Why You Were Taken

A SWARM, A SMACK ₁₁

Johannesburg, 2021

The ragged tooth shark swims straight towards her. His dull eyes virtually unseeing in the water the colour of an overcast sky. Serrated teeth hanging out at all angles, as if he has long given up hunting. Her pulse quickens as he approaches, her finger on the trigger. He glides quickly with little effort. The water is murkier than she had hoped. Kirsten fires away. Just before it reaches her – a severed arm’s length away – the shark turns to avoid the tempered glass of the tank. Superglass.

She gets a few shots of his profile: a vast muscle-and-cartilage body wrapped in slate sandpaper. Her head throbbing, she flicks through the thumbnails on the screen of her camera, making sure she has enough that are in sharp focus.

The lighting had been tricky because she couldn’t use her flash; it would bounce off the glass. She was shooting in MultiFocus 3D to get more drama out of the looming shark. The shots were certainly dramatic, but shooting in MF3D always gives her a headache.

She sits down for a moment, watches the dancing blue light of the water (Aqua Shimmer) paint her arms and hands. The pressure in her head makes her feel as though the silicone-framed glass is going to give way and knock everyone over in a tidal wave of exotic fish, eels, and strangling seaweed.

She has a long gulp of CinnaCola from the can her assistant hands her. She had been at it for ages and she still wasn’t sure if she had the shot. She powers up her Tile and looks at the pictures in subpixel HR. The pictures she had of the Leafy Sea Dragon, the Blanket Octopus and the Sea Wasp jellyfish were fantastic. The Blanket Octo looks like a silk scarf underwater: a billowing maroon cape. She could have watched it for hours.

The Sea Wasp was almost invisible: smoke caught in a bubble underwater, with elegant silver tentacles and enough deadly venom to kill up to sixty humans. If you get stung by this jellyfish in the sea, said the digital projection on the glass, it causes you such intense pain and shock you won’t make it to the shore. A group of jellyfish is called a swarm or a smack. Such grace in its movement: hypnotic. She makes a mental note to do a jellyfish project in the future.

Her assistant offers her a ganache-glazed kronut but she, for once, declines. She doesn’t feel great. A bit dizzy, nauseous. It had been a long morning and she still had to shoot the model. Her eyes are strained and she is battling to concentrate on the photos, so she closes the window and looks around the aquarium for a moment.

It’s deliciously cool and quiet inside; even the children whisper. The cobalt luminescence ripples over the floor and the visitors, making everyone seem calm. It has a clean taste: ice and fresh mint, with a hint of citrus.

Who would have thought that an aquarium would work in Jozi? It had been an impromptu idea of some BEE-Kitten who had more investors than sense. There were so many things up against the project: the water shortage, the protesting fish-hippies, the transport costs. Can you imagine the logistics of trucking sharks, dolphins and other endangered fish from some sleepy coastal town to Johannesburg? It was a joke. Until it wasn’t anymore, and now it’s AQUASCAPE: a gushing money-spinner, a veritable pot of liquid gold. She looks around at the illuminated faces of the kids and their parental units, and feels a twinge. In drought-blasted South Africa it does feel magical to see so much water. She had always loved water – rivers, lakes, waterfalls, oceans – and swimming. She often wondered why she lived inland. Perhaps one day they would retire to the Cape Republic.

As a teenager she had read an article in the New York Times about the ‘loneliest whale in the world’. It was about an animal that looked like a whale and sounded like a whale, but her call was slightly off, which meant that even though she called and called, no other whales could hear her.

The people that found her named her 52 Hertz. Her tone was bassa profunda, just a notch higher than the lowest note on a tuba, and it got deeper over time. She kept swimming, kept calling, but the entire ocean was dark, cold and deaf to her. ‘That’s me,’ Kirsten had thought at the time, ‘that is the whale version of me.’

