Death’s Abyss

We’re driving through narrow streets, neighborhoods, the outer lanes of the neighboring Phase II development shadowed by the concrete-and-marble husks of buildings.

On the flyover, our car meanders through slow-moving cars and veers northeast onto Nelson Mandela Drive. We pass a spire of a building, distilling fractured light and shadows from its criss-cross façade onto the sidewalks and roads. I’m anemic-faint. Every facial recognition scanner of every doorway of every home, office building, restaurant, hotel knows the history of my body before it knows me, the real me.

My skin, my DNA categorized into the system as “potentially violent” for transparency and security purposes. But my reputation has been my messiah. My work, my name stands higher than the damaging history of my body, which is why others don’t look at me funny.

A sparkle of light smacks my eyes. The top body of a car. A woman in a restaurant, the light skimming her glass of water, the windows of storefronts—reflecting me, seeing me, recording me. I suddenly can’t breathe. Too much reflection. Too many eyes unwittingly capturing us, potential witnesses.

“Dim the windows,” I direct the driver-assist, the car’s computer. The windows darken, shushing out the sunlight.

“I detect bodily harm,” the female driver-assist says. “Life Gaborone Private Hospital is two-point-two kilometers away—”

“No, go to my parents’ farmhouse.”

“Heading toward Bogosi farmhouse.” I sneeze as the water from the swimming pool drips from my braids down my back. I smell like chlorine. I pat myself dry with a towel from the gym bag that I store in my car.

Jan’s lying in the back seat, and I jab my knee into the car’s console and grab tissues from the glove compartment to dab on his wound. Flanking the roads are buildings that smear past our windows in blots of grey.

“Please buckle your seat belt,” the driver-assist voice says, “we’re entering a restricted sixty-kilometer-per-hour zone—”

“Don’t slow down!” I shout.

“Estimated time of arrival is forty-one minutes.”

“Drive faster. We don’t have time. That is a command.” I turn to Jan as I buckle my seat belt. “Jan, are you okay?”

He ruffles his hair. “I believe you now,” Jan whispers, dazed. “I felt like I was being struck by electricity. What the hell is that thing?”

“Quick, how long did she take to die?”

“What?”

“Jan, my family is going to die! That’s how much time we have to save them.” His eyes color with shock. I grab his collar. “How long did she take to die last night?”

“I wasn’t timing her death,” Jan says. “She talked to you? What else did she say?”

“She blames me. Only me. Says I’m the one that took her breath away. That it’s my DNA, my fear that woke her up. If she can do this to you . . . Oh, Modimo. Car, accelerate!”

“We’re entering a section of the A1 highway often patrolled by police,” the driver-assist says.

“We don’t have time for that. Bypass through Sebele Valley!” I shout. The steering wheel swings left by the traffic lights—and we swing right, sweaty and anxious—into the agricultural district of Sebele Valley surrounded by paloverde trees. “Conference-call my parents and brother. Put it on speaker, no visuals.” The dashboard fills with their caller IDs and photos. It rings, and they answer.

Mama. “Nana, what a surprise.”

Papa. “Hello, my babygirl?”

Limbani. “What the hell do you want?”

“This is an emergency,” I say. “I’m on the way to the farmhouse. We need to meet now. I can’t say much on the phone but please, if you see a strange woman nearby, whatever you do, keep away from her. Don’t help her. Lock your doors, asseblief.” Wait. Only I can see her? Fuck.

“What’s going on?” they say at the same time.

“I’ll explain at the house. It’s very urgent that you’re all there. Hanging up now.”

The line cuts. “Oh God, what if she can walk through walls?” I ask. “I need to warn them—”

Jan tugs at my hand. “And say what? That the woman we killed last night can walk through walls?”

“A crime has been detected,” the driver-assist says. “Calling police.”

“Stop,” I shout, and the dashboard blackens. “Please update terminology settings. ‘Kill’ in this context is synonymous to winning at something or doing something excellent.”

“Use of slang updated,” the driver-assist says.

I glare at Jan. “Watch yourself. Driver-assist, discontinue listening to our conversation.”

“Conversation detection disabled,” it says.

“If this car was a chatterbox last night, we wouldn’t be in this shit,” I moan. “I mean, why didn’t the car detect anything?”

“That’s what I’m thinking.” Jan taps his chin.

“Hand me Moremi’s ID,” I say, withering inside. He hands me the backpack from the floor. I decant her purse for her ID, an electric-blue, translucent, self-powered augmented card. The digital text glows ghost-white upon contact. I tap her headshot, her lips read:

MOREMI GADIFELE, 23

0-RIGINAL (ceased)

LIFESPAN 0

BODY-HOPPING 0

Jan moans. “She’s not microchipped. Thank God.”

“Ceased?” I feel faint. I scroll as a din grows in my head.

Sex: X (she/her, they/them)

Nationality: Motswana

Height: 154 cm / 5 ft 1 in

Weight: 51 kg / 112 lbs

Blood type: O-

Location: Nelson Mandela Drive

-24.636474, 25.916249

Vitals: Health App (disabled)

Date of Bodily Death: [01:34] Saturday, 10 October

Cause of death: AUTHORIZED ACCESS ONLY

Words dribble from my tongue. “Jan, they know she’s dead.”

“Who?”

“The Department of Immigration and Civil Registration. They have her cause of death listed on her identity card, but I can’t access it. Do you have access to it, since your father has tentacles in places we can’t reach?”

