Acceptance

ACCEPTANCE

A place where heroes go to rot their flesh to white bone.

We Blacks have it, down to the whitest bone. They said, they said, and we heard their words. Here we are, alive and clicking from having met the orators of our time. How alive are we, I ask you? I have asked. The pulse that beats in your ears; is it for a nation, a tribe, a family, a self? How invested are we in these extensions? I want to know who owns us. Maybe it’s Time. Time owns us. Time is space. Matter is energy. This is existence. But how many existences are there?

Sitting a man is, on a decision. Ample and wide enough is it to support his lanky form, spread-legged on the lawn of pre-decisions. He looks carefree, but he is not. The decision beneath him is on his mind. Deaths of friends and comrades, too. To an outsider, he would seem to be at rest, but he is not. It’s time to move from this point. He decides. He decides to accept the bomb. He knows the manufacturers well. They’re talented, meticulous folk, and he feels relatively safe, considering the gravity of the situation before them. The land beyond the lawn of pre-decisions is vast. So many routes to take. He must choose a path where he survives the goings on. They go, they go. On and on do the repercussions of our decisive acts go.

The coffee cup is emptying. The kettle is cold. People are hawking outside the window noisily. They’re selling at higher and higher prices lately. They won’t even resist the oppressive taxes that hang over their heads like a coin-operated guillotine. They’ve been beaten down to the level that capitalist faux-democratic governance wants them. Compliant, dependent, hungry and apathetic. As the duality of the multiverse goes, extreme apathy always beckons the reflex of extreme activism. He is on the deep end of activism, and it isn’t a pool. It is an ocean.

He prepares to swim a gulf between the normative and transformative. Between this trying world and the next few. Asking always if and how his influence will change things. Alou is no suicide bomber. He is a survivor—one of those people who like to sit and watch over what he has wrought. No doubt about it, this is an act of overt, by-the-book terrorism. The days of poetic terrorism are over. Appealing to the humanity, the aesthetic and reasoning faculties of the people in charge no longer works. Has it ever? Protests, marches and petitions engulfed the government offices. But after decades and decades of marches and petitions, the government started burning them. Protesters and petitions alike. The big riot trucks with the hoses had been replaced with flamethrowers, and revolution(aries) burned. The jackboot on the human face now wore spiked cleats. The fire of fight in people was thought to be all but extinguished. But an ember was kept safe. One burning hot coal survived in the hearts of the vigilant.

“Inaba. Dial,” Alou says out loud. His wrist-comm picks up the command and dials—a few seconds of a binaural beat ringtone and then a reply.

“Hello? Bespoke Watches. How may we help you get in sync?”

“Salut! Inaba, this is Alou. I accept. Let’s meet up, alright?”

“You sound as sure as quartz, my man. Sho. Where do we meet?”

He nearly says, “At the valley of decision,” but catches the words before they escape his mouth.

“Meet me where they killed Yoli and Stha.”

“Sho. Sure. And at the same time, yes?”

“You know it.”

Alou terminates the connection and sits back for a while, looking up at his zebra-striped ceiling. He switches his wrist-comm to projector mode and aims for the wall. The most popular game show is on. Head In A Bag. In this show, criminals and pretty much anyone the government wishes to make an example of are put through trials. Different tests are thrown at them, from the physical to the mental. Right now, they were doing the Schrodinger’s Cat game, which involved putting one of the contestants in a sound and lightproof box. The audience was then asked to vote if he was alive or dead. The other contestants would then have to guess and then wait for the big reveal. If he was alive or dead, the contestants who guessed wrong would be executed on the spot. The irony was that one couldn’t vote that he was both alive and dead. The game was rigged. Someone won. Someone lost. It was zero-sum.

The prison industrial complex that had been prevalent for so many generations was now entertaining itself with the inmates at the cost of the prisoners’ lives. And there was no shortage of inmates. They played for freedom, of course. One emancipation out of a possible five or even up to ten deaths per show was a brutal price for freedom. But as it always has been, the state could murder people in public with impunity.

