Why You Were Taken

by JT Lawrence

  ‘I can’t imagine that.’

  ‘He left home at fifteen. He just couldn’t live with his dad any more. He won’t even talk about him. Cut all ties.’

  ‘An evil father… so is that why he keeps trying to save the world?’

  ‘Probably. Good premise for a superhero story, anyway,’ says Kirsten.

  ‘It’s been done before.’

  ‘What hasn’t?’

  ‘Funny you should say that,’ says Keke.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I have a… story for you.’

  ‘You found something? About my parents?’ Kirsten turns the ring on her finger.

  ‘I tried to get something out of the cops, anything, but they completely closed ranks. Even my contact there, in profiling, said only certain creeps are allowed access to the case. Who’s that inspector?’

  ‘The thug? Mouton. Marius Mouton.’

  ‘Yes, Mouton is handling the thing, doesn’t want too many other creeps involved. Can’t have any leaks jeopardising the investigation. Apparently this happens sometimes on high-profile cases, according to my guy, but it’s not like your parents were, like, diplomats or anything? But then he said it could be that the criminal is high profile, you know, like a serial killer, or in this case, maybe a terror gang. So maybe they’re close to getting someone, and they want the case to be really tight.’

  ‘Ack. We’ll never get anything out of Mouton.’

  ‘Ja, we’d have better luck asking a gorilla.’

  ‘The gorilla would have more manners.’

  ‘A better vocabulary.’

  ‘Better teeth. And smell better. A gorilla would smell better.’

  ‘More sex appeal?’

  ‘Okay, I think you just crossed a line there,’ laughs Kirsten, ‘as in, a legal one.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the first time. Anyway, I don’t see us getting much out of them, so I asked my FWB, Hackerboy Genius, to see what he could find, under the radar.’

  ‘Remind me?’

  ‘Friend With Benefits. Marko. The hacktivist.’

  Keke is the only person Kirsten knows who’s gone bi-curious speed-dating to gather work contacts. The fact that they come in useful for her journalistic grind doesn’t mean there is no sex on the table. From Keke’s cryptic hints Kirsten gathers there is, indeed, a great deal—and variety—of sex on the table. As well as being ‘a raging bisexual,’ (‘Isn’t everyone bi these days?’) she is what she likes to call ‘ambisextrous’.

  ‘Marko is a very—talented—individual,’ she sparkles, sitting up a little straighter.

  Uh-huh, Kirsten thinks. ‘Speed dating?’

  ‘Yawn! Speed dating is so last season, old lady. How ancient are you? Now it’s DNA dating. Very New York.’

  Kirsten is glad she doesn’t have to date anymore. The dating pool in Joburg makes her think of a tank of Piranhas; Keke loves it.

  ‘Chemically compatible couples, what’s not to love? And boy, are we… compatible. You’d never believe it if you met him. Anyway, so he’s actually the one who found this for me.’ She puts her hand on the folder.

  ‘It’s big. Really big. Cosmic. You ready for a mind-fuck?’

  Kirsten’s fingers tingle. Keke slides it over to her, and she opens it.

  Journal Entry

  3 March 1987, Westville

  In the news: a guerrilla is shot dead by Gugulethu police after firing at them with an AK47.

  What I’m listening to: The new Compact Disc (CD) of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ by the Beatles

  What I’m reading: ‘Watchers’ by Dean R Koontz. It’s about two creatures that emerge from a secret government laboratory, one to spread love, the other doom.

  What I’m watching: Nightmare on Elm Street 3. Totally gnarly. Usually I enjoy scary movies but I had to walk out of the cinema. Life is grisly enough.

  I went in for my abortion (hate that word!) today. I felt so trapped and alone but it seemed like the only solution. I got up really early, I had to be at the ‘family planning clinic’ at 7 and after waiting for a while in a grubby room with two other girls with shame-flamed cheeks they gave me a depressing pink gown to change into. Had to take off all make-up and jewellery, even my new nail polish. There was a mirror in the fluorescent room and I just looked at my face and I was so pale and looked so terrible. I kept thinking ‘what have I become? What have I become?’

  I am NOT the kind of person who sleeps with married men, and definitely not the kind of person who has an abortion! And once these things are done they can never be undone. I will be forever bruised. My soul will be dented. I was looking into that mirror thinking that I didn’t even recognise myself, and I just started crying. Weeping, really. That hyperventilating ugly-cry.

