I’m shivering when I take my seat in Professor Mane Mbanefo’s class. Was Sesay right? If wu potions could swap vices and virtues temporarily, maybe it was possible that more powerful wu could switch them permanently. What if Icy Blue had always been within me, lying dormant, waiting patiently for puberty to turn my body into a vessel worth steering? What if Kasim had been born perfect, free of vice, and I’d polluted him?
“Mr. Mtuze,” Professor Mbanefo demands, voice strong and virulent despite his hunched-over body. He was old on the back cover of his book, but he is ancient now, long rows of coarse gray hair plaited intricately down his head, his generous beard given the same treatment. “I assume you asked to be placed into my class this late in the quarter because you want to be here. Please pay attention.” His pointer snaps against a detailed painting of a pair of broad backs, chimeral stripes prominent—one with tan on dark brown skin, like my own. The other dark brown stripes on tan skin. Had the dark-skinned twin a couple more keloid scars on his arm, I would have sworn it was Kasim and me. “In this illustration, we clearly see the marks left by our makers, Grace, and yes, Icy Blue, too. All of you bear these marks, though it is easier to see on some than others. But . . .” Professor Mbanefo draws black curtains and dims all but a couple of the classroom’s lamps. Giggles fill the room as we’re plunged into near darkness. He then holds up a lantern with violet panes. “Can I have a volunteer?”
An andy kigen raises eir hand. I recognize em from my wing of Kalukenzua House, slightly built with skin darker than mine, and intense, widely set eyes that never lift from the floor.
“Yes, Ezek, you’ll do nicely. Please, class, mind your curiosity.” Professor Mbanefo places a hand on Ezek’s shoulder. “I’m going to lift your ciki in the back, okay?” Ezek nods quickly, then crosses eir arms as the shirt rises revealing black skin, perfectly smooth and uniform. Professor Mbanefo is disturbingly gentle, finger catching the bottom edge of Ezek’s chest wrap, and lifting it discreetly out of view. Still, a few students notice, and giggles erupt once again. “Class, I will not warn you again. Now, what do you observe? Yes?” Professor Mbanefo nods to a studious fem kigen sitting up front.
“No stripes,” ey says.
“No stripes. For most of us, it is easy to forget that our bodies were forged from heavenly blood and seed of both Grace and Icy Blue. But look here . . .” Professor Mbanefo raises the lantern to Ezek’s back. The entire class gasps as beautiful stripes are revealed under the pale violet light. Ezek’s neck snaps back, trying to see over eir shoulder. “We owe our lives to both of them, and yet we worship one and vilify the other.”
“You’re suggesting that we worship Icy Blue?” the fem kigen says with derision.
“Of course not,” Professor Mbanefo’s face puckers sour. “But we should pity him, have mercy. He is compelled by vices to do his evil, just as we are.”
My temper swells, and the surface of my desk ices over. I do not need these people’s pity. I calm myself with the biology I learned at my old school. “It’s not Grace and Icy Blue,” I shout.
“Mr. Mtuze?”
“It’s not gods that make the stripes. It’s biology. Genetic material is swapped in utero between twins. You can see evidence of that in the striping as you described. The darker twin got his light stripes from his twin, and vice versa.”
“Mind your curiosity, Mr. Mtuze! This classroom is not a place for your mental masturbations!”
“It’s science, Professor Mbanefo. It’s why Ezek has breasts and a penis, and whatever else ey has going on down there. Eir sibling contributed male genes, and ey contributed female genes and everything mixed together. It’s why half the population is chimeral gendered!”
“Enough, Mr. Mtuze,” Professor Mbanefo grates, his heated eyes drilling into mine, until I’m forced to look away.
When I do, I catch the sour look on Ezek’s face, and I give em one right back. Yeah, I feel shitty, but sometimes it’s easier to tear people down than to waste time trying to build up all the broken pieces inside me. I spend the rest of the class biting my lip, listening to this nonsense pseudoscience: leaves drop right before the narrow season because they are vulnerable to Icy Blue’s breath, and would cause the tree to die if they didn’t; meteor showers are Grace crying for joy over the devotion of his followers while the twin islands to the south of the Cape erupt with the molten blood of the gods from wounds caused by the failings of nonbelievers. I look around and everyone is wide-eyed, eating this all up. Bunch of gullible pricks.