Her news tickertape lights up with a fresh story. She clicks it and is taken to page six of Echo.news, the local online newspaper she does the odd job for. It’s a satirical cartoon of the NANC politician who was caught with a secret pool. He is standing in court with a sheepish smile on his face, dressed in nothing more than soggy grey underpants, with a yellow duck-shaped inflatable tube around his waist. The prosecutor has a whistle around her neck and the judge is sitting on a lifeguard chair, the ones you used to get in public pools. She moves her cursor to close the window when she spots a headline that draws her in.

This has always been a secret fear of Kirsten’s: ending up old and alone, slipping in the shower/accidentally electrocuting herself/choking to death on a toaster waffle, only to be found weeks later by the building’s rodent-control man. She scans the article to see how ancient this woman was and how exactly she had kicked the bucket, so she could at all costs avoid the same sorry end.

But it turns out that the woman is precisely her age, and it’s a suspected suicide. ‘Betty Weil’s body,’ it read, ‘was found yesterday by her mental health doctor who had grown concerned when Miss Weil had missed several appointments. She was found in the kitchen where she had died after apparently gassing herself. Miss Weil had a history of mental illness, most notably paranoid schizophrenia.’ There was a little more info on her history, and then the usual disclaimer to seek help if needed. Lawsuits are sticky now that suicide is trending. The small black-and-white picture accompanying the article showed a laughing young woman with long dark hair, obviously taken before her illness took hold of her. Something makes Kirsten look twice. She reads the article again. Betty. It couldn’t be.

It couldn’t be the mad woman in the parking lot. She had to have been in her forties, at least, and didn’t look anything like this photograph. Kirsten put her fingers over the woman’s long hair, giving her a helmet-cut.

‘Your Kirsten is my Betty,’ she had said.

‘Fucking hell,’ she says, speed-dialling Keke.

‘I’m busy,’ Keke answers, noise and static in the background.

‘Where are you?’

‘The Gladiator Arena, in Roma. Well, fake Roma, anyway. Roman Rustenburg. Dusty as hell but some fine ass here in gladiator get-up. Skin all bronzed and shit. Failed Amusement Park turned film set for the second instalment of the Mad Maximus thrillogy.’

‘You do lead a charmed life,’ says Kirsten.

‘What’s up?’ asks Keke.

‘That mad woman I told you about, the one who stalked me in the basement the other night?’

‘Yebo?’

‘She’s in the paper today.’

‘Arrested? Admitted to an asylum? Elected as a minister?’

‘Dead.’

‘Who wrote the article?’

‘What?’

‘Which journo wrote that article? Was it from Echo?’

Kirsten scrolls and sees the name of the journalist.

‘Echo, yes. Mpumi Dladla.’

‘Ha! He’s a hack. He probably didn’t even investigate. Most likely lifted a police report.’

‘Do you have his number?’

‘Of course I do.’

Fiona’s moans, though stifled, are getting louder. Seth cups her mouth with his hand, smudging her lipstick and butting the back of her head up against the gun-metal grey locker door in the stationery room, which makes her groan even more. It had started innocently enough, or so she had thought. She was there to pick out some new pens, e-paper and stickernotes for her desk. She had been looking forward to it all week: Fiona Botes had an almost unhealthy love of stationery. It was so old fashioned – romantic, really – to use real pens on real paper.

She had been inspecting the different kinds of yellow pens on offer in anticipation, when Seth strode in and locked the door, startling her. He had used her temporary breathlessness to advance on her. Not a word exchanged, he had put his hand behind her head and kissed her slowly, making sure at every stage that she wanted more. As the kiss grew deeper, she pulled her stomach in as his hand slid over her smooth pink shirt; her generous breasts. Seth used just the right amount of teasing, and the right amount of pressure. He pushed her against the closed door of a locker; trapping her body between the heat of his body and the cool metal. His mouth didn’t leave hers as his hand travelled down, lifting her knee-length tweed skirt and stroked her through her panties. At first slowly, in lazy circles, then faster and harder as he felt her grow wet. Her arms, holding the door behind her, became stiff; she stopped groaning, held her breath, and her whole body became rigid before the orgasm took her. He held her up as her knees almost buckled – her entire being felt like it was buckling – and tears sprang to her eyes.