He winces. “His power is corruption. He could connect me to someone, but that could lead back to us, which is not what we need.” Jan swipes out his wallet, ID card, scrolls through his ID details as I pull mine out, comparing the two, silver and gilt-edged.

JANITH KOSHAL, 30

0-RIGINAL

LIFESPAN 0

BODY-HOPPING 0

Sex: Male (he/him)

Nationality: Indian

Height: 189 cm / 6 ft 2 in

Weight: 97 kg / 214 lbs

Blood type: A-

NELAH BOGOSI-NTSU, 28

LIFESPAN 3rd (430 yrs)

BODY-HOPPING 1st

BODY CONDITION: CRIMINALLY PRONE

Sex: Female (she/her)

Nationality: Motswana

Height: 160 cm / 5 ft 5 in

Weight: 60 kg / 132 lbs

Blood type: AB+

“Nothing suspicious on ours,” Jan says.

My eyes bolt out when I notice the location listed on her ID. “Oh God,” I say, “get rid of her ID—it’s tracking us.”

He thumb-presses the window’s button and throws it out into the wailing mouth of the wind. Botswana’s notorious heat rushes in with the riff of kwaito music from the side-street vendors and guzzles every bit of coolness we have. Grey clouds stir above, so perhaps the rain will cool shit down. I stare out my window, watching pantsula guys on the pavements with their ankle pants and spottie hats, doing stunning footwork dances to the deep bass of a gqom track as a woman sing-songs, “Woza, woza!” The contrast stuns me: life moves on merrily outside, whilst ours remains stagnant as the dry-arid air of Gaborone.

“What the hell is going on?” I yell, smacking the cards onto the seat. “If immigration knows that she’s dead, shouldn’t their systems flag the absence of a death certificate? Shouldn’t their system notify them to alert police to this discrepancy?”

Jan pinches the bridge of his nose. “If they know when or where she died, they could have tracked her body to her last active location. By now, we’d have heard something—anything. Why is her cause of death hidden? Could it be because her family’s incarcerated? Hold on. Something’s bothering me. I need to call my father.” He stares ahead silently as if steeling himself, adjusting himself, righting his fury into something calm. He speed-dials Aarav. He pulls up holo-call visual, but Jan’s disabled our visuals.

“Son,” his father says. “Show yourself.”

“I can’t, Ba,” he says with a disgusted curl of the lip, as if the latter word is sick in his mouth. His repulsion for his father is a sticky tangible particle of the air and it paints his cheeks a gloomy color. “Quick one. A young woman worked for you three years ago. Moremi Gadifele. She did admin work and graphic design.”

“Son, women come and go in our firm. I hardly recall their names or how they look.”

The ropes of veins in Jan’s fingers writhe as he tightens and unclenches his hands. “I’ve seen the same women in your firm for the last three years.”

“What’s this about?” A note of suspicion in Aarav’s voice.

“I thought I could take you up on that offer you made me,” Jan says.

“Why specifically her?” He seems suddenly attentive, voice barricading the words he’d like to say.

“I saw her looking for employment at one of my associates’ firms and recognized that she worked for you,” Jan says.

“Today?” His voice perks up. “Is the young woman with you? I want to speak with her.”

“Unfortunately, you just missed her.”

“Oh,” he muses, a good thought lighting his brown eyes. “She’s still alive.” My body goes cold. “What’s that joke running the grapevines? Anyone who says ‘no’ to me ends up bewitched.” He laughs. “Son, where’s your humor today?”

“My humor is alive as she is,” Jan says sarcastically. Of course, his humor is dead. “Anyway, she looks interesting enough. The divorce proceedings are tightening the screws on me, and I thought I could blow off steam so that Melissa won’t catch wind of the affair.”

“Well,” Aarav muses, laughing in relief, “if the girl is the one I’m recalling, she was a highly astute and talented girl. She didn’t stay with us for long. Though, I’ve sent my employees to headhunt her with irresistible offers that she unfortunately declined. Now, seeing that you owe me for clearing up the unsightly mess of that ‘wiretapped’ architect you keep pissing around, I believe you can talk to this associate of yours . . . that’s if they hired her, to offer the girl to me.”

I stare at Jan, and his eyes bolt out. “No, Ba, I don’t think I can do that. It seems my associate wasn’t interested in hiring her.”

“That’s unfortunate. She’s irresistible, isn’t she?” he asks.

Jan rolls his eyes. “Well, she’s something.”

“Apparently, Ms. Gadifele’s gone AWOL, which is unusual coming from my team. You know how thorough their surveillance is, which goes to show how off-the-grid excellent her skills are. But I have a couple of our girls I can offer to you. I’ll have my secretary send you a list.”

Jan. “Right, I look forward it. Well, I have to go. Talk soon.” He hangs up. Evades eye contact, and I wonder why? What does he truly think about his father?

“Your father and his cohorts raped women then hired some hotshot lawyers to clean it up,” I say, a bad taste in my mouth. “He’s ruthless in his business transactions, which sometimes doesn’t work out for those in partnerships with him. Some say you have the same acerbic touch.”

“Through fair strategies, not backstabbing and manipulation.” Jan hangs his head down. “It sickens me that I have to act chummy with him. But he’s my father.”

“So,” I say, staring at him full-on, “he knows you’re pissing around me? Did you tell him I was infertile? Is that why we got a good rate with the Wombcubator?” I ask, angry. “I don’t need your father’s corrupt network anywhere near me.”

