My Eyes

It is said that women used to get raped in post offices, family homes, and public spaces. They couldn’t walk at night without carrying their keys in a way that could serve as weapons to defend themselves. That they couldn’t walk in peace. They couldn’t feel safe in some homes when an uncle, father, brother, or nephew was sliding into their bed. That men faced the same fears and couldn’t speak out for fear of being called less than a man. That those whose genders weren’t accepted were forced to bend and break at the violence throttling them.

We leave our doors unlocked. I can walk at night without looking over my shoulder. I can leave my drink unwatched without fearing that it might get spiked. We can leave our children unattended. Men can transition into women’s bodies, and women can transition to men’s bodies with ease and the aid of gender-affirming clinics in collaboration with the Body Hope Facility. There are no hijackings, robberies, or hit-and-runs. Botswana is a utopia of peace, and it is worth the privacy we give. No one would dare commit a felony against a microchipped body. I am always safe wherever I roam.

The world is considered a crime-free place because crime is immensely lower than before. Given the number of people waiting for new bodies, the government has faced such pressure to meet their demand that citizens are criminalized for minor infractions and their bodies recycled for new souls who face strict surveillance and latent criminal tendencies. Souls who have committed low-level crimes are ineligible for a new body and must either serve an extended sentence of punishment trapped in limbo before they can be loaded into a new body or serve eternity for the highest degree of crime committed. I’ve heard worst-case scenarios of people being evacuated from their bodies for offenses such as shoplifting, burglary, and petty theft, so there’s one more body to supply those on the waiting list. This will be my fate and worse: the loss of my daughter and her loss of her body.

The upside is that a person will think twice before groping a woman, breaking and entering a house, or committing an act incited by their ill-will thoughts to another lest they lose their body; as Mama always quotes, “‘If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two hands and go to hell, into the unquenchable fire.’ A body that sins must be cut off from the owner.”

And I wish to utter to her,

my mouth has sinned,

my body has sinned,

and might my daughter be dismembered from me?

It takes a lot to make a perfect world that bleeds crime at the seams.

The Mokolodi townhouse, painted charcoal black, with off-white roof sheeting. Jan, a car aficionado, stands by the garage’s slate stone cladding as I park my car. He pats the car’s body: an SUV by a Kalanga automaker he invested in. “Let’s hit the road.”

“Eish, can’t. He’s expecting me any minute now,” I say.

“He got you on curfew?”

“Ja, something like that.”

Jan steps forward, teases his fingers into the waistband of my pants, tugs me forward, and I have to lean my head so far back to keep eye contact. “Love, you shouldn’t be chilling with babysitters.” He tips his head to one side. “Got some stuff to turn around our day.”

“Don’t be dom. I don’t just hang around you for the sex and drugs. Quit advertising our dates like that to entice me.”

He pulls back. “You’re the one who keeps calling me a side-bitch.”

I look away. “It’s a joke.”

“Why’d you even come?” he asks.

“I wanted to see you, even for a second. Sober.”

He shrugs. Moves back. “Well, come in. It’s your house, too, after all.”

The house we’re renting, well, technically, that he’s renting for us. We’re halfway official. Damn. I follow him past the front garden, up the steps, and into the foyer of our home, serenaded by a shimmering chandelier. Jan waits for me in the kitchen.

“I have a gift for you.” He opens the drawer with the utensils. Inside sits a box wrapped in a chiffon ribbon. “Happy anniversary.”

No. No. No. I swallow, step back.

“It’s not what you think,” he says sadly. “Open it.”

I untie it. Sitting on a cushioned tiny pillow is a circular grey disk, small enough to fit in my palm, with a blue LED light in the center. I raise it to the light. “What is it?”

“I want to have sultry, dirty conversations with you without getting flagged.” He traces my microchip with his thumb. “I got this for us. When we’re together. Got it manufactured in Malaysia by a tech expert I shared undergrad classes with. He helps with our firewall and technological breaches.”

“What does it do?” I ask.

“I promised you I would protect you,” he says. “This tool interferes with the microchip’s transmission signal, the recording interface that dials back your conversation to the police monitoring towers. You just need to press the center to activate it. When it’s on, it’s blue. So if you were snorting coke, the flagging sensor wouldn’t control your microchip to, say, stop you or report you. Ergo, no drone will be activated to find you.”