Alou switches to an audio channel and plays some Jazz Trance. Watching state-sanctioned murder for entertainment has made him doubly sure. He will bomb the Reserve Bank. He steps up, bobbing his head pensively to the trinaural 160 BPM beat. He’s thinking about how much planning this has taken. The people of the world: Swoden, Afu Ra Ka, US Atrocities and Zumbizil were sick and tired. Too many of them were too broken down to fight back. But 10 people in 4 countries was enough.

Inaba’s bombs have always been perfect. What Alou doesn’t know is just how perfect the latest ones are.

As he mixes up some stim-coffee, the smell makes him reel back. It’s fresh. Too fresh. He has to let this pack dry before he can consume it. He shakes it with both hands, puts it down and watches the fumes rise along with some fine grain powder. He sticks his melanated hand into the almost empty pack from yesterday and chews a bean while the water maker assembles enough hydrogen and oxygen to make 2 cups of water. The bean’s bitter, but he can feel the buzz already. His pupils dilate almost immediately, and he exhales vociferously. His mildly refreshed mind reflects on Yoli and Stha. His demelanated right hand drops 2 cubes of sugar into his mug.

Yoli, a 27-year-old hijra, and Stha, a 30-year-old fourth gender, were the leaders of the Zoeloe cell of Destroyers. Their mission had been to get the schematics for The Box, a device said able to fuse usually non fusible materials together. Yoli identified as “she” most of the time, while Stha identified as “this.” The Box was in Thekwini and was being shipped to Jozi with two quad-lane hover trucks. The schematics were said to be in transit with the cargo as well.

The Destroyers, despite their name, were actually a benevolent group of hackers and thieves who stole technology from the wealthy for the benefit of those who could not afford it. They’d bankrupted about six companies by releasing schematics for technology to improve the quality of life of the masses. As we know, governments tend to be the pawns of corporations, and the overlord corporations didn’t take well to open-source and other benevolent ideologues. The Destroyers were trying to build a world where cash did not rule everything. A world where water, food and land were free. For this ideal, they had been killed outside Khala Station in the south of Thekwini as they were parked, waiting for the first piece of The Box to move. The Destroyers had never found out who snitched on their agents that day. And after a long, drawn-out battle with the state of South Afu, they were themselves, eventually destroyed.

A few gifts from the revolutionary work had stayed. The water-makers and soil healers were among them. Healthy soil to plant trees and herbs would never be in shortage again nor the water to sustain them. But there would be no more talk of open-source and free licenses. Not in Corporate South Afu. She and that were quartered in front of cameras. Stha’s genitalia were left for the birds and ants to feast on. Yoli, who had no genitalia, had her heart removed and left next to Stha’s flayed members. All this horror was made visible to the viewing public and executed in broad daylight at 4 PM on a Thursday.

***

Alou is now waiting there, at the site of Yoli and Stha’s tragic deaths. His car is steaming, oozing heat in the Thekwini winter cold. There is a hint of sleet on the tarmac. Sayidi Industria is noisy, busy, clustered. The air feels encumbered by noise, smoke, and activity, as well as something tense and nameless. They had built a comm device factory over the site where they killed the heroes beyond gender, and no one besides the few revolutionaries left even remembers the incident.

Concern is a dry river that might never see rain again. This world is filled with the walking dead. And the dead thirst for nothing.

Inaba and Phelu, partners in work, love and war, pull up right next to his car. He’s been smoking inside because it is disincentivizingly cold out there. His window is rolled down a tad to let the smoke out. It merges with the engine’s steam, and they rise together.

“My man,” says Inaba, flicking his head in a greeting. “Always on time.”

“Believe it. Been sitting here, thinking what a better world we’d have with more Destroyers around. But barely anyone even knows who they were.”

“The times have covered memory in tarmac and concrete. We’re walking over the skeletons that were too many to fit a closet.” These words come from Phelu. He’s always had a touch for the poetic. And if the revolution ever rises again, he would be their orator and demagogue.

