Iceberg of a Secret

In sleep, the words drift into my dreams clear as day: Nelah Bogosi-Ntsu, you are not obliged to say anything or act in any way, but anything you do or say, any of your actions, may be used as evidence . . . Where were you on Saturday between the hours of 1:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m.?

I wake with a jerk, with terror, and realize the reason for my dreams. I’ve slept ceaselessly for only five hours. My husband must have let me sleep in, with him starting his morning late, too. So I slip back into sleep. Morning light slits my eyes open. Nature is so nauseating, so disturbing. Dread. I’m choked by dread. Like I’ve done something wrong. It couldn’t just be a hit-and-run, could it? No, you had to dump the body.

The alarm hammers against my mind, disrupting my chain of thought. My neck aches. A blood-pumping headache beats behind my eyes. Bloody migraine. I envy his being at the Matsieng Fertility Fund last night, looking after our daughter, little Naledi, our name for her. If he loved me better, if our marriage wasn’t so parched, last night wouldn’t have happened. I hate myself the same way I hate him. But I can’t blame him.

I can hear him downstairs. Chuckling. Chatting on a call. Happiness gliding through his body. I am drained, shaking, trying to get up, but the bruises yank me back. Dry tears tremble down my face. The shock drags fear into my body. Last night. Jan and I just went out. Had a couple of drinks. A few drugs. That’s it. Everything else has to be a nightmare. A hallucination. I check my phone. Dead. Covered in mud crusts. Evidence?

“No, go away.” I scrape the mud crusts off. My voice is hoarse from all of last night’s screaming, arguing, negotiating.

What to do, what to do?

Bloody bliksem, my career.

Bury the body, bury the secret.

That’s a human. A life. That’s someone’s—

It doesn’t matter. What matters is we have drugs in our bloodstream. We’re fucking high and drunk.

Life, a wretched bloody poem. Bury the body. Bury the secret. No. I’m not a murderer. Silence and light shadows intermix, a misty body invading our bedroom. Every sound muffled. The long stretch of window overlooks our garden’s trees, which are normally fresh and green. But today, they are blank, bleak, and grey as the storm-cast sky.

“It’s raining.” My voice startles me. I didn’t realize that it’s raining. “She’s out there, lying in the rain. In the mud. The cold eating at her skin,” I silently whisper in shame. I’m here, in this fluffy bedding, this warm home that cost us an entire year of my business’s earnings to acquire. That feeble thing of a girl. Out there.

No. It’s her fault. What was she doing there in the middle of the night? Just standing there. In the way. Toying with us. Toying with death. She wanted to die. And she got us roped into her morbid plans. Couldn’t she have offed herself with a gun, a rope, or a knife? Why use us as her props? Stupid. Stupid girl. Jesus. My heartbeat won’t fucking shut up. I can’t have this. Not this morning. I have a meeting. A business to run. I have an unborn daughter. A beautiful daughter who needs me. Bills to pay. What obligations did she have? Clearly nothing for her to stand in the middle of nowhere like a ghost. She’s haunting me now. But the silence . . . no sirens, no murder-mist in the air.

I scramble across the comforter, throw a couple of pills down my throat. Please silence these voices. Please silence these voices. Please silence these voices. Evict her from my memory, her small body. Her thin fingers. I lean back against the headboard, and pain strangles my neck. I pull up my gown to conceal traces of where her fingers scraped me. The morning is quiet, so is the sun, its rays not raising fumes leading to the body we buried. Only on Sunday, in sixteen hours.

I can imagine how it’ll go down tomorrow morning: a scent that emanates from the dead, grows potent, grows through the soil, a plant seeking daylight. The blossomed pheromones hover eagerly above the crime scene, above the makeshift grave, above the dismembered body parts, the loose tissue thrown amok, the bone tossed aside with reckless abandon. The scent will hover, grow citywide, waiting waiting waiting for the sun to wake up, for a particular building exterior to breathe.