We got away with it before, the drugs and all. There’s this secret gentlemen’s club of some sort, in Lobatse, a haven for microchipped men. Its walls are retrofitted with a substance that manipulates surveillance and allows the men to get loose with sex, alcohol, and drugs. Jan used to take me there, to one of the private rooms where we’d get up to dirty deeds. But this device he’s offering is flexible, portable, and offers privacy from prying eyes.

A tiny tool that can serve as a cushion for my thumb.

I touch my face. “But my eyes.”

His thumb brushes my cheek. “Your eyes are beautiful, love. You could walk into a bank and rob it, but as long as a warning alert is intercepted, their monitoring towers won’t flag you. Only flagged visuals are assessed; the others get drowned in the noise of every wiretapped person’s stored footage.”

“But the footage will still be in their servers of, say, ‘me snorting drugs,’” I say.

He nods.

“That’s still dangerous,” I add.

“It’s better than nothing.”

“I mean, anyone can search my profile and analyze my footage.”

“It’s AI monitored. It’s illegal for any human—”

“And you believe that? That’s a lie the government probably tells the public.”

He steps closer, rubs my arms. “Even if it’s a lie, they’d have to reveal their lie if they were to prosecute you.”

I used to wonder why people committed crimes even though they were aware they’d get caught. Men who’d rape and murder. Women who’d steal and murder. People who laundered money. Couldn’t they just restrain themselves? How stupid can one be to give in to a temporary impulse that will destroy their lives permanently? It’s all about control, restriction, and discipline. But the amount of sacrifice is too heavy a weight to carry. At some point, you break under the pressure, you give in. And I realize impulses aren’t temporary. Jan is an impulse I’ve had for years. What’s the point of life if all I’m doing is restricting myself from living? Having an affair isn’t a crime. I’m not killing anyone. In fact, the forensic panel are bound by the confidentiality clause. If one of them so much as breathed out the affair to my husband, they’re done for. It wouldn’t be that difficult to trail it back to the snitch. But the drugs. Oh, the drugs. There’s always a loophole in every system. No matter who you are, which part of the world you live in, there’s always a fucking loophole you can squeeze through.

Jan hands me the remote that will manipulate the signal into an innocuous one. “But,” he says, “the remote has to be on—blinking a blue light—during the event. Otherwise, it’s ineffectual.”

I stare at him, unable to take him at his word. Am I naive to fully entrust my life to Jan? Some days, I think so when I call him randomly, and he drops everything to meet me. Some days I think not. I don’t have too many options, nor do I have the energy to find them. Am I repeating my mistakes with men? From the emotionally unavailable Elifasi to Jan and his promises? Am I repeating history with Jan? How do I know if I’ve picked a lousy seed again?

Eli and I got married full of promises that are comatose now. I’d be selling myself short, trusting Jan, giving him full access to me while having no evidence from our past to show me that he could protect me.

Jan. I stare at him, his thick eyebrows, deep-set light-brown eyes, and his summer-set brown skin glazing in the sunlight. I press the tips of my fingers against his sharp jaw and his lips, memorizing the shape of his face, his breath a firelight against my skin. “It’s easy to make promises, not so to fulfill them,” I whisper, placing the remote back into his hands. “I have much to lose, and you’ve nothing to worry about.”

He looks sadly at the remote before putting it into his pants pocket. His breath is warm against my face when he whispers, “If we’re going to have a serious conversation, let’s at least relax a bit.”

I raise an eyebrow as he uncorks a bottle of wine.

“Isn’t it too early for a drink?” I ask, reaching for two wine glasses.

“I’ve been up since 3:00 a.m., work shit,” he says, walking toward the fireplace, pressing a switch to ignite it. We sit in the lounge, and I watch his Adam’s apple bob up and down as he takes a long sip.

“There’s a cost to trusting you, Jan,” I say. “Losing my child, going to prison . . . Any slip-up will lead to that. As you’ve revealed, your family is exempt from what we ordinary people experience.”