“Go round back with Phelu. The thing is in the boot. You’ll know how to use it. And if you don’t, just give me a ring when you’re at the spot.”

Alou and Phelu both open their doors at the same time and go to the back of Inaba’s car. The Bespoke Watches logo on the door says it’s 16h07 in South Afu. The boot clicks open, and a rectangular black and grey box fills the interior. Two large handles are on each end, and they grab each handle with both hands. It’s not heavy at all. To Alou’s surprise, he can carry it alone. He’d expected more.

“Surprised, ey? Is it not as light as a mantra? And yes, just as powerful.”

“Alright, let’s get it into mine. Don’t like being out in the open like this. Quick-like.”

They move the box into his back seat, and Alou tosses an Indish throw over it, just to feel a bit more secure.

“I won’t waste time. This will happen as soon as possible. Everyone around the globe has theirs, and now that I have mine, that’s everyone, yes?”

“US Atrocities just messaged. She was the last to receive. But that’s all of us, yes. See you everywhere, my friend. Good luck. Four minus plus.”

“Four plus-minus, my friends.”

Alou gets into his car and heads straight for the Pan Afu Reserve Bank. There is no time to waste. There is no time like the present. There is no time. There is no space. There is no matter. No energy. Yes, this is what he wants, no? Maybe he purposefully will not survive this dance. What for? To live in a world that once more needs suckling, nurturing and to be taught how to walk? He’d seen successful terrorism and it was no different to successful war. There is little holy about lives rent from the face of the heart. No matter the cause, love must be the motive. Love fills life’s cup, even when carrying death’s gourd. But he doesn’t know how perfect the bomb is.

Twenty minutes later, he turns down Runnings Street and can see the Bank ahead. There is little traffic as per usual, as the inner city folks prefer the tunnel web just beneath the CBD. He can see that inside, it is about closing time as people hustle that bustle that speaks to home time. All the doors from here down to the Bank are flashing red, as well—the South Afu signal for closure.

Alou parks a few hundred meters before the Bank and inspects the bomb box. He opens it. Inside it is a device that speaks to the hourglass. It is about the size of his leg up to the hip joint. Inside it is a roiling, churning golden plasma with smudges of red that appear and disappear. There is a cover and on it, a top ergonomically structured to be flicked open by a thumb. He can see why anyone in the world can use it. It has no instructions, it speaks communication via its physical form. An arrow with a dash is on the lower, thicker side of the device, and to him, this means “this side down.” Its chunkier, reinforced left end makes it quite clear that it is that end which is the bottom. He flicks the thumb switch, and a timer flashes on the (he assumes glass) surface.

It’s counting down from 2 minutes.

It’s already at 1:52 when he notices the trigger beneath the thumb flick switch. He puts his foot to the pedal. Pedal to metal. He speeds past the red flashing doors and one door is still green. Bespoke Watches.

1:00, and he is now sure that he will not give his life for this. Was it the yes door amongst all the no? Or something inside him all along that promised to watch over the burning ruin of South Afu?

0:40. His car breaks through the first barricade, but he doesn’t force it through the second one. He slaps himself hard on the chest, and his plasma armour activates. It grows all around him, a faint green aura covering his entire body. He’d turned it on right on time as a bullet enters the armour right by his ear and slows down to a dead stop by the time it touches his skin. It’s still hot, though, and a minor burn is on his melanated side. The armour makes it hard to grasp his door handle, so he kicks it open.

0:24, and he is sure he will make it out of the barricade. A few more bullets from security men land on his back, but they do no harm, as if they have taken the Hippocratic Oath. He is making the best run he can in this protective shield. The more impact it swallows and negates, the heavier it becomes. But he’s taken more than this.

0:00. The bomb strikes midnight.

In Afu Ra Ka.

In the US of Atrocities.

In Zumbizil.

In Swoden.

Four people have accepted the baton to change their world.

The bombs go off.