  Shame, the nurse was so kind to me, she could see that I was really shaken up. She held my hand. Told me if I didn’t want the baby then I was doing the right thing. That the world doesn’t need another unwanted child. It would be best for everyone, if I was sure that I didn’t want it. It’s not that I don’t ‘want it’ I wanted to say to her. It’s that I can’t have it. Look at me, I may be 24 but I’m just a child myself.

  So I was on the operating table after taking the pre-med and feeling totally woozy and my legs were in stirrups when something just happened, like a bolt of lightning. All of a sudden the abstract idea of pregnancy became a real idea of a little baby (a little baby!) instead of an ‘it,’ and the thought was there as clear as day that there was no way I could go through with the termination. Mine and P’s baby!! A little pink gurgly precious baby! The anxiety fell away (I blame the drugs) and revealed my true wish, even if it was clouded by conflicted emotions.

  I felt so embarrassed telling the doctor but he didn’t mind. Usually I absolutely hate doctors but he was really nice: said it was better to be sure, and that I still had another 3 weeks to change my mind if I wanted to, said he’d take care of me. But I won’t. Something happened to me on that table and it totally wasn’t what I planned.

  The nurse squeezed my arm and gave me her number in case I wanted to talk. I started crying again – something about the unexpected kindness of strangers in hard times. Also, the meds! I am going to have to tell P about the baby. I’m sure he will be angry and end things. I will probably have to find a new job, a new town. My parents will, like, never speak to me again! No duh. My life as I know it is over. Never felt so lonely before!

  All that said I can’t help feeling a tiny jab of excitement (stress?) when I think of the baby. Eeeek! An actual baby. What was I thinking? I’m totally terrified.

  Bon Jovi’s song is constantly playing on every radio and in my head. I’m living on a prayer!!

  Chapter 5

  Tommyknockers

  Johannesburg, 2021

  Seth sits in the lab. It’s late, but he feels as if he’s on the point of a breakthrough in the project he’s grinding. It’s his second-last day at the smart drugs company and he wants to leave with a bang. It will be good for his—already enhanced—ego. He adds another molecule to the compound he’s configuring on the screen of his Tile, subtracts one then adds another. It’s almost ready.

  Seth is the best chemgineer at Pharmax and he knows it. No one can map out new pharmaceuticals like he can. To add to his professional allure–—and to his considerable salary—he is known to be mercurial. No one company can pin him down for more than a year, despite offers of fast-tracking and bonuses. Some colleagues blame his exceptional intelligence, saying he bores easily, others, his drug problem. While both hold some truth, there’s a much more pressing reason Seth moves around as often as he does, which he keeps well hidden.

  During the short ten months he’d been at the pharmaceutical company he had already composed two first-class psychoactive drugs, and is now on the brink of a third. His biggest hit to date has been named TranX by the resident marketing team. It’s a tranquiliser, but modelled in such a way that while it relieves anxiety, it doesn’t make you feel detached or drowsy. After the tranquilise
r hits your bloodstream, making you feel warm and mellow, it’s followed by a sweet and clean kick.

  It’s all in the delivery system, he told his beady-eyed supervisor and the nodding interns as he showed them the plan. All about levels, layers, the way they interact with each other and the chemicals in the brain. The molecular expression is beautiful, they all agreed.

  The drug before that was a painkiller. It doesn’t just take away your physiological pain, it takes away all your pain: abusive childhood, bad marriage, low self-esteem, you name it. It is one of his favourites, but then he has a soft spot for analgesics. With the drug based on the ever-delicious tramadol, Seth had used the evergreen African pincushion tree for its naturally occurring tramadol-like chemspider, allowing for a rounder, softer, full-body relief, without the miosis or cotton mouth.

  Genius, if he doesn’t say so himself. The formula isn’t perfect though: too much of it is taxing on the liver. And he isn’t sure what the long-term effects on the brain might be, but that is for the Food & Safety kids to figure out.