Fiona Botes had not had a lot of orgasms in her life, and the ones she had never seemed quite satisfactory. Her girlfriends told her that she had to DIY before she could show a man how to do it for her, but she didn’t like thinking about that. It seemed smutty. Besides, she believed that a man should intuitively know what to do with her parts; she certainly didn’t. Never had Fiona imagined that an orgasm could feel like this. And so quickly! Fully-clothed! She was in shock. Intoxicated. What surprises her even more is that she finds herself unbuckling him. This gorgeous, tall man, in the stationery room, with her! She couldn’t have dreamt up a better fantasy if she had tried.

Kirsten feels a twinge in her abdomen. Maybe I’m ovulating, she thinks. She checks the OvO app on her watch: 36 hours to go, it says. At least she’d get laid this week. She takes the escalator to the second floor of the pastel green art deco building (Pistachio ice-cream), where the journalists, editors, copy-editors and layout artists buzz around in the open-plan offices of Echo.news like a drone-swarm.

They had moved to this downtown building when their original offices in ChinaCity/Sandton were firebombed a few years ago by a group of Christian extremists called The Resurrectors. Previously infamous for their mission to ban The Net, they had since taken to terrorising anyone who ‘disrespected Jesus.’ The newspaper had published a column by a cocky, jaded journo in which he had criticised each major religion in turn, and from which you could extrapolate he found anyone of religious persuasion a bit dim-witted. There was a line about rising-from-the-dead Jesus being a huggable zombie that had particularly inflamed the group and the next day – Poof! – their building was razed. The Lord doth smite cocky columnists. No one was hurt – how very Christian of them – and because Echo don’t put out a hard copy, the newspaper business went on as usual, operating remotely from the employees’ individual lounges and tennis courts until this new building was found.

The Resurrectors had also recently taken to threatening fertility doctors, SurroSisters, and bombing IVF clinics. They called fertility treatment ‘devil’s work,’ surrogates ‘SurroSluts,’ and the resulting embryos – very unimaginatively, in Kirsten’s mind – ‘devil spawn.’ They had published a piece on FreeSpeech.za outlining their thinking, backing them up with archaic biblical verses. Kirsten had tried to hate-read it once, to make fun, but all the exclamation marks had hurt her eyes.

Firebombing the Echo.news building was one thing, but there was a public outcry about the disrespect they showed the SurroSisters. Without professional surrogates South Africa’s birth rate would be through the floor. Singe fertile women who volunteered to assist infertile couples were afforded special treatment in almost every facet of their lives: free accommodation, travel, medical treatment. Each SurroSis had their own bodyguard, and their own car. Fashion houses dressed them, jewellers loaned them diamonds, brands virtually tripped over themselves to place their products in their hands. They wore ‘SS’ badges in public so that they could be easily identified and shown the proper respect: the opposite of a scarlet letter.

When she reaches the top of the escalator at the Echo offices no one takes any notice of her so she walks up to the closest table and asks where she can find Mpumi. She is directed to the untidiest desk in the place; she casts around for familiar faces but sees no one she recognises. Mpumi is on the phone, and typing at the same time, so she smiles at him and gestures that she’ll wait. It’s obviously a personal call, because he wraps it up quickly and calls the person on the other side of the line a ‘chop’.

‘Hi,’ she ventures, but he holds up a silencing finger at her and finishes typing his sentence with his other hand. He reads it again, makes an adjustment, makes another adjustment, then smashes the SAVE key.

He looks up at her and blinks, as if to clear his head of the previous conversation. He’s super-groomed and dressed in 50s Sophiatown chic. Retrosexual. Kirsten thrusts an extra-large double-shot cappuccino at him, believing from experience that you couldn’t go wrong with that in a news office. He crinkles his nose.

‘Sweet, darling, but I don’t do caffeine. Or sugar… or moo-milk.’

