22:25 /// Truth Bomb

Our car winds through a narrow Phakalane road hemmed in by thorn bushes and paloverde trees. My chest’s heated with remorse. My crimes have desecrated my mother, forced her into a horrifying role. How can I ever repent for what I’ve done? And now we’re ten minutes late.

“You sure this the right place?” Jan whistles. “This is high-end real estate.”

I shrug as I pinpoint the house number in a suburb of privacy, modern architecture, lawns, and driveways. Rosebushes and kids’ scooter bikes are bumming it out in the scatter-rained gardens.

He slows onto the driveway adjacent to the garage of a brick-faced double-story, lined with a strip of grass. There’s a wall on either side of the gabled house that separates the front yard from the back. The front windows are dark, no lights on.

Jan switches off the ignition. “I’ll jump the wall and break in from the back to open the front door for you.”

“No time. Break down the front door.”

His eyes widen. “How are we going to carry a dead body into the house without getting caught by the neighbors?”

“It’s 10:00 p.m. Looks like a geriatric neighborhood. They’re proba­bly passed out.”

“Which is where young couples hunt real estate: for the quiet.”

“Look, who fucking cares? It’s not our problem,” I say, stepping out of the car, clicking open the trunk. “That’s the Murder Trial Committee’s headache. They want us to participate in this sick game of theirs as they watch with their booze and bets, then they’ll have to deal with the mess.”

“Good point.”

I gather Moremi’s feet, Jan shimmies his hands under her armpits, and we hoist her out. Opposite us, a car trundles onto an identical driveway. Doors swing open. A young mother is surrounded by two toddler boys with party hats and party blowers jumping out from the car with squeals, the streetlights like dancing candles around them.

The mother carries a box of birthday presents from the car’s back seat. Her smile freezes. She stops short. Watches Jan kick down the front door, and both of us promptly carry a decomposing body inside. Her box falls to the ground when I return to collect Moremi’s journal and screenplay. I wave, and smile. The woman runs, hustling her boys into the house, locks the door, sweeps open the curtain, and stares at me with a phone to her ear, hand trembling. The authorities will remedy the situation by tampering with her memory.

“What if Moremi doesn’t live alone?” Jan asks, standing by knee-­height woven baskets decorated in zigzag patterns that remind me of mud huts and the patterns that were imprinted onto their façades. We hesitate in the hallway, can’t see much through the side-lit windows. Jan picks a poker from the fireplace, stands adjacent to me under the dining room’s arch as he bounds through every room, leaving the doors opened.

Returns, smiling. “She has a cinema room. Fucking brilliant. She has everything we need down there. You’ve got to see this. I think she was working on something.”

I sigh in relief, staring at the ebony African masks hanging on the wall, surrounded by wood scents from the flooring and exposed rafters. “We can upload the contents of her microchip.”

A neat, luxurious home, with an open-plan kitchen with black-­grouted subway tiles, living room with a beige sectional couch, a modest office, blond wood shelves crammed with books, a spacious garden with a hot tub surrounded by fir trees, and an upper floor with two bedrooms. No framed pictures.

The cinema room. Humble. A starlit ceiling. We stand at the back, moving down a set of thick-carpeted stairs flanking one side of the three rows of plush leather seats draped in greys and black colors. The screen, shadowed and blank, upfront with a game console and a satellite feed. Of course, she’s a cinephile and gamer. Has she housed any of her private slasher films here? Who are her closest friends? Who does she spend downtime with in this home? Told her deepest secrets? Has anyone even tried to reach her? What was she before we destroyed her life? I feel despicable because we’ve annihilated a woman and everything she’s worked hard for.

Jan picks a tablet from a front-row seat, flicks on the home automation system’s interface. Switches on the lights. The screen glares blue. One wall is clad with hundreds of famous film posters, genres ranging from thriller to horror, encasing the cliché typical frozen pose of a screaming woman, blood-dabbed in pop art colors. Moremi, a horror auteur, is now stuck in a real-life horror show. What does she think of that? Consider this a satiric spin on the final girl? It is, after all, contained in my microchip’s footage. What if, centuries later, this footage will be used for documentaries to expose our government, the corruption—everything we’ve done to Moremi and all that has been done to us? Either way, both victim and murderer are always supported by obsessive fans.