And they have the audacity to pity me?
A rigid chill whips through the room, and the entire class braces against it in unison. The bells toll, and class is concluded.
“A word, please, Mr. Mtuze,” Professor Mbanefo says as I hastily pack my belongings.
Great. I make my way to Professor Mbanefo’s desk. I wait for him to reprimand me for my tirade about kigens, but he just looks me up and down, eyes sticking to the angles and curves of my body.
“Mmm,” is his only comment.
“What?”
He fondles the length of one of his beard plaits. “Your mind is so nimble, yet your heart is so unyielding. Amazing. You’ve spent your whole life learning to draw a line between science and religion. Everyone has, religious and secular alike. The truth is, there is no line. They sit on top of one another, two sides of the same coin.”
“That type of talk could get you excommunicated. Or is that why you’re a teacher here now instead of chancellor at one of your Prim universities?”
“My resignation was my choice. By college, it is too late to mold minds that have already been set. Your brains are younger, suppler.” His index finger meets my chin, tilts my head from side to side like I am cattle and he is assessing my worth. I may be young, but I am not vulnerable. My claws itch beneath my nail beds. “Mmm,” he says again. “So much like your mother. In mind and in spirit.”
His words snap me from my brewing temper. “You know my mother?”
“I do.”
“What, did she clean your house or something?”
“Or something,” Professor Mbanefo says with a lecherous grin.
My mind snaps back to the machination I’d found in Mother’s closet, like the one the streetwalker had turned emself out on. I can’t even imagine what Mother had been thinking all those years ago, so proud, yet so desperate. She knew all too well what life would be like for her young sons who would certainly test lopsided on Discernment. She saw the way her and her sister’s lives had diverged, based solely on their own virtues and vices. She would do anything to ensure Kasim and I had a better life. Maybe even sell her own body for the money to pay a mystic to tamper with the results.
I shudder at the thought. And the next thought knocks me back altogether. I grab the desk behind me for support.
What if she hadn’t stopped?
I think of all the sacrifices she’s made to put us through a private secular school. Cleaning houses in the morning, businesses at night. Or so she said. For all her grace and diligence, duplicity runs strong within her. Could she have been just as easily sneaking away to see her regulars, legs spreading as quickly as her smile? And was this pervert . . . Mane Mbanefo, one of them?
“Oh, Mother . . .” I eke out before flipping the desk so hard it hits the far wall before clanging against the floor.
“Mr. Mtuze!” Mbanefo yells after me as I storm out of his classroom. I do not turn to engage him, for if I did, there would be nothing of him left.
That evening, I scurry about our childhood home, along the floorboards, underneath furniture, around cheese-baited traps, silently following her. From my vantage, the meekest of mice, my mother is as tall as a giant, though I suppose she has always seemed so grand, so formidable. She wears loose slacks and a boxy button-down shirt. Comfortable shoes. Her smell is hers, but with my new senses, it is a hundred times more potent—citrus blossoms, polished and powerful, doing their best to cover up the ground-in scent of industrial cleani
ng solvents. Her breath smells faintly of tinibru, just a few sips to take the edge off. Nothing about her smells like that streetwalker had.
She quickly brushes her fro into a large puff, perfectly balanced upon her head, pomades the edges, and checks herself over in the mirror. Her vainglory is in full force. She practices a lackluster smile, clips her work badge to her breast pocket, then gathers a light jacket and a large lunch bag.
I chide myself for leaping to such farfetched conclusions. She’s not hiding anything. My mother works her ass off for us. No more, no less. I shout out an apology, but my squeaky voice gets lost in a jungle of cobwebs and dust bunnies beneath the couch.
Before she leaves, she touches the clay heart sitting upon her writing desk. Kasim’s and my five-year-old handprints fill the center of it, our thumbs overlapping. I smell the tears budding in her eyes. She’d been so angry when Kasim and I told her we were going to Gabadamosi. Didn’t help us pack. Didn’t see us off. My heart is heavy, seeing her like this, tracing each of our fingers set so long ago in clay. Then she twists it upside down, and something clicks.
