Why You Were Taken

RAINBOW VOM ₂

Johannesburg, September 2021

Kirsten, late for the appointment that she’s been dreading for weeks, taps her sneakers on the scuffed concrete of the communal taxi stop on Oxford road, near her apartment in Illovo.

The taxis are supposed to collect passengers every fifteen minutes but the drivers don’t pay much attention to the official timetable. Most of them are passive aggressive which, Kirsten thinks, is better than just plain aggressive, which they were in the old days.

Taxi bosses, South Africa’s own mafia, used to gun down their rivals: blood in the streets: as if our history didn’t have enough of that already. It was a long time ago, but she had seen the photos in varsity, in some photojourno module, and the images had never left her.

There were a lot of pictures that stayed with her. She didn’t know if it was part of her synaesthesia or if she just had a more visual memory than most. Regardless, it came in handy with her job as a photographer, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.

The exception, of course, was her early childhood, of which she could remember very little. It was before you could download and back up your memories. Her parents would tell her what she was like when she was a child, describe her first word, her first steps, the outings they had gone on, but Kirsten’s early memory remained an odourless, flavourless blank.

One year, for their anniversary, Marmalade James had given her the first book she had ever read cover-to-cover. It was a hardbound, beautifully illustrated, vintage edition of a Grimm’s’ fairy tale: ‘Hansel and Gretel’. The pages were foxed, the cover bumped. When she held it in her hands she could feel that the book contained more than one story.

She had been so touched by the gesture: James knew that she didn’t know many nursery rhymes or fairy tales because of the gap in her memory. It was as if he was trying to give her a small part of those early years back. She treasured it. Read it carefully, was appalled by it, fell in love with it, couldn’t bear to read it again, had it framed and put up on her wall. Still dreams of toaster waffle tiles.

Just as a minibus rolls up, her watch beeps with a reminder. She is supposed to be there already. She double-clicks the message and it dials through to the reception machine at the clinic, giving them her location and in doing so letting them know she is running late. People are more flexible now that personal cars are practically extinct and almost everyone relies on public transport. At least that’s what Kirsten hopes, seeing as she is terminally late. The irony of her period being precisely on time every month is never lost on her.

She lets a few passengers push in front of the queue so that she is last to board and gets a seat in the front row. She hates sitting at the back. All the smells: the perfume and aftershave and shampoo and worn pleather shoes and hair-wax and atchar and chewing gum. All the sounds: the tinny kwaito, jazz and retro-marabi on the radio; the different languages and dialects; the shades of skin; the mad hooting.

The close fabric of different textures and colours: it made her feel giddy, sometimes ill. Overwhelming: like having to see, smell, touch and taste all the colours of the rainbow, in 3D, at the same time. At its worst it would mix together and become a thick, soupy, smelly, bubbling, multi-coloured mess.

She would normally close her eyes, picture herself in a clean white room, and try to cut herself off from her senses, but fellow passengers never liked that. They either took offence or moved a little away from her, afraid, perhaps rightly so, that she would hurl on them. Rainbow Vom, she thinks, and smiles, although the idea doesn’t make the trip any easier.

With her LocketCam she takes a quick snap of the miniature disco-ball hanging off the taxi’s rear-view mirror, which swings as they stop to pick up passengers and let others alight. The taxi driver makes a dangerous stop at a dogleg to offer a woman a ride. Probably because she is pretty, Kirsten thinks, till the door opens and she sees the woman’s bulging stomach.

Christ, she thinks. As if this morning isn’t difficult enough.

The other passengers all snap to and make the appropriate noises. Not gasps, not quite, but something similar. They shift up in their seats, making space for her, dusting invisible crumbs off the cheap cracked upholstery seat.

The pregnant woman smiles shyly, thanks them in vernacular. The people either side of her beam as she sits, and steal shy glances at her bump. The woman smiles, puts her hand on her belly. A special kind of smug, the way only pregnant women can be. Kirsten stares out of the hair-oil smeared window.

