Slipping

by Lauren Beukes

  From somewhere deep in the church, women raise their voices in ululation and all the hair on her neck pricks up as if she is a cat. Tomislav turns the wheelchair around and parks it beside a huge gold throne with carved leaves and flowers and a halo of spikes. He pats her shoulder and leaves her there, facing the crowd, thousands of them in the auditorium, all staring at her. “Smile, Pearl,” Dr. Arturo says, his voice soft inside her head, and she tries, she really does.

  A group of women walk out onto the stage, swaying with wooden bowls on their hips, their hands dipping into the bowls like swans pecking, throwing rose petals before them. The crowd picks up the ululating, and it reverberates through the church. Halalala.

  The Beloved One steps onto the stage, and Pearl has to cover her ears at the noise that greets him. Women are weeping in the aisles. Men too, crying in happiness to see him.

  The Beloved One holds out his hands to still them. “Quiet, please, brothers and sisters of the Pentecostal,” he says. “Peace be with you.”

  “And also with you,” the crowd roars back. He places his hands on the back of the wheelchair.

  “Today, we come together to witness a miracle. My daughter, will you stand up and walk?”

  And Pearl does.

  10. Call to Prayer

  The restaurant is fancy, a buffet of Pakistani food, korma and tikka and kabobs and silver trays of sticky sweet pastries. The athletes have to pose for photographs and do more interviews with Brian Corwood and others. The journalist with purple streaks in her hair and a metal ring in her lip asks her, “Aren’t you afraid you’re gonna die out there?” before Tomislav intervenes.

  “Come on! What kind of question is that?” he says.

  But the athletes can’t really eat, and there is a bus that takes them home early so they’ll be fresh the next day, while the promoters peel away, one by one, in fancy black cars that take them away to other parts of the city, looking tense. “Don’t you worry, kitten.” Tomislav smiles, all teeth, and pats her hand.

  Back in her room, Pearl finds a prayer mat that might be aligned toward Mecca. She phones down to reception to ask. She prostrates herself on the square of carpet, east, west, to see if it is any different, if her God will be annoyed.

  She goes online to check the news and the betting pools. Her odds have improved. There is a lot of speculation about Grange’s injury, and whether Rachman will be disqualified. There are photographs of Oluchi Eze posing naked for a men’s magazine, her tail wrapped over her parts.

  Pearl clicks away and watches herself in the replay, her strikes, her posture, the joy in her face. She expects Dr. Arturo to comment, but the cochlear implant only hisses with faint static.

  “Mama? Did you see the race?” The video connection to Gugulethu stalls and jitters. Her mother has the camera on the phone pointed too high so she can only see her eyes and the top of her head.

  “They screened it at the community center,” her mother says. “Everyone was very excited.”

  “You should have heard them shouting for you, Pearl,” her uncle says, leaning over her mother’s shoulder, tugging the camera down so they are in the frame.

  Her mother frowns. “I don’t know if you should wear that top, it’s not really your color.”

  “It’s my sponsor, Mama.”

  “We’re praying for you to do well. Everyone is praying for you.”

  11. Desert

  She has a dream that she and Tomislav and Jesus are standing on the balcony of the main building of the Karachi Parsi Institute looking over the slums. The fine golden sand rises up like water between the concrete shacks, pouring in the windows, swallowing up the roofs, driven by the wind.

  “Did you notice that there is only one set of footsteps, Pearl?” Jesus asks. The sand rises, swallowing the houses, rushing to fill the gaps, nature taking over. “Do you know why that is?”

  “Is it because you took her fucking legs, Lord?” Tomislav says.

  Pearl can’t see any footsteps in the desert. The sand shifts too fast.

  12. Rare Flowers

  Wide awake. Half-past midnight. She lies in bed and stares at the ceiling. Dr. Arturo was supposed to boost her dopamine and melatonin, but he’s busy. The meeting went well, then. The message from Tomislav on her phone confirms it. Good news!!!! Tell you in the morning. Sleep tight kitten, you need it.

  She turns the thought around in her head and tries to figure out how she feels. Happy. This will mean that she can buy her mother a house and pay for her cousins to go to private school and set up the Pearl Nitseko Sports Academy for Girls in Gugulethu. She won’t ever have to race again. Unless she wants to.

