music: “Extracting The Re-Re” by Renaldo & The Loaf

There are four boys there, and one girl, an older sister sitting in the shadow of a Sell All! convenience store. The owner, an Indian man (almost to be expected of Jozi) with a lazy eye and a halo of whitening hair, is kind enough. He comes out sometimes to bring lukewarm sodas to the kids and slips the girl dime novels, mostly short stories and mystery novellas from thirty years ago, still dusty under their covers. Felix is grateful for his charity; even though the boys are rich (very rich) they are still low on the pecking order, and they can only play when the adults don’t want to. That means mid-day doubles when the sun is hottest, and even the shadows perspire.

The racket game is as much a national pastime as a status symbol. Everyone here plays tennis, yes, but not everyone plays it equally. The way a person holds a racket is almost a better indicator of status than clothing or cars. This is why Felix is now extremely frustrated. He’s playing badly, like a chattis, afraid to swing high and hard because the fabric of his t shirt (9 rand from a street vendor) has ripped under both arms, revealing two layers of soaked-through sports bras-- they’ve been sapping his strength for some time now, leeching it in gallons of sweat and making him struggle to breathe in air that is already so thick that it is swallowed, not inhaled. 

His only redemption is speed; puberty has graced him with little, but at least he’s a lot quicker on his feet than the others. His companions are mistaking the small foot-to-foot dance he keeps doing for strategy, but the truth is that the tarmac has been burning a hole through the soles of both shoes for about an hour now, and the bottoms of his feet are red-raw from heat. 

The ball is arcing through the air towards him now.

Twang! Felix swung casually, underhandedly with a sharp laugh and a whoop, his free hand held over his eyes to shield them from the June sun (pointless, he was already well guarded by a pair of dark Ray-Bans, and even at its fiercest, London sunlight was always tempered by pollution and gravid cloud coverage). 

“Aweh! Think it’ll bring the ISS down?” Felix scrubbed the sweat from his forehead with curled fingers, flicking it away before propping his sunglasses up with a hooked thumb. He wanted to see Maya Lang’s face, squinted and scrunched, maybe even pinched with pain as xe craned back to search the skies for the ball. Felix hoped it would come down behind xer; maybe frustration would finally put the fight in xer. 

He’d always liked that part of tennis; it was the only kind of physical combat he could have ever appreciated, and one of very few sports he considered deserving of his time. The movement was refreshing, and something about the rubbery tug of the grip in hand, the violent clip of the racket against a moving ball, had always felt like home. It was easier now than ever before, too; nothing around his chest to keep his lungs half-full, breathing freely in a loose-fitting silk shirt-- one that would not rip under the arms, at least not for a good ten years.

The ball came hurtling back, rocketing into view as its proximity to the ground painted it in dark contrast against the sun. Ah, crap. Felix bent his knees, let the racket hang loosely in his fingers, and smiled as warmly and widely as he could-- more for the benefit of their audience than Maya. 

Performance was almost requisite now. A small crowd of suburbanites and white collars had gathered in the background, fingers hooked through the chain link while they exchanged comments and shouted encouragements as if the game was their business, as if Felix had not paid good money to rent the court for their privacy. Still, he was well liked within the country club-- familiar young money with a winning smile-- and if he hadn’t wanted witnesses, he wouldn’t have dragged Maya Lang all the way here just to talk business.

 “Make this good, eh?” Felix called, clipping his racket against the ground as the smile became a toothy grin. Never had an expression read so authentically of ‘humor me now, and I’ll have less energy to fuck with you later’.

The Rumpus Hypertext Interview With Maya Lang

This week the world will celebrate Bloomsday, the crowded twenty-four hours of James Joyce’s intertextual epic. In the spirit of Joycean experimentation, my collaborator Christopher Boucher and I wanted to shake things up a bit with our interview of contemporary novelist Maya Lang. Lang’s The Sixteenth of June reimagines Joyce’s classic—and therefore the work of Homer, and of those who came before him—as a single day in 2004 Philadelphia. Rather than offering a linear record of a single conversation, this interactive interview asks you, the reader, to decide when and how to move behind the text: clicking on highlighted passages leads to more information about Lang’s writing process, the evolution of literary themes, and the sometimes surprising voices that influenced her novel.