The cold dark huddles around us, reeking of death, rotten skin, and mildew.

Jan lies her face down on the floor.

My phone rings. Eli.

Deep lines of frustration scathe Jan’s forehead.

I click “answer.”

“Hey, babe, how’d the site visit go?” Eli asks.

“What?”

“Your Mahalapye project.”

Oh. “Sorry, it’s a bit crazy down here. Workers used the wrong concrete mix. That’s a financial headache and screw-up we’re remedying.”

“It’s after ten. Don’t tell me you’re still out there.”

“Talking to one of the suppliers—no one sleeps in this industry,” I say.

“Right. Well, I’m almost done reading the fairy tales. I never thought it’d be so peaceful reading to our unborn baby.” A pause. “I miss you. Let me see your face.”

I stare at Jan. Spin toward a plain wall. Activate the video call. Smile.

“Where are you?” he asks.

“One of the barracks.”

I signal to Jan, who interrupts from behind the phone, “Boss, there’s a problem with the foundation—”

“Have to go,” I say. “Talk in the morning. Sleep well.”

“I love you,” he says. My guts squirm with bile. I hang up.

“What?” Jan asks.

“I just got a strange feeling from that call.”

“Nothing regarding him can be worse than our predicament,” Jan says.

“I don’t trust Eli. He’s always up to something,” I say. “There’s nothing I can think of that can give him a leg up on us.”

“Do you think he knows that Moremi is after him?” Jan asks.

“He’d be dead by now if he did. The victims don’t know until they see Moremi. But Eli works for the police. Surely, he must have someone giving him confidential information.”

“Well, there’s no evidence to prove that,” Jan says, raising his hands in frustration. “We’ve nothing to worry about except getting distracted by worrying. Surely, I hope that Moremi will go for him before me. If she were to kill me before him . . . I mean, you can’t love that cockroach more than me. I’m stuck in this with you, not him.”

“Hae, Jan, whom I love is not important—”

“People are dying,” Jan says, “your love is worth my life right now. The less you love me, the earlier I die.”

“Jan, of course, I love you.”

“You just don’t know who you love more. How fucking great.”

I press my hands to his chest. “No, that’s not—”

“Let’s get on with it.” He moves toward a workstation adjacent to the screen. “I found an identical quantum computer to dock onto her microchip. To move forward, we need to experience her memories.” Jan’s breath is uneasy when he speaks. “How the fuck does this work? I’ve never had a microchip.”

I bring up the screen of the quantum computer. “Press your thumb down at a ninety-degree angle. It’ll snatch DNA data from your finger­print scan. This will connect us wirelessly and, with the help of her pills, it’ll put us into the simulation by manipulating our brain and forcing us into a deep sleep.”

Jan plants his finger onto the screen. “How do you know all of this?”

I smile sadly. “My husband used to do this sometimes when he’d assess my memory files for undetected infractions. Sometimes we’d watch them on our Plasma.”

Jan’s eyes widen. “Jesus. You do know that wasn’t necessary, right?”

“I know. But better him than dealing with some police officer.”

Jan cups my cheek. “I want you to win.”

“I want both of us to win.” I smile and resume explaining. “Eli would say ‘the DNA is the storehouse of all your information,’” I say, mimicking my husband whilst placing the coal-black handheld quantum computer into the projector’s dock for instant connection. It doesn’t need to be physically connected to Moremi, as it seems she’s used it previously. A neon-blue light zips along the slim edges. “And the microchip gathers biometric data from it.” I point at the quantum computer, which long ago used to be the size of a low-income home, but now is a portable, handheld device. “The computer will be able to recognize her DNA and interact with it, gathering her data, transmitting and altering it into digital files and potentially showing us any other stored files, which it’ll use as material for the simulation.”

