Why You Were Taken Read online

  Declining fertility rates are a problem the world over but nowhere is it as dire as in South Africa. No one knows the definitive reasons behind the crisis. Billions have been spent testing the various hypotheses: cell tower radiation, Tile and/or Patch use, hormones used in farming and agriculture, high stress levels, bad diets, GMO, people waiting too long to start their families. While there is some correlation, they still can’t figure out why South Africa is so badly affected compared to other countries. The population is declining rapidly, and those fortunate few who do manage to conceive are treated like queens.

  When they draw near to where she’s going, Kirsten lets the driver know by shoving a hundred rand at him. They’re supposed to use government tokens to pay for community taxis but drivers always appreciate cash. Old school style. She doesn’t do this for the sake of the driver, but more as a small act of rebellion against the incumbent ruling party, the New ANC—known, regrettably, as the Nancies—because the idea of a nanny state makes the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

  She jumps off onto the pavement, glad to put distance between herself and the bun in the oven. Digital street posters call her name and tell her to wait, they have a message for her.

  ‘Kirsten,’ a recorded voice says in an American accent, ‘have you done something for yourself today?’

  Bilchen knows her favourite ice cream flavour—rose petal—and showers her with 4D rose petals and a blast of cool air. A travel agency tells her that it’s been 206 days since her last holiday—doesn’t she need another one? Bolivia? Mozambique? The Cape Republic? The soundtrack is vaguely island style and she can smell rum and coconut. Has she considered a travelbattical? Workcation?

  Tuk-tuks zoom past her, hooting as they go. The sky darkens. Kirsten shields her eyes and looks up to see a drone-swarm fly overhead. She doesn’t like them, doesn’t like the shadow they cast. Hates that they have cameras, as if she’s living in someone else’s bleak futuristic imaginings. Already she feels as if she’s being watched, always has. She shakes her brain, tries to focus on the task ahead. The time has come.

  Carpe diem, and all of that.

  For as long as she can remember, she’s always hated doctors. And hospitals, but doesn’t everyone? She abhors it when someone says they hate hospitals. That’s like saying you hate stepping in dog shit, or wetting your pants in public. Obvious. Or in local slang, obvi-ass: the stating of which usually just shows how little you know.

  Yuck, I’m just grouchy. Nervous.

  Her underarms are damp so she slows her pace, and thinks about the ice cream, the Piña Colada.

  Besides, how can she say she hates doctors when she’s practically married to one? Just one example of how conflicted (read: crap) her personality is. Anyway, Marmalade is different. He’s a paediatric cardiologist and goes around fixing kids’ hearts, like some kind of golden-haired scalpel-bearing angel. And it’s not like he has ever been her doctor. Never going to happen (No, not even then).

  inVitro looms before her. It’s bigger than she expected. The pictures on the website made it look less intimidating. The architecture is beautiful, inspired by Petri: the disc-shaped building is built out of attenuated glass (Crystal Whisper), strangely transparent and reflective at the same time: as if the architect meant for it to look invisible.

  Kirsten wipes her clammy hands on her jeans, wonders if she really wants to go ahead with this. All the electronic poster-projectors near her apartment have been advertising this place; it seems to be the best of the hundreds of fertility clinics around. The spambots hack your online social status, and as soon as they see you are in a relationship they bombard you with wedding messages. As if anyone gets married anymore. After a while they give up on you getting married and start with the fertility and baby spiel. A bit like parents.

  Or—Kirsten sniffs—how parents used to be. Her pain is still jagged.

  Two heavily armed guards stand at the entrance. They look more like American militants than security: top-of-the-range automatic rifles, Kevlarskin, tortoise-shell-shaped helmets that make them sweat. They don’t take their eyes off the pedestrians walking past. Seeing-eye cameras swivel in Kirsten’s direction and blink at her. A bit further in, a lesser-armed female guard scans Kirsten for anything suspicious, then points where to go.

  The reception area of inVitro is plush but anaemic: decorated in the kind of soulless way a five-star hotel is. The walls are covered in vanilla wallpaper that feels flat, dry, and tastes sweet, like a wafer. Kirsten hears the whisper of air sanitiser as she approaches the empty smiles at the desk.