I have a terrifying fear that although Elifasi may have the power to protect our child, he wouldn’t dream of wanting it, for it would mean him being a single parent should I be imprisoned. Would he truly let her die because of that? He’d instead find a new wife and start a family from scratch; after all, he completely cut ties from his previous body-hop’s identity. No, I can’t think such things, for it’ll only give them life and jinx death into my daughter. It’s only real if I say it out loud, and my husband would never abandon me or his child like that.

What kind of life is this that my freedom is infinitesimally restricted? Should I wait a hundred years until the law tightens or loosens its noose around my body? Should I consider investing my entire season in relocating to a place that treats women better, like Canada, where my other best friend immigrated? There is no perfect place for a person like me.

“You know I would never let anything happen to you,” Jan says.

A laugh escapes my mouth at his naivety and audacity. “One thing, Jan, that you don’t understand is that you haven’t lived as a woman in this place, so it’s easier for you to make promises,” I say, leaning onto my knees, grazing my glass across the table’s edge. “I know married friends with men and women like you. Promises, promises, promises—being used, and when the price gets too high, we’re discarded. My friend in Cape Town was microchipped, single, and got into a relationship with a wealthy woman who promised him marriage and a perfect life. But marrying a microchipped man would destroy her career and image, so she bought time by asking that they be private. When they were photographed together, landing in the gossip magazines, she took only a few hours to toss my friend aside and find someone ‘respectable’ she could marry to confirm her reputation. His career suffered, and hers is still intact.”

“It’s been two years, and you think I would do that to you?” Jan asks. “I’m the one getting divorced.”

“My husband is dangerous.” The words are projectiles propelling from my mouth before I can stop them. They land on him with shock, and his eyes widen in surprise. Perhaps now he will feel the risk. “Eli monitors me in the house and can monitor me outside the house. What’s to stop him from logging into my feed? From seeing us in this instance, watching us? Nothing. He can find a sneaky way to do so, and his colleagues will surely protect him if he’s, say, caught in the act.”

Jan’s perplexed look turns into worry. “Well, he hasn’t said anything, has he?”

“The thing about Eli is that he knows how to use resources available to him to his advantage, even people he despises,” I say instead. “He hates one of his colleagues, but you would think they’re best friends when you see them together. It scares me sometimes how Eli’s calculative on the fly when unplanned events occur for him to use to his advantage. It would take a while for a normal person to see that they can turn a situation in their favor. And honestly, he can be very patient waiting for the outcome knowing that it’ll be fruitful and hence worth the discomfort he has to endure.”

“Discomfort?” Jan asks.

“If he knows that I had an affair, for example, he’d keep his mouth shut to keep me comfortable or docile, so I don’t see what he has planned for me, so I don’t mess his promotion up. He’ll probably wait to get to the top position before he kicks me to the curb. You’re only valuable to him for as long as you’re useful.”

Jan sighs. “That’s petty.”

“Angazi, but Eli has an eye for spotting strategies in the most minor scenarios. His brain is always on, ticking, and working, processing the environment and the people in it like life is a never-ending chess game. Sometimes I can tell by the shade of concentration in his eyes that he’s scheming something. I was a chess piece bride, probably. Eli is not the man you give an office in a powerful organization and expect him not to go snooping around lured by the power of access. To you, you wouldn’t see him step foot out of those boundaries, but he’s long left the room and already using that power on you to blind you from seeing his steps.”

“You think he’s using the technology at work for his benefit?” Jan asks, shocked, which is surprising for someone who’s the son of an unscrupulous businessman.

“Probably. He’d never admit that to his wiretapped wife. Trust no one. Not even dead people. He says, ‘Secrets always come out if you bury them in people. So bury the secret in yourself to keep it safe.’”

Jan leans back, thumb to his chin, musing. “Perhaps I shouldn’t quite undermine a man like your husband.”

“He interrogated me after my forensic evaluation about an affair I’m having, but nothing came of it. After all, I’m behaving as he’d like,” I say, pondering. “Well, I’m behaving to a certain extent. On paper, he’s a family man, has the package of a wife and child—he benefits from it as long as I uphold that image, too.”

Jan clenches his fingers around his wine glass. “Nelah, why are you still married to him if he’s dangerous to you?”