The door swings open, pouring in the hallway lights. We shield our faces, and Jan steadies his grip around the poker. Moremi. Disfigured hands, newly bloodied. In one hand, she’s holding the foot of a man, dragging the comatose body. I cringe as she inhumanly walks down toward us, the downlights careening off the shadows and planes of her peeled-skin face. Jan grimaces, unaccustomed to this sight I’ve seen a dozen times up close.

I hurry toward the unconscious body, face congealed in blood. “That’s my brother. What have you done to him?”

“You owe me a thank you. It was either him or your daughter,” she says. “You wanted more time. This is how I buy time. You called me whilst I was in the middle of something. This better be good.” She licks her fingers. “Can’t say much about your brother. He’s halfway to death as we speak. Soon as we’re done, I’m going to finish him off.”

I exhale. “His wife and kids—”

“Oh, nothing to worry about,” she adds with a seductive lilt. “They’re still asleep. It was a quiet affair. Although, it was an effort to bring him along.”

Jan says, “I’ll go find something from the rooms upstairs to rest him on.”

He exits the room, returns ten minutes later with a dishrag, pillow, and a blown-up mattress which we place Limbani onto. I wipe the blood from his face, listen to the little breaths leaving his mouth. Eyes sealed into sleep, he looks peaceful, a contrast to his acerbic nature. My brother is still alive. I have to keep him alive. For Mama. For Papa. That leaves Jan, my husband, and my daughter.

“Do you remember why you were in the middle of the road after midnight?” I ask, getting to the point.

“No,” Moremi answers with death-burned eyebrows. I can taste her hunger for the truth of what happened to her.

“Or why my father is looking for you?” Jan asks.

“Your father is not important to me,” she says, voice harsh. “But, you, oh, I can’t wait to lick your nerve endings and munch your penis off.”

I gasp. She’s playing the monster effectively; her creative well is brimming with morbid ideas.

Jan squirms, adjusts his pants. Clears his throat. “There’s a reason I’m asking. It seems that you’ve upset a lot of powerful people. You have secrets that can destroy a thousand men. No one wants a woman that powerful. They sent my father after us to clean up this mess. He burned the microchips we retrieved from your bag.”

Her eyebrows rise. “What microchips?”

“Jesus.” Jan thumps his head.

“Death has erased her memory,” I note.

She jolts forward. “You caved my fucking skull in with your fucking car. What the fuck did you expect?” Her anger trills the air. The more people she kills, the less we can contain her vengeance. “I should finish you off right now. Fuck this list, these rules, this truth.”

I raise my hands. “Moremi, stay with us. Hold on, please. Come, let me show you something.” We walk toward the front-row seats, the large screen. “We’re going to plug ourselves into the footage from your microchip. You’ll be able to watch.”

“Why can’t I come with you?” she whines.

“You’re a ghost,” Jan says, losing patience.

“Unfortunately,” I add softly, “the technology is not advanced enough to interact with incorporeal people.”

Jan makes several selections on the computer’s screen. A message appears on the cinema’s screen, signalling its connection to Moremi’s microchip, giving us visual access to its contents.

“Now we’ve connected your microchip, let’s have a look,” I say.

Moremi narrows her eyes at the screen, not understanding what she’s seeing.

Jan scrolls his hands across the cinema’s screen, which responds to his gestures. There’s only one folder titled “Truth Bomb.” “Truth Bomb?” Jan asks, staring at Moremi. “Does that ring a bell?”

Something flickers in her eyes, then she doubles over, palms on her head. “It hurts. The memories, they hurt. Stop!”

“I don’t think she’s meant to process any memories prior to the accident,” I say. But even when we’re alive, we can’t process memories from our previous lifespans. We’re no different than dead women: everything is always stolen from us, men are our death. And Matsieng is a female god, oppressed beneath the earth, fed evil to subside Xer wrath, drinking women’s murders and our blood.

“It won’t stop.” Her hand throttles outward, wraps around my neck, and she gains some solace, some peace it seems, for she’s no longer breaking down from the torture of the onslaught of memories. Then it hits me: I am the painkiller to her pain. The only way to stop the painstaking retrieval of her memories is for her to deal with the task she’s assigned: killing, avenging her murder. Attacking me.