Jan nods, more with relief than sorrow. “I’m sorry. I despised going to him, but I had to.” He scratches his forehead. “His former colleague saw us at that dinner function, told my father about it. My father became fascinated with you. He wanted to bring you on to his team for the design of the cultural precinct skyscraper. I told him to stay the fuck away from you. And once I asked for that Wombcubator favor, he asked me to sign you over as a deal. I agreed just to get it done, knowing I’d have to think something up because he’s not one to let things slide, especially significant deals like this. So I’ve been stalling, and he’s getting very impatient lately. Soon, he’ll punish me again. I’ve backpedaled before on a promise, so he messed with our Tokyo clients, obliterated our merger to teach me a lesson. It poisoned my relationship with my managing partners at the firm.”

I keep quiet, feeling guilty.

“I’m not like my father,” he spits. “You keep looking at me the way I look at him, as if you don’t know me.” He focuses his eyes on me, burning golden-brown irises. “Do you really think the same of me as of him?”

I touch his shoulder, feel ashamed. “You just scared me last night. You didn’t seem like the Jan that I know. The things you were saying . . . You had no regard for that young woman. I couldn’t think straight, but you . . .”

His eyelids crush closed. “He’s in my blood, his way of thinking in my brain. I just wish I could get him the hell out of my DNA.” His fisted hands jam into his jaw. “I think Mel’s sleeping with him. After me, she had to move up. And now you . . . What can I do to prove myself to you? Should I burn myself—?”

I wrap my arms around the boulders of his shoulders so crippled with emotional pain. “No. I won’t let you go down that rabbit hole. I’m here, nè. You are you. Look at me.” He lifts his eyes to mine, and they shimmer with vulnerability. My breath fiercely grasps his, takes him in, secures him on my mouth, my tongue. I pull back, look deeply into his eyes. “You mean a lot more to me than all that’s happened to us. I have trust issues. I fucked up by thinking the wrong things. But you? You saved us from going to hell, and it’s not like I’m innocent.” I kiss his forehead, his hard jawline, and his lips. He relaxes into my arms, and we rest into our breaths.

“Okay,” he whispers. “Now we need to save your family.”

“Good.”

“Maybe try killing her again, then she’ll stop.”

“She’s powerful, Jan!”

“Sorry.”

A message beeps into his wrist. He opens it and sighs.

“Is that the list of women from your father?” I ask, watching him type a series of texts back.

“You understand why I had to act complicit, right?” Jans asks. “He was very suspicious, which makes me very suspicious. I’m wondering whom I can talk to to find more information on Moremi’s history at my father’s company, but he has such a tight leash on his social circle that no one would risk being a whistleblower. For now, let’s deal with the matter at hand, Moremi.”

Jan strokes his chin, then his eyes flicker with realization. “The timeline. Moremi’s ID card stated her time of death at 1:34 a.m. I think we left the townhouse around 11:00 p.m. I got home around 4:45 a.m. That’s five hours, forty-five minutes. I mean, we drove for a bit before we . . . hit her. It took a while to dig the grave. Check the time log on the car.”

“You’re right.” I click the side buttons on the back of the driver’s seat, press the GPS location on its computer display, and scroll back to yesterday’s destination routes. “We left the townhouse at 11:59 p.m. We covered the fifty-six kilometers to the Oodi-Modipane Road—which is where we . . . buried her. Got there around 1:11 a.m. We got off onto some unnamed gravel road and hovered there for a bit. The car shows movement at 4:14 a.m. The car is logged at your Tsholofelo East home eighteen minutes later at 4:32 a.m. Then my house at 4:44 a.m.”

“So our window of time is 1:11 a.m. to 4:14 a.m.,” Jan says, finger to his lip. “She must have died sometime when the car stopped moving. We spent roughly three hours at the site. Much of that was bickering and digging, which felt like forever, but the grave was shallow. Her ID says she died at 1:34 a.m.” He swallows. “We may have taken twenty minutes or so . . . killing her.”

I swallow. Twenty minutes. That’s all it took to end twenty-three years of life in her. As if years stacked in a body make someone invincible. Why is it so easy to die?

“Everything happened so fast,” I whisper, leaning into my knees, staring at my hands, how they had blood last night. “How could it be that quick?”

Jan checks his watch. “Given the estimates, it’ll take her twenty minutes to kill your loved one. Jesus. But how long will it take her to get to them? Wait. Does twenty minutes refer to when you struck the deal with her or does it speak to the length it’ll take to kill . . . your family?”

“I need a skyf.” I rummage around the pockets of the seats as if I’ll find something, although I’m not a smoker, except for those wild-youth years. Jan balls his tissue in his fist. “This is driving me kad mad!” I shout. “I need to be home now. Car, activate FlightMode.”

I work the screen. Enter: FLIGHT PREPARATION

Destination: Bogosi Farmhouse

Distance 15.7km

Walk	Bike	Drive	FlightMode
3h 26min	1h 9 min	24 min	12 min

I press the FlightMode icon, activating hyper-drive. Mechanical parts turn and revolve, changing from drive mode. The car jerks, heaves forward above the traffic into the less congested air roads, and air-pods shoot by like bullets. In FlightMode, the screen depicts air lanes and traffic lights invisible to the naked eye. Only the air vehicles whizzing in and between skyscrapers are detected.

