Slipping Read online

  “Just goes to show,” he says, folding up the crinkled plastic tubing and packing it away. “You can take the meat out of the human, but they’re still full of shit!”

  Pearl smiles dutifully, even though he has been making the same joke for the last three weeks—ever since they installed the new system.

  “Nearly there.” He holds up the hotbed factory and she nods and looks away because it makes her queasy to watch. It’s a sleek bioplug, slim as a Communion wafer and packed with goodness, Dr. Arturo says, like fortified breakfast cereal. Hormones and nanotech instead of vitamins and iron.

  Tomislav pushes his hand inside her again, feeling blindly for the connector node in what’s left of her real intestinal tract, an inch and a half of the body’s most absorbent tissue for better chemical uptake.

  “Whoops! Got your kidney! Joking. It’s in.”

  “Good to go,” Dr. Arturo confirms.

  “Then let’s go,” Pearl says, standing up on her blades.

  3. Forces Greater Than You

  You would have to be some kind of idiot. She told her mother it was a bet among the kids, but it wasn’t. It was her, only her, trying to race the train.

  The train won.

  4. Why You Have Me

  The insect drone flits in front of Pearl’s face, the lens zooming in on her lips to catch the words she’s murmuring and transmit them onscreen. “Ndincede nkosi undiphe amandla.”

  She bends down to grab the curved tips of her legs, to stretch, yes, but also to hide her mouth. It’s supposed to be private, she thinks. But that’s an idea that belonged to another girl: the girl before Tomislav’s deals and Dr. Arturo’s voice in her head running through diagnostics, before the Beloved One, before the train, before all this.

  “It’s because you’re so taciturn, kitten,” Tomislav tries to comfort her. “You give people crumbs and they’re hungry for more. If you just talked more.” He is fidgeting with his tie while Brian Corwood, the presenter, moves down the starter’s carpet with his microphone, talking to Oluchi Eze, who is showing off her tail for the cameras.

  Pearl doesn’t know how to talk more. She’s run out of words, and the ones Dr. Arturo wants her to say make her feel like she’s chewing raw potatoes. She has to sound out the syllables.

  She swipes her tongue over her teeth to get rid of the feeling that someone has rigged a circuit behind her incisors. It’s the new drugs in the hotbed, Tomislav says. She has to get used to it, like the drones, which dart up to her unexpectedly. They’re freakish—cameras hardwired into locusts, with enough brain stem left to respond to commands. Insects are cheap energy.

  Somewhere in a control room, Dr. Arturo notes her twitching back from the drones and speaks soothing words in her head. “What do you think, Pearl? More sophisticated than some athletes we know.” She glances over at Charlotte Grange, who is also waiting to be interviewed. The big blonde girl quakes and jitters, clenching her jaw, her exo-suit groaning in anticipation. The neural dampeners barely hold her back.

  The crowd roars their impatience, tens of thousands of people behind a curve of reinforced safety glass in the stands high above the action. The rooftops are also packed and there are children swarming on the scaffolding of an old building overlooking the track.

  The people in suits, the ones Dr. Arturo and Tomislav want to meet, watch from air-conditioned hotel rooms five kilometers away. Medical and pharmaceutical companies looking for new innovations in a place where anything goes: drugs, prosthetics, robotics, nano. That’s what people come for. They tune in by the millions on the proprietary channel. The drama. Like watching Formula 1 for the car crashes.

  “All these people, kitten,” Tomislav says, “they don’t care if you win. They’re just waiting for you to explode. But you know why you’re here.”

  “To run.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  “Slow breaths,” Dr. Arturo warns. “You’re overstimulated.”

  The insect drone responds to some invisible hand in a control room and swirls around her, getting every angle. Brian Corwood makes his way over to her, microphone extended like a handshake and winged cameras buzzing behind his shoulder. She holds herself very straight. She knows her mama and the Beloved One are watching back home. She wants to do Gugulethu proud.

  “Ndincede nkosi.” She mouths the words and sees them come up on the big screens in closed captions below her face. They’ll be working to translate them already. Not hard to figure out that she’s speaking Xhosa.