“That’s why you can’t remember,” I whisper, “because you’ve been killing and killing. Any moment of rest allows you to remember. The curse doesn’t want you to remember.”

“What’s important to remember other than you killing me?” she shouts.

“Because your body was infiltrated with an illegal microchip,” I say, “against your wishes. That’s far worse than what we’ve done. Whoever did this to you, you can’t even remember them. Don’t you want to know what they did with your body?”

“No, no, no,” she cries. “You—you—killed me!”

I raise my hand to Jan, stopping him from interfering. “Open the files.” And to Moremi, “I understand what you’re going through, the pain. If you want the truth, you have to steer through it. We’re here. You’re not alone. Look, we have to work together. We’re on the same team.”

“There is no us or team here when you’re not fucking dead,” she says.

“Fair enough,” I say. “But I’ll eventually be dead, and he’ll be dead, but we’re trying to do something bigger than our lives. You need to help us because this will help you, too. Now can you let me go?”

She considers. Releases her grip. Forces her hand down to her side, where it trembles under some undeniable force. Steps back into the shadows. Watches. My stomach twists. Can I really trust her not to kill us? She clenches her jaw, trying to steady herself, to cling to this one thing we’re trying to do.

“Jan, we don’t have much time,” I say. “She could kill us whilst we’re under.”

Her cheekbone-hung skin quivers when she grumbles, “Fingers.” Shaking, she doubles over, carves her nails into her jean-clad thighs. She cranes her neck, cocks her head to the side. “Fingers.” Her voice, coarse at the edges.

Jan shakes his head. “W-w-what?”

“You can’t kill him,” I bargain.

It’s too late. Moremi snatches him by his arm, her teeth clamp his fingers—smash, chew, and crunch. He growls and screams, floundering about. Imprisoning him into place against a wall with her free hand, she stretches her head outward, yanking the bony meat restrained by stretchy veins from Jan’s pain-screaming hand. The elastic fibers snap from the pull, dismembered from their three lost fingers lost in the bone-crunching synth sounds of Moremi’s mouth as she chews, chews, chews. She spits out the soggy mess of a thumb, index, and middle finger. Jan falls to his knees, hammers his fist into the carpet, stares at his decapitated fingers, no longer singular, individual forms, but mush.

Moremi sighs with ecstatic relief. “I feel better now. That should buy us some time.” My pity for her drowns me, and I reach forward to smear the blood off her lips. But something sharp and biting prickles between our skins, and she steps back at the sudden foreign fondness trickling from my body into hers.

Jan’s crippled moans dissipate into silence, into his tense jawline, biting down on the pain. I exit the room into the guest toilet and rummage through the counters looking for a first aid kit and return with alcohol and kitchen towels from the kitchen. I stumble down the cinema’s stairs and pour the clear alcohol onto his wounds and he screams into his fist, digging his head into his shoulder. He raises his head, swallows a bunch of painkillers as I apply pressure with an absorbent cloth around his raised hand. The white cloth quickly colors red as beads of sweat collapse from his face onto my working hands.

I brush his sweat-slick hair back. “Hold on, okay?”

I gather new towels and tie them tightly around Jan’s hand.

Moremi observes us with bloody, brown skin, eyes beady and black with hunger. There is no time to mourn lost limbs when they’re the cost of clinging to our lives. Efficiency is our only currency to secure our survival. But I understand why Jan stares at me incredulously like I’m some heartless bitch when I say, “Let’s get this over and done with before you pass out.”

He wipes the sweat from his face. Swallows. Eyes pale with life, he rises onto his feet. Exhales. “You’re right, straight to business,” he says.

Dizzy with shock, he sweeps his hands across the screen, opens the Truth Bomb folder. We find over a hundred video clips labeled with names and numbers of chronological order. Names of men, women, and the positions they hold: graphic designer, intern copywriter, creative director, secretary, CEO, editor, marketing director.

