The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2021)

by Oghenechovwe Ekpeki

  “I don’t just sit at home,” I said, quietly. “It’s actually hard work being self-employed, wondering where my next salary is coming from.”

  Your fingers scrolled through the hologram screen, and after a few minutes I asked if you heard me. “Ja,” you said. “There’s nothing I can say that won’t make you angry.”

  I stared at the boundary wall, a bird sitting on its top.

  “Did you get my messages?” I asked.

  “What messages?” You always do that. I’ll call or send a message, but you’ll claim you’ve never seen them, which is ironic given the endless business calls you rarely leave unanswered. You have this upgraded cochlear phone your boss has implanted into your ear so you’re always wired, on the ready for 24/7 business calls. You made me get it once. I hated that thing, used to burn up my ear, disrupted my sleeping patterns. It makes you snore so relentlessly that I just want to snip your lungs off. I had the manufacturer take mine out, and sometimes I can barely hear out of my left ear. And I caught you once, in the mall, when you sent me to get your order papers in the aircar, I buzzed and buzzed your cochlear phone and you just let the vibrations continue in your skull endlessly without answering. I found you standing in an aisle, watching the shop consultants cut a five-meter cord for you, the tinny red light blinking in your earlobe.

  I’m not crazy, but I knew it then that you actually ignore my calls. You have two of them, these little slim expensive devices implanted in both ears. And if I scrolled through their call records, I’d find my missed calls. My ignored messages. And I wonder, if you just watch the ID caller fill your vision, see my name, cringe, and swipe it aside. But I don’t want to believe that, I don’t want to believe that you’ll ignore me during our difficult time, during a time you’ve put me in debt. I’ve never been in debt before until we moved in together.

  I refilled your glass again and said, “The messages I sent you about—”

  Your ears pinged red. A call. Your reflexes snapped; your eyes turned foggy. “Hello?” you answered so obediently, like a dog, leashed to the system. The conversation turned into you scanning through your laptop to remedy the problem that was being reported by the client on the other side. Sometimes I wished I was as important as your job. I felt terrible because I know you’re busy and overwhelmed with work. I wouldn’t function as a human if I were in your shoes. I just felt too lonely.

  That night, I’d said to you, “You’re too busy to be in a relationship. You don’t hear me, understand me, or have time for me anymore.” I wished you’d let me go, it’d be easier, but it’d kill me.

  And that’s why you brought that cackling ThoughtBox. Into our house.

  “Now we get to hear each other’s thoughts,” you said, smiling. “I will be able to understand you now, love.” You held me tightly, kissed me on my forehead, and murmured, “I love you, Ogone.”

  * * *

  Snatches of advertising intermission woke me up that midafternoon. The Internet is part of our inhales and exhales, it’s dissolved into the air like fine dust. The internet is everywhere, in the air we breathe, in the food we grow. Sometimes I wish I could disconnect from it, but I’m still updating my mental mail and apps. I sit up, tilt the orange juice box into my mouth, and finish the last drop of our food.

  It’s best for relationships to be transparent, you’d said. This thing you got as a gift from a client, but it’s a lie I try to believe, because these things aren’t supposed to be consumed by the public. It’s a prototype restrained to office buildings of detectives and forensic anthropologists. The LED light is amber, which means it’s updating or something, but it’s still recording every thought in my mind regardless of proximity. Bluetooth, wireless, all the works, given the feed you made us consume on our bed that became mechanical nanobots circulating my nervous system connecting me to this ThoughtBox. I sigh. The steam of my coffee rises into the air and I blow on it before taking a sip. I look out the picture window of our two-bedroomed apartment and nature looks deadpan and beat.

  “Ogone, he should have just gotten you flowers or a trip to the Maldives not a fucking AI snitch,” my friend, Keaboka, says. Her hologram-narrow body sits on the edge of the kitchen counter during our call. I can make out the features of her open-plan office in the background, a traffic of white-collar employees moving about like uniformed buzzing sheep behind her gray cubicle. “ThoughtBoxes are used for forensic investigations and insurance companies to sniff out duplicity, not to hand out to your girlfriend so you can stalk her mind. How the fuck did he even get one?”