  The idea of the money sits on her chest.

  She swings her stumps over the side of the bed and straps on her blades. She needs to go out, get some air.

  She clips down the corridors of the old building. There is a party on the cricketing field outside, with beer tents and the buzz of people who do not have to run tomorrow. She veers away, back towards the worn-out colonial building of the KPI, hoping to get onto the race track. Run it out.

  The track is fenced off and locked, but the security guard is dazed by his phone, caught up in another world of sliding colorful blocks. She clings to the shadows of the archway, moving past him and deeper into the building, following wherever the doors lead her.

  She comes out into a hall around a pit of sunken tiles. An old swimming pool. Siska Rachman is sitting on the edge, waving her feet in the ghost of water, her hair a dark nest around a perfectly blank face. Pearl lowers herself down beside her. She can’t resist. She flicks Rachman’s forehead. “Heita. Anyone in there?”

  The face blinks and suddenly the eyes are alive and furious. She catches Pearl’s wrist. “Of course, I am,” she snaps.

  “Sorry, I didn’t think—”

  Siska has already lost interest. She drops her grip and brushes her hair away from her face. “So, you can’t sleep either? Wonder why.”

  “Too nervous,” Pearl says. She tries for teasing, like Tomislav would. “I have tough competition.”

  “Maybe not,” Siska scowls. “They’re going to fucking disqualify me.”

  Pearl nods. She doesn’t want to apologize again. She feels shy around Siska, the older girl with her bushy eyebrows and sharp nose. The six years between them feels like an un-crossable gap.

  “Do they think Charlotte is present?” Siska bursts out. “Charlotte is a big dumb animal. How is she more human than me?”

  “You’re two people,” Pearl tries to explain.

  “Before. You were half a person before. Does that count against you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know what this used to be?” Siska pats the blue tiles.

  “A swimming pool?”

  “They couldn’t maintain the upkeep. These things are expensive to run.” Siska glances at Pearl. In the light through the glass atrium, every lash stands out in stark relief against the gleam of her eyes. “They drained all the water out, but there was this kid who was . . . damaged, in the brain, and the only thing he could do was grow orchids. So that’s what he did. He turned it into a garden and sold them out of here for years, until he got old. Now it’s gone.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “The guard told me. We smoked cigarettes together. He wanted me to give him a blowjob.”

  “Oh.” Pearl recoils.

  “Hey, are you wearing lenses?”

  She knows what she means. The broadcast contacts. “No. I wouldn’t.”

  “They’re going to use you and use you up, Pearl Nit-seeko. Then you’ll be begging to give some lard-ass guard a blowjob, just for spare change.”

  “It’s Ni-tse-koh.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You say tomato, I say ni-tse-koh.” But Siska gets it right this time. “You think it’s all about you. Your second chance and all you got to do is run your heart out. But it’s a talent show, and they don’t care about the running. You got a deal yet?”

  �
��My promoter and my doctor had a meeting.”

  “That’s something. They say who?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Pharmaceutical or medical?”

  “They haven’t told me yet.”

  “Or military. Military’s good. I hear the British are out this year. That’s what you want. I mean, who knows what they’re going to do with it, but what do you care, little guinea pig, long as you get your payout.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “My body is drunk. I’m just mean. What do you care? I’m out, sister. And you’re in, with a chance. Wouldn’t that be something if you won? Little girl from Africa.”

  “It’s not a country.”

  “Boo-hoo, sorry for you.”

  “God brought me here.”

  “Oh, that guy? He’s nothing but trouble. And He doesn’t exist.”

  “You shouldn’t say that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can feel Him.”

  “Can you still feel your legs?”

  “Sometimes,” Pearl admits.

  Siska leans forward and kisses her. “Did you feel anything?”

  “No,” she says, wiping her mouth. But that’s not true. She felt her breath, burning with alcohol, and the softness of her lips and her flicking tongue, surprisingly warm for a dead girl.

  “Yeah,” Siska breathes out. “Me neither. You got a cigarette?”

  13. Empty Spaces

  Lane five is empty and the stadium is buzzing with the news.

