ad land, the geeks figured out what the paint could mean for the consumer and the brand experience.

  Entertainment.

  Communication.

  Etc.

  Paint innovation was mandated and costed and assessed. Strategists plotted. Clients caught their collective breath.

  But nothing could match club land.

  Club VR had been fine, fun, entertaining in the sense that the future was fuzzy yet tangible. But the interface was inherently fake. The VR clubs were, despite much effort, mall kiddie pens with booze and pills.

  Now, painted clubs stitched geolocation to the network, creating an interface with actual, physical depth. Now, once the punters paid and stepped through, the walls fell away. They could be taken anywhere. No matter who you were or where you went, the experience suddenly felt seamless. Limitless.

  After years of burrowing down inside ourselves, we poured out of our houses – big and small, brick and tin, flat and shack – into the basements and the warehouses.

  To touch, to hold hands, to kiss … to blow it all up into hyper augmentation and exaggeration. To step inside, then out into the stars and the planets and the true mythical. Well, fuck. It was great.

  Genital nappies – naps – became the accessories of my generation.

  And yes, I explored as well. I slipped my nap on, zipped up my retro advertising pants, donned my wire frames, descended to the basements, paid my money and did what everyone else was doing.

  It was a clear, assumed city agreement. Clubs and drugs and VR sex downstairs. Advertisers and government up top, controlling the veneer.*

  Everyone else in the cracks.

  ‘There is appeal,’ said Mongezi at the time. ‘If they weren’t such monkeys with the avatars it could be wild, nè? But I felt a bit stupid at the end. You know, when you take that nap thing off and admit you were fucking the same shitty JPEG as everyone else.’

  It was an offhand balcony conversation. A flippant comment. But it made both of us rich.

  VR punters wanted fantasy. They wanted to fuck the woman or man of their dreams, and they wanted to look unbearably hot doing it.

  Mogz’s idea was simple: punters should compose avatars, not select them. They should wield the freedom of the four critical categories (face, ass, chest and legs). They should morph and blur identities. They should be able to pull together any mix of face and ass and have the result feel and look and taste right. None of it was new, but his brilliance was the jacking of open-source image software to deliver the fractional file sizes that allowed thousands of users to interact seamlessly within the club network – sexually and otherwise.

  I knew none of these things. I barely knew what image resolution was. Nonetheless, about a month after our conversation, two things happened.

  (1) Rick Cohen, a university associate, stumbled into my table at a Rosebank coffee shop, drunk, depressed and bemoaning the fact that he was closing down his VR club – the punters were dribbling away … the fad was over.

  (2) The following week Mongezi sent me a message:

  It’s done. The VR thing. It works. We should sell it.

  Mgz

  We sold it to Rick, who rebranded his city VR club as Mlungu’s. He gave us fifteen per cent each.

  Heels clicked through all night, down the concrete stairs, ominous rather than filthy, then into the reception area staffed by rippling Zimbabweans who patted them down, took their cash and pushed the trembling punters in.

  Rick Cohen was a true businessman. He knew the underground hype would die, fast, and when it did he was already selling off virtual chunks of Mlungu’s to sponsors. The bar counter, the tabletops, the urinals, the waitress’s cleavage. He lured the brands with the promise of their own slice of the legend, virtual reality in perpetuity, blah blah.

  Smarts aside, he was also connected. Within six weeks Mlungu’s had formal office space at HHN. As the ‘reputational head’ of a new division, I had the job of making sure Mlungu’s sponsors looked good.

  ‘Mlun
gu’s changes the VR game,’ the street-pole slugs said.*

  The door to the top floor of media life swung open, but instead of walking over the threshold I stepped back.

  ‘What is it with you?’ Angie taunted. ‘When the suits arrive it’s like you’re back in nursery school.’

  I changed corners many times. I logged in from the office, I logged in from home, I logged in at Mlungu’s itself, but I always ended up in essentially the same position, just off the bar, on the side, watching the same scene play out over and over again.

  ‘Are you actually drunk if you’ve been drinking at Mlungu’s all day?’ Rick asked quasi-seriously, more than once.

