These Dark Thoughts

Pistons of skyscrapers cram into the skyline as the highway curves into the city center, where the horizon is grey and mist-covered. Rain slashes against the windscreen. This is the life I’m living.

Gunshots.

Blood spatter.

Danger at every corner, and an ever-escalating speedometer.

My brother’s knocked out beside us in the back seat, clipped back by the seat belt. Myself in the middle, between him and Jan. My brother’s blindfolded, legs tied, hands tied, still unconscious. A flurry of worried texts from Mama. She boarded a flight two hours ago. I sent her reassurances that Papa was suffering mild symptoms of dementia and that we put him to bed. To dead.

Papa’s dead. Papa’s dead. Papa’s—

Jan shakes me. “Did you hear me?” My arm burns in pain. He unbuckles my seat belt, holds my face in his hands. “On the bright side, your family’s consciousnesses will be transferred into other bodies. They’ll be back before the end of week, tops. Back home. It’s murder. Not suicide. So they’re guaranteed a body.”

My father just sacrificed himself for me. For my crime. There’s a secret in this family burning us into molded corpses, our skins wilting into each other like flower petals.

“I’m so scared,” I whisper, hyperventilating. “All I wanted was love, intimacy, a body to hold, someone to have my heart. I just wanted connection. Why was that too much to ask? Our affair has done this, Jan. Our affair is killing people.”

Jan rubs my cheek, and I realize I’m crying. “He’ll be back home sooner than you know it.” He taps his chin as doubt fizzles in. “He did keep up with his premium subscriptions, right? Made sure to stay connected?”

The air tilts, sweaty and claustrophobic. The three-tiered health plan only benefits the rich. Premium earns you less time on the waiting list, around ten years to receive a donor body. The second level and third level, you wait twenty to fifty years, cheaper, but at the expense of your family members becoming far more separated.

On the far-left side of the A1 highway towers the crematorium, a bland concrete block. Its smokestack sticks out like a poorly done joint, and every evening it lights up and breathes out the smoke of burning flesh into the sky that’s turning gloomy. I watch the pyre smoke of burning flesh rise into the sky, the heavens smoking it up. Lightning flashes on the horizon, across Gaborone Dam. If it was way back then, the crematorium chamber would be his bed tonight. I stifle a breath, and Jan holds my hand tightly as if he can hear what I’m thinking. Papa preferred traditional interment at our family estate grounds, and each time he drove me to the prestigious university that he and Mama paid for with their mortgage, he’d glimpse that smoky shroud obscuring the treetops and mutter an, “Mxm,” and say, “God is smoking all these assholes’ sins.” I was only twenty. I didn’t understand how you could be religious and still commit blasphemy by putting “God” and “asshole” next to each other. But I took it as an expression of his overwhelming anger . There are others like my family, but they form only a minority of our population that is against body-hopping.

“Look,” Jan says, putting his arm around my shoulders. “He’ll be back.”

“No,” I mumble. Grab a water bottle from the car door’s pocket. Unscrew its top. Wash the blood from my face and hands, jittery.

“What’s that?”

The wipers squeak back and forth against the windscreen.

I take a deep breath. “The day I came home in his daughter’s body wasn’t my welcome home party—it was the funeral for their daughter. Papa stormed out the back door. Took off. We didn’t hear from him for a week. Mama kept reassuring me, comforting me, because that’s just who she is. I couldn’t understand why he hated me so much. He came back three weeks later, gaunt. It took him two years even to have a normal conversation with me, to look me in the eye. One time, we were in a jammed elevator, stuck between floors. He had no choice but to face me. We got into an argument. He said I’d stolen his daughter’s body, ‘because she didn’t want this, she wanted cremation, but the government refused.’ Accepting me was like rejecting his daughter. That conflict tore him up.”

I seal my eyelids tightly, trying to keep the tears away, the white noise of rain unable to silence my thoughts. “Jan, the government took her body. Notified the family that their ‘revived’ daughter was alive and home now, dropped me right on their doorstep like a fucking package. They were waiting for her ashes to be brought home—not her body with a stranger living in it. Can you imagine preparing a funeral rite for your own daughter, only to be told the government took her body and did what they pleased—that they didn’t cremate her, they didn’t respect her last wishes? That’s how the institutions are resolving body shortage issues. Can you imagine how many families this has happened to? This body lost its rights the day its host committed a crime.” The tears tremble out, and a sob escapes my lips. “Can you imagine how he felt? How strong and brave my mother is to consider me her daughter. To still love me.”

Jan reaches over, traces his fingers on the back of my neck. “And there I was sleeping under their roof, needing healthcare, school fees—I could hardly swallow their food without feeling guilty. Began starving myself.” I grip my hands together. “I hated this face. Hated this body. Misused it. Until I almost drowned and realized I was desperately clinging to life. No matter how many lives you have, you’re still afraid of dying. I’ve been guilty since then. Guilty. The people who loved me, cherished me. How the hell can I repay them like this?”

Jan stirs. I never told him this. Never told anyone. Not even my husband. I’ve been pushing it away, burying it for years, never allowing it to surface. “I owe them, Jan. And these aren’t the type of people who are paid off by money. Money is easy. It comes, it goes. But real courage, real bravery has to be demonstrated to them. And look at me. I’m a coward. I’m a damn coward who won’t sacrifice herself for a family that have sacrificed themselves in a heartbeat.”

I reach into the gilded folds of my coat where the gun lies. Stroke it. The flicker of lightning gleams across its metallic body. Jan attempts to take it, but I tighten my grip.