There is no explosion. However,A faint ticking sound that can be heard for many kilometres and a sound similar to a drum kit played in reverse.

There are those.

Like some green-tinted wife of Lot, Alou turns to look back. His car looks brand new, then it looks old, then it looks scrapped, just the chassis left. Then there is no car. There are 20 versions of his car all at once. But the merging of realities and times is expanding. Is this the bomb? Is this how it ‘explodes?’ The grass around the car looks grown, then wilted, then overgrown. It disappears. The security guards closest to his car are suffering, but in their agony, there is laughter and horror rolled together tighter than a handmade spliff. They age, one dies, but an infant is in his clothes. The same infant explodes as a teenager bursts through its skin, covered in infant entrails and a small skull on his bloody hair. His skull. Time and space are fusing too close together. Too many times and spaces are coming to join the party.

He turns off his shield and breaks into a full run heading towards Phelu and Inaba’s shop. What he doesn’t see is the South Afu Reserve Bank building meeting every version of itself from many dimensions. In the dimensions where there is a children’s park where the bank should be, the trees break through this dimension’s Bank’s walls. A swing cracks through the reception window. The secretary is impaled by a bicycle from a version of herself cycling happily in the park instead of fixing currencies today. Then she fuses with her happy self, and a dead and living person fall to the ground in the agony that comes from two bodies joining too close and too fast.

There is chaos, and it is spreading.

It is happening in four parts of the world simultaneously. The ripples are spreading through many times and spaces of many worlds. It is horror and beauty fucking on the flaming bed of the beginning with a big bang singularity watching perversely through the window. Perfection and abject failure 69 on God’s lawn.

He won’t make it. Alou is moving fast, but he won’t make it. His left leg gets caught in the expanding blast wave. His right side, totally lacking melanin, starts to show colour. He can see through his shoe. His shoe changes to a grey version of the same brand. Then there is no shoe. He pulls his knee forward in a full gallop, and his leg returns, but the blast wave is faster than him and speeding up. He disappears for a microsecond but comes back, Black negroid. Then he flashes away again and comes back full albino, then again and again.

He travels through 6000 versions of himself in a fraction of a second, and it HURTS.

He dies many times but some of him live.

He loses touch of who is the “original,” which him is “real.”

Even that concern soon fades.

The rest of the city suffers the consequences of his deed.

Times and spaces. Matter and energy. They lose meaning. For a moment, he is outside of them, and the reference spectrum breaks apart like an old fortune cookie.

***

He is going to another place, he decides. If he is truly everywhere and nowhere, he will choose to go beyond the places of flesh and bone. He knows that the ancients of Afu Ra Ka had it. They had this knowledge all along somehow, the clock smiths of Thekwini had found it.

The key.

The merger.

The way beyond.

If he truly was everywhere, then he wasn’t dying. But this consciousness, be it the original or not, was going beyond the stars.

What was his name again?

 

DISSOLUTION

A falling apart of the story. Expect rupture, breakage and allusions to lesions.

How could I not go back? I knew the way. Somewhere from afar, I could hear the dogs of war barking.

To tell you the truth is a lie. Truth is for pretenders. Pretending to know what the truth is. Falling into an old pattern of lies is just as tiring. So madness seems my only option. As they say: madness is not preferable. Breathe through the mouth pipe. Feels like float(ing) in amniotic fluid. Keep your eyes open. You or me? Self or other? Which is it? The body. The explosion. The explication. Maybe.

Reason is caving in.

It’s darker than Plato’s cave in here.

Words: I. You. Them. Us. Our. People. Jungle. Yes. My.

Words. Pointing to the idea of pointing. To something. Or other.

Keep it together.

You’re dead. You know it. Time blew up. There are no reference spectra. Light. Up. Darkness. Left, down and round mean less. They used to mean. Like a line going to a destination.

I was going somewhere.

To meet the people beyond man and woman. We were going to throw Molotov cocktails at concepts. All night long.

But that didn’t last.

