The message I wish to pass on is not complicated. There is indeed a force more powerful than humankind. I have assented and do not know much else.
Neither do I.
Dr Naomi Buthelezi
Stellenbosch
December 2, 2043
1The owner of the domain is hidden, but we have reason to believe the account was passed down to the sender.
2A note for our foreign readers: the Ciskei homeland was a nominal independent state, symptomatic of the apartheid regime, that existed from 1981 to 1994. It was located in the southeast of the republic, taking up less than 3,860 square miles, and run as a dictatorship. It excluded the port of East London as well as economic centers such as King William’s Town—which would later become the sender’s home—and Queenstown, which belonged to the Europeans of the republic. To give the scheme a veneer of legitimacy, the land was assigned to isiXhosa speakers in two “self-governed territories.” The two homelands were divided by the Great Kei River and dissolved in 1994, at the arrival of our first democratic elections, leaving behind ethnic tensions that simmer into the present.
I
THE MACHINE
October 4, 1999
I was 14 when I first lingered in front of the mirror next to our home computer, and touched myself, coming twice, so I wouldn’t think about Mama’s abduction.
I’d never done that in front of a mirror before, and I’d never gone beyond that number, but I told myself to stop when Tata woke up coughing. I snuck back to my room, and listened to him as he left the house. Later I’d learn that he’d gone to the clinic.
That night, close to midnight, our front door unlocked again and Tata walked back in, bringing his illness with him.
I opened his bedroom door to let out smoke. “You’re doing it again,” I said.
Tata told me to go to sleep.
“I don’t feel well.”
I could tell he wasn’t sure if it was me or Mama. “It’s me,” I said.
“Tell me what’s wrong with you.”
“I don’t know what it is.”
“Then go back to sleep.”
I turned and went to bed.
I could still smell the cigarette smoke seeping out from his room. I sat up in bed, measuring my breathing so he wouldn’t know I was awake, waiting for him to fall asleep.
Lying back, I looked up at the ceiling and thought about how, 42 years ago, the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite, into orbit. Not that Tata would’ve cared. Although he had a degree, it was in agriculture, from a farming college in the mid-’70s.
I closed my eyes, feeling cold as the bedsheets bunched up behind me. I remembered the time I’d felt a pain similar to his. In magnitude, at least.
I was nine years old when I fell off a creaking swing in a corner of Bhisho Park. I’d seen a column of rain clouds racing toward me, and moments later, I’d flipped over and hit the ground with the left side of my head. After a minute, I couldn’t see.
It was a condition the doctor at our local hospital described as corneal sunburn. It happened when I was lying on my back in the park, unable to move, staring directly into the sun before my head rolled over and everything went dark.
That was in 1994.
Afterward, Tata often told this story to his friends, pausing to mention that I never cried—a fact the doctor attributed to shock. I still remember standing in the bathroom that morning, trembling as Mama cleaned the cut on my brow and tried to dress it with an old t-shirt from Tata’s closet. Then the two of them drove me to our local hospital and walked me down a long corridor that blinked under a malfunctioning fluorescent light. I got stitched seven times, prescribed 500 milligrams of paracetamol, and given a week off school.
I wasn’t concussed, but for the first few days, being home felt different. My parents tottered around the house, silhouetted against the ceiling light, their shadows providing me with care, Vick’s VapoRub, minestrone soup, continental pillows. Through all their efforts and between fevers, I lay on my back, hearing their voices as if from the inside of a bunker—a booming echo that preceded each one’s presence inside the bedroom or the lounge, where I either slept or sat absorbing a blur of television without sound.
Mama, a counselor at the University of Fort Hare, had been a communications officer for the homeland government, and liked to leave our TV turned to the news. That Saturday, when my vision healed, I spent the afternoon drifting in and out of sleep in front of different news reports, waking up to broadcasts of conflicts in countries whose names I couldn’t pronounce. At one point, Mama joined me on the sofa, stroked my neck and felt my forehead, then settled back to watch the explosions flicker into clouds of dust and fire with me, the two of us silenced.
The following summer, she went missing, and four years later, Tata returned coughing from a different hospital in a different town. I’d often wonder what connected us that afternoon as we watched the bloodshed in Mogadishu together—if that was when I inherited the machine, as one doctor would later suggest, although he didn’t seem to know much about it—but feeling her touch on the wound had soothed it.
Later, I’d try to evoke this moment with Mama again, calling her back into the living room with news reports on the disasters she’d left behind with us on Earth.
I opened my eyes and breathed out again, absorbing the newfound warmth in my sheets. I could hear Tata coughing again, our house having grown still, as if the two of us had been interred inside a capsule and sent out into deep space to freeze.
Maybe on a mission to find her, I thought; but how would he know that?
As abruptly as it had started, his coughing stopped, and I could tell he was asleep.
Soon, I drifted off, too, thinking about how Sputnik had persisted for three weeks after its batteries gave out. It floated alone in the dark for two months before falling back to Earth. I took this as evidence that things came back down in the end. Including Mama.
Regression Therapy Recording (RTR): 001
Date of Recollection: 05.28.2002
Date of Recording: 06.20.2035
Duration: 4 min
Format: Monologue
Ever since I got put on medication, I’ve been thought of as defective. That’s what people decide about me. In the 8th grade, at my last school, I was asked to join the debate team after I saw a speech coach. My grades were good, but I needed self-confidence. I didn’t speak enough, and when I did, it was hard to discern how I felt. That’s what my English teacher said.
The speech coach taught me how to gesture, maintain eye contact, correct my posture, and project my voice, but I didn’t join the
