Once, for my cousin’s birthday bash in the year after the Cardiff Effect, my father arrived wearing a neck brace and told everyone he’d been in a car accident and was suffering from whiplash. He couldn’t have moved his neck to look upwards at the ceiling if he’d wanted to.
He didn’t fool me for a moment.
Now he’s given up attending those sorts of events. He says the open air suits him better and spends his time between talking engagements walking for miles, sitting on benches outside tea rooms in national parks, even in the dead of winter. The sky has never betrayed him.
I picture him outside. I lie in bed in my room in the Holiday Inn and look up at the plain white ceiling, and I imagine him stomping around Snowdonia. We can see many things in blank spaces.
The hotel is far from silent. People come and go along the corridor. Next door, someone is watching television. It sounds like a news channel, and I will myself not to pay attention. I need to sleep. I have a busy day at the convention tomorrow. I’m meeting with three different cyber-security suppliers, trying out their wares, finding a reason to choose one over the other for my company. I said to Maggie that I didn’t want to attend, and she sympathised, then phrased my attendance in terms of having a job or not having one.
My father stomps over the dales of the ceiling. No dead people will make an appearance in this short and informative film brought to you by the imagination of Eliza Raley.
* * *
A large-screen television, placed high on the wall, dominates the breakfast area. Other guests troop underneath it as they line up for the silver domes that house the buffet items, their eyes glancing to the screen as the headline loops:
Rainbow Effect reported in Cairo stadium
I pick at the bacon on my plate and watch the shaking image taken by a phone. The sound is turned off and I’m glad.
The colours. I remember them. That splay of lights, as if through a prism, splashed across that huge expanse of ceiling, and then arcing down in the curved bands of a rainbow; the effect ends – or does it start? – in mid-air but then seems to hug to the blankness of the ceiling – no, I’m not able to describe it, not even to myself. Nobody is, and the image doesn’t hold steady. It’s a scattering of thoughts and vision. The camera tries and fails to capture its beauty. It chooses one small part and zooms in as close as it can to show the faces, mouths open, eyes open, not blinking. Their cheeks press against each other; they are packed in tight. Blues, reds, yellows. Every colour.
Authorities working on identification
The writing on the screen scrolls on.
Then zooming out, the entire surface of the ceiling of the Cairo stadium is revealed again. So many faces. Their mouths, their stares. I know the heads aren’t flat, although when they are filmed they appear so. They have texture, dimensions. They are not faded, or misty. The television can’t portray it accurately; something is lost in transition.
What do the colours mean? Much discussion has settled on that, for want of answers. If fifteen heads are yellow and only six are blue then our brains leap into gear and make judgements. Judgements become easier to make with less evidence, and there’s really no proof here of anything at all.
In the absence of experts, anyone will do. And that description includes my father, who now appears on-screen, and begins to talk.
Did he become qualified in this subject simply because he was one of the people who saw it first? He hasn’t studied it. He has few qualifications, and before this had no experience in dealing with the media, but born of the mystifying en masse splay of the dead was his own self-confidence to handle the world’s questions.
Recent poll shows 58% of respondents believe
Rainbow Effect is genuine post-life event.
This scrolls underneath him as he talks. He’s in the study, at home, with the bookcase arranged just so behind him. His face shines from the screen. I really think he doesn’t understand the dangers inherent in this conversation. Nearly everyone tiptoes around any religious connotation, and those who are mad enough to address the issue are soon ripped to shreds from all sides. What does my father think about this? He manages to never quite say. It’s an impressive balancing act, but surely everyone can see what he thinks. It’s even more obvious with no sound.
Or maybe nobody can see that but me. It’s a question of distance.
How can he transmit such happiness about the Effect when he can’t even face a ceiling? We’re all complicated beings but he is an unfathomable contradiction, which is why I’ve been finding reasons not to phone or visit anymore. I would prefer him to be solid, in some way. In any way.
