“Please don’t do this to me.” A voice speaks inside Musa’s mind. He ignores it.

He’s standing on top of a black rickstacker chair. His dark-skinned feet frequently shift their balance from heels to toes to the sides as if the surface of the chair is hot. His knees, right under his black Nike shorts, are shaking. The plain black T-shirt Musa is wearing is wet with tears and mucus. The chest part of the T-shirt expands and deflates rapidly as he breathes. A brown rope is loose around his long neck. His lips press against each other as his nostrils widen, pulling in a deep breath. His lips are thick, his face thin.

Musa closes his eyes. He kicks the chair and the rope stops him mid-air with a thud.

“Knock knock,” says a drunken woman’s voice on the other side of Musa’s locked bedroom door. It’s Musa’s mother. “Your brother just told me what that slut of yours, Thembi, did to you. Can I come in?”

A spaghetti of thick veins instantly appears on Musa’s temples and neck. His eyes open wide. His throat lets out the sound of an off-frequency radio. His nails begin to plow white trails on the sides of his lower face and neck as he attempts to pry the rope away. These trails well up with blood. Musa kicks and sways his legs trying to find a surface to stand on, but he prepared well for this, there’s nothing nearby to save him. His legs soon stop kicking and his arms drop. Every muscle in his body softens.

Musa sees, hears, tastes, smells, feels and thinks nothing for a few minutes. Then he hears a familiar voice. It’s the voice that spoke in his mind before he kicked the chair, but now it sounds like it is outside of his mind.

“I can do better,” the voice echoes as if it is in a big, empty hall. “I can live a better life than this one I’ve chosen to end.”

Musa begins to feel a sting on his fingertips. He remembers that his nails broke and ripped from the flesh when he pried the rope. His neck begins to ache like it is both broken and burnt. He breathes in a sharp scent, like freshly cut steel. He tastes a cocktail of blood, snot and saliva. The posture of his body makes him realize he’s now sitting on a chair with his arms on a table.

“Am I alive?” he thinks, but his mouth involuntarily speaks the words. “What?” he thinks again, and his mouth says it.

“I’m not really alive,” Musa hears the voice again. He knows it’s not him speaking because his mouth is closed, and he didn’t even think. “Maybe I should open my eyes so I can see where I am and figure out why I speak when I try to think.”

Musa opens his eyes. Everything is blurry before he sees his dark-skinned arms. He sees his hands with their bloody fingertips and broken nails. He sees blood on top of the shiny steel table under his hands. He moves his eyes forward and sees a sealed tube of superglue at the centre of the table. And then he sees hands that are similar to his, on the other side of the table.

The hands don’t have bloody fingers and broken nails. Musa looks back at his hands and then returns to the ones on the other side of the table. They definitely are the same hands. The arms above the hands are covered in a clean white shirt. The tie on the shirt is a solid black. The neck doesn’t have bruises from the rope. Musa is now eager to confirm if there’s a goatee on this person’s chin. He wants to see if he has his thick lips and a wide nose. He wants to see if the face is thin, and dark skinned and if there’s a fade haircut on his head. But instead, Musa sees a white A4 page masking the face. He sees a big, sloppily written “90%” on the page below two different sized eyeholes.

“Yes, this is me,” the masked man nods his head and speaks using the voice that spoke in Musa’s mind. “I’m looking at myself right now. And to make the following conversation a little less complicated, I will talk to myself as if I’m two different people, Musa and Mr 90.”

Tell us: The writer spends quite a lot of time on physical descriptions in this chapter. It’s as if he is doing it to remind us that our bodies are a really important part of our physical existence. Which of you sense are most important to you, and why?