  “Pearl Nit-seeko,” the presenter says. “Cape Town’s miracle girl. Crippled when she was fourteen years old and here she is, two years later, at the +Games. Dream come true!”

  Pearl has told the story so many times that she can’t remember which parts are made-up or glossed over. She told a journalist once that she saw her father killed on TV during the illegal mine strikes in Polokwane and how she covered her ears so she didn’t have to hear the popcorn pa-pa-pa-pa-pa of the gunshots as people fell in the dust. But now she has to stick to it. Tragedy makes for a better story than the reality of a useless middle-aged drunk who left her mother to live with a shebeen owner’s daughter in Nyanga so that he didn’t have to pay off the bar tab. When Pearl first started getting famous, her father made a stink in the local gossip rags until Tomislav paid him to go away. You can buy your own truth.

  “Can you tell us about your tech, Pearl?” Brian Corwood says, as if this is a show about movie stars and glittery dresses.

  She responds on autopilot. The removable organs, the bath of nano in her blood that improves oxygen uptake. Neural connectivity that blows open the receptors to the hormones and drugs dispatched by the hotbed factory. Tomislav has coached her in the newsworthy technical specs, the details that make investors’ ears prick up.

  “I can’t show you,” she apologizes, coyly raising her shirt to let the cameras zoom in on the seam of scar tissue. “It’s not a sterile environment.”

  “So it’s hollow in there?” Corwood pretends to knock on her stomach.

  “Reinforced surgical-quality graphene mesh.” She lightly drums her fingers over her skin, as often rehearsed. It looks spontaneous and shows off her six-pack.

  She hears Dr. Arturo’s voice in her head. “Put the shirt down now,” he instructs. She covers herself up. The star doesn’t want to let the viewers see too much. Like with sex. Or so she’s been told. She will never have children.

  “Is that your secret weapon?” Corwood says, teasing, because no one ever reveals the exact specs, not until they have a buyer.

  “No,” she says. “But I do have one.”

  “What is it, then?” Corwood says, gamely.

  “God,” she says and stares defiantly at the insect cameras zooming in for a close-up.

  5. Things You Can’t Hide

  Her stumps are wrapped in fresh bandages, but the wounds still smell, like something caught in the drain. Her mother wants to douse the bandages in perfume.

  “I don’t want to! Leave me alone!” Pearl swats the teardrop bottle from her mother’s hands and it clatters onto the floor. Her mother tries to grab her. The girl falls off the bed with a shriek. She crawls away on her elbows, sobbing. Her Uncle Tshepelo hauls her up by her armpits, like she is a sack of sorghum flour, and sets her down at the kitchen table.

  “Enough, Pearl,” he says, her handsome youngest uncle. When she was a little girl, she told her mother she was going to marry him.

  “I hate you,” she screams and tries to kick at him with her stumps, but he ducks away and goes over to the kettle while her mother stands in the doorway, face in hands.

  Pearl has not been back to school since it happened. She turns to face the wall when her friends come to visit, refusing to talk with them. During the day, she watches soap operas and infomercials and lies in her mother’s bed and stares at the sky and listens to the noise of the day: the cycles of traffic and school kids and dogs barking and the call to prayer vibrating through the mosque’s decrepit speakers
and the traffic again and men drunk and fighting at the shebeen. Maybe one of them is her father. He has not been to see her since the accident.

  Tshepelo makes sweet milky tea for her and her mother, and sits and talks: nonsense, really, about his day in the factory, cooking up batches of patés, which he says is like fancy flavored butter for rich people, and how she should see the stupid blue plastic cap he has to wear to cover his hair in case of contamination. He talks and talks until she calms down.

  Finally she agrees to go to church—a special service in Khayelitsha Site B. She puts on her woolen dress, grey as the Cape Town winter sky, and green stockings, which dangle horribly at the joint where her legs should be.

  The rain polka-dots her clothes and soaks into her mother’s hat, making it flop as she quicksteps after Tshepelo, who carries Pearl in his arms like an injured dog. She hates the way people avert their eyes.