  “Didn’t think they’d actually ban her,” Tomislav says. She can tell he’s hungover. He stinks of sweat and alcohol and there’s a crease in his forehead just above his nose that he keeps rubbing at. “Do you want to hear about the meeting? It was big. Bigger than we’d hoped for. If this comes off, Kitten . . .”

  “I want to concentrate on the race.” She is close to tears, but she doesn’t know why.

  “Okay. You should try to win. Really.”

  The gun goes off. They tear down the track. Every step feels harder today. She didn’t get enough sleep.

  She sees it happen out of the corner of her eye. Oluchi’s tail swipes Charlotte, maybe on purpose.

  “Shit,” Grange says and stumbles in her exo-suit. Everything comes crashing down on Pearl, hot metal and skin, a tangle of limbs and fire in her side.

  “Get up,” Dr. Arturo yells into her head. She’s never heard him upset before.

  “Ow,” she manages. Next to her, Charlotte is climbing to her feet, a loose flap of muscle hanging from her leg where they tried to attach it this morning. The big girl touches it and hisses in pain, but her eyes are already focused on the finish line, on Oluchi skipping ahead, her tail swinging, Anna Murad straining behind her.

  “Get up,” Dr. Arturo says. “You have to get up. I’m activating adrenaline. Pain blockers.”

  Pearl sits up. It’s hard to breathe. Her singlet is wet. A grey nub of bone pokes out through the skin under her breast. Charlotte is limping away in her exo-suit, her leg dragging, gears whining.

  “This is what they want to see,” Dr. Arturo urges. “You need to prove to them that it’s not hydraulics carrying you through.”

  “It’s not,” she gasps. The sound is wet. Breathing through a snorkel in the bath when there is water trapped in the u-bend. The drones buzz around her. She can see her face big on the screen. Her mama is watching at home, the whole congregation.

  “Then prove it. What are you here for?”

  She starts walking, then jogging, clutching the bit of rib to stop the jolting. Every step rips through her. And Pearl can feel things slipping inside. Her structural integrity has been compromised, she thinks. The abdominal mesh has ripped and where her stomach used to be is a black hole that is tugging everything down. Her heart is slipping.

  Ndincede nkosi, she thinks. Please, Jesus, help me.

  Ndincede nkosi undiphe amandla. Please, God, give me strength.

  Yiba nam kolu gqatso. Be with me in this race.

  She can feel it. The golden glow that starts in her chest, or, if she is truthful with herself, lower down. In the pit of her stomach.

  She sucks in her abdominals and presses her hand to her sternum to stop her heart from sliding down into her guts—where her guts used to be, where the hotbed factory sits.

  God is with me, she thinks. What matters is you feel it.

  Pearl Nitseko runs.

  Yellow is my favorite color. That’s what I’d like you to believe. Other things you should believe if we are to remain friends: that my gender is female. That my birthday is 19 August 1988, with its pleasing arrangement of numbers. That I am interested in women and men but currently single, although you may find that hard to believe.

  My religious views are “eyes on eternity,” which is vague enough to appeal to theists and atheists alike. My political views are “pragmatic optimist egoist,” which says that I am smart and sunny and witty and irreverent, but also that I am beautiful and cool and I know it. But you already determined that from my profile picture. “About me” says I am just a girl. There’s humility in that. But not truth.

  My favorite artists are Mikhael Subotzky and David Goldblatt. My favorite musicians are Spoek Mathambo and Lady Gaga, in all her incarnations. My favorite film is Jennifer’s Body. My favorite author is Haruki Murakami. I don’t watch TV. Who cares that these things are incompatible? People are complicated. I’ve said so myself. Or did you say it first?

  I post arty photographs, washed out or heavily filtered by tungsten film, taken on my Nikon F2S or my Lomo Diana or my Polaroid camera. I post status updates bitching about how hard it is to get hold of Polaroid film. Also: philosophemes poached from pop culture. Michel Houellebecq. Alexander McQueen. Mae West. Anaïs Nin.

  One day I get Bette Davis and Bettie Page confused. This is not my fault. It’s yours. And how are we supposed to know anyway? We weren’t even born yet, we snipe in different conversation threads in parallel universes. On your page, this conversation goes nowhere. On mine, it leads to a riff on the best Bettys of all time. This should tell you something.