  “He says a client gave it to him.”

  “Mxm. Bullshit.”

  “He just gets worried about me, all the way out here alone and—”

  “Brah, you’re not in the fucking bundus or in the middle of the desert. You live in a gated estate. What the fuck? Is he afraid the neighbor’s daughter is going to steal into your house with a chainsaw and hack you to death?” She giggles, amused by her joke.

  “I also get to read his thoughts.”

  “Oh?” She props up onto her elbows, her bob-shaped braids shake as her brown eyes brighten with excitement. “So, anything juicy?”

  “He’s stressed about work, his work trip up north, the incessantly irritating client, and his boss. This morning, he had a sweet thought. He was watching me sleep and he thought of how much he loves me, how he’s planning to marry me—”

  She jerks her head back. “Sounds scripted.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “It’s just . . . too perfect. His thoughts could literally win an acting award.” She chews on her lower lip and I know she’s hesitating to ask me something. “So how do you read each other’s thoughts?”

  “The ThoughtBox prints them out. I can opt for a mental listen or read them through a hologram screen. Of course, his thoughts sound like his voice.”

  She blows out her lips. “Ag, creepy. My boyfriend and I have a very organized relationship, thank you. He can have his side dish, I can have my own side dish as long as we respect each other.”

  I lean back on the stool laughing. “Now that’s creepy.”

  “Can you . . . can you delete or edit thoughts before you listen or read them?”

  My eyes flick away from her. “Ja, but that would appear as a deletion in the logbook. I deleted something once and he gave me the moody silent treatment for a week.”

  “Has he deleted something?”

  I look down. “Ja. When I asked him about it, he was honest. He’d signed a nondisclosure agreement for a project his company started working on. And well, his thought revealed too much detail that would compromise his job.”

  “Brah, you’re his girlfriend, not a fucking AI snitch.” She shakes her head, rattling the beaded braids. “You really love this guy, huh?” She doesn’t say it with envy or joy, she says it with pity, like I’m being naïve, so I quickly add, “I am living with him.”

  She taps her manicured nail on her table absentmindedly. “That’s not what I asked. I just wish you hadn’t moved in with him. No wonder why he’s so chilled with shit. Other guys, sure, they’d get more serious, but he’s . . . I don’t know, taking advantage of you. You know you can be open with me, right?” She chews on her thumb’s nail and adds, “Don’t worry, we’re not on loudspeaker, my colleagues can’t hear what I’m saying except you.” The hands-free hologram calls were recently upgraded in such a way that only the caller and respondent could see each other and hear each other’s voices. The sounds are muted to every party. My hologram form that appears in her office is invisible to her colleagues.

  I quickly add, “Our company could be in competition with that client’s project, and I could subconsciously end up using the idea . . . unaware.”

  “Eish, ja-nee. Well if you trust him. But, tsalu, it looks like there’s more bothering you.”

  I turn the mug in my hands and stare at the ripples in my tea. How can I deliver this in such a way that makes me less stupid? Keaboka has been my
best friend since childhood, but she just has this way of making me feel like I’m naïve and in need of hand-holding in making smart decisions.

  I take a deep breath and blow it out. “He says he didn’t get paid this month. So I’ve used the last remaining of my savings to pay the rent and this month’s costs. I’m just trying to figure out how to make money.”

  Her eyes widen. “Hold up. Doesn’t he already owe you money?”

  I heave in a breath. “Ja, since last year.”

  “Dude—”

  “I know, I know what you’re going to say. Listen, I don’t mind my boyfriend borrowing money from me, especially if he’s stuck, you know.”