  The waiting room is packed; this place must be printing money. A woman, camouflaged in beige, hands her a stylus and a glass tablet with a form to fill out. She looks for an empty seat in the crowded room. Mainly couples: some scrubbed-looking and hopeful, some carrying the stale air of defeat, a few pinkly embarrassed, although Kirsten sees no reason to be. As difficult as it is, it’s generally accepted that everyone in South Africa is IUPO nowadays: Infertile Until Proven Otherwise. At least Kirsten, and the other people in the room, have the money for treatment—most aren’t that lucky, hence the huge skew in the latest population stats.

  Some of the patients are wearing SuperBug masks. Kirsten supposes she should be wearing hers too but reckons she has to draw a line somewhere. If she has to choose between wearing a mask over her face every day for the rest of her life or getting sick she’d rather take her chances with The Bug. Besides, the government-issue masks are revolting to look at. Perhaps if she can get hold of one of the designer masks… she’s about to sit next to a resigned-looking pair when her name is called.

  The gold nameplate on the half-ajar door is blank. The nurse knocks and they enter. Now or never. Kirsten takes a deep breath.

  The doctor takes the electronic clipboard, dismisses the nurse, and looks with interest at Kirsten over the top of his black-rimmed glasses.

  ‘Miss Lovell?’

  His eyes are the palest blue (Quinine) (Arctic Icecaps). They drill through her, make her feel intensely uncomfortable.

  ‘I’m Doctor Van der Heever.’

  Kirsten’s nerves stretch her smile wide. She feels like running. He motions for her to take a seat and ignores her for the next two minutes while he scans her form, pinching and paging. She focuses on her breathing and casts her eyes around: one side of the office is floor-to-ceiling glass, with an uninspiring view of ChinaCity/Sandton. Glinting certificates take up most of the opposite wall. What kind of specialist feels the need to wallpaper half of his office with certificates? What’s he trying to make up for?

  ‘So… you’ve been trying for around three years?’

  Kirsten jumps to attention. ‘Three years. Yes.’

  He grunts acknowledgement, keeps paging.

  ‘You have children?’ she blurts, without really meaning to. She thinks he’ll say no, that he’s married to his job. There are no framed prints of family on his desk.

  He looks up at her, stares. Moistens his lips. ‘I do. A boy. Well, he used to be a boy. A grown man, now. A doctor.’

  Yuck. ‘You must be proud.’

  He blinks at her; his eyes magnified by his glasses. ‘Your family’s medical history –’

  ‘It’s patchy. I’m working on getting more information. I’m actually –’

  ‘No matter,’ he says, ‘we’ll do the standard primary diagnostic tests on you and your partner.’

  The mention of tests sock Kirsten in the stomach. It’s true she doesn’t have many memories of her early childhood, but what she does remember is having endless examinations, specialist after specialist, x-rays, MRIs, CAT scans, blood tests. Breathing in gas to trace the blood flow to her brain, a hot flush of an iodine IV to examine her renal system.

  It had made her hate her condition. Only once she’d been free of the weekly appointments did she finally start to accept the way she is: regard it as a gift instead of a disability. Now it seems as if it’s starting all over again and she is heavy with for
eboding.

  ‘What kind of tests?’ Kirsten tries to keep her voice even.

  ‘Nothing too invasive, for now. Bloods, HSG, PCT. Then maybe a laparoscopy, hysteroscopy, depending on what we find.’

  Using a stylus, he writes something on the glass, then clicks a button to bump the prescription to her watch. Her wrist buzzes as it comes through. A spray of tiny blue polka dots.

  ‘It’s a prenatal supplement. Folic acid, DHEA, Pycnogenol, royal jelly, omegas.’

  Dr Van der Heever stands up, as if to see her out.

  Is that it? Nine thousand rand sure doesn’t buy you much specialist.

  ‘Don’t look so worried,’ he says with a sidelong glance, one Kirsten can’t help but to find menacing. ‘We’ll take good care of you.’

  Chapter 3

  They Must be Playing with the Weather Again

  Johannesburg, 2021

  Everyone holds their breath. The pale, painted puppet-like bodies keep still while the light flashes bright white.