The Infertility Crisis has hit the lower socio-economic groups the hardest, with 9 out of 10 couples battling to conceive. As the salaries climb, though, the infertility – bizarrely – decreases, with top-earners having the reversed fortune.

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. Millions had been spent testing the various hypotheses: cell phone 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 was some correlation, they still couldn’t figure out why South Africa was so badly affected compared to other countries.

The only thing that they could confirm was what everyone already knew: the population was declining rapidly; and those fortunate few who did manage to conceive were treated like queens.

When she gets to near 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 3D 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 the fact that they have cameras. They make her feel like she is living in someone’s bleak futuristic imaginings. Already she feels as if she is being watched, always has. She shakes her brain, tries to focus on the task ahead. The time had come.

Carpe diem, and all of that.

For as long as she could remember, she had 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, she thinks, I’m just grouchy. Nervous.

She notices that her underarms are damp and slows her pace. 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.

She slows down, 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.

There are two heavily armed guards 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 out 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, compact, and tastes dry, but slightly sweet, like a wafer. Kirsten hears the whisper of air sanitiser, sees empty smiles at the desk.

Understandably, fertility is big business nowadays. 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, had 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 supposed she should be wearing hers too but reckoned you had to draw a line somewhere. If she had 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 were revolting to look at. Perhaps if she could get hold of one of the designer masks… she is about to sit next to a resigned-looking pair – two men who look nice enough, if not a little beaten down – when her name is called.

She is led by a woman in scrubs through a few adjoining corridors that open on to another waiting room, which she skips, and finally to the doctors’ offices. The gold nameplate on the half-ajar door is blank. The nurse knocks and they enter. Now or never, Kirsten thinks, taking 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 the screen. 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. She wonders what kind of specialist feels the need to wallpaper half of his office with certificates. What he’s 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 out, 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,’ he says. ‘A boy. Well, he used to be a boy. A grown man, now. A doctor.’

Yuck, she thinks. ‘You must be proud.’

He grunts, and resumes studying the tablet. On the last leaf there is something that catches his interest.

‘You’re synaesthetic?’ he asks, eyebrows raised.

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘It’s less interesting than it sounds.’ It was her standard line.

‘Indeed,’ he says.

‘I’m sure it has nothing to do with… my difficulty to…’

Finding the words was tricky. Conceive? My fertility issues? My infertility? They didn’t smell/feel/taste right.

‘Of course not. It’s just unusual. These things… interest me. Being a medical man. Are you an associative or a projector?’

‘Projector.’

‘Hmm,’ he murmurs. She can tell he wants her to go on. She doesn’t.

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 was true that she didn’t have many memories of her early childhood, but what she does remember is having test after test, doctor after doctor, specialist after specialist, x-rays, MRIs, CAT scans, urine tests, blood tests. Breathing in radioactive gas to trace the blood flow to her brain, a hot flush of an iodine IV to examine her renal system.

It made her hate her condition. Only when she was free of the weekly appointments did she finally start to accept the way she was: regard it as a gift instead of a disability. Now it seems to her like it’s starting all over again and she feels heavy with foreboding.

‘What kind of tests?’ she asks, trying 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.

‘Come back on the seventh day of your cycle. Take a painkiller an hour before your appointment, the HSG can make you cramp.’

Wince. She spins the ring on her finger.

‘Go to the sisters now. They’ll take your blood and brief you. We’re testing for oestrogen, FSH and AMH. We’ll also just make sure you are clear of SuperBug and confirm your MMR and HI-Vax status.’

‘What are—?’

‘I’ll explain that all to you when we have your results. In the mean time, take the pills on the script.’

She looks at him.

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

She bumps the prescription forward to James; he can fill it for her. Dr Van der Heever stands up, as if to see her out.

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

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

Without correcting him, Kirsten thanks him and scurries.

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 the shots she’ll touch up later.

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 got some excellent shots. Highly stylised, super slick, this job is definitely going into her portfolio. The client had left hours ago, already happy that they had ‘The Shot’. Kirsten wanted to push it a bit further and the result was even better than she had hoped. She feels hopped up, Mint Green.

