From the Neck Up and Other Stories

by Aliya Whiteley

  The wrongness of this death, the inexplicability of it, aroused an intensity of feeling she had never experienced before. Rage swelled and swelled; it outgrew her body, flowed from her eyes and fingers in red hot streaks. It was stronger than death.

  She grasped her rage with her stiffening fingers and it kept her tethered to the earth, even as her murderous husband dropped her body onto the bed and rubbed his hands as if to touch her had disgusted him. It was the last she saw of him.

  She had been everything a princess should be and many made the mistake of thinking the gods must have blessed her, right up until her murder, which was blamed on a random beggar. But, of course, there are no such things as gods. There are only the ghosts of the displeased departed, who choose not to depart after all. These ghosts float around, eyeing the living with the severe expressions of those that have not been chosen for a team event, and then their eternal depression takes its toll, and they sink. They sink lower and lower into the ground and get caught up in the deep streams that lead to rivers, seas, and then out into the ocean. There they give themselves over to the coldest of the currents that lead to the Pit of Xenophyophores – a spiked congregation of giant unicellular creatures characterised by poisoned thought and prickly sentiment.

  An amount of time later, in the darkest of darks, the Princess’s ghost settled down within one xenophyophore of so many. She might have stayed there until the time for all stories had passed, if it wasn’t for Doctor Chin and her giant deep-sea grabbing machine.

  * * *

  The xenophyophore was kept within a pressurised environment, simulating 15,750 psi, and it was the star attraction in Doctor Chin’s attempt to raise funding for a further trip to the Pit of Xenophyophores, otherwise known as the Mariana Trench.

  The Princess awoke. The collective sadness of the other ghosts no longer rubbed against her and at first this new emotion of loneliness permeated her torpor, rather like how music sinks into the dreams of the sleeping. Then it became insistent, and she woke, and became watchful once more. Where was her husband, her murderer? His face as he took the knife to her was as fresh as the memory of her young and beautiful body, and yet everything was intangible, unreadable. She hated. How she hated. The spikes of the xenophyophore she inhabited trembled with her righteous anger.

  Through the transparent container the Princess made out a white room and a distorted face. An old woman was watching her. It was the first face she had seen in such a very long time, and there was no beauty in it. She had awoken to a world without beauty, and her time in the deep ocean had not soothed her spirit.

  So, when the old woman pushed a long stick through the clear wall of her prison and into the body of her xenophyophore, she felt it as the mother of all outrages – how dare she? How DARE she? She pushed herself up through the stick, out of the tank, and into the arms of the woman. From there it was a short trip to the brain. The Princess found the frontal cortex and curled herself up like a smug parasitic worm making itself comfortable for the long haul.

  Dr Chin dropped the probe, stood up straight, and looked around her laboratory with fresh eyes. It had been her home from home for the past four years and it bore the marks of her success. She was one of the stars of the Second Renaissance; her paintings of the deepest places on Earth cycled through the top left corners of the slick screens she had opened around her. She closed them all with a pinching gesture, then returned her gaze to the creature she had found. She saw it as if through fresh eyes. It was not a creature at all. It was everlasting hate.

  She found she didn’t want to look at it anymore.

  She left a voice note on the system for her assistants before leaving the laboratory, taking a slow walk through the campus, avoiding clusters of students. The solar rail transported her to her apartment in the village. There, she took herself to bed and stayed there for hours, while the Princess took out the thoughts she found boring and replaced them with the enduring image of the face of a murderer.

  * * *

  “It must be the menopause,” Doctor Chin said to the image of her son. He looked vibrantly well, as only the young can. He had recently moved to Karachi to be close to his new partner and he said the city was a revelation of colour. Doctor Chin suspected these were the words of his partner, who designed batik clothing adorned with mathematical puzzles, rather than his own. But she had the good sense not to say so. One does not raise a child single-handedly without becoming both a tyrant and a diplomat.

  “Can’t you get pills for that?” said her son.

  “I’m already on pills for that,” she reminded him.

  “Have you had the dosage checked?”

  “I don’t think it’s that.”

  “You just said it was.”

  “I know,” she said. She felt like such a stupid child in his newly adult presence.

  “Mother,” he said, “are you having a thing? Do I need to come over there?”

  “No, it’s fine.” But she was gratified he had asked, even if he didn’t really mean it. “It’s just this face. I keep seeing him. A man. I feel so angry towards him.”

  “Is it Dad’s face?”

  She shook her head. She could understand the question; Tan’s father was the only man she did really despise, and such feelings are difficult to keep hidden from those you live with. But all her anger towards him had gone. And her love for Tan was also ebbing. The night before she had looked through her image archive and found no joy in any of those captured smiles from the past. That had been the catalyst for this call. Even with Tan’s face before her she could not quite remember how she loved him. That was a terrifying feeling, and she did not want to speak of it.

  * * *

  The Princess worked fast. She put her ghostly fingers to the brain of Doctor Chin and worked at the definitions stuck there, one at a time. Adventurer. Biologist. Lover of traditional Shadow Play. Atheist. Vegetarian. All of these came loose and fluttered away. New definitions were put in place, taken from a personality long dead.