There is silence for several seconds, then gears churn. The top of her desk rises on well-oiled hinges, but I am too low to the ground to see what is inside. I forget my stealth and claw my way up the back of the couch, and perch on the high cushion. I catch a glimpse of metal, but still I need to get higher, closer. I run along the back of the couch, down the arm, make a risky leap to the glass-top end table, skitter around her still-cold can of tinibru, across a dozen water rings, and another jump onto the high-back recliner, just a few feet away from my mother. From up here, I see it all. The left half brims with tools baring sleek, wooden shafts ending in every combination of steel tips. Hammers, screwdrivers in ever-diminishing sizes, and a dozen objects I have no words for, capable of measuring things I have no concept of. The other half of the desk, the right half—it steals the breath out of my little mouse lungs. Brassy machinations inset carefully into red felt-lined divots. Mother sets a small leather satchel in the middle of the desk, picks and chooses several tools—sharp, precise things, as well as a set of reticulating lenses. Her hand brushes one of the machinations as she sets the lenses into her satchel, a brass ball, like the one I’d found in her closet. It hums for a moment, then six spider legs ratchet out from its sides. It lifts itself out of the divot and makes a rush at Mother’s arms. She tsks it, shooing it away as if it were a fly, and not an abomination that could get her locked away for the rest of her life. It skitters around for a moment, as if confused, before settling back into its divot. Legs retract.
My heart retracts.
Mother, my mother, is making these machinations?
She carefully ties up the tool satchel and places it into a lunch container, and her lunch container into her lunch bag, and stacks an oily sack of samosas, a bunch of plump grapes, and an orange on top.
She checks herself in the mirror once more. She is not overcome with vainglory. It is the opposite. She is making sure she blends in. If she is caught in public with such tools, she would be detained, questioned, searched. It probably wouldn’t be enough to have her imprisoned, but eyes would be upon her every movement.
“Mother, no!” I squeak out as her hand touches the doorknob.
Her head whips back, and she sees me. She is not startled, but exasperated. Mice have never been an uncommon sight in our home. She takes a pair of balled socks from Kasim’s old loafers still sitting at the door, and chucks them at me, all in one smooth motion. They hit me dead on, knock me back and onto the floor.
I lie in the dark, dazed. Confused. Mother is sneaking out at night with lecherous intent, only it’s a lechery of a different sort. A more dangerous sort. Masturbations of the mind. Science. She’s hiding machinations in her closet, hiding mechanical sketches in posh magazines, and hiding these skittering automatons in her desk. For as long as I can remember, she’d left Kasim and me to fend for ourselves in the evenings several times a week so she could “clean office buildings,” well into the night.
A pair of long, rough whiskers brush against mine as something climbs upon my back. Buck teeth nibble at my ear, and side by side, a beaded red eye stares me down. Big rat balls lie heavily upon my tail.
“SQUEAK,” the rat says to me, aggressively, and so sure of himself. I’m pretty certain he’s told me that I am about to become his bitch.
I turn back on him, stretch my jaws wide to show a pair of sharp fangs, like those of a snake. He tries to scurry away, but I catch him with mouse claws that aren’t quite so little anymore. I sink my fangs into the back of his neck, swallow, moving him slowly through my throat. His legs still wiggle and fight, and scratch at the inside of my mouth until they are swallowed, too. I make sure not to kill him. I’ll let that happen in the acidic hell of my stomach.
By the time he’s fully inside me, my little mouse belly is so swollen that my paws can no longer reach the floor. I shift into my old friend the caracal, and pounce through an open window, sprouting wings. I catch my mother’s scent on the breeze. I soar toward her, not caring who else sees me. I land a block behind her, crouch and stick to the shadows as I follow her to an office building. She shows her badge to the door attendant, who acknowledges her with a heavy nod as ey lets her in.
It’s obviously a front. My mind snaps back to Msr. Ademola’s class and the fifth of the Seven Holy Wars—The War of Masturbations, 836, the year of the Benevolent Fishmonger. A bloodless war, compared to the others. Knowledge was the primary casualty. One hundred and twelve Mzansi scientists were imprisoned right here, on a small island off the Cape’s coast. Religious zealots claimed that their work was born of self-satisfaction, and that their mental masturbations were driving Grace from the hearts of the people. Science was deemed a form of lechery. After some twenty-something years of protest, the prisoners were released. The direct references to science being lecherous were begrudgingly removed from the Holy Scrolls, but the subtext remained. Science became something you did alone in shame, under the covers of night, maybe with a few close and trusted partners if you yearned to share your titillating theories of chemistry, biology, astronomy. And, if you were feeling particularly dirty, you might partake in mechanics as well.