“It’s less dangerous in the marriage than out of it,” I say, gulping my wine. “Don’t you get it? You don’t just book out from dangerous men who wield such power.”

“Does that mean you’re planning something?” Jan asks, his voice heavily salted with excitement.

I ignore the question and ask, “You say you can protect me, but do you have the power to protect me from a man like him?”

A breath hitches in his chest, and he stares at the fireplace, the flames reflecting in his irises, mesmerizing him into a far-off memory. “When I graduated from university, I started running one of my father’s subsidiaries in South Africa and Dubai. Our businesses are all kept in the family, and my father groomed me to head these companies. You don’t negotiate with my father. You follow his instructions. That’s how I grew up.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I ask. “It’s in no way related to what I just said.”

“You asked me if I have any power to stop a man like your husband,” he says. “May I continue?”

I nod, drinking in his words rather than the wine.

“If I disobeyed him, I’d lose everything, be disowned,” Jan says, twisting the stem of the wine glass in his fingers. “My father made sure to remind me of that threat. If he needed something, I had to drop everything I was doing to satiate him.”

I recall the times I spent with Jan. He’d get a call from his father and leave immediately. It frustrated me that he was at the beck and call of his father, dropping everything, regardless of what we were doing. We’d argue because I never understood why he allowed himself to be his father’s slave.

“Initially, I was blinded by my privilege until I couldn’t stand it anymore being under his thumb,” Jan continues. “I worked hard to separate myself from him, but he had informants everywhere and would block and threaten me. It took two hundred years plus to navigate without him finding out—”

“Two hundred?” I ask, perplexed. “This is your first lifespan, no?”

“Well, by the book, yes. But it’s my second.”

The anger struggles to flow in my body, for I am fed up with their intoxicated privilege. “What does this mean? You’re not his real son?” I ask.

“I was his son in my first lifespan. We were known as an uncle and son of the family,” Jan says.

I gape. Close my mouth, stare at the passing scene outside our tinted windows. “Fok maan.” I turn to him. “Have you ever been on the waiting list?”

He looks ahead and steeples his hands between his legs. “No,” he says quietly. I think I misheard him. “No,” he repeats. “But, unlike the rest of my family, my memories were erased when I entered this lifespan. My family met many obstacles this time, so I wasn’t the only Koshal who endured this loss.”

“What was different this time?” I ask. “The power of the Koshal name unable to be effectively corrupt?”

Jan shakes his head. “I’ve just caught whispers about the embroilment of the Murder Trials, Matsieng, and memories. I don’t know how those link together. But whoever they were dealing with couldn’t allow them that much privilege because Matsieng is dealing with a deficit of resources.”

“Deficit of resources? Why would Matsieng need resources? What type of resources?”

He shrugs. “I was never given access to that information.”

A cold breath escapes my lips, and I curl my fingers around my wine glass. “Your secrets are of no value to me,” I whisper. “If you think that’s how you’ll coerce me.”

Jan continues, “I had to be careful of what I said, whom I spoke to, and whom I was headhunting for the companies I wanted to start. Of course, when I started my second lifespan, I had to start from scratch and reconnect to the people I was secretly talking to. I had to strategize on whose identity I’d use to register and front companies. I had to use technology that obscured my identity in meetings and calls. By the time I got out, he was too stunned, he admired my skills, and he was surprisingly calm.”

“That doesn’t sound like Aarav,” I whisper, suddenly cold.

He stares deep into his wine. “There’s something I never told you. Before, you used to ask why I allowed him so much control over me. It isn’t for the money and power of the Koshal family. It’s because my identity, the body he gave me, is controlled by my father.”

Terror fills my lungs. “What does that mean?”

“He has me hostage in this body.” Jan breathes out the weight of his demise. “My father has a trail of evidence that could destroy my life if it were revealed. He got me the first and second bodies illegally. The evidence will only incriminate me and not him. If I don’t follow his instructions, he will use all that documentation to expose me to the authorities. After all, he colludes with politicians and the government. It’ll only be easy for him to ensure that even my being a Koshal won’t protect me. So I minimally find ways to satisfy him without forgetting myself, which is a difficult balance.”

“Jesus, have you tried to destroy the evidence he has?” I ask.