“Who are all these people?” Moremi asks. “Why do I have these files?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” I say. “We found ten unbranded microchips in your backpack that Aarav destroyed, but these must be the backups. Luckily, Aarav didn’t destroy the other items we found: your journal, screenplay, and a set of pills—”

“The pills.” Recognition flickers in her eyes. “The pills take you to a dream world.”

“Dream world?” I ask. “You mean they assist with the simulation?”

“They connect you to a dream world. I don’t want to go back there, please, no.” She slaps her palms against her face. “Too painful to remember.”

I place my hands on her shoulders. “Moremi, you’re not going back, wherever that is. Everything is going to be okay.” I turn to Jan. “We’ll consume the pills to initiate the simulation.”

He nods, points at an icon. “Moremi, it seems you’ve been editing the footage from your microchip. This one, for example, prefixed with VER 39 is the latest version which I believe we should watch.”

He double-clicks “1_VER 39_MoremiGadifele_graphic_designer,” and a video enlarges, projecting the healthy glow of Moremi’s living face on the screen. The ferocity in her beauty-taut face, supple with youth, is brown-stitched with a long-gone naivety.

She staggers back. “That’s me. I . . . I look so different . . . from now.” She stares down at her body, hands feeling the texture of exposed cartilage on her face. “I was so alive.” She presses her back into the wall, fear flickering in her eyes.

The Moremi in the video either sits or stands against the dim grey background. No other features. No desk, no plants, no window. Braids tied up high. Brown eyes flicker with vulnerability and fury. “Hello,” she says. “I am Moremi Gadifele, and this is my most personal docu-film: the truth. I hope it reaches the masses before the monsters find me. Their faces will show in the reel, their names will show in the credits. Either way, some of you know these people personally. As most fans know, I’m an IT consultant and film student, and I run a horror circus show that simulates live feeds of our most horrid nightmares into entertainment, films, and games. You enjoy being simulated into my work, being one with the characters. Unfortunately, this nightmare started when I was twenty years old and has been my reality for three years. Not only mine, but my colleagues’, my friends salaried elsewhere, and strangers bootlegged to multinational corporations by our own. Three years I’ve been working, filming, and editing this project in the only seconds of freedom I’ve got. No one knows what happens in the establishments that run our cities or the stories behind our irises. They’ve made us prisoners in our own bodies. The only way you can understand me is to be in my skin and behind my irises.”

The video cuts to black. Jan and I stare at each other. Moremi is a mangled confusion between the seats and the screen.

Jan asks, “Who are you?”

“I don’t know,” Moremi cries, falling to her knees, gripping at air’s fabrics. “I don’t know. Who am I? Please tell me who I am.” Her eyes glimmer in the soft lights, childlike.

I kneel, wrap my arms around her, press my fingers down her braids. “Shh, it’s going to be okay.”

She grips my shirt. “Something bad happened. Please, you have to find out.”

I swallow. “I promise we will.”

Jan clicks open the folder titled “Behind Our Irises.” In it, we find similar videos, hundreds and hundreds of them. He clicks the one titled “Moremi Gadifele.”

Jan hands me the chiffon of pills to untie. He pops one onto his tongue. Swallows. We’re back to the beginning. Drugs and fantasy. I slide one onto my tongue, chase it down with my saliva. I’m nervous of what we’re about to slip into. Quickly dizzy, Jan and I sit, side by side, holding hands.

The air is deep-freezer cold. The screen flicks to blue, revealing the preface:

I gasp and stare at Moremi, anxious. “Jesus, physically controlled, imprisoned in skin-tight abuse, chloroformed into subserviency—what does all this mean?”

The reflected words on Moremi’s face warp. “I don’t know,” she says.

“If we’re going to live out your experiences in your body, I’m seriously afraid of the abuse we’re going to go through,” I say.

Jan tugs at my hand, squeezes once. “Are you ready?”

“It’ll be just like a dream,” I say. “No, a nightmare.”

He nods. Presses play.

Black and white lines scratch across the cinema room’s screen, zipping back and forth as it processes through the reader. My eyes roll back and forth, making me drowsy. Jan’s hand loosens in mine. We sink into black. Even as we know the simulation dream has us under, our minds slip us into a new reality.