“Jan, what if we’re stuck in the simulation?” I ask. “How can we tell if this is truly reality? The CBE tricked me before. What’s to say they’re not doing it again?”

“No, they’d have woken us up when we buried that girl.”

“How sure are you of that?”

He looks at me, deadpan. “Why make us go on?”

“I just want it to be a nightmare—the simulation.”

“The consequences are real, not just nightmares.”

“I know, but we wouldn’t have murdered someone,” I cry out.

“But we’d be put away for it because of the CBE’s prediction.”

“What we did was wrong.”

“You have to decide. Make a decision. You’re either good or bad. Your actions must align. You can’t just choose the middle,” Jan says. “Good is reporting yourself. Bad is saving yourself. Sticking in the middle is being a liability.”

I hold my mouth shut. Too much is spilling out of me. “How come she’s not following you?” But she didn’t scratch Jan last night. It’s my DNA under her fingernails, not Jan’s. Is that why and how she’s targeting me?

Jan shifts. “Maybe you’re the architect of your story.”

“Mxm. Fuck off.” I swat his hand. “Seriously.”

“You think I planned to have a murder on my hands in the middle of my war-zone divorce? I don’t know how this works, either.”

“But you killed her, too.” We stare at the dashboard. Silence.

“You took her last breath.” He jabs the air before me. “You’re the real killer. So technically, she’s haunting you, not me.”

Anger. Anger. Blazing anger. “She wouldn’t let me go. You still took her halfway to death. I’m not going down alone. We’re in this together.”

He sighs. “Of course, we are, sweetheart.”

“What did you do with her skin?”

“I burned it in an oil burner over and over and over and dissolved the ash in my morning coffee and threw it like caution to the wind.”

“Jan, if she can burn me with her touch, what else is she capable of? Wait, do you think this is the work of Matsieng’s blood? You said it was powerful. Can it revive a dead body? What if Matsieng steps in if the microchip fails? I mean, we are being haunted by the crime we committed. What if Matsieng is the backup plan? Serati said, ‘We do everything through Matsieng. We acquire peace through Xem. Matsieng understands your blood intimately.’”

“Love, please, let’s not allow our minds to run us into the ground.”

“It has to be Matsieng’s blood. If Xer blood is this powerful, what else can it do?” I say.

Instead of answering me, he says, “You didn’t call your husband. Does that mean you’ve selected him as a killer by proxy?”

I stare silently at our views as the car cruises past the ridges and hilly terrain surrounding the highway, the sun’s eye tracking us in its cloud of mirage, time felled by the second.

Twenty-eight minutes in, and we’re in view of Tshele Hill, its oil storage facility. It brings back memories of the day I was released into this body. The Bogosi farmhouse. Driving through the wide gravel road to their sprawling four-hectare farmhouse, a land untouched by the greedy mouth of urban sprawl’s concrete jungle. The veldspan fence hums with the clipped ticks of electricity. The kraal out front, the borehole pumping water. The fields with long stalks in a wispy-yellow wave in the breeze. Tswana cattle graze in the distance, various breeds of chickens in their coop. I remember my consciousness sim-transit architect’s sleek car coming up the quiet werf’s estate, thick trees, sky swollen with blue, the punch of vivid green in the rolling gardens, the sharp peace of quietude, chalets for visiting relatives, where I’d escape to, verandas full of light, warmth, and air, filtering into the house with its high-ceilinged beams, the gardens up the driveway.

Everything was somber and heavy with death the day I was released from the Body Hope Facility into a new body—the Bogosi family’s daughter’s body. The engine stalled.

She smiled, unclipping her seat belt. “You ready to meet your new family?” She was the first person I saw when I woke up, in her crisp white cloak, to suggest pointers to acclimate into my new body.

Fold-away doors, rammed-earth strata of brown-red colors, clay bricks, the traditional setup of a Setswana setting in a modernized layout—I took it all in, in awe at the immensity of their wealth. The car door slid open for me, the fragrant air mottled with the perfume from flowers and . . . and the smell of sadness in the air, pity swindling my homecoming. Two male workers carrying a slaughtered cow dropped it, mouths agape, staring at me. Everyone stared at me as I walked into the house, the hallways, the large gathering room, where everyone sat, black-clad, coffee cups by their lips, confusion amok in their eyes. A pinprick. A gasp. Against the floor, a cup cracking like a skull. The body that I’d just entered the room in, its deceased owner’s spirit had been buried that day. That day, they saw the deceased’s body walking around willy-nilly.

“This is wrong,” my brother shouted.

“It’s injustice,” Papa said.

You don’t choose your family; the system picks it for you. The system picks randomly which consciousness slips into which body like cloth. Allegedly, no discrimination of pre-identities. And I’d just been delivered into a wealthy family. Lucky for anyone. Yet I wanted to flee. The rejection was hot against my face. The cotton around my skin sharp as pain. There was no turning back. I was delivered to a family who didn’t want me and yet had a moral duty, obligation, to take care of me.

The first day my brother saw me was the day of the funeral. How did the sister die? No one wanted to talk about it. I didn’t know, otherwise I wouldn’t have come to the funeral, wouldn’t have desecrated such a special moment.

That day was supposed to be my homecoming into a real world after waiting for a body for fifteen years, they said, and Limbani robbed me of that. “Who are you?” he spat at me. “Who the fuck are you?” Someone squealed and collapsed. “This is disgusting!” he exploded. “She’s not my sister. We don’t have to take her in. It’s our right.”