It was just a party. Wine, lesbians and song. Thunderbolts to fry gendered normalcies. Fire on conceptualised patri-

And then petrol and hate.

Someone had called the feds.

 

Last I remember of that night was jackboot nonsense. Teeth in batons. Blood on boots. Nerve stimulus suppressive firearms.

 

Running. Running

fear

like sweat off my brow

or mascara from a bleeding transvestite.

 

They transformed a braai into Auschwitz.

I recall making a call soon after that. Because that wasn’t the only horror I knew. Been breathing in that casket so long it felt like a broken home. I remember accepting because life like that was not acceptable.

***

I’m from the place where heroes go to rot their flesh to white bone.

Where white is still right, even then. Where all of reality is mediated by some medium. Or other. There comes the duality again.

Drop this act, you’ve always been a dualist, and you know it. You’re just a bitch for the binary. How many times did you watch that footage as they tore a hijra apart for ratings? The entrails eaten up by the viewing public.

You watched it.

And that speech by the Minister of Sexuality.

Her speech was:

Political pornography

Premature ejaculate planting illegitimacy

Her mouth was the only orifice

Yes, porn exclusive to the oval orifice

There were cameras and voyeurs

Starving eyes watching the latest version of Perversion 4.5

Attention whore

With nothing but people to sell

She is an unethical kink in our armour

 

Eventually, it all gets reduced to nonsense. That’s the best part of the story: every story—history, her-story, their stories—reaches the pinnacle of entropy.

I keep going back to that tangential line of existence. I keep on experiencing existing like it’s got something to offer me. Of the many things I have become and unbecome, why do I keep choosing that life? I think to am. I unthink to am not. States of existence are important. So I keep telling this self. States for nations are not. States ruin lives.

In a small room, thinking about the state. Two closets to my right. A mirror (covered because of the storm) in between them. As I lie on my belly, disruption is on my mind. Maybe I should find out who’s killing queers. In that (remember time) (yes) moment, I’m still just thinking. I have yet to commit to the bomb. To commit to the collapse of time.

All that matters then is finding out who in the Department of Sexuality is fucking killing queers.

But there’s the noise. There are twelve radio stations playing at full blast in every direction. From direction. In direction. Direct reminders of why I hated living in the Kasi Prime. The post-township was a crazier place than the kasi of old. Any kasi from back then was insane, doubt ye not. They cooked pills you wouldn’t believe, hijacked moving trucks. Fired guns in the air at funerals while the family watched. Nasty fucks, those guys. Kasi Prime was one place. Hold on, I’m thinking. Kasi Prime is many townships divided throughout South Afu but it is one. One economy. A dominant culture type for elites which comprised of House Music People™. It was a giant monoculture. The sex culture was dynamic. Sex including gender. Sex including biology. Sex including physics. Sex inclusive. It was the freest place in all of South Afu. I loved that about it. But the noise! Oh, the noise was incessant. House music of every type. Chicago Soul, Brooklyn Bounce, Fidget, LA Hardstyle, Durban Gqom. All at once. Always all at once from every direction in three-dimensional space. Outside of Kasi Prime was safe for no one who didn’t fit the sensibilities of the Governors.

I HAD TO GET UP.

Fuck this place. So I rose. Like hope, or maybe the sun. Closed the noise-suppressing windows. Felt better by a noticeable amount. I checked my Psimeter, and it said that I felt about 43% better than when the windows were open. I felt closer to 50. There was time for investigation exploration. And definitely a drink. Drink first. I went out to the streets to catch the next taxi to town. I didn’t drive in these streets. Due to the lack of service delivery for 50 years straight, they weren’t conducive for walking, never mind driving. Everyone hovered. Hoverboots, hoverboards, hover scooters and surely, hover taxis.