  Being perpetually drunk was – in the context of Mlungu’s – almost the same as being sober. Regardless of location or orientation, getting high and fucking – the combination, the marriage of the two – was the point. The only point. The perpetual point. Without drugs, even the new-generation interface became generic, the avatars recognisable, the stitching on the seams of the interface a little too predictable.

  Drugs and fucking. Fucking and drugs.

  Thus, yes, I was permanently drunk, but I was also, within the jagged reality of the club, the sober-minded guiding hand.

  CHAPTER 5

  I leaned back casually

  By the time I fled to Eileen’s flat, I had been running Mlungu’s for over ten years and Angie and I had parted ways in every respect except the sharing of a residential address. We lived in the same building but, as in a classic TV series of your choosing, we hardly saw each other. The evening at Clarissa’s had in fact been our first out together for months. I worked late, drank late, slept late, and she did the same, but according to a different sequence.

  Eileen wasn’t an affair and her flat wasn’t our love nest. She was a sweet, plain, thin, twenty-three-year-old account manager with a wealthy, concerned daddy watching over her.

  She gave me the spare keys to her flat in a rush. ‘My grandmother,’ she said, shoving them anxiously into my fist, ‘in Cape Town. She’s … she’s … not well. At all. Will you feed Mozart?’ She looked panicked, embarrassed. ‘Sorry. I don’t know who else to ask.’

  No problem. ‘Dog or cat?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh!’ she barked with relief. ‘Cat. Very self-contained. Female. Sleeps most of the day. This is my address.’ She buzzed the details through. ‘Parking bay, alarm codes, instructions on how to feed her. Once a day – should be pretty easy. I’ll call as soon as I know what’s going on.’

  ‘Take your time.’ I leaned back casually, pretending I wasn’t already worried about fucking the whole thing up.

  CHAPTER 6

  I lit a cigarette and thought about my father

  Lean. All in black. Daniel Craig beneath a half-smiling, ironic, clubby-cool exterior.

  It was important to be clean and straight. Unflappable. They had to be able to recognise me. And they did.

  They called my name.

  Life passed like that. Me, avatar-black, striding in slow motion, ears primed, waiting for the call.

  Years after he had stopped, become adult and all that, Mongezi pulled me aside. Skin bunched up around his eyes. He winced. It had looked like he was about to smile, as if the glory would flicker again. But he winced.

  ‘You haven’t had enough yet, Roy?’

  ‘I can’t do media management, Mogz. I just can’t do it.’

  ‘Sho. But clubs. You can’t do those either. Not for so long. You just can’t, my broe. It’s gonna kill you.’

  ‘Ah, but what a way to die!’

  ‘It’s a shitty way to die, Roy. Shitty.’

  I had my reasons, then. I’m sure they made sense. Now I think maybe I just fell in love with a time. A place. An idea. For those first few years we thought we had the world in our hands. Planet earth. City of Joburg. We owned it all. We changed it on a whim. I met and married Angie in that place. Ceremony in Rosebank Church, reception at Mlungu’s. We hatched the dragon. We hung on as it flew. That it would fly was never a question. Not to me anyway. I would be firmly on its back as we crashed through the atmosphere. It never occurred to me that we were already done. That change had come. And gone.

  Year after year, hype cycle after hype cycle, there was nothing new. The revolution stalled at paint broadcasts and geo-located VR. Technologies were turned into advertising. Messages were bought, broadcast, sold. Clubs stayed clubs. The drugs evolved. There were additions to the technology, incremental shifts, but that next quantum leap … well, it turned out to be a mirage. A myth, forming and swirling in the middle distance.

  ‘You got money, my ninja. Money. You can do anything. Why don’t you quit? I know Angie would love a change. Go overseas. France. The south of France. You could write a novel.’

  ‘And Angie could paint.’

  ‘Ja!’ Mongezi’s eyes lit, then faded, angry. ‘Fuck you. Stay cynical like that and life will punish you.’

  ‘Ag sorry, Mogz. Jammer. For real. It’s just that Angie and me … we struggle, nè? Even to be in the same room, if I’m honest, if she’s honest, she’ll tell you we struggle.’

  ‘Well, fucking get a divorce then, you fuck. Do something. Anything. You have to do something.’