“Honey, what’s the worst that could happen?” Mama cried. “We can’t just kick your sister’s body out into the cold.” I was just “the sister’s body.”

“And if this thing”—he jabbed his finger in my direction—“fell in love with me? We’ve heard the stories of incest, of what things like her get up to. How far are you willing to go to accept this thing into our family? How many of your ideals and beliefs are you going to sacrifice for this thing before it’s too late? Will you sacrifice your god for this thing?” He stood before me, walked around me. “We can’t tell if this thing was even a woman before. If it was Black, like us.”

Papa stormed out. The room was full of shadows. Everyone kept quiet. The silence fraught with tension. Body-hopping nonbelievers forget that we’re also human, just looking for a home. Everyone’s eyes shifted toward me. For a fraction of a second, doubt flickered in his mother’s—my mother’s—eyes, and just as quickly, the poor woman grabbed me into her arms, desperately hoping to smudge out this irrevocable pain and decision. But I felt it then that I would know no love that their daughter knew, and as much as Mama welcomed me in, I would always stand at the periphery.

My brother jumped forward, had his hands tight around my neck. Manual strangulation, the forensic authorities would call it. Here I was about to die on my first Body Release Day. They pulled him back. The veins strained in his eyes. He spat at me. Called me a thief.

I “stole” the body of his dead sister, and he would never forgive me. So what if he found a way to punish me? I’d waited so long for this day, and now I had to promise this family—my new family—that I was worthy of their child and sister’s body. Today, I have desecrated that promise.

We’ve arrived, and Jan perks up. The farm’s iron gates wind open for our car. One of the farmer boys looks up, shields his face from the sun, then familiarity lights his brain. He smiles and waves. I’m squeamish.

Three exclusive cars are parked out front, red, black, and white. My parents’. Limbani is not yet here, and a cold chill curdles my blood. Mama’s car should be parked at the airport, unless Papa had taken her to catch her flight.

“If only we knew how long she’ll take to get here,” Jan says.

“Jan, she disappeared into thin air,” I say. “She could just as instantaneously reappear at my family’s home. I don’t know the rules to this, either. We don’t know what we’re fighting.”

He pinches his nose. We’re thinking the same thing: If we’d never had an affair, would this be happening in a different way, or not at all?

“Stay here,” I say, as the car door slides outward.

“But—”

I slam the door shut, cutting Jan off.

The helper, Kesego, opens the front door and welcomes me into a high-ceilinged foyer, the staircase rising toward a chandelier. “Would you like some tea, mma?” she asks in a soft Zambian accent.

I shake my head, making my way to the living room. I follow the quiet jazzy notes of mbaqanga, which paint the air warm, syncopated with Kalanga chants. I take cautious steps through the arched hallways into the dining room, which has a spacious dinner table with a Persian rug, a veranda overlooking the luxurious garden. Honeyed light flows through the wooden windows, charging me with tension. Mama’s standing by the bay windows, inspecting her garden. Her body is covered in a luminous, electric-blue tint. She’s on call. Holo-call. It’s the only way she can be present. She’s currently in Dar es Salaam in her hotel room, and parts of her background are static lines, a fuzzy network. Through her window, I can see the steely ribbed outline of towering buildings and the glittering spine of the harbor. She turns when my knee knocks against a coffee table laid out with oven-baked phaphatha, a terrycloth kitchen towel, and a teacup half-filled with the shimmering gold color of rooibos tea.

“Nana.” She’s startled. “What’s the emergency?” Joy is starry in her eyes. That’s all I remember, her arms warm around me as she pulled me into a hug, welcoming me into the family despite her son’s hot-arid anger toward me. I stare at my watch. Thirty minutes since I last saw Moremi. Nowhere in sight now. When does she pitch up?

“Which hotel are you in, Mama?” I ask, craning my neck to take inventory of the other rooms in the farmhouse.

Mama’s travels reminds me of my work trip to Morocco, which lasted a month, and the laws governing microchipped women there are so stringent that I felt blessed to be a Motswana. Their microchips alert the authorities and administer electric shocks to their bodies if they enter places that women aren’t allowed, if certain parts of their bodies are not fully robed, or if they have sex with a man while they’re unmarried. In Nigeria, Uganda, and other African countries, many LGBTQIA people are microchipped. If they enter same-sex relationships, their microchips alert authorities, ending in a virtual prison sentencing and the loss of their bodies. Such bodies are rated low and cremated to avoid tarnishing the souls that would otherwise fill them. Only wealthy people can navigate these laws, while these laws devour the poor. The rich can buy new identities, smuggle their way out. Some parts of the world are disgusting, intolerable places to live.

Her eyebrows furrow since I’m distant. “Golden Tulip Dar es Salaam City Center Hotel,” she says. My husband and I went there for Valentine’s last year. “Nana, it’s so beautiful here. The air, the ocean, the people—you should come back here for your anniversary. How’s your husband doing?”

“Ma, what time’s your flight?”

She rotates her wrist, checks the time. “Soon. At three forty-five.”

“How long’s your flight?”

“Roughly three hours.”

Three hours, she should land at 6:45 p.m.

“I took the ferry out to Zanzibar,” Mama continues. “Look, can you see the harbor from here?” She points through the black-framed picture windows. “And there’s St. Joseph’s Cathedral—you’d love it here, nana.”