  The church is no more than a tent in a parking lot, although the people sing like they are in a fancy cathedral in England, like on TV. Pearl sits stiffly at the end of the pew between her uncle and her mother, glaring at the little kids who dart around to stare. “Vaya,” she hisses at them. “What are you looking at? Go.”

  Halfway through the service, two of the ministers bring out the brand-new wheelchair like it is a prize on a game show, adorned with a big purple ribbon. They carry it down the stairs on their shoulders and set it down in front of her. She looks down and mumbles something. Nkosi.

  They tuck their fingers into her armpits, these strangers’ hands on her, and lift her into the chair. The moment they set her down, she feels trapped. She moans and shakes her head.

  “She’s so grateful,” her mother says and presses her down with one hand on her shoulder. Hallelujah, everyone says. Hallelujah. The choir breaks into song and Pearl wishes that God had let her die.

  6. Heat

  Pearl’s brain is micro-seconds behind her body. The bang of the starting gun registers as a sound after she is already running.

  She is aware of the other runners as warm, straining shapes in the periphery. Tomislav has made her study the way they run. Charlotte Grange, grunting and loping, using the exosuit arms to dig into the ground, like an ape; Anna Murad with her robotics wet-wired into her nerves; Oluchi Eze with her sculpted tail and delicate bones, like a dinosaur bird. And in lane five, furthest away from her, Siska Rachman, her face perfectly calm and empty, her eyes locked on the finish line, two kilometers away. A dead girl remote-controlled by a quadriplegic in a hospital bed. That is the problem with the famous Siska Rachman. She wins a lot, but there is network lag-time.

  You have to inhabit your body. You need to be in it. Not only because the rules say so, because otherwise you can’t feel it. The strike of your foot against the ground, the rush of air on your skin, the sweat running down your sides. No amount of biofeedback will make the difference.

  “Pace yourself,” Dr. Arturo says in her head. “I’ll give you a glucose boost when you hit eight hundred meters.”

  Pearl tunes in to the rhythmic huff of her breath, and stretches her legs longer with each stride, aware of everything: the texture of the track, the expanse of the sky, the smell of sweat and dust and oil. It blooms in her chest—a fierce warmth, a golden glow, and she feels the rush of His love and she knows that God is with her.

  She crosses third, neck-and-neck with Siska Rachman and milliseconds behind Charlotte Grange, who throws herself across the finish line with a wet ripping sound. The exo-suit goes down in a tumble of girl and metal, forcing Rachman to sidestep.

  “A brute,” Dr. Arturo whispers in her ear. “Not like you, Pearl.”

  7. Beloved

  The car comes to fetch them, Pearl and her mother and her uncle. A shiny black BMW with hubcaps that turn the light into spears. People came out of their houses to see.

  She is wearing her black dress, but it’s scorching out, and the sweat runs down the back of her neck and makes her inch under her collar.

  “Don’t scratch,” her mother said, holding her hands.

  The car cuts between the tin shacks and the government housing and all the staring eyes, nosing out onto the highway, into the winelands, past the university and the rich people’s cookie-cutter townhouses, past the golf course where little carts dart between the sprinklers, and the hills with vineyards and flags to draw the tourists, and down a side road and through a big black gate which swings open onto a driveway lined with spiky cycads.

  They climb out, stunned by the heat and other things besides—the size of the house, the wood and glass floating on top of the hill. Her uncle fights to open the wheelchair Khayelitsha Site B bought her, until the driver comes round and says, “Let me help you with that, sir.” He shoves down hard on the seat and it clicks into place.

  He escorts them into a cool entrance hall with wooden floors and metal sculptures of cheetahs guarding the staircase. A woman dressed in a red and white dress with a wrap around her head smiles and ushers them into the lounge where three men are waiting: a grandfather with two white men flanking him like the stone cats by the staircase. One skinny, one hairy.

  “The Beloved One,” her mother says, averting her eyes. Her uncle bows his head and raises his hands in deference.

  Their fear makes Pearl angry.