  “We’re four months into the new year.” She claps her hands the way only a Motswana can do in shock. “This guy though. He owes you money, and then he doesn’t contribute to your ‘cohabiting’ expenses. Yet he’s sleeping in your bed, eating the food you cook, walking through the house you clean, wearing the clothes you wash for him, hammering your vagina whenever he wants, and then showing all of this off to his relatives and friends because you’re a ‘kept’ woman. Brah, you’re enabling this asshole.”

  That’s my blunt, no-filter best friend.

  I place my mug down, hoping the air will hold me.

  “You’re investing your time and money into a guy who’s just taking and taking,” she continues. “He hardly gives you the time, he hardly helps you with anything. He doesn’t pay for shit, then he makes you feel guilty for all these things—he’s the only one gaining from this relationship.”

  “No, come on. His work-and-family situation is very unstable and . . . abnormal, but it won’t be forever. Things will work out eventually. We’re just waiting for things to tide over. He’s overworking and he doesn’t really have time, and the company he’s working for hasn’t paid him this year. He doesn’t even have time to look for another job, it’s not like it’s easy—many of our friends are unemployed!”

  “You always have excuses for him,” she says. “If he’s not getting paid then why stay? Why can’t he just stay at home with you and hustle to make your own money? I swear he’s just lying to you, but you, just—God, why do you always believe him? He probably knows he can get away with anything when it comes to you. I mean, what if he’s actually getting paid and hiding the money from you?”

  “No, no, no. He’s not like that. These are facts we can’t change. Things will look up at his job. They’ll pay him, then I can recoup my costs.”

  “We gave him three chances.” She lifts three fingers to count off. “One: he said things will be better if he moved out so you could spend time together. Two: when you tried breaking up with him a million times because it didn’t work out, he promised he would make things better. Three: he promised things would be way better if you two moved in together. You’re not living with a man, you’re living with a devil baby who’s so comfortable that his needs are met and not yours. He is not your child. You are not his parent. You need to start living for yourself.”

  My body turns cold, the whole world shakes, ripples. I’m cold. I’m feverish. It’s not true. I am both the girlfriend and boyfriend in this relationship. No, but he loves me. He can’t be that cruel.

  “And last thing, I don’t trust him,” she says. “He’s hiding or manipulating his thoughts somehow, so you don’t see Satan laughing behind his face.”

  “I feel sick,” I say. “He wouldn’t do this to me. He loves me.”

  She turns her head quickly as if something caught her attention, though I can’t see. She cranes her neck. “Or shit, the boss is hobbling his fat ass over. Gotta go. Chat later. Please take care, choms!” She reaches out to the screen to end our call.

  Her hologram figure fizzles like white noise, and soon all I see is the kitchen counter, dryer, and washing machine no longer obscured by her opaque hologram. The silence is ostentatious, it has a deafening voice clearly telling me how alone I am. I hate being this lonely, it itches all over me like an allergy.

  I jump when an echo sounds: “Call ended,” a neutral, bodiless voice responds. Our home system. He has our home calibrated to our minds. The heating and air-conditioning system. The coffee maker. The door automaton system. And right now, my design work, which I’ve mentally projected out from my computer as a 3-D object which has taken up the entire space of my home office. I walk through one of the bedroom designs of a multi-residential project I’m working on for my company. I am an architect and property developer. I started this company with my boyfriend hoping it would sustain us in the future. Except, because of his overworked job, I’m doing all the work, reading through the contracts, vetting all sellers, analyzing market trends of plots and property markets, and injecting all funds from my savings. You’re his golden goose, you’ve sure made it too comfortable for him that he would never leave, Keaboka had said. I laughed it off. But I’m now sitting here in the 3-D design, knowing that whatever decision I have over the interior décor, I still must run it past him, and how his hard criticism will chide me. I pinch my wrist. I hate the way he always looks at my creative work with a serious bored face and picks the one thing he hates. Always. Never mentions something good and something bad. Only bad. I do all the work and all he gets to do is decline or offer a signature after much begging to read through the contents.