Kirsten swaps his for hers. He fiddles with his bowtie.

‘Half-caff, stevia, soymilk.’

He takes it from her, flips the plastic top off, and takes a small sip.

‘So you ARE an angel. I thought so, when you walked in. All fiery-haired and horny and shit, with the light behind you. Are you here for the Feminazi interview?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘I just need five minutes.’

‘What can I do for you?’

Kirsten sits on an old bashed-up office chair. Pulls it closer.

‘That article of yours on the tickertape this morning… ’

‘The monkey that they’ve programmed to talk? My sources swear it’s true.’

‘No, the woman. The woman that committed suicide.’

‘Ah,’ he says, ‘you a relative? We haven’t been able to find any relatives, nor could the cops, so we went ahead and named her. Not a friend or frenemy in sight. If you’re—’

‘No,’ interrupts Kirsten. ‘I just have a question, about how she died.’

‘Straight up and down a suicide, m’lady.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘No sign of forced entry. In fact, the windows and doors were locked from the inside. The super had to get in by smashing a window – the lady had, like, ten different locks on the front door.’

He snorts.

‘Well,’ he says, ‘it’s ironic, isn’t it? Locking the baddies out before you stick your head in the oven.’

‘When do you think she died?’

He looks down at the masses of paper spread on his desk and, after a few moments, locates a blue file.

‘It’s a finely tuned arrangement,’ he smiles at her, gesturing at the mess. ‘It’s the only way I find anything.’

Keke was right: it’s a copy of the police file. He flips through a few pages and then stops, finger pointing to a detail that Kirsten can’t see.

‘Estimated TOD was the evening before.’

‘But then how did they find her so quickly?’

‘She hadn’t been showing up at her shrink’s appointments, had been avoiding her calls. It looked like she hadn’t left the place in a week.’

‘Is there anything else you can tell me?’

His phone rings, but he mutes the tune.

‘Not much else to tell. Suicide is contagious now, didn’t you know? Bitch went schizo and offed herself. All in a day’s grind in this crazy-ass city. Believe me, I’ve seen worse. A lot worse. In fact, I remember thinking, how considerate of her to take a clean way out.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you know, she could have jumped out of the window, slit her wrists, put a shotgun to her head. Can you imagine having to clean that shit up?’

The pictures of her wax doll parents come back to her. Dark red holes, weeping.

‘Never thought of it that way.’

‘Yeah, well, they’re mostly selfish bastards, Suiciders. We used to call them suicide victims but, ha! Hardly. Men are the worst, always the messiest. Pigs. They seem to like the drama of leaving blood and bits behind. Leave their mark, like a dog pissing on a tree. Women are more considerate. Usually do it with more grace: pills, asphyxiation, walking into rivers.’

‘But she was a victim,’ says Kirsten. ‘I mean, she was ill… she couldn’t help it.’

He purses his lips to show that he doesn’t agree. His phone rings again.

‘Anything else I can help you with? I have a 6pm deadline and I don’t have any of my facts checked yet.’

She gets up to leave, binning her coffee cup. Caffeine dulls her synaesthesia so it feels like she is moving in monochrome. She still couldn’t believe that normal people saw the world this way. Flat.

‘Was there anything weird about it? Anything that you thought was strange?’

He uses the back of a pencil to scratch his scalp. Shakes his head, but then stops, narrows his eyes.

‘There was one thing… I wanted to put it into the article but Ed said it was unnecessary. He didn’t want it to sound like we were making fun of the lady.’

‘What was it?’

‘It was something the shrink said to the cops. I didn’t interview her personally but she said that the woman had out-of-control paranoid delusions. She heard voices talking to her and telling her to do shit. But she also had this idea that she had been microchipped, I don’t know, by aliens or Illuminati or something. She had a lump on the back of her neck – had it for as long as she could remember – and she started to believe that it was a tracking chip. Thought someone was monitoring her. Maybe she watched too many 90s movies. But it’s cool, you know, in a way, that’s why I wanted to put it in the article. I mean they say they want more readers but I had to pull the most interesting part. Ed can be a bastard.’