‘Stunning,’ her assistant hisses over her shoulder, making her jump. 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 were 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 into the Gautrain station. Mummatus clouds are gathering in the East. They must be tweaking the weather. It felt wrong to her that they were allowed to. She knew the country needed rain desperately but influencing the weather just seemed wrong. Unnatural.

Forcing an outcome rarely worked, in her experience. It’s one of the reasons she had waited so long to visit a fertility clinic. Surely if it was meant to happen, it would just happen? But then it didn’t. So now she guesses that she is in the same boat as the weather manipulators.

It’s not the first time she had 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. Kirsten finds it remarkable that the more people who commit suicide, the more suicides there are. 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. After the doors slide closed there is the hissing of the air sanitiser, and then they start to move. The sugar paints her mouth bright yellow (Cadmium Candy).

The 4D 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 mean time South Africa has serious problems; the news broadcast now back and showing 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; prisoners dying in the Crim Colonies. People protesting everything from the PLC to Transgender rights.

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, thinks Kirsten, then looks down at the wrapper in her hand and realises her chocolate is missing. She checks her lap, her bag, the floor. Surely she didn’t eat 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 was good PR, but they didn’t really need to advertise. Apart from being the largest soda and water-bottler in the country, Fontus have had the sole government contract to supply subsidised bottled water nationwide since it became unsafe to drink tap water. They practically owned 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 at 10 litres an hour, 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 had 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 the teasing they have to endure by their friends for being ‘neo-pinko socialists.’ Kirsten just didn’t see the point of paying R750 a litre for a prettier label. Granted, it was delicious – like liquid New York cheesecake – but ridiculous at the cost.

More than the price-tag, they rejected the notion that water was becoming a status symbol. She would drink tap water if she could, if it was safe. People still did of course, dirt-poor people, and those who shirked the warnings on homescreen and radio, people who believed it was all just a money-making racket, or worse, an post-Illuminati conspiracy. Thought of bottled water as the new Kool-Aid, wore Talking Tees that shouted ‘Don’t Drink the Water!’ that made you jump as you walked past.

But paranoia also has its price: hospitals have entire wings dedicated to water-borne diseases. Those and the SuperBug. It’s as if God/The Net/The Universe/Karma decided that not enough people were dying since the HI-Vax was invented so She replaced AIDS with a couple of particularly deadly strains of viruses.

The thought makes Kirsten feel navy (Blackbeard Blue); she can’t wait to get home. She hadn’t realised how tired she was, after the demanding shoot and this morning’s anxious appointment. She pulls the plaster off the inside of her elbow, revealing a light bruise and a blood freckle where the nurse had taken 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 old 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, she thinks, as 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 there isn’t anyone 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’d touched down in Zimbabwe a few hours ago, to work at the new surgery they had set up there. He had always spent a lot of his time grinding out of the country, but lately it seems that he is never home.

They often discuss emigrating: James would 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 would invariably end up wondering out loud to each other how much worse South Africa could get before they seriously considered moving to a safer place. Sometimes, sitting in the dark of loadshedding, talking by candlelight, eating olive sourdough and cheese, they’d say all they wanted was a more efficient place, a country that didn’t seem as inherently broken. And while James was always ready to leave, eager to leave, Kirsten couldn’t bring herself to, as if bound by some stubborn magnetic force.

Kirsten is slightly out of breath when she reaches the third floor (Wheatgrass Shooter). When they first moved in she would say she lived on the green floor, or tell visitors to press the green button in the elevator, and they would think she was crackers. Of course there was no green button, and there was nothing green about the floor she lived on.

Marmalade understands her colours though: If he asks her how many slices of toast she’d like and she answers ‘red’ he would know that meant two. Or yellow: one. Wasn’t it obvious? No, he says, I’m just used to your type of crazy.

She walks down the dim corridor and fumbles at the door, dropping her access card. Swearing purple (Aubergine Aura), she bends down to pick it up and a dark figure steps towards her.