  ‘And it’s a wrap,’ Kirsten announces, lowering her camera and looking around at her team. The models, tired of holding their stomachs in and being pestered by the make-up artist, pout and blink at her gratefully. She rides her swivel chair to the 24” screen to file her shots.

  She’s happy with the day’s grind. There is a luxury that comes with advertising shoots, compared to the journalistic and proactive stuff she usually does. It makes for an easy day, and she feels good because she knows she’s got some excellent cinegraphs. Highly stylised, super slick, this job is definitely going into her portfolio. She feels hopped up, Mint Green.

  ‘Stunning,’ her assistant hisses over her shoulder, making her start. She closes the file. ‘Seriously, that’s some bang tidy work.’

  ‘I’m off,’ says Kirsten. ‘Will you give the models some of this food?’

  Shoots for brands like this are always over-catered. She slips a packet of Blacksalt crisps and a CaraCrunch chocolate bar into her pocket, grabs a bottle of water.

  ‘Tell them to eat something. Models love being told to eat something.’

  The sun is sinking behind the jagged downtown skyline when Kirsten walks towards the Gautrain station, and a warm drop of rain on her cheek makes her look up at the sky. She always expects the rain to be perfumed by the data in The Cloud. She imagines all the pictures there, all the poetry and music. Surely the rain should taste of something? Mummatus clouds are gathering in the east. They must be playing with the weather again. It feels wrong to her that the government is allowed to. The country needs rain desperately but influencing the weather just seems wrong. Unnatural.

  In her experience, forcing an outcome rarely works. It’s one of the reasons she has waited so long to visit a fertility clinic. Surely if it’s meant to happen, it would just happen? But it hasn’t. So now she guesses she is in the same boat as the weather manipulators.

  It’s not the first time she’s drawn a parallel between the drought and the fertility crisis. Human bodies, after all, are 87% water. Without water there can be no life. Perhaps this is the next step in human evolution—Learnings from Lemmings—our natural resources are coming to an end but instead of diving off cliffs and walking into the sea to control our population, we just became infertile. A neater solution. Civilised.

  Although lemming-inspired people still exist on the fringe of society: the suicide stats are soaring. They call it the Suicide Contagion, as if it’s infectious. As if you’re coasting along nicely, happy with your little patch of life, until the guy in the cubicle next to you decides to take a bottle of TranX to bed with him and the next thing you’re contemplating doing it too. Like it never crossed your mind that you could end your life until you hear that someone else has done it. So on your way home from work you buy a bottle of TranX and a box of toaster waffles. You eat the waffles.

  Kirsten gets on the train and sits as far away from everyone else as she can so that she can furtively eat her pocket-softened chocolate. The doors slide closed and they start to move. The sugar paints her mouth bright yellow (Cadmium Candy).

  The projection looming above her interrupts the 7 o’clock news with snaps of contrived family moments: a father playing soccer with his IVF triplet sons, a mother gardening with her mixed-race daughter, a double amputee with bionic legs graduating from university. Then a slogan in bold typography appears over the picture: “A Future For All!”

  It’s the global slogan for 2021, but what does it even mean? Kirsten finds it especially ironic given the fertility crisis. She would laugh if it was funny. Ever since The Net shrunk the planet and the rich countries ‘adopted’ the poor countries, the UN is going around thinking that the Earth is some crazy-quilt version of Shangri-La.

  In the meantime South Africa has serious problems; the news broadcast returns to show her cases in point: crippling rolling blackouts for those still stuck on the Eishkom grid; people dying of dehydration, cholera, and the SuperBug; strike after strike in the labour force retarding the already dismal service delivery; townships being razed to the ground to make space for factories and soulless, culture-barren RDP grids; a violent spike in hijackings; and prisoners dying in the Crim Colonies.

  The global news: more ocean innocents disappearing on a regular basis, most likely nabbed by Somali pirates. More casualties at Hoover Dam as China continues its invasion of the US in search of water supplies.

  Ha-ha, future for all. Kirsten looks down at the wrapper in her hand and realises her chocolate is missing. She checks her lap, her bag, the floor. Surely she hasn’t eaten the whole thing?