  Seth moves to an appliance on the counter, clicks ‘print,’ and after a rattling he takes out a tray of pills. Shakes them down a plastic funnel and into an empty bottle, catching the last one before it disappears and popping it into his mouth. The bottle makes its way into his inside pocket after he scribbles on it with a pen. These particular pills are green; they look innocuous enough, like chlorophyll supplements, or spirulina. His latest project involves experimenting with salvia, or diviner’s sage, as the hippies used to call it. Mexican mint.

  On his way out, his tickertape blinks with a news update. A minister has been fired for having a secret swimming pool. The NANC is contrite and apologetic; they don’t know how this could have happened. They have hard lines for mouths and use words like ‘shocking,’ ‘unacceptable,’ ‘unconscionable,’ and say they will certainly press charges. The journalist reporting the story looks familiar: a young, uncommonly attractive woman in cornrows and a tank top, leather bottoms. Biker? A white lace tattoo covers her shoulder; she has kohl eyes and an attitude. Just his type.

  He thinks of the swimming pool and remembers a sunblock-slathered childhood of running in the sprinklers, drinking from the hose, water fights with pistols and super-soakers. Having long showers and deep bubble baths. Flushing the toilet with drinking water. Chlorine-scented nostalgia: kidney-shaped pools, dive-bombing, playing Marco Polo. The feeling of lying on the hot brick paving to warm up goose-pimpled skin. Then one day they weren’t allowed to water the garden, then domestic pools were banned, then all pools were illegal, then, then, then. It had been so long, he’d do anything for a swim. For a tumble-turn in drinking water. How decadent that all seems to him now. The next news story is about a famous pianist found drowned in his bath. Seth switches it off.

  He shrugs off his lab-coat, replaces his eyebrow ring and snaps on a silver-spiked leather wrist cuff. He puts on his black hoodie, applies some Smudge to his eyes, ruffles his hair into bed-head, and checks his appearance in the glass door on the way out. His mood starts climbing; he can feel the beginning of the slow-release high.

  Thunder in winter, he thinks as he walks outside: they must be playing with the weather again. His superblack jacket renders him almost invisible, and his compact silver-tipped umbrella shields his face from the unseasonal shower. The city street is dark and slick, highlighted only occasionally by pops of lightning and the reflection of neon shop signs on the tar’s uneven surface. Algaetrees, green streetlights, flicker on and off as he moves beneath them. There’s jubilant shouting in the distance; a wave of music; a car backfires. A building’s clockologram blinks an error message.

  Jutting edges of the pavement interrupt the man’s usually elegant stride: missing bricks, gaping manholes, roots of trees smashing their way through crumbling concrete. Undulating and decorated by shimmering litter, the walkway seems to take on a life of its own.

  A group of people is up ahead, walking in his direction. Coal-skinned men dressed in oiled leathers and animal skins. Sandals and scarred faces. He sees their determined foreheads in blasts of light as they pass under the streetlights. Gadawan Kura. Ivory bracelets click as they walk.

  When they get closer, Seth lifts his chin at the leader. He doesn’t step aside, as most people would. Instead he brushes an arm and keeps moving. Once they’re clear, one of the men starts shrieking, imitating the hyenas they are known for keeping, and the rest of the men cackle. Seth adjusts his hood and walks on.

  A stranger in rags jumps out of a side alley and into his path. A hobo? Impossible. There were no more homeless creeps in the city: they had all been ‘enrolled’ in the Penal Labour Colonies. The faint whiff of matches and booze. Seth’s hand tightens around the gun in his pocket, snicks off the safety. Water droplets glisten on the ragman’s dark skin and hair; he pats himself down with twirling hands and a gap-toothed smile to show his tattered pockets are empty. He smells like the street.

  ‘Jog on,’ says Seth. ‘Scram.’

  ‘Jus’ asking for a smoke, bra.’ One of his eyes is black, bottomless. The other is overcast.

  A cigarette? You’ve got to be kidding. It’s 2021 – nobody smokes anymore.

  He closes his umbrella.

  ‘Get out of my way.’

  A spark of defiance as the obstacle opens his mouth to speak. There’s a glint of a blade. Instinctively Seth knees the stranger in the crotch, and when he’s off-balance, raps him sideways on the jaw with the handle of the umbrella. The ragman falls backwards onto the shining road, knocked out cold, his trench knife clattering on the pavement beside him.