  Then I’m blamed for the decision-making.

  “You make the decisions, it’s not like you’re interested in my input or my ideas,” he once revealed during an argument, “you made sure you had a higher number of shares, but anyway you put in the money, so my thoughts aren’t important.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to make you feel this way. It’s just that . . . ” and I was too afraid to say it: that you’re always too busy to spare a second to go over things. I knew it would lead to another sulky and moody event. Lately, even when I call him for his input, he’s too busy. When I send him an alarm message, he hardly responds.

  So I wait for him.

  I wait for him.

  God, I wait for him.

  So he doesn’t feel small,

  left out,

  closed out.

  I slump against the wall and I want to sob. I want to destroy everything that closes me in, including myself. I throw the cup of coffee against the visualization of my design. The cup just waddles through the hologram projection,

  fibrillating the walls it skims through

  until it hits a

  real wall

  and shatters.

  Who are you?

  I knew it. You’re deleting your thoughts. I know it’s not just work-related ones, but you’re hiding something from me.

  When I extracted the morning logbook after my workout, with a steaming cup of coffee now in hand, I coughed out the hot beverage onto the digital printout. The hologram reported a night’s worth of deleted thoughts. Every single one. You were sleeping for fuck’s sake. What was so revealing about work that you had to get up and delete them? This was becoming ridiculous. If it was me, you’d be despondent and moody for a month. But that’s not it. The time stamps remained, showing that you were up at 2:33 AM, a couple of hours after I went to bed. Your mind was overworking like a seething laptop processing heavy software until 4:17 AM, which explains your sharp, moody behavior that morning. Snapping at me because you didn’t get much sleep.

  Well, I bought a File Recovery, installed it into my mind depository, despite how expensive it was, to recover mind files “that are accidentally deleted” goes the description. And, well, our thoughts are files. If you are telling the truth, that your thoughts are in fact work-related, I’ll dump the file recover and I’ll never go behind your back again. It’s the least I can do for doubting you.

  Twenty-four hours it has been since I mentally linked the recovery app to the ThoughtBox. I logged you out from the ThoughtBox as soon as you left for work, but there’s not much I can do for the thought-reporting chip you shot into my neck. The requested files have been recovered. I
f you catch me going behind your back like this and I’m wrong, I’ll manage your moods for at least a month; they can’t last longer than that, right?

  I’ve been sitting in a locked bathroom in case you come home. Using the hologram screen, a message floats before me: Read through the terms and conditions and press accept to obtain the recovered files. I’m on my knees now, leaning against the bathroom cabinet, and I’m too afraid to accept, too afraid to read the truth. What will I find? Will you still be the same man I fell in love with? I don’t even read the T&C’s, couldn’t be bothered really. I close my eyes and jab my finger against the “accept” icon. A window in gray shades comes up with an .exe file that I must install, which a program in my mind depository can read. Once I run the .exe file, I flip the hologram window with my right hand, and it opens an MTM (mind text messaging) app that allows for free international conversations and shows a list of dated backup files, which are basically thoughts you deleted.

  I hold my breath as the chat opens, obscuring the shower behind it. Fear trickles into my chest when a series of images and texts fill the empty space of the hologram. The first thing I see is a snapshot of someone’s breasts, their thighs, and their insides, like I’m watching a medical procedure through a laparoscope that tunnels its way through them. I clasp my hand to my mouth. My whole world turns black as I try to slap away the images. Is this a joke? The conversations span back one year. I scroll through the messages between you and your correspondent Boothang69, who’s in Shenzhen, China.

  Her profile picture is a photograph of my face, intensely photoshopped. Except, it’s a mask she’s wearing. What sick-minded game is this? Why would another woman want to wear the face of the girlfriend? The masked girl is staring up at the camera, smiling, large eyes, a weave on. She’s squeezing into her breasts, so they appear bigger, the cleavage showing.