I pointed my index in the air to signal my destination. One of the three taxis stopped for me. The door hissed open to unleash a bass kick so massive my heart raced. Psimeter reading went down. I stepped into the crowded noise and shut up. Not like anyone could hear anything in there. When I alighted in the CBD, I instinctively headed left and straight. The Jameson’s Pub had dug even deeper into the ground by this age. I avoided the elevator, took four flights of stairs down to their always-open door and always-locked gate. I was buzzed in by J-3rd, who seemed to always know when someone was at the door. The artists and subversives who used to populate this place had mostly been replaced by shady politicians, councillors and their friends. The jazz was good, but the people were generally the polar opposite.

“J-3rd, my men,” as I slid into the barstool.

“Hi, Alou! We, we and I, welcome you. How do you always notice?”

“That you wear three sometimes different genders at a time? Let’s just say I have insight, okay? But three men, today. Isn’t that overdoing it?”

“Omsombuluko are tough days, we prepare accordingly, man.”

“Come back when you’ve got a woman with you. For now, I’ll take a Durbale Blue and you getting the fuck out of my face. I can smell the testosterone,” I faked a cough through my smile.

“Fine by me. These Monday regulars prefer being served by men, anyway. Here’s your gender-neutral drink. May I offer you a man’s beer next time?”

“No. Go. Hehehe, and thanks.”

“My, my and his pleasure, Alou.”

I grabbed my drink while already in the motion of getting up. That corpulent and attractive cum-bucket over there was Silindile Khumalo. She was the Server Director and Head Curator at The Department of Sexuality. She handled all the legal pornography and decided what could be hosted in South Afu or not. She also decided what was exhibited on our screens regarding any content involving sex. Sex inclusive.

Silindile also had the Sex Identification Psych Evaluation files of everyone in the Governing Party. She still did a few hardcore films here and there, but her work was done mostly from behind the desk, not on top of it. “Slimen,” they called her. For those who don’t speak Nguni South, both syllables in her nickname rhymed with semen. Bukakke Queen of the South.

I knocked on her table in a greeting of neutrality and sat down before she even looked up at me.

She had these oval, wide brown eyes. Genetically extended lashes and medically reworked lips. Her skin was bleached. Her body, though, was all natural. Every curve and ounce of fat was kept unchanged. I always wondered what she had found wrong with her face and skin colour. I would sooner have slept with unmodified amateur Sli Khumalo rather than this Michael Jackson wannabe.

“I’m running out of 3rd gender snuff, Sli. Hook me up?”

I pulled my chair closer to the table. She retreated until her weave was against the wall. Stayed seated.

“That shit’s been illegal for 16 years. Even talking about it is a finable offence, Mr Alou.”

“Alright, alright, how about asphyxiation bukakke, that still legal?”

I saw her eyes sparkle. Something in her was excited for a moment, but she recovered quickly.

“Actually, it is so legal, I’ll be releasing a fan appreciation choke ‘n jizz in a few moons. How do you always know how to make me loathe and lust after you?”

“Ask J-3rd, he knows my answer,” I said pointing with the back of my head to the bar.

“Sli, listen, seriously, if you get me a certain video, I will be in your debt. Hell, I might even buy your videos after all the…” I motion with my finger around her whole face.

“There are men out there killing queers and I have a feeling it’s not just higher-ups. It’s higher-ups, with a violence fetish. This recent tirade of violence reminds me of… something.

Drink something, jeez! I haven’t even said the part that should scare you shitless.”

She reached for her wine glass but didn’t drink. Looked down at it but didn’t lift it to mouth level.

“I’m already scared for two reasons. One, is that you’re sitting in front of me. Nothing good ever becomes of the people you sit with. Two, I know every fetish and every politician and the fetish inside them. I am the queen of kink. The politicians you will suspect of this might or might not be guilty, but they’re not the kind of cobra cages you want to rattle.”

“Now, why don’t we finish our drinks,” she tilted her head to the side to read my drink label, made a disapproving face and continued, “go to your place, and maybe I’ll let you do some truly unspeakable things to me before you die. You will die.”