  Seth keeps moving, and the Algaetrees flicker. He turns into a back street scented by tar and trash. A rat scurries out in front of him, but he doesn’t flinch, which he takes as a good sign. He expects the drug to peak in two hours, maybe three. Optimism in a bottle. With one click of his earbutton his life has a soundtrack, and he’s ready for a bright night.

  Once he reaches his block the microchip in his ID card automatically opens the main access gate. A new biomorphic building, cool with smoked emerald glass and metal; glittering charcoal porcelain tiles. Smog-eating exterior paint and a solar Cool Roof with water catchment tanks. It’s the ultimate lock-up-and-go: wholescale security, self-regulating, pet-free. He ignores the open mouth of the elevator and runs up the stairs, punches in his code—52Hz—and has his retina scanned to open his front door. The entry panel blinks and the door unlocks. A woman’s voice purrs from the speaker above the door in a neutral accent: ‘Welcome home, Seth.’

  The main lights glow; the temperature is set to 24 degrees. He pops a pill, locks away his gun and checks his Tile for messages. Just as he hoped, the green rabbit blinks on his screen. He has a new job to do. A thrill tugs at his guts. It’s his most important post yet. Dangerous. He can’t wait to get started.

  The TommyKnockers club is underground. You have to know a person who knows a person to get in. There isn’t any secret code word to gain access; the club is so difficult to find, you either know where it is or you don’t. That, and a giant Yoruba bouncer called Rolo, ensure that only the right kind of people get in. As Seth approaches the nondescript front door, Rolo steps into the grey frame and tips his invisible hat to him. Diamond fingers catch the light.

  ‘Mister Denicker,’ he says in a voice as deep as a platinum mineshaft.

  ‘Rolo.’ Seth nods back. He glances behind him before entering. Despite leaving the ragman in the gutter, he has the distinct feeling that someone is following him.

  On the other side of the door is another world. You step from the bleak and broken inner city street into a gaudy 1940s Parisian-style steampunk bordello, replete with scarlet velvet bolted in gold, chain tassels, and oiled men and women wearing very little in the way of clothes and too much eye make-up. The twist comes later: as you move from room to room, and deeper underground, the imagery becomes more exaggerated, bizarre, sinister, as if someone has decided to cross a brothel with a spooky amuse
ment ride. As if TommyKnockers is the representation of someone’s erotic dream turning into a nightmare.

  The deeper you go, the less mainstream the dancers become, catering to more exotic tastes: a voluptuous woman with three breasts, a freakishly well-endowed man, a heavily inked hermaphrodite with a clock etched into her back. The art on the walls changes from chat noir and Marmorhaus prints to surreal landscapes, obscured faces, bizarre vintage pornography, disturbing portraits hung at strange angles. Luminous sex toys alongside hallucinogenic shooters at the spinning bars, lit by deranged copper pipe chandeliers. Sex shows featuring Dali-esque hardcore fuckbots.

  Seth doesn’t usually go further than the first few rooms. He is no prude, enjoys a bit of kink, but his insomnia doesn’t need encouragement. He has enough to keep him up at night.

  This evening, as soon as he crosses the threshold, he heads directly to an attractive blonde standing against a wall. It’s an old tactic, one that frequently pays off. None of that seedy languishing at the bar, surveying all the available meat on offer and later trying to hook up. This technique is cleaner. It shows you are a man who knows what he wants. The woman, caught off guard, invariably accepts the offer of a drink, and from then on it’s usually green lights all the way to the bedroom. Or club restroom. Or taxi. Or White Lobster den. Or wherever else they happen to find themselves.

  This particular blonde is wearing a belt for a skirt and black boots with heels so high he wonders how she manages to stay vertical. Masses of teased hair, powdered with fine glitter.

  ‘Hello there,’ says Seth. Not too friendly, not too distant.

  ‘Er,’ she says. Where has he come from?

  He looks at the glass in her metallic-taloned hand: ‘Campari?’

  The rose-coloured sequins above her eyes blink in the uneven light. He has a coldness in his eyes. A hardness. She tries to size him up. A drug dealer? A psychopath? A rufer? Does she, after her countless drinks, even care? She looks him up and down, nods. He leads her to the bar and orders her a double, vodka for himself, and two ShadowShots, which are not, strictly speaking, legal.