‘So what you’re saying is that she really was crackers, and she really did kill herself.’

‘Yes, ma’am. Oh, and one other thing…’

Cheeky shit, calling her ‘ma’am’ as if she were twice his age. ‘Yes?’

‘There were dog bowls – and dog hair – but no dog food, and, well… no dog.’

She stares at him. His outfit is now desaturated of colour. She snaps a pic of him with her locket.

‘You look like you stepped out of a 50s DRUM magazine cover. I like your style. Thanks for your help.’

‘You’re Kirsten Lovell, aren’t you?’

She is surprised, and nods.

‘I’ve just recognised you. I loved your photo essay on Somali pirates. It was really cool. Bang tidy work. Epic stuff.’

That was years ago, how could he have known it was her? The essay was from a time when she had been young and irresponsible, doing dangerous work to try to fill The Black Hole. It hadn’t worked, but she had won some awards. It had advanced her career; made her semi-famous in the journo circuit.

‘You a freelancer now?’ he asks.

She nods. ‘Now I have the flexibility to panic about my job insecurity at any time.’

It was an old joke. He smiles, holds up the coffee cup in thanks and farewell. He waits until he sees the escalator swallow her, then dials a number.

‘She came.’

He didn’t know why the cop wanted to know this, but that was the deal, in exchange for a copy of the police report. Mouton is a cop, after all, Mpumi reasoned, trying to assuage his guilt. It’s not like he’s a psychopath.

Seth is reading the news on his Tile while he waits for The Weasel to go to lunch. A headline about a woman committing suicide catches his eye. So young, so alone. He feels a jab. He knows better than to think it’s compassion; he knows that it’s just his own mortality raising its head to give him a nudge. That could be you, it says, dying alone in your apartment. Not suicide, never suicide, but people die all the time, and you could be next. Freak accidents, dehydration, murder. And who would miss you?

The Weasel leaves his desk at 1pm every day, on the dot, and goes downstairs to the American-styled health diner. He has a cheese fauxburger, which is less delicious than it sounds, and certainly not anything vaguely sexual, which is what Seth had first thought when he overheard Wesley’s order and almost choked to death on his whole-wheat carob-chip doughnut. Choking, falling, earthquake. No one would miss him.

The Fauxburger is a shamwich: the diner’s healthy take on the old classic, with a full-grain rye roll, cottage cheese, masses of micro-greens and sprouts, a black bean and wild mushroom schmeat patty, topped with a black tomato-chilli salsa, and sweet potato wedges on the side. Since meat and fish had become so expensive, a lot of sheeple had switched to meat alternatives. Not before, not so save massacring animals, or to spare thousands of cows/pigs/chickens their sorry battery lives, but when steaks started to cost a week’s wage. Enter the age of carnaphobia. Then all of a sudden soya lost its bland taste; vegetarianism became mainstream and schmeat steaks and Portobello burgers became the food of choice to bring to Saturday braais. Hairy men snapping their tongs and discussing the merits of citrus versus balsamic marinades over their fire-warmed tins of lager.

Seth still ate steak. Ostrich, duck, venison, or any GMO version thereof. His favourite was still real beef steak, AKA cow-meat; bovine oblivion. Medium rare: he liked it a little bloody. It’s not that he didn’t have empathy for the animals. He just believed that humans were top of the food chain. You don’t see a leopard crying over its prey.

After The Weasel eats his sad burger, wipes his too-full lips with the old-school red- and white-checked linen napkin, he goes to the bathroom, presumably to wash his hands. Then he opens the communal drinks fridge and gets himself a CinnaCola, which sits on his desk for the rest of the afternoon. Seth has never actually seen Weasel drink the stuff – after all, he would know what’s in it – but there it is, every day, sweating on his desk at 1:30 sharp. Seth no longer takes lunch breaks because it’s the only time he can escape his manager’s beady eyes. He uses this time very carefully.