“Ready for the scary part? I need the unedited Yoli and Stha tape. And b-before you interrupt me, I know it was edited by AI during the livestream. What people saw with their eyes and what people saw on TV were not the same thing, and very few people were on the road on that Thursday. The four-lane freeway was incomplete, so low southbound traffic; the garage at Khala Station was empty except for one big truck, which somehow had many cameras installed on it; and would you believe only two of the eight staff members reported for work that day? If it wasn’t their last chance at The Box, Yoli and Stha would have never appeared in the open like that. They were set up. You saw the footage. That was a violent porn scene, and we both know it! Very high-end gonzo.”

She sipped a long sip, taking the glass to half full. She kept it all in her mouth and then swallowed down effortlessly. Looked at me in the eyes.

“It’s a restricted file. Screened once on the day and never again.”

I added, “And write-protected. Because I tried recording it, and only got one layer of footage saved. Just the green and blue lines but I can make out the discrepancy between real live footage and live-edited footage. You know I don’t make threats, Sli. I came in neutrality, the closest thing to peace in this land. I’m just after the story. Between that and the oncoming war against the Callasians, I don’t think a bigger story exists. Or at least to me. I could have just hacked you instead of asking, but I’m asking.”

“What happens when heads start rolling?”

“I can guarantee it won’t be yours unless you double-cross me.”

“Give me a week.” There was a question mark there, I felt it.

“I have to make the necessary distractions so the leak doesn’t point to me. Make that hack, but make sure it fails. That should have the Information Technology boys ask fewer questions. You’ll have the file after we start investigating the ‘breach in security.’ How does that sound?”

“Like a deal.”

I hadn’t touched my drink. The bottle was perspiring like a dog’s nose in summer. I picked it up, and it nearly slipped out of my hand. As I put it back on the table for balance, a memory of the future washed over me. She was right. I was going to die. But the small moment of foreboding doom told me nothing about how or when. So I picked up my drink, firmly, this time and drank the whole thing down in one sip while staring at the minister’s double Fs. I got up loudly, my chair-scraping cutting through that lo-fi number from some anonymous producer. I knocked on her table again. And went to the bar to get another. My luck was on form today. I’d just come here to clear my head, but I’d bagged a whale in the process.

They called me Alou. Because I never had a name before that. I was found in a black plastic bag, one-month-old and about to suffocate to death. I was found in Kasi Prime, which could have been anywhere. Joburg, Umtata, Cape City or Thekwini. I never did know where home was. I was speaking complete sentences by the age of 2. My palate was an adult’s, the stymied doctor had told my mothers. Yes, I was raised by lesbians. In fact, Minenhle was pansexual, and Lufefe was bisexual. They’d ended up with a woman because, well, I don’t know. But they were together, and everybody called them lesbians for simplicity. The anti-queer violence wasn’t so bad those days. Lesbians and gays were having it the worst, still. Licenses to have kids, psychic screenings to check if they weren’t “sick”, and other far more invasive things were put on them, just for choosing homo over hetero. A lot of bisexuals had just chosen heterosexual relationships to make their lives relatively easier.

Repression is the true enemy. Repression can destroy a nation as efficiently as a virus. I wasn’t interested in destroying the nation. I wanted to know where I came from. And all my previous research pointed to having been made, not born. Minenhle said my genetics were too complex and, in some places, too simple to be a natural occurrence. It’s been said that nature abhors perfection. And some things in me worked too well to be natural.

I drank alone this time, ‘outside,’ where the air blew through the hidden air conditioner pipes to simulate above-ground weather. I looked down at my Psimeter, and would you believe it, I was happier.

***

I used to be happy. Bouncing between states of becoming and unbecoming, climbing ladders of existence. A ladder looks the same at the top or bottom.

This thinking thing wants to be called self but web. A body in a web, connected to every other node that is neither beginning nor end, top nor bottom, middle nor between, beneath, beyond. The reference spectrum is getting violated. It bleeds out, and we swim in its essence. When all ends, and there is no beginning because there will be no end. That is my state: I am, but I am not there. I am not, but I have perceptions and precepts. There is a pre to my con, and the –clusion is looking for a home.