“Mama, please, are there any layovers? Are you certain it’s three hours?”

“Nana, I’m coming from Dar es Salaam, not China. It’s a nonstop flight. Although there was that time from Rabat-Salé, and those tedious connecting flights and—”

“And which airport will you be using?” Lounge, empty. Study office, empty. Kitchen, empty, except for Kesego.

“Julius Nyerere International,” she says. “It’s the closest, of course.”

“I know, Mama, I just wanted to make sure. Ma, listen to me. I’ll pick you up from the airport, nè? Come straight to me.”

Folded arms. She’s a bit perturbed by my interruptions. “Where else would I go if you’re not in the waiting area?”

I hustle toward the windows. There’s no one except our dog, Rabi. Mama’s safe. Three hours safe, to be exact. I’m certain Moremi can’t teleport to Dar es Salaam or a plane in flight. Then again, there are no limits to Tswana supernaturalism—not that I’ve experienced any, only heard stories through word of mouth, which are bizarre and anachronistic in this digital age. This byzantine phenomenon is not heavily documented like other cultures with surprisingly serious avidity in museums, archives, the internet; instead, it sleeps in geriatric minds, which are now our museums of folklore, and supernatural entities. Prisons of cultural stories. That’s the demarcation of the old and millennial: knowledge is separated by the physical realm of our skins. I regret being ignorant of old-folk tales. Can’t exactly cross-check a guidebook for a what-to-do list. I’ve never believed in shit like ghosts and hauntings, but Moremi has duly baptized me into Ietsism.

For now, Mama’s one person off the list. I slouch against the wall wiping sweat from my forehead. My heartbeat slows down.

“What’s with the interrogations?” Mama asks.

I need to know where everyone is and keep track of them. That way, I can situate myself near them to avoid Moremi touching them. Now the only people I need to concern myself with are my husband, brother, and father. Three, that’s manageable.

“What’s the emergency?” she asks with raised eyebrows at my silence and harried look. “Oh no, is it the baby? Did something happen?”

“No, no, no, she’s fine. Let’s wait for everyone to gather,” I add. “Where’s Papa?”

“He’s using the bathroom,” she says.

Papa enters the room, whistling a matching tune to the mbaqanga music, head almost skimming the top of the doorway, making him always have a stooping figure. A gait to his walk, arthritis chewing through his bones and nerves. Wrinkles and crow’s feet deep in his light-brown skin, woven like leather. A handsome face still lit with joy. I did love the nobility of the family, how together they were. Watching him, I suddenly feel ashamed. How will he protect himself from Moremi? She’s a demon, and they’re in their late fifties. My brother is only five years older than me.

Limbani enters the estate in a cloud of dust, tires spitting grit and gravel. If he saw Jan parked out front, it’s the least of my worries. The main door bangs open against the wall when he storms in. He has a farm farther out north, though he heads a newspaper in the city centre. He’d put me on the front cover, fuck conflict of interest. Everyone close to me is here—apart from my daughter, who is in the safest place in the world, besides her father—nearby where I can take stock of them to conduct a calculative strategy.

“Who are you to summon me?” he asks.

Mama rolls her eyes. “Eish, calm down, please. Has anyone been watering my plants? God, Rabi looks waifish. Are you all feeding him well?” Rabi lies in the garden, perks his ears up, comes trotting to the window, a greeting bark to Mama.

“Mama, you’ve only been gone for ten days,” Limbani says. “We’re not sadists.”

Papa chuckles, stroking his beer belly, asking her to point out which of her plants is experiencing malnutrition, and she takes the joke seriously as she points to a bed of azaleas. Under the shade of a large baobab tree, something stirs. A trick of the mind, shadow and shade intermingling with the moving sunrays. I take a deep breath, press my palms against the glass dinner table. Now that I have gathered everyone here, I don’t know what to say, but I need to quarantine them from her wrath.

“Well?” My brother folds his arms, studying me. I scan his face, his eyes as if I’ll find something telling in them. “Who is this woman you mentioned on the call? What does she do? What does she look like? What does she want?” he barrages me.

“She . . .” She has no skin on her face. She is dismembered, she is dead—how do I spin that into something more normal? “She’s dangerous, and she looks quite rattled. Her body, her face is . . . distorted. Just—you’ll understand what I mean when you see her. Just keep your distance from her.”

Limbani narrows his eyes. “What exactly did you do to her?”

“Like I said—”

“You’re lying,” he says. “You’ve stolen every mannerism of my sister, and now you’ve turned her into a liar.”

“Your sister is dead. This is my body!” I yell, and I’m loose, the screws unturned.

“Oh, not today!” Mama says, anguished. “I won’t stand for another argument. I won’t be on my flight worrying about you two.”

Papa huddles near Mama to hug her, forgetting that’s she’s not here physically, so he slips through her holo-form, bumping the wall. Steadies himself. “We’re here for you,” Papa says. His tenor slides warmly around me, making me breathless with comfort. “Family sticks together.” He puts on his reading glasses from the table. “Is your husband doing something about this?” My husband in quotes it sounds like, and if I told him, I’d never maneuver his interrogations.

I pat my braids to mask my trembling hand. “I . . . Well, I just found out today, and I came straight here because . . .”

“Because?” Limbani throttles forward.