  ‘I do do something. You people might need to accept that I am happy doing this.’

  You people. Once it was us, all of us, together. We were powerful. Full. Stuffed. Then it was you people. I was the only one left, still at the bar, still zooming and refocusing. The rest were in meetings. Building houses. Having babies.

  You people.

  How did I get so angry? So lost? Where did that decade actually go?

  Mongezi believed it was all my father. His death. My denial.

  Roy, he would say. Roy, you can’t. You have to. You can’t. You must. Look. Look at it. At him. You can’t just. Please. Roy. Please. Please.

  But I didn’t look. I would like to say it wasn’t possible. That there was a mess inside that was simply too much. But really I could have.

  Still, I chose not to. I turned away. Fuck Russle. Fuck parents. Family. There was never anything for me in that place. I was different. Others might need to look back, down, into the past. Me, I was headed in one direction.

  Forward.

  And then they let go. Mongezi drifted away. Angie too. Rick. The rest.

  Me? I remained in rotation, swirling in tight, personal little circles.

  Eileen, and the others like her, were the final evidence of my decade of decline. After I had pissed on my friends, after the wife and I had spat at each other, green and angry, I was adopted by a succession of thin, anxiety-ridden young girls. Girls who liked cats and struggled with men and worked far too well. Organisers. Anxious little beings. Filers of documents. Placers of calls.

  And really, it was right. For what was I other than feral? Wild. Hungry. Hunting for affection I would instantly reject.

  Eileen’s flat eased my aches and awakened a sense of shame at my own shabby, juvenile existence. The place reeked of adherence to a life regime. From the well-used exercise bike to the bookshelf and its contents (Cormac McCarthy, Josie Blues, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, JG Ballard, Lesego Rampolokeng, Gabriel García Márquez, Vince Khumalo, Gore Vidal, Kagiso Nkuna, Zadie Smith, Zapiro, Calvin and Hobbes), the markers of structure and adult activity were everywhere.

  Most attractive was sleeping in her bed, which I did shamelessly, making sure to ruffle the linen in the spare bedroom, where I was supposed to be. Her bed, full of the olfactory pleasures of the female nest, was my sanctuary. I wallowed in it.

  I turned off my mobile and dropped naked into her soft, dark-pink bedding. I drained the red wine in my glass, poured another, drank that and went to sleep.

  I dreamed of my father. He was chasing me. As usual.

  With knives. Belt buckles. Broken bottles. He chased and I ran and it lasted for days, weeks, until eventually he stopped. Hands on knees. Panting. Staring at me. Exhausted. Tears in his eyes.

  I woke up.
/>   I sat in the lounge. I’d been out for a long time. I lit a cigarette and thought about my father.

  He died when I was twenty, crashing into his coffin with a brain haemorrhage. He warranted a few column inches here and there, a mention on the news scroller, that kind of thing.

  Russle Fotheringham, who played a single season for the Proteas and three seasons for the Gauteng Lions, and who started a second career as a DJ in the greater Gauteng area, died on Saturday of a brain haemorrhage. Fotheringham’s symptoms were consistent with what has become known colloquially as Cell Brain. He is survived by his only son, Roy.

  Towards the end, just before the haemorrhage, my father had fallen into fluffy trance. The last time I had visited him he was spinning Markus Schulz obsessively in the lounge, finger in the air, eyes half closed.

  ‘This,’ he said, pulling the cans behind his ears and looking at me seriously, ‘is actually very good stuff. People say it’s too simple and too happy, but I’m telling you, this is good music.’

  I took the Senheissers from him and plonked them on. It was standard four-to-the-floor trance, a simple, never-ending bass underneath a litany of equally simple, rising candy synths. Beats for children, sports back-tracks and junkies. I put my finger in the air. ‘Someone pass me my lollipop.’

  Russle Fotheringham took his headphones back.

  He was all spindly legs and arms. A cigarette burned in the ashtray next to him. There was always one waiting, smoke curling. It was one of the marvels of my father, his ability to keep a smoke alive without ever really smoking it. He would grab it with long, accomplished fingers, toss the butt into his lips, give it the smallest nip possible and then lay it back in the groove.