Or a fuckmate.

I’m bleeding out nonsense, and only truth will remain.

This isn’t death. I’ve heard of death, and death has very definite ways of behaviour. There are places to go to when death is what gets you to the other side. This isn’t the other side. There are no sides, and I’m finding it hard to linguistically exploit the place that isn’t space or time or matter or energy but beyond, beneath, between such concepts that I whip with my attempts at comprehension.

Dissolved. Like salt in water. Spreading. Like wings or honey stirred in hot tea. Closer to a feeling of having dissolved. Yes, solved because living was a problem. A computational bug that needed to be eradicated by solution|conclusion. Whipped by reality, so I rebelled and whipped back. Reality sucked, and I didn’t want to be swallowed. Dissolving.

I must go back.

There.

Always that same there in that same general (remember time) then.

A week after Jameson’s. A big room with me. I was called Alou. A big room with me in it. That was my name. Names are pointers. Like an address for people. I was single people. Called person. My body was personal, this room was communal. There was a community. Many of us in a room, Many persons with names. I hoped they had names. How else would I point to them?

“Oi, awuvule inombolo yesithathu. Ya.” My finger pointed repeatedly down to the machine.

I booted up Khubon OS on PC number 3. It was the most secure operating system for what I wanted to do. I checked my mail and there, beneath four less important messages, was the file. A video in .DN4 format. I knew which video it was. Didn’t open it. Sli was true to her word. Looked secure. Looked complete. I uploaded it to my AFB drive and did some paltry tasks to make my 30 minutes of access worth something. Cyber-D, the tech central in the Thekwini CBD, offered 30 minutes of free hypernet access to anyone and everyone.

I was just watching the popular news from Zumbizil. Why the hell did they still use Portuguese? It seemed UnoFemme were stepping up their assault on male politicians. The femicide over there had never stopped. And, unlike South Afu, they had never taken to making their atrocities popular media. The fact that South Afu’s gameshow, Head In a Bag, was internationally screened just went to show. UnoFemme had assassinated three presidents in 12 years, but by this age, they’d gone to attack corporations. CEOs were in hiding. The fires of anger no longer burned schools and shops but mansions. Parliaments were as good as dead in Zumbizil, but we all know that capitalism fights back. Destreza Calevera was on my screen, shouting in some rare Peruvian dialect about murdering every rich thing with a penis.

“They will die in a pool of blood and semen, the rabid horny dogs. WE are tired of dying. WE can barely live.”Who knew how trustworthy the translator was?

Destreza made me horny.

But it was her fiery vehemence and actions that moved my loins. She could have been a Destroyer had she been in South Afu. Maybe she was. I clicked down to find that the cryptocurrencies of the Southern Americas were booming while the official currencies were tanking hard. I hated economics, but that made me smile. I remember smiling. A rare and pleasurable experience.

Wiped the memory from Khubon. Logged off. Stood up. Looked around. Shuffled my erection to the left for comfort. Walked to the cab that was waiting for anyone.

“Kasi Prime. The nearest instance.”

That meant the place that used to be Umlazi. We hovered silently southbound. The most famous queer musician was on the cab’s radio. She was doing some poem to a (surprise, surprise) house music beat.

“I’m a woman when you want. My manhood will beat you up. I’m an ocean of class. Ratchet fills my cup.”

She went on like this for a good nine minutes before the track switched up. Luckily, we were almost there. A message beeped on my wrist comm, and I checked it.

“INVITE FOR ONE. AKHALA’S PLACE. 8 PM. 4+-”

The four plus minus told me that it was legit. Well, there was something to do that night, at least.

But that was the night the boots of the feds came knocking on our skulls. That was the night they turned our braai to horror. The next day, I sat on a decision.

The next day I accepted.

Enraptured by temporal rupture. In love with my state of statelessness. I float to a when that isn’t here. The end came. It, too, ended. And as I look into the many selves I could become and unbecome, I accept. Once more, this I is nameless, formless and spaceless. This is acceptable.