I need to be careful of what I say in front of my brother. It would do me damage to have the owner of a distinguished media company as a witness. Given the size and important international positioning of my brother’s media company, its reporting has real influence. His news media is unlike the vitriol of gossip rags, and its reports criticize my firm’s designs and ethos with such a journalistic flair that sometimes even I’m convinced that my designs are useless to society. I didn’t let that destroy me. Instead, it only motivated me to advance further than him, and outdo him internationally, which emasculates him sorely because I’ve proven him wrong. So he takes out that jealousy on me through biting remarks targeted at my weaknesses—my marriage, my infertility, everything. If Limbani finds out about my crime, his company would be the first to investigate and report it in detail.

“Well?” my brother asks, tapping his foot.

“Because she talked about my family. So I felt you were in danger,” I say.

My brother raises an eyebrow. “In such imminent danger that you didn’t notify your policeman of a husband?”

“Jesus, why isn’t she on the news?” Mama asks.

Limbani steps forward, enunciates again: “Who is this woman? What does she do? What does she look like? What does she want? What. Have. You. Done?”

The noise swells around me like an ocean current. And déjà vu pummels into my brain. My forensic evaluation. The waiting room at the Body Hope Facility. My husband carrying a blood-soaked brown paper bag with fingers inside like soggy sweets, interrogating me. This is an interrogation. Is this my brother or a simulated version, a prosecutor’s puppet? I block my ears and scream. Like the CBE simulation is tormenting me. Is this the prosecutor Serati using my brother as a bloody pawn? But she’d know he’d be the last person I sing to.

I scream and scream—it’s not real, it’s not real—as if screams can shatter the glass walls of a CBE simulation, and I expect them to buckle and dismantle like the day I spent at the Body Hope Facility. What if I’m still sleeping, inundated by the serum of the simulation? That was a month ago. They couldn’t have kept me under for over a month, could they? Who am I kidding? Time is different in the CBE simulations. Years can pass by in minutes, regulated or sped up by the forensic panel—pushing as hard as they can to squeeze out a confession or an act of terror from us. They lied before because I was too aware of the CBE. What if they continued to lie the day I woke up to a yelling husband?

God, what if, what if, what if there is no baby at the Matsieng Fertility Fund? A way for them to make me weak. Let’s give her a daughter, the thing she’s always wanted, threaten her with losing that and see if she’ll still be pure, is what they’d probably say to test me, which is hardly fair. But they’ll risk anything to create the purest society, which is impossible. Humans can’t be 100 percent saints, not like Jesus. What if the forensic panel is keeping me under for their own reasons? What if Jan is part of the simulation? What can I use to tell if I’m in reality or their modulated unreality? Maybe to take control of the situation, I should act differently than my natural self. But how do I sever myself in two parts that act as polar opposites? And how can I be objective enough? Maintain that objectivity?

Even now, the microchip doesn’t stop me.

The sun doesn’t expose me.

I’m out here, a murderer, frolicking about. I want to break reality, shatter it to pieces, find the truth somewhere in its mangled body.

What if

I can push back just as hard, terrorize the CBE simulation—if I’m stuck in it—and break it?

But how? I stare at every little mottled fabric of this room, and for the first time interrogating it, its presence—them, my family, the streaks of brown in their irises, their mannerisms. This time I get to question things, not the other way around. I will shine a light on hidden secrets and the unknown crevices we’ve squeezed parts of ourselves into.

Everyone stares at me, a dangerous, alien creature. Papa raises his hand to a male worker behind me, one who was slowly approaching me to subdue me. He bows, leaves. A smile twists up Limbani’s face. Ja nè, he’s been waiting for this for years. For me to crack, the outer shell to reveal the horrid Matryoshka doll inside me. There she is, look at the evil leaking, she can’t hide it, I see his smile say.

“What happened to her?” I ask.

I feel everyone’s thoughts step back, surprised, confused. Mama narrows her eyes. “Who, nana?”

“Nelah,” I say. “The first daughter of this family. The amputated arm,” I say, raising my prosthetic right arm.

“No, no, no. Fotseke!” Limbani rushes forward, towering over me, his finger pointed at me as if it can shoot bullets. “You will not do this. You will not do this.” Spit strikes my face.

Somehow, I’ve never been afraid of him. His masculinity like a bomb doesn’t seem to terrorize me, yet it sends others away, dismantles them, makes them bend for him, makes his wife submissive. The alpha male that sees an alpha male in me, perhaps. It scares him, I see that fear flicker in his eyes, and his machismo bulks, expands to take up space, to push me out of the way, to prove something, although what I don’t know. Patriarchy is just like racism, a glutton for power it won’t share, for sharing power means loss of power to them, a form of weakness—if we give them space, where will we sit? What will we do? Who are we, then? Fear, the most poisonous animal that stands between them and enlightenment. I’m a woman, a power-hungry woman. I’ve seen it and I’ve felt it. And now I punch it out to another young woman; I’d rather remain in the privilege of power than deal with my emotions, my consequences—at least I admit this to myself. That fear, that emotion in him, Limbani doesn’t want to recognize it, has too much pride to give in to it.

