God, I’m So High

Dinner date with the side-bitch, and I’m the bad bitch. Jan’s fingers cuddle the remote that will hamper my microchip’s recording of our time together, the little LED light is a smiling blue light—if it’s not capturing what I’m doing, my activities won’t get flagged by the police monitoring towers. I’m officially offline. Been popping pills since noon. Can’t tell the time, how it clip-clopped from hot noon to sin-cold night, from office to the townhouse, home of our affair, paraded by the hooves of up-tempo music. But I’m here, night-clad, skin off. Elevated. This shit so good. Freckles of sweat skip my eye. Deep bass sways my vision. I swear the edges of my body fray. Skin more porous than usual. Mind lifts, slips through the skull, and Jan’s milky way trickles down my neck—how’d I get down so quick? Fuck it, the universe is glorious.

Time jitters.

Jan’s taut muscles writhe in his arms as he works the sommelier corkscrew into the wine bottle. Pours another glass under the warm glow from the valance lights. I’m dancing with the devil on my left side, God on my right, ain’t sure which way I’m tipping by the end of tonight. But I’m a motherfucking god tonight. My foot daggers the air, clips a vase, shards sing the fucking night. Jan is somewhere, his voice a beast. It tremors through my uterus, and oh my God, I’m on my back.

Time is slayed, a dizzy bitch.

On the living room sofa, Jan’s head’s tucked in between my thighs, lips whispering to my lips, drives me heaven-high, tongue changes gear, strokes the G-spot, revs my heart. The night pushes my head back, and through the windows, it shows me the dark sky’s broken into splinters of glittering stars.

My mind is racing, racing out of me, out of time. Light shimmies, buries into my sight.

“Joh, is that the sun?” I ask.

Jan kisses me. Gin on his breath.

I could be dying, but my orgasm straddles the constellation’s reality. Husband only likes the devil in me. Not the sad. Not the clingy. Just the glitz and sin, the woman he fell in love with, cremated in marriage, exhumed by my lover. Vision sways, swimming in and out of my body. Lover stands, muscles licked by light. Walks to the glass table, skinny whites as its centerpiece. The moon’s dead, caked and crusted into powdered stone; Jan rakes his face through it, inhales the crisp pulverized bone. Exhales. Swipes tongue along teeth’s edge. Kisses me, I suck him high. He draws me one line. Guides my face. Nose slips some powdered moon into me. I skid into death’s lane, smoke my lover high. I am his cigar, his lips rope around my orgasm. Cigarette sex. I love this man. Death tastes delicious, so another line. Palms to skull, I try to hold my mind in, but it’s gone, it’s gone, it’s gone with God or the devil. The music’s dancing, the room is shaking, gravity eclipses my entire being. Murdered the pain, I’m so numb, I’m invincible, I could kill a bitch. The music scratches, my soul stirs.

“I’m a notoriously excellent driver,” I say.

Jan looks up from the table, where he’s fixing a line, and smirks. “If the lady wants to go for a drive, then we’re going for a drive.”

I lean back. “I’ve driven in a worse state, way over the limit, never hit anything. We’re safe, love. No accidents under my belt. I wouldn’t jeopardize our future.”

“Careful, don’t get too cocky with that.”

“Ooh, cocky.”

He returns to the table. Mixes pills, mixes demons, fuck it.

My larynx works: “We shouldn’t be mixing.” But my voice speaks from the far side of the room—it laughs and tinkles.

Jan burns something on a spoon, that ceramic gold, a sinful taste of death—

Darkness, lock-jawed. Where’d we go?

I wake up in the driver’s seat. Hands twisted around the wheel. The fast lane, a twisting sordid road, cut sharp by a speeding night. The speakers hush out cold, air-conditioned Afro-Mexican house tunes. Birdsong ripples through the music, cumbia tugs the beat forward, alchemizes the dark. We’re floating in a dream; I’m just beneath the surface, the charango-flute current blurring me. My consciousness pulses, grows out of my body. The weightlessness of the world, perfection. The strings of the charango, its fingers across my skin—

“What’s a charango?” Jan’s eyes on me.

My voice laughs, catches our thoughts torpedoing from our mouths. “Charango, it’s an Andean guitar.”

He nods. “Where’d you get this music from?”

My voice crushes the dashboard, roadkill spiel: “An ex. From college. He was a DJ. We had a bad breakup. He took my virginity, so I stole his stack of music. It tore him up, more than the breakup did. It was good revenge. He had no backups.” My throat snickers.

Jan nods his beer stein at me. “One would think you’re a stickler for bastard boyfriends.”

Again, time’s a dizzy bitch. I feel the sun screaming in some part of the world, moonwalks to now. Dashboard: we meander off the A1 highway, through the Oodi-Modipane Road. No self-driving, no quantum computer steering the wheel. Just my love, a smooth tarmac, that svelte sky. The back road connects us through Ruretse to the Tlokweng border road.