  You have your friends. I have mine. And also yours. It’s easy. This city is small. It is not unlikely that we’d have friends in common. And all I need is one. One pragmatic optimist egoist opens all doors. You might not trust me, but you trust your friends. It’s a vicious unicycle, as I said once, clowning around.

  These are not my words. But be honest, they’re not yours either. Nothing belongs to anyone anymore. Culture wants to be free. This is not my original thought. But who of us can claim to be truly original? Aren’t we all remixes of every influence we’ve ever come across? Love something, let it go. If it comes back, it’s a meme. There’s a double me in meme.

  It hurts when you accuse me of being fake. But it’s not a surprise. Your jealousy is a poison flower. If anything, I expected it to bloom sooner. You get off on playing detective, sniffing out the trail of other people’s photos I’ve “stolen,” other people’s status updates I’ve “plagiarized.” Why, you ask, if I’m so popular, has no one ever met me IRL?

  I unfriend you, trying to control the damage, but you raise your voice on other pages, rousing the rabble, until I have no recourse but to kill Amber Richards. A whole life erased with one click. One of you jokes that you should create a memorial page.

  “Amber” would probably love that, I say on another page in another voice.

  Did you think I wasn’t prepared for this? Already I am among the chorus condemning the ghost of an alter ego.

  This time I will be more careful.

  We were at Stones, playing pool, drinking, goofing around, maybe hoping to score a little sugar, when Kendra arrived, all moffied up and gloaming like an Aito/329. “Ahoy, Special-K, where you been, Girl, so juiced to kill?” Tendeka asked while he racked up the balls, all click-clack in their white plastic triangle. This pool bar was old-school. But Girl just smiled, reached into her back pocket for her phone, hung skate-rat style o
ff a silver chain connected to her belt, and infra’d five rand to the table to get tata ma chance on the next game.

  But I was watching her, and as she slipped her phone back into her pocket, I saw that telltale glow beneath her sleeve. Plus long sleeves in summer didn’t cut it. So it didn’t surprise me none when K waxed the table. Ten-Ten was surprised, though. He slipped his groove. But Boy kept it in, didn’t say anything, just infra’d another five to the table and racked ’em again. Anyone else but Ten woulda racked ’em hard, woulda slammed those balls on the table. But Ten . . . Ten went the other way. You could see how careful he was. Precise, like an assembly line.

  Boyfriend wasn’t used to losing, especially not to Special-K. I mean, the girl held her own against most of us, but Ten could wax us all six-love, baby. Boyfriend carried his own cue, in a special case. Kif shit. Lycratanium, separate pieces that clicked into each other, assembled slick and cold, like he was a soldier in a movie snapping a sniper rifle together. But Kendra, grinning now, said, “No, my bra, I’m out.” Set her cue down on the empty table next to us.

  “Oh ja, like Ten’s gonna let this hook slide,” Rob snorted into his drink. Jasmine looked a little worried, but that’s Jazz for you.

  “Best of three,” Tendeka said, and smiled loose and easy. Like it didn’t matter. Chalked his cue.

  Girl hesitated, then shrugged. Picked up the cue. Tendeka flicked the triangle off the table, flip-rolling it between his fingers. “Your break.”

  Kendra chalked up, spun the white ball out to catch it at the line. Edged it sideways so’s it would take the pyramid out off-center. Leaned over the table. Slid the tip of the cue over her knuckles once, taking aim, pulled back and cut loose, smooth as sugar. Crack! Balls twisting out across the table. Sunk four solids straight-up. Black in the middle and not a single stripe down.

  Rob whistled. “Damn. You been practicing, K?”

  Kendra didn’t even look up. Took out another two solids and lined up a third in the corner pocket. Girl’s lips twitched, but she didn’t smile, didn’t look at Ten, who was still saying nothing. He chalked his cue again, like he hadn’t done it already, and stepped up. The freeze was so tight I couldn’t take it. I knew what was coming. I was off by the bar, but nears enough to check the action. Ten lined ’em up and took out two stripes at the same time, rocketing ’em into different pockets. Bounced the white off the pillow and took another, edged out the solid K had all ready to go. Another stripe down, and Boy lined up a fifth blocking the corner pocket. “You’re up.”