  Royal. Beautiful. Special. A girl, a flower, a jewel, a wife. With each new word she injected her unique contempt. Why had her story ended in such a way? Should she not have been the ultimate bride?

  Thoughts of Egypt also pervaded, and it wasn’t long before Doctor Chin began to formalise these thoughts into images. She felt she knew the House of the Dazzling Sun better than her own apartment, its scenes of reeds and crocodiles painted on the walls, and geometric designs adorned the ceilings. The lake sparkled bright blue through the hot, hot days.

  Doctor Chin began to draw them. She drew picture after picture of this ancient glory, and she drew the most handsome face of the murderous husband. Eventually, an idea came to her. She shared the pictures with her online followers, all four million of them, and they told her: that looks like Ancient Egypt. The Second Renaissance was a great time for finding well-educated, helpful people in every subject.

  Research led to Amenhotep III and the west bank of the Nile. The Princess inside Doctor Chin recognised these things with a strange delight, but she was most offended to find no mention of her name or her murder in any of the documents. She had been written out of her own history. It came to her that, if she could return to the scene of the crime, she might find some answers. Surely it would be impossible to stand in the very place where such a terrible thing happened and not feel the echo of it down through the centuries?

  She began to pour her idea into Doctor Chin’s mind. It didn’t take long to have the desired effect.

  * * *

  “What is the purpose of your visit?” asked the border guard with a palpable degree of suspicion.

  Doctor Chin did not answer. Princesses did not explain themselves to lowly border guards.

  But, after a long period of waiting in the airport security cell block, the Princess decided that exceptions could be made in this strange modern age, and Doctor Chin talked her way into a visa on the understanding that she had lost her voice but was all better now and wanted to
check out Egypt in the hope that it would offer inspiration for a new series of scientific endeavours.

  A car and a translator were offered and accepted, and Doctor Chin instructed the driver to take them to Malkata, where the ancient palace had once stood.

  Eventually, she arrived, and emerged from the car, resplendent in a ball gown (the only dress that had appealed to the Princess from the entirety of the Doctor’s wardrobe) and tiara. She walked around the remains for miles, turning this way and that as if in the grip of the strongest currents of the sea, and nothing pleased her eyes. Dirt and noise, that’s all there was. A few traces of the great wall paintings remained, and the Princess could almost feel herself returning to life as she stared at them, but it was not enough. Besides, there were the signs of modern industry everywhere – the locals traded and cajoled, while the tourists snapped their cameras and strolled. The past had become a business that she did not understand.

  As Doctor Chin walked on, the Princess began to feel a grudging respect for the busy industry of modern humanity. She could not know that, no matter how much she fiddled with the brain, some aspects of the Doctor’s personality could not be changed. Character does not simply sit within a mind. It also sinks into the cells, the blood and the bone, and it can never be entirely destroyed. A process of osmosis was underway; the immutable core of Doctor Chin – imagination, interest, innovation – was sinking into the Princess and changing, changing, changing her in return.

  It took only a few hours in Malkata for the process to become irreversible. Doctor Chin was the Princess as much as the Princess was Doctor Chin. She wanted love and flowers and fountains, and to see and shape the future of humanity, and to be treated like royalty and to be treated the same as everyone else. She wanted golden clothes, lapis lazuli adornments, and her lab coat. She wanted to be swept away on a grand adventure in which she could take samples, and she very much wanted to go home, wherever that was. Unsurprisingly, she had a headache.

  The Princess had a lot of experience in denying her instincts. She had, after all, been attempting to live a storybook life at one point. She refused to let go of the one thing that might have – with its disappearance – given her peace. No matter what anyone said or did, she had been murdered. The case was not closed. Even though Doctor Chin’s pragmatism had infected her to the point where she could see the futility of her quest for revenge, she clung to it.

  If the murderer could not be made to pay then somebody must pay in his place. A man. A man must suffer in the name of all men. It occurred to her for the first time, from a fresh scientific perspective, that her father had not saved her. Wasn’t his greatness meant to protect her like a curving fan in the heat? What had he been thinking, to betroth her to a murderer? And why had her Nubian bodyslave not been around to help in her moment of dire need? Her life had not been worthy of a storybook after all, but this wasn’t her fault. The supporting characters had never been up to the job.

  Doctor Chin turned a corner and there it was – the place where a royal bedroom had once contained a princess and her husband on that fateful wedding night. It was nothing more than a crumbling wall. It spoke of nothing. No mark of the crime existed. She would never know why he killed her.

  Crouched at the base of the wall was an evocative figure: a beggar. Beggars are universal. They have a timeless quality; desperation always comes with a certain kind of look, and smell.

  “Please,” said the beggar. “Please.” He stretched out his hands. He looked a little like a long-dead murderer and a little like an ex-husband. Doctor Chin and the Princess looked around. It was a spot far from the usual tourist trail, and it was the hottest part of the day. They delicately lifted the hem of the ball dress and kicked him. He tried to move away, but his legs did not appear to work well, and after a few kicks he stopped trying and curled up tight on his side. They aimed for his face and soon it was a mess of red and hardly looked like a man at all. At that point they put their hands around his throat. It was thin and greasy and the veins could be felt under their fingers.