Yet it is his weakness. He’d rather be a “man.” Perhaps the problem was his sister’s sweetness, a passivity that made him feel superior. Then I came. Inquisitive. Competitive. Hardworking. Pushing through adversity. Riding higher than him, younger than him, me a “little girl.” She’s just a little girl, brah, nothing to be afraid of, joh, he’d say in a macho coolness to his mates when they came over to fawn over me, aroused by the confused mixture of their fear and attraction to me. There’s a man trapped inside my little sister’s body, he’d say to his relatives. I remember how I used to dress in skimpy clothes just to prove I was a woman. How stupid, when I think back. Because this is who I am, this is the gender I align with, with all its femininity with or without the vagina and breasts. I frighten myself as if I have masochistic tendencies. Why must I be the one ashamed? Why must I always tolerate? I didn’t question so many things out of courtesy, kindness, and guilt. I’ve been so afraid, treading the paths carefully—today, I make my own path.

I am selfish. A selfish bitch.

I turn the inquisitive mirror back at him: “Where is she? Who was she? What. Has. She. Done?”

Papa buckles against the table. “She was so young.”

The threads of this family unspool. I burrow myself into the tissue of their emotional scars. “What are you all hiding from me?” I throw the question at them. “Why won’t anyone tell me what happened to her?”

I’m shameless, trying to lay blame on someone else—that I murdered someone because of your actions. Boo-hoo, poor me. Fuck me. Staring at death’s abyss, there is nothing to lose. I feel powerful, invincible. I need to be the one in control—for my own safety.

“A talk,” Limbani demands. Gathers me by my arm. Drags me to the adjacent room, the study office. He spins. “Jou bastard. Who the hell do you think you are? You have no right. You are not a part of this family just because you wear my sister’s body. My parents are kind people who let you in.”

I stretch my hand out to him. “These scars,” I say, “why won’t anyone explain how I got them? You make me feel dirty, but something tells me your sister was far dirtier than I.”

He slaps me, and I’m shocked. But then again, I’m not shocked. I cradle the pain on my cheek. “You’re afraid,” I say, realizing his expression. “You look very scared. What? Am I getting close to the truth?”

He steps back, ashamed. “Why would you make me do that to my sister’s body? You destroy everything you touch.” He stares at his hands for the abuse they’ve left on my face.

As long as I am near my family, no harm can come to them.

I stare at Limbani, and I struggle to reconcile the two ideas of him: the owner of a fast-growing media company with the man who is so antagonistic to me that it makes him appear immature—of course, he’s never body-hopped given their re ligious beliefs to opt out of it, so he doesn’t have hundreds of years stacked up in him, like me. That’s probably why I repulse him as a body-hopper, why he can’t help but be antagonistic to me. He’s my older brother, but this is my third lifespan, an accumulation of 430 years to his thirty-two years. He appears to behave respectably toward me in front of other people, in public, and at galas and events. Still, behind closed doors with family members where no public eye can anoint itself with his image, his resentment is gaudy and draws with brute force damage against me with pure obsession. His resentment that I’ve replaced his sister is something he can purely entertain as he continues with his established career. Unlike Jan, who’s shackled to his father, Limbani’s a loose cannon mollycoddled by our parents, who are at his beck and call when he needs any form of support for his business and any other endeavors. After all, they consider him their only child, and I’m just a stranger holding their daughter’s body hostage—they’re only being kind to me out of respect for her body.

Limbani is the heir of this family and seems to have no concerns that his resentment might affect his inheritance because he knows it won’t, based on the confidence with which he considers himself the only child of this family. After all, I have no access to my inheritance until they pass away, and each day, he’s working on our parents to write me out of their will. This has become his second job. I may understand where he’s coming from, but I hate him. I hate that he might be right, that I will always be a stranger, that I am no heir of this family, that they will never consider me one of their own, that I’m just a thief waiting to snatch their wealth.

My brother shoves me against the bookshelf. Takes me by the neck. “You destroy everything,” he spits. I am a truth he wants to smother. He’s never touched me like this, but I’m unafraid. I pressed the wrong button. The six-foot-two of bulk, tense muscle, and power packed into him slackens my resolve. How am I supposed to fight a man when they’re born with more horsepower than us? I used to ask my trainer. My brother’s greed and hunger for power flows in and around me as I struggle with him, trying to see what’s going on in the other rooms.

Through the open door, I see glimpses of my parents like a different track shot. I hear their voices, keeping earshot of everyone. The windows: outside, a sky’s constipated with clouds, drizzles rain. Muffled voices through the walls. Shadows in the window. Clothes shuffled by movements. I eye the doorway.

Papa nears the window. “What’s going on out there? Haebo, do we have a new worker? There’s a woman. In our backyard. Staring at us.” He steps back, a grimace twisting his face. “Oh my God.”

The mbaganqa rises in tempo, the Kalanga switches into a dizzy, witching speed, and I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe with the fear smothering me.

I crane my neck. Mama focuses her eyes, squints at the view. “I can’t see anything.” A pause. “Did you take your meds? You can’t keep forgetting.”

Something breaks. Glass. Ceramic. “Kesego, what’s going on?” Mama asks.

“Let me go,” I say.

“Sorry, mma,” Kesego responds. “I dropped a plate by accident.”

“Mothowamodimo, that better not be my mother’s china,” Mama says.

The dog barks, yelps. Papa steps back, a grimace twisting his face. “Oh my God. Mogatsaka, call the police.”

“Let me go,” I shout.

But my brother keeps repeating, “You destroy everything.” Pinning me to the bookshelf.

I peer through the window. Our dog, barking. Papa cups his mouth. A scream culls the serenity. “Jerusalema, moloi wa mosadi,” he whispers in Setswana: witch. “There’s a witch, a witch in our yard.”