He eyes my fingers, the weight of his eyes too heavy to bear. “You have a daughter.” He exhales. “You’re not selfish to consider her.”

“My mother has—had—a husband, has a son. Two people she loves. Don’t they matter? I killed her husband—my father—for fuck’s sake. Left him there alone.” My fingers tremble. “The whole family, Jan, the whole family doesn’t believe . . .”

“Believe what?”

“This is no make-believe death, a death postponed,” I say. “My family opted for no-resuscitation via a donor body. Papa’s never coming back. He didn’t believe in this type of reincarnation shit that’s manipulated by man and the government.” I pull my knees to my chest and chew my nails, thinking hard. “People like my family believe that our ancestors are reborn, that reincarnated people come from the ancestral realm following a natural order of things, not this ‘artificial waiting list’ our consciousnesses are held up in. But the beliefs vary regionally on how one becomes an ancestor, informed by what that person did during their lifespan and how that person died. If that person died by suicide or an accident, or they were killed, their spirit lingers on earth, unable to transcend to the ancestral realm. That’s what some people would call ghosts, no? Is this what’s happening to us? If I look at what has happened since the accident, Moremi’s spirit is trapped here, terrorizing us until . . . I don’t know, she’s appeased? Moremi mentioned something about Matsieng’s blood flowing through her. Is the structure of our body-hopping reincarnation based on our culture’s belief in reincarnation? Does that mean that the government has interfered with the order of things and that there are devastating consequences resulting in this horrifying phenomenon of a powerful ghost? There is an equal and opposite reaction for every force in nature, no? Our country is using science to imitate our cultural reincarnation, enmeshing it with the spiritual dogma of Matsieng. That fusion must have brought about absurd results of this terrorizing ghost. The Murder Trials are based near the Matsieng site, why? In what way are they disturbing that site?”

“Love, let’s not bury ourselves in conspiracy theories, okay?” Jan says, stroking my face.

“What if the Murder Trials are demonizing the power of Matsieng, and we’re the ones getting punished? Maybe that’s why families like my family don’t believe in this manipulated reincarnation. Perhaps, based on our people’s varying beliefs, more than our souls gets transferred into these bodies with residues of sin and things we may not know, things they’d rather not get mixed up in.”

“Nelah, look at me,” Jan enunciates, framing my face. “We will figure a way out of this and find our answers.”

“Nothing feels real anymore. Are we real?”

“Yes, we are.”

“How do you know we’re not stuck in a manufactured reality? If I can understand how this works, I can understand a way out of this mess,” I say. “Papa’s gone. He didn’t want to be in a stranger’s body. It’s against nature. Against God’s will and his belief to be reincarnated by our institutions. My father opted for cremation. The whole family did. If they die, they are gone forever. Imagine taking in a stranger, loving that stranger, only for that stranger to commit familicide, to peel the skin off your bone. Imagine the betrayal that must be.” I stare at my brother.

There’s a portion of our society that doesn’t believe in body-hopping. Because they are original owners of their bodies, they decide what happens to them, unlike those who have opted into the body-hopping schemes; that’s where the institutions have the authority to determine whom to supply their bodies to. We have coexisted this way for a long time, and of course, there are loopholes where the government can slip in: when the original owner donates their body, they’re automatically opting into this scheme, thereby affecting any hosts who inherit their body.

Jan swallows, realizes just how dangerous things have become. He lunges for some sense of hope. “Let’s look at our options because the rest of your family can’t die.”

The car lurches forward and last night sneezes into my line of sight: darkness folds over the windscreen, a blur, like she fell from the sky against the car’s hood. My reflexes snapped. The car spun out of control, jostling across a bump and coming to a still on the side of the road. Dust smoked into the flare of the headlights, panic froze in our blood.

The gun leaps to the floor as the car comes to a sudden stop behind a car that unexpectedly cut in by the traffic lights. The driver eyes us through his rearview without a sense of remorse. I could aim the gun at him and shoot his brains out. I squeeze the sides of my face, desperate for my cranium to cave in and expel these dark thoughts.

Jan cloaks me with his broad chest. “It’s alright. We’re okay. Nothing happened. Take a few deep breaths, ja.”

Minutes pass as I attempt this breathing exercise. I gather the gun from the floor and sit back, staring at the line of cars beside ours.

“The quicker we figure this out, the sooner we can save your family,” Jan says, rattling my thoughts. “It’s Moremi’s first microchip in a body she owns. In cases like this, when she was still alive, she should’ve experienced the common symptoms: nausea, migraines. How would she forget something like that?”

I shake my head. “How could she not know that she had a microchip in her body? Unless death’s affected her memory.”

The silence thickens between us. I watch Jan’s Adam’s apple throttle up and down. “How long do you think she’s had the microchip for?”

“I don’t know.” I reach to the back of my neck, massaging the soreness that’s been flaring irregularly.

Jan observes Moremi’s microchip and her quantum computer. “She wants answers. We just need her fingerprint to access her quantum computer to read her microchip. We can experience her memories before she died, so we know who did this to her and why she threw herself in our path. Your mother is next. So, where the hell are we going?” he asks, exasperated.

“The office,” I say. “If this has happened to us because we killed someone, then it must have happened to other murderers.”

“Other murderers who are in prison,” Jan repeats slowly to himself.

“Police headquarters was extended three years back by our firm,” I say. “We have a storage of prisoners’ interviews, basic case studies that helped with our design process. Shells of their personas exist in our storage. Our advantage: one of them has answers that Moremi won’t give.”