A sad smile spreads across Jan’s face. “Love, you have a dangerous man in your life, and so do I. It is less dangerous to be his son than outside that kinship. And he’s been here for a long time to know how to protect his evidence.”

“Fuck, Jan, if I’d known.”

“I didn’t want to burden you with that,” he confesses. “I’ve thought about trafficking myself out of this identity, but I have children and people I love. Divorcing myself from this identity is as difficult as you divorcing your husband. I despise my father. Sometimes I fantasize about killing him, but . . . I’m not capable of murder. Do you think it’s beautiful that my privilege comes from the crimes my family commits? No, it comes at a cost, and I wish to be free of the Koshal family.”

I stare at my wine glass, unable to consume anything. “I feel terrible for how I treated you when it came to him. I didn’t know—”

“That we are victims to men?” he says, a sad laugh escaping his mouth. “I may not know your life as a woman, but even powerful men abuse me.”

“What’s your plan?”

“For decades, I tried finding trails that would connect him to his illegal body-hopping scheme he got me entangled in, but he’s been good in keeping his hands clean of the deed. If the people he worked with haven’t disappeared or died, some aren’t willing to speak for fear of the Koshal name. I’ve considered incriminating him for other things, but if he falls, he’ll take everyone down with him.”

“These men can’t be that untouchable,” I say.

“Well, it seems they are. For now.”

The fire dances in its furnace. “Then how can you promise to protect me from Eli when you can’t even protect yourself from your father?”

He swirls the wine glass, watching the dark red liquid spin and spin before drinking it to its last drop. Stares at me. “Love, my father is more powerful than Elifasi. I do have my advantages being within the confines he has me in. Elifasi is nothing but an ant compared to him. I come from the most powerful family in this country. Your husband is easily disposable. I will use my family’s power to protect you if I must. We are effective and fast.” He pulls the remote from his pocket, placing it into my hands. “Do you trust me now?”

I am moving from one powerful man to another. Which one is more dangerous for me? There’s a thrill of excitement knowing that I could ask Jan anything, and he would do it. He’s observing me as if he can see my thoughts forming a line in my mind.

“Would you prefer if your husband got promoted or demoted?” he asks. “Remember that promotion will give him more power. A demotion will inadvertently affect the finances of your marriage. Or would you prefer a microchip-free body today? You do understand that my words mean nothing without evidence,” he says, tapping his wrist to project a hologram and mentally tapping a series of texts I can’t see. Within a minute, he gets a call and nods, whispering, “We’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

My mouth falls open. “What did you do? Where are we going?”

He takes hold of my hands and guides us to the car, which cruises past Phakalane’s tree-lined streets, the sun a gilded eye in the sky. It takes half an hour of driving through graveled back roads into Oodi, shadows of thorn bushes slurring against the windows as I’m swallowed by the leather seats, alcohol simmering in my blood.

We come to high wooden gates and a tall fence singing with electricity. A groundskeeper waves as we drive into a vast land of trees to a white-washed farmhouse juxtaposed with an elegant-looking warehouse with the backdrop of an orchard.

“What is this place?” I ask.

“It’s one of the body-fostering agencies that our family owns and runs to assist in storing bodies for those whose minds are held up in immigration application systems,” Jan says, driving the car into the garage.

A dissonance in my mind as I watch dust unravel behind our car’s trail. My life before arriving here feels like a distant mirage. I open my door and slide out into the serenity of the outside, the air cool against my skin. A dog barks in the distance.

“This way,” Jan says, jerking his head to the right.

I follow him toward the warehouse, which appears metallic with a glassy surface. Inside, it’s sophisticated, with reflective surfaces and without many openings or windows, as if the intrusion of sunlight would deteriorate the building’s innards.

A doctor approaches with quick steps, smiling and shaking Jan’s hand. “Mr. Koshal, seeing you again is a great pleasure.” His eyes skim mine, but he mentions nothing about my presence as he leads us to a set of doors with the words AUTHORIZED ACCESS. I capture nothing of his face except his white coat, hairy hands, and shiny shoes.