There’s an open window up a few floors, but I get the feeling that this is the kind of place where everyone knows everyone, and I won’t get any real answers scurrying about at people’s feet.
I hear footsteps, smell the sweat of anticipation upon the breeze. A heartbeat, quick but steady. An andy kigen emerges from the shadows—big, burly, and awkward, wearing the same getup as my mother, buttons on eir shirt straining across the chest. Not my first choice for blending in, but I can’t take a chance that another will come along.
I crouch, swish my caracal tail, then spring upon em, my claws half-extended, bracing against my instincts to kill. I have the element of surprise, ready to knock em unconscious and hide eir body in the shadows. Eir eyes snap to me, quick as lightning, and there’s not a lick of fear to be found in them. Instead of me catching em by surprise, I’m caught by the neck. Several snapped vertebrae later, the kigen lets me fall to the ground with little note, as if ey’d swatted a fly.
I lie there in the streets, dead, but not dead. Angry. Embarrassed. I shift, though my body is slow and stubborn to respond. I flop over like a fish out of water, so I can stare up at the stars in the night sky. I reach down, deep into the pit of my stomach, futilely stoking an oven that almost certainly has no fuel left to burn. But there’s something, just enough smoldering embers to shift one last time. As soon as I’m done, the desperate need to feed overwhelms me, so intense, I feel like I’m gasping for air.
“Oy!” I call out to the kigen. Ey turns, and eyes go wide as ey sees me wearing the bulky suit of armor that is eir body. There’s the fear I was expecting. The kigen runs and is surprisingly fast, but not fast enough. I am upon em. My girth matches the kigen’s, muscle for muscle. We are one and the same person.
“What
kind of evil is this?” ey asks, voice deep and quavering. I tune it out. This is a kill just like any of the others. I run my claw neck to pubis, cutting through clothes and skin all in one swipe.
Ey screams, but they all scream, and it does not deter me. I lap greedily, blood both overwhelmingly savory and sweet. “Grace help me!” ey whispers—the very last words I expect to hear from a subsecular scientist. All the same, the kigen’s warm blood goes chill and sour in my mouth. I spit it out, and back away, but the aftertaste sticks with me like a curse upon my tongue. I brood over what could have caused this abomination, and then, for just an instant, I swear I see Kasim’s reflection in eir eyes.
I divert my gaze to eir badge, snatch it, and run. I shift again to rid my clothes of bloodstains, and clip the badge to my pocket. It is cruel to leave em to bleed out like that. Those few weak strings of charity tug at my heart. I should turn back, put em out of misery at least. I ignore the thought. According to Sesay, it isn’t my charity in the first place. Let Kasim do so if he sees fit.
I hold my badge up to the door attendant.
“Rabe,” the attendant says with the same heavy nod ey gave my mother. “How are the kids?”
“Fine,” I say over the sick bulge in my throat. Figures I’d killed one of the few kigens who managed to procreate. Never has my conscience weighed so heavily. I have to do something to help the real Rabe. Anything. I turn back, but the attendant shoves me through the door. “You’re the last one. They’re waiting on you,” ey says, eyes drilling into mine. Ey nods me in the direction of a mop and bucket, but I get the overwhelming feeling that I’m definitely not here to clean.
Forty scientists fill a hot cramped room on the fifth floor of the building. Small groups huddle around demonstrations, motors humming, test tubes bubbling, and gears churning. Thanks to Rabe’s stature, I can see over everyone’s shoulders. There is a small mechanical coach, one that moves on its own under the power of magnets. I marvel as it does lazy laps across the tabletop. At the window, several people huddle around another machination. They argue over it, each spurting out numbers and nonsense names and pointing up at the star-filled sky. The word astrolabe is tossed around, and I edge my way closer. It is some sort of tool for measuring the stars. I listen intently as they blabber on about focal lengths and lenses and apertures. I even snag a look through the small handheld telescope everyone is bickering over. For a handful of seconds, I become one with the stars, hanging so close in my view, I swear I could touch them. Then the scope is gone, snatched out of my hands.
Temper Page 21