  Doctor Chin and the Princess killed the beggar.

  Then they wiped their hands and returned to the waiting car.

  * * *

  The xenophyophore sat in the pressurised chamber, being its spiky self. Doctor Chin had eyes for it alone. She ignored the questions of her assistants until they obeyed her unusually aristocratic request to be left in peace.

  She prepared the probe in silence and approached the chamber.

  “I promise,” she said, to herself. “I promise.”

  The probe slid into the body of the xenophyophore, and Doctor Chin felt a tearing of her mind as the Princess ripped free and made her way out of the brain, down the arm, through the probe, and back to that black ball from the depths.

  Then there were no more thoughts of revenge or romance. There was only the sensation of being Doctor Chin.

  She removed the probe and put her face against the chamber. The xenophyophore looked the same but within it a princess slept. She would be returned to the deepest place on Earth and left there forever more, for as the Princess pointed out, she could neither forgive nor forget. She was simply not cut out for modern life. Every man she saw she wanted to either conquer or kill, and there really was nothing else suitable in the wardrobe to wear.

  “Goodbye,” Doctor Chin whispered.

  She looked around the laboratory. She had the feeling something was missing. No excitement permeated her at the thought of her research or her paintings. The Second Renaissance meant nothing to her anymore.

  In desperation she pinched open a screen and called her son.

  “Where have you been?” he said. “I left messages.”

  “Sorry. I had a lot to think about.”

  They talked for a while, and she was horrified to discover she still felt nothing for him. Had the Princess taken too much back with her to the xenophyophore? Or was it the memory of the beggar’s last breaths that forced every other emotion from her head?

  The call ended. Doctor Chin closed the screen. She stared into the chamber and examined the giant one-celled creature within. Her head was free of the dreams of the long dead, and instead there was – what? A blank slate? The responsibility to be clean of all definitions of revenge, desire, and storybook fate overwhelmed her.

  “Who am I?” she asked it. “Who am I now?”

  REFLECTION, REFRACTION, DISPERSION

  The players have stopped playing.

  Fear spreads through the stadium but it does not touch her, not directly. Eliza feels it as a presence that rains down upon the adults that surround her. They are momentarily frozen by it as it soaks into them. Then they unglue, melt, crouch, lie flat. Her father pulls her down to a space between seats, and jostles her into a gap before curving his body over hers.

  Nobody runs. This is not panic.

  “Don’t look up,” he says. “Don’t look up don’t look up.” She wonders if he is talking to her. He’s heavy. She squirms to the sound of so many others breathing, sobbing. He shifts his weight, and she turns her body, craning her neck.

  She looks up.

  * * *

  My meal has been sitting before me, the lone object on my corner table, for five minutes and it’s still too hot to eat. It does smell good though, cheesy and cheerful, and I’m happy with that. Nothing terrifying could ever happen with a reheated lasagne in the room, could it? I am a mess of ridiculous beliefs that I have scraped up from the shreds of my normality. Why should I be falling apart, a little more every day, at the age of twenty-seven? Seeing the Effect that day did not bother me for years. But it bothers me now.

  The chain pub is a popular spot, filing up quickly around me. Families mostly, but a group arrives and they squeeze around the table next to mine. “Can I take this chair?” says a voice, and I tell him yes vaguely, taking in his shape only in my peripheral vision. He moves the chair around to face his group and they begin their conversation.

  “Shall we get started by
going around the table?” says a woman, and she tells them that her name is Suzanne, and her daughter was diagnosed three years ago and it’s an ongoing battle. Next, Matt tells everyone about his mother’s relapse. Then Nicola says that there’s not much time left for her husband and she’s coping, really, she is coping but she thinks a lot about what happens when the time comes. Will he become one of the Rainbow Effect?

  “It’s not usually cancer,” a man reassures Nicola. “It’s violent deaths. I read that online.”

  “You can’t believe everything you read,” says an older woman, with sharp disapproval. “Or see.”

  “You don’t believe the videos?” says Nicola. “You don’t believe anything you haven’t seen for yourself? What about the Atlanta sighting, or the—”

  “This group is about support, not conjecture,” says Suzanne. Something in her voice – the annoyance and the good manners vying for supremacy – makes me laugh, out loud, and then I try to turn that into a cough, but it’s too late. I’m the focus of their attention for a brief moment. I get up, leave the meal, and squeeze past their chairs to get myself free of them, free of their dying relatives and their fear of what might happen next.

  Why is it always about fear?

  * * *

  People collect. I don’t mean that they gather objects; I’m saying that they are, themselves, gathered. They flock together as an act of identification: humanity, standing or sitting, sharing a mutual presence, creating their own signature scent. Nothing smells quite like a room full of people. The worst are occasions that come with the expectation of happiness. Weddings and christenings. I spend the entire service with my eyes turned up to the ceiling in case the worst happens, trying not to breathe through my nose.