Past the doors is a room similar to the Matsieng Fertility Fund, dark as if subterranean with bodies stored in glasslike coffins, eyelids slid over the eyes peacefully. The doctor, who has no identity card for me to know his name, guides us toward one metallic-bottomed coffin where a body lies waiting, naked, face up—a woman’s body.

“We have the theater ready for the mind transfer and the documentation you need, sir, which we procured with some difficulty, but under these circumstances, we’ve done everything in our power. We also have a host to take over her identity and the associated risks.” The doctor’s eyes skirt mine when he says this. “My partners are still working with our associates at the Matsieng Fertility Fund to transfer ownership of the fetus to Ms. Nelah Bogosi-Ntsu; that may be highly unlikely, but we are trying.”

I gape, shock hanging at my ribcage.

“That will be all,” Jan says. The doctor nods, taking that as his cue to leave. Jan turns to face me. “I know you don’t want this, but I wanted to show you what I can do. Your husband will receive the promotion. Do you trust me now?”

“This is impossible,” I whisper, grazing my fingers across the coffin’s façade, thinking about my best friend Kea, who may have been in these places while waiting for naturalization body-hop approval into a different continent. Could the Koshal family have hosted her body and sold it?

“This is one of our businesses,” Jan says. “Of course, we follow a set of regulations, but there’s always a loophole in how a business runs.”

“My friend, Kea—”

“I remember you talking of her, and I looked into it,” he says, and my eyes cling to his face with hope. “Our agency never fostered her, but one run by another businessman did. Unfortunately, her body was sold to a private buyer. From thereon, I’ve no leads.”

“Does that happen often?”

He nods, folding his arms. “Her body can be written off as damaged goods and cremated when it, in fact, was sold.”

“For what purpose?” I ask.

He raises his eyebrow. “Illicit motives of traffickers.”

My nails clasp my lips. Oh, Kea. Shem skepsel.

He takes my hand, walking us back to the outside and sunlight, and I take deep breaths of the flowery scent saturated in the air. Push back the thoughts of Kea, of the devastation, as Jan waits for the calm to claim my body.

Finally, I say, “If my microchip fails to record any part of my day, it will get flagged in the monitoring system, and I will be immediately hauled in for a chip repair or replacement by the government.”

“The microchip will send a technical failure notification if the recording has no moving pictures or if it’s completely blank,” he says in agreement. “This device will manipulate the images fed into your microchip into a sanitized version, say if you’re taking drugs or driving a knife into someone’s flesh.”

“Bathong, Jan!” I exclaim.

“I joke, I joke about the last part,” he says, raising his hands in surrender, then strokes my cheek. “You wouldn’t hurt a fly. The changes implemented aren’t that drastic—the device blots out the illegal parts of the visuals, or if the change requires too much an edit, it augments a new scene using images from your archived footage, but it never changes the scene’s location. Otherwise, that will contradict your live real-time coordinates and set off an alert to the surveillance system. Now remember that your story has to correlate with the manipulated images fed to your microchips if your morning assessor interrogates you about your whereabouts.”

I stare at him, unable to find my words.

He places the remote into my palm, and perhaps for the first time, I trust him.

The peace this will give me, the freedom, what I could get away with. I stand on my tiptoes, press my lips against him. “Thank you. You’ve no idea what this means to me.”

His lips smile against mine, words leaking into my mouth: “This is also for you. When you want time to yourself. Away from everything. The surveillance. Your husband. Me.”

I step back. Brush my braids over my shoulder. “Never you.”

“Funny you say that when you won’t even remember us last year.”

“Ag, Jan,” I moan.

He tucks his hands into his jeans pockets. “We’ve been together for close to two years, but for some odd reason, you pretend as if the year-and-a-half never happened.”

“It never happened.”

“You just disappeared.”

“I had a miscarriage.”

“And now you’re back.”

“Jan.”

“S’tru. Don’t look at me like that, ja. If you stay married to him, this can only go so long until I find someone else. Then this will be over. I mean it.”

“So it’s okay that I cheat for you, but you can’t cheat for me?”

“I have been cheating for you, too. I’m divorcing my wife.”

I swallow the tension, the room chills. “You’re mine, Jan.”

A panic grips me when he says, “If I am to take this risk, I must say this: I can’t be yours forever if you won’t be mine forever.”