  Now the news shows some square-jawed businessman cutting a shiny blue ribbon, and people flashing their teeth and applauding. His name comes up: Christopher Walden, CEO of Fontus. Airbrushed pictures of Fontus trucks offloading crates of bottled water to impoverished-looking schools and remote villages. Cuts to Walden handing a bottle of Hydra to a lollipop child and showing the cameraman a thumbs-up.

  It’s good PR, but they don’t really need to advertise. Apart from being the largest soda- and water-bottler in the country, Fontus has had the sole government contract to supply subsidised bottled water nationwide since it became unsafe to drink tap water. They practically own the country.

  There are portable water purification systems available, towers and billboards and bottles and straws where nanoparticles in the filter remove heavy metals and biohazards, but they are slow and the water still tastes grey. Most homes have them but it’s just easier to buy bottled when the world is spinning so fast no one feels they have the time to wait for something as basic and essential as water.

  Kirsten and James have recently begun to make a point of drinking Hydra and not the more expensive brands, Tethys, or the luxurious 27-flavoured ‘champagne of waters’ Anahita, despite their friends’ teasing for being ‘neo-pinko socialists.’ More than the price tag, they reject the notion that water is becoming a status symbol. She would drink tap water if she could, if it was safe. People still do of course, dirt-poor people, and those who shirk the warnings on homescreen and radio, people who believe it is all just a money-making racket, or worse, a post-Illuminati conspiracy. People who consider bottled water as the new Kool-Aid, wear Talking Tees that shout ‘Don’t Drink the Water!’ that make you jump as you walk past.

  The thought makes Kirsten feel navy (Blackbeard Blue); she can’t wait to get home. She hasn’t realised how tired she is, after the demanding shoot and this morning’s anxious appointment. She pulls the plaster off the crook of her arm, revealing a light bruise and a blood freckle where the nurse took a sample at inVitro. The train slows to a stop. She surreptitiously drops the plaster and the CaraCrunch wrapper into a litterbin on her way out.

  Kirsten loves the flat she shares with James in Illovo. It’s an old building with high, ornate pressed ceilings, parquet floors, and decorated in her shabby chic bohemian style, accentuated with knickknacks from their travelling and orphaned props from previous shoots.

  It’s an ol
d block, aged but sturdy. It has soul, she tells Marmalade, not like those new edge-of-cutting-edge buildings going up in town with their moving walls and pollution-sucking paint. Superglass everywhere so that you are constantly walking into walls. Hundreds of pivoting cameras to catch you walking into said walls. Not a comfortable chair in sight. Fake pebble fireplaces. Not like theirs, which they light with actual matches and feed with solid hunks of wood, and watch the florescent flames slowly work away at the grain.

  God knows she likes this brick-and-mortar building, she thinks, punching the worn-out elevator button for the third time, but this lift could really do with a(nother) service.

  Eventually it cranks into life, something whirrs and settles with a dull thud from above, and it begins its unhurried descent. Good thing I’m not in a hurry. The numbers-caught-in-amber buttons light up painfully slowly: 4.

  There is another noise, closer, a shuffling behind her and Kirsten whirls around, expecting to see someone, but the lobby is empty. 3.

  The overhead lights flicker, and she thinks: just perfect. She is in just the mood to walk up three flights of stairs in the dark. 2.

  The lights seem to stabilise, and then they go out. The elevator stops mid-groan. She hopes no one is stuck inside. The auto-generator will kick in any minute but the person trapped might not know it.

  She flicks her watch’s torch function on and begins climbing the stairs. It’s hardly a searchlight, but it will do. She wishes James was home but he touched down in Zimbabwe a few hours ago, to work at the new surgery they’ve set up there. He has always spent a lot of his time grinding out of the country, but lately it seems he is never home.

  They often discuss emigrating: James will be cooking some wholesome dinner while she reads the Echo.news tickertape out to him, and on bad-news days, which seemed more frequent lately, they invariably end up wondering to each other how much worse South Africa can get before they seriously consider moving to a safer place. Sometimes, sitting in the dark of loadshedding, talking by candlelight, eating olive sourdough and cheese, they say all they want is a more efficient place, a country that doesn’t seem as inherently broken. And while James is always ready to leave, eager to leave, Kirsten can’t bring herself to, as if bound by some stubborn magnetic force.