  The grandfather waves at them to come, come. The trousers of his dark-blue suit have pleats folded as sharp as paper, and his shoes are black like coal.

  “So this is Pearl Nitseko,” the Beloved One says, testing the weight of her name. “I’ve heard about you.”

  The stringy white man stares at her. The lawyer, she will find out later, who makes her and her mother sign papers and more papers and papers. The one with heavy shoulders fidgets with his cuffs, pulling them down over his hairy wrists, but he is watching her most intently of all.

  “What?” she demands. “What have you heard?” Her mother gasps and smacks her head.

  The Beloved One smiles. “That you have fire in you.”

  8. Fearful Tautologies

  Tomislav hustles Pearl past the religious protesters outside the stadium. Faiths and sects have united in moral outrage, chanting, “Un-natural! Un-godly! Un-holy!” They chant the words in English rather than Urdu for the benefit of the drones.

  “Come on!” Tomislav shoulders past, steering her towards a shuttle car that will take them to dinner. “Don’t these cranks have bigger things to worry about? Their thug government? Their starving children?” Pearl leaps into the shuttle and he launches himself in after her. “Extremism I can handle.” He slams the door. “But tautology? That’s unforgivable.”

  Pearl zips up her tracksuit.

  The crowd surges towards the shuttle, bashing its windows with the flats of their hands. “Monster!” a woman shouts in English. “God hates you.”

  “What’s tautology?”

  “Unnecessary repetition.”

  “Isn’t that what fear always is?”

  “I forget that you’re fast and clever. Yeah. Screw them,” Tomislav says. The shuttle starts rolling and he claps his hands. “You did good out there.”

  “Did you get a meeting?”

  “We got a meeting, kitten. I know you think your big competition is Siska, but it’s Charlotte. She just keeps going and going.”

  “She hurt herself.”

  “Ripped a tendon, the news says, but she’s still going to race tomorrow.”

  Dr. Arturo, always listening, chimes in. “They have back-up meat in the lab, they can grow a tendon. But it’s not a good long-term strategy. This is a war, not a battle.”

  “I thought we weren’t allowed to fight,” Pearl says.

  “You talking to the doc? Tell him to save his chatter for the investors.”

  “Tomislav says—” she starts.

  “I heard him,” Dr. Arturo says.

  Pearl looks back at the protestors. One of the handwritten banners stays with her. “I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” it reads.

  9. She
Is Risen

  Pearl watches the buses arrive from her bed upstairs in the headquarters of the Church of the Beloved Pentecostal. A guest room adapted for the purpose, with a nurse sitting outside and machines that hiss and bleep. The drugs make her woozy. She has impressions, but not memories. The whoop of the ambulance siren and the feeling of being important. Visitors. Men in golf shorts and an army man with fat cheeks. Gold watches and uniform stars, to match the gold star on the tower she can see from her window and the fat, tapered columns like bullets at the entrance.

  “Are you ready?” Dr. Arturo says. He has come from Venezuela especially for her. He has gentle hands and kind eyes, she thinks, even though he is the one who cut everything out of her. Excess baggage, he says. It hurts where it was taken out, her female organs and her stomach and her guts.

  He tells her they have been looking for someone like her for a long time, he and Tomislav. They had given up on finding her. And now! Now look where they are. She is very lucky. She knows this because everyone keeps telling her.

  Dr. Arturo takes her to the elevator where Tomislav is waiting. The surgeon is very modest. He doesn’t like to be seen on camera. “Don’t worry, I’ll be with you,” he says and taps her face near her ear.

  “It’s all about you, kitten,” Tomislav says, wheeling her out into a huge, echoing hallway under a painted sky with angels and the Beloved One, in floating purple robes, smiling down on the people flowing through the doors, the women dressed in red and white and the men in blue blazers and white shirts. This time, she doesn’t mind them looking at her.

  They make way for the wheelchair, through the double doors, past the ushers, into a huge room with a ceiling crinkled and glossy as a sea shell and silver balconies and red carpets. She feels like a film star, the red blanket over her knees her party dress.