How’d we get here from the house? Memory teeters, moves in reverse. Its sound system echoes into my head of an hours-back scene:

We barreled to the car, giggling and tripping over domestic paraphernalia. Then the road. A carbon-fiber body slew our rush; the machine, a classic 600-horsepower supercharged V16 engine, 722 pound-feet of torque of high, so high. God, I’m so high.

Me: “Where’s my head?”

Jan: “It’s here, babe.” Hands me a joint.

Can’t breathe.

His hand stops the window going down. “Don’t, we’re hotboxing.” Hotbox, we’re burning. Someone gonna dox us.

No guilt. No pain. Nothing. Taste for speed. The devil trickles through the vents, simmers with the tangling smoke. “You good?” Jan asks.

My voice: “Work hard, party hard, ja.”

“I love you,” he whispers.

I turn onto a graveled road, stretch my hand out to him, tease his five o’clock shadow. He kisses my fingers, curls his tongue around them. I sigh into the leather seat. His free hand reaches for my thighs, moves my black lace dress up. I moan. He pushes my panties aside, whispers, “You’re wet.”

I could have him right here, sex in a 200 km/h drive.

He tips the amber drink into his mouth.

The road is slick with rain, a horned devil.

The car sails through the ocean of dark.

The world spins. Distorted arms of trees snag the night.

“We’re flying!” I shout-scream-cry.

Lightning blasts an avenue of trees into fluorescent ghosts.

The sky falls—

A dark shadow meteor-drops into the windshield. Its weight rolls, pinwheels against the hood onto the ground. A snap, a swerve. Bone-crunching.

“Jesus!” I scream. Swerve. Tires spit bits of rock to the side. Something catches in the wheel, it snags, swerving the car. The car swallows a lump on the gravel’s tongue. Another lump. Skidding, my head snaps against the window, neck cracking at the base. Jan’s hands slam into the dashboard, holding him steady. My eardrums pop, like the little sugary crackle sweets my niece eats. I hit the brakes. The car comes to a halt. My heart slams into my chest. My shoulder into the window. A standstill. The engine roars, sizzles. Hands braced against the wheel. Knuckles pale, snagging my skin taut. There are no speed bumps on this gravel. No wandering animals, except, perhaps, humans.

Jan’s hand hits the dashboard again, breaths chugging from his chest. “What the hell was that?”

“Jan?” My voice is hoarse, pinched. My braids have escaped their bind, soggy wet at the temple. My hand returns into my vision dark red, not wine. My blood. “Jan?” My voice a squeaky scream.

I turn to Jan, eyes wide. He blinks, hand still on the handbrake, having killed the motion of the car. “What was that?” Jan whispers.

“That was a cow, right?” I ask.

“It’d have bashed the screen in,” he says. “But a skinny cow wouldn’t do that.” It’d be a joke in a different scenario.

“I hit a skinny cow,” I plead. “I hit a skinny cow.” I hope. “I hit a skinny cow.” My hands shake, unclasp the seatbelt after several tries. A gravel road. Farms too far off. Thorn trees. Dusty air. My fingers slip against the door latch. It won’t open. I thumb the power lock, slide out into the heart-pounding dark, crumbling to the ground. I snap my head both ways, the dark giving forms to nothingness. Someone will grab me. Someone will grab me. A crunch of stones startles me. My heel snaps as I stumble to a stand.

The passenger door dings open as Jan exits the car. He walks to the back. I check the front. I exhale a sigh. We’re safe. Something must have fallen—but I look up to find nothing suspicious, just an empty sky bearing down on us. When I look back, the car is undamaged. No shrapnel crack on the windshield as I thought I’d seen. No blown-out airbags. The night, dead silent. I open my mouth, my windpipe blowing out a chilly smoke into the air. I rub my hands together, cup them against my warm breath, and stagger onto the sandy road. I drop to my knees, cough, splurge blood onto the ground. Nails grip through mounts of sand.

“Let’s get out of here,” I say, but Jan is suspiciously quiet.

My feet crunch on sharp rocks and soft sand as I head to the car’s rear. Jan stares at me, taillights red in his bloodless face. He’s staring down. Two cones of light probe the dark, the smoky road. On the ground, a torso burns from death, gargling its last breath. I stoop. I scream. I cry. She lies there, eyes wide, staring at me. The engine hums. I stare up. A lonely moon fog-tied to the sky, looks at me: I know what you’ve done. A sob crumples my mouth. A silent sky, no drone, no AI eye. The moon is unencumbered by forensic science.

Around us, sand still swirls around like smoke. Pain singes my lower neck, where the microchip’s retrofitted into my body. I snap, touching my arms, my body. “What’s going on, Jan?” My body goes cold. There’s a dead woman on the ground. I killed a person.

My microchip has seen everything and has prompted a warning alert to the server towers. Any minute now, a minuscule drone will spear toward me. I look up through the windscreen. Something’s wrong.

The sky, a machine-less moon unencumbered by science and forensics, is no alibi, no witness. The microchip didn’t stop me, didn’t control me, didn’t paralyze me with electrocution. It let me kill a young woman. No drone rips through the night to offer CCTV footage of me, to debilitate me further. I am unbound. I am a murderer.