The perforated outer façade of the Gaborone Police Precinct building is retrofitted with a storage of chemicals, automated to hiss and exhale these noninvasive chemicals into the air. We will breathe it in. Dead bodies will breathe it in. Even dead bodies lying fifty meters below ground. Chemicals will come into contact with the corpse’s pheromones, and the sun, in his clear, cloudless haven, will burn this tousling fusion into a cloud-like sapphire blue, and this flame of a serpentine trail will light up the city, twisting through the highways, the narrow neighborhood streets to the outer edge of the city, the place where we buried her, where our DNA lies. This is the new cadaver dog, and on its trail will be the police, news vans and news drones and EMTs.

Murder is a toxic beauty against the sky’s skin.

The CBE may fail.

The microchip may fail.

The sun will not.

I will be found. Exposed. The crime I’ve committed.

Sunday is tomorrow. Sunday is tomorrow. Sunday. Tomorrow. Will Jan and I have figured things out by then?

I’m about to conduct an online search of how to erase the scent released from a dead body. Then I remember a digital trail is just as damaging as DNA left at the crime scene. I wonder how it used to be to kill someone before, to hide it in the earth, and it might go unnoticed for days or even years. What a privilege. I close my eyes, hating myself for thinking that. What if it were me, placed in the earth, in the dark, in the forest, all alone?

“Babe?” Sticking his head into the room, my husband asks, “You alright? You came in late last night, ja.”

He can’t even tell, can’t smell the death clinging to my skin. It’s part of his job. The police staff’s olfactory organs are surgically fine-tuned to the perfection of a cadaver dog’s. Perhaps it’s good that he can’t detect my immoral acts. I have time to right things.

“Jesus, what happened to you?” He sits down on the bed, touches my cheek. It hurts.

I stab the charging cable into my phone and switch it on. “Mxm, fucking work drunkards. Had me drinking more than I could,” I lie. “I fell. Have another meeting this morning.” I helped you pay for my lobola. What have you done since then besides chow and chow? I hate panicking. It sends out all my demons. All of my anger. I snap at anyone.

He tilts his head, leans against the headboard—stares too long. “You’re overworked.” He crawls onto the bed. It’s your fault. Yet you don’t have blood on your hands. “Let’s go on a holiday. Get some rest. Last night, you were talking in your sleep. Clearly, you’re overwhelmed.”

Bloody bliksem, even my mouth is snitching on me. “W-w-what did I say?” I can’t let him see my eyes, the fear, the hatred, the anger.

“You were talking about someone.” He chews the inside of his cheek, always when he’s analyzing a situation. Eyes scanning, rolling back as if to see the memory printed into his brain’s archives. “Some woman. You kept telling her to get out of the way.” He pinches my chin, turning my face toward him. In the opaque stillness of dawn, his eyes are dark, unreadable, scanning my face, his skin a still, quiet brown. “Every time you have a nightmare, it always reveals something that you’ve been hiding.”

I hate my nightmares. Little snitchy bastards that infiltrate our minds and thoughts when we lie unconscious, use our lips like their vuvuzela. I thought the sleeping pills would knock me out cold—yes, even on top of the cocaine—seal my mouth shut. Kill the nightmares, at least.

His fingers tighten around my chin. “Who is this woman? Do I need to be worried?”

Something’s stuck in my throat. Won’t get out. My lopsided smile, I twist it up my face. “My mistress,” I joke. Attagirl. Look cool. Look normal. Look hundreds.

I squirm, getting away from his grasp. His lips turn down. I hate it when I hurt him. I’m exploding. Overreacting. Losing control of my boundaries. Breathe. Stay intact. Stay in control.

“Just . . . things are complicated right now,” I whisper. “The project I’m working on is a bit of a headache. I’ll be done soon, and then we can go on holiday.”

“I’m here for you, nè?”

Tell him tell him tell him, my thoughts erupt.

In comfort, he rubs my knee. Always seeming understanding, baiting me for the catch, to reel me in.

Still leashed to the charger, my phone buzzes. Instead, I glance at my wrist. A text blips across my skin screen:

Janith Koshal: It’s raining. What if the thing washes out onto the surface?

A knell tolls in my chest. The iceberg of a secret, tipping up, lulling above ground. It must be sunk.