His segment finishes and the picture returns to the captured moment at the Cairo stadium. The Effect is long gone, now. It only ever lasts for a minute at most and there’s never been an incident recorded in the same place twice, but still my instinct shouts at me to get up, to leave the hotel, to travel as far as it takes and when the time is right to look up, to look up and see—
I look down. The bacon on my plate has congealed to a pink and white curl. Even that reminds me of the Effect.
* * *
So many famous ceilings are decorated. They are their own magnificent spectacle. The Effect never occurs over the Sistine Chapel, or the Strahov Monastery. Unbroken space is what it craves, like the vast curves of superdomes, and it has now been seen in four of the five largest covered stadiums in the world.
I witnessed the very first. We were at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff. The other stadiums are all in the United States: Arlington, New Orleans, Houston and Atlanta. Houston is the odd one out on this list; there’s been no recorded effect there. There have been many other events in different locations, of course, covering vast undecorated ceilings in Germany, Japan, Brazil and South Korea to name but a few. And there’s nothing to say that an Effect will happen at Houston at any time soon, or indeed ever.
I shouldn’t have worked this out. I shouldn’t be left alone with a laptop and the desire to feel like I’ve ferreted out an answer from thin air.
“Are you ready?” says Maggie, as she passes my desk on the way to her office and I call after her, “I’ll be right there.” I follow company policy and lock my screen. The screensaver is a photograph of my mother that I’ve taken from one of my social media accounts. I scanned this one in a few weeks after she died. I was eleven, but she’d been ill for a long time and my father and I shared a sense of relief, I think, at the end, to think of her pain as finite.
After, I went through a phase of finding every photo I could of her. I wanted to put the sight of her everywhere. I still do. The one on display on my locked screen was taken before I was born; she was about the age I am now, I suspect. She had already met my father, but he’s not in this shot. Wait – he is in it, just. The side of his face is just visible on the far left and his thick brown hair is jutting out, refusing to lie flat around his ear. I remember now – I only scanned in the parts of the photos that contained her. I wonder if that hurt his feelings, at the time. He never said anything and it’s never occurred to me to ask.
“Eliza!” Maggie calls from the doorway of her office, and I get up and follow her voice.
* * *
After careful evaluation I’ve decided that we should purchase the five-year plan from a respected security firm, who aren’t the cheapest but aren’t the most expensive option either. I show Maggie the charts and spreadsheets I’ve compiled on performance, response times and other factors.
“I’ll take all that into account,” she says, nodding.
I wonder what that means. “The quotes are only good for the rest of this month,” I remind her. “After that we’ll have to re-evaluate if we decide to go ahead with them. This is a special rate I negotiated at the convention.”
“Yep.” She closes the notepad she’s been doodling on throughout.
“Any feedback you can give me to pass back to them?” I ask.
“I don’t…” She leans forward and her hair, in
a neat bob, frames her face. I can see a thin line of white running from her forehead to her crown where her dye is growing out. “Between you and me, I don’t have a great feeling about it.”
“About what?”
“The deal.”
It would be easy to dislike her on the basis of this arbitrary statement, but instead I feel the curious encroachment of pity. Is that what it comes down to, even now, in the age of zeros and ones? A bad feeling undoes all evidence.
“Listen,” she says. “On a different subject, can I just say that we’ve received an incident report regarding your mobiles.”
“My mobile?”
“The things over your desk. Someone collided with them and got their hair caught up. The person in question had to ask for scissors to be fetched in order to be cut free.” Maggie is watching me closely. I’m meant to be making a certain sort of face. I can feel myself not making it. “Can you possibly take down the mobiles?” she says.
“They’ve been up there for years,” I say. Since before Maggie became my boss, in fact. I pitched it to my previous manager as a way to brighten up the place – break up that expanse of white tiles overhead – and he loved the idea. I feel like fighting for that long-spent enthusiasm for one of my ideas. “I’d rather not.”
And so the usual conversation begins, where I’m sympathised with until it erodes my objection.
“Do you think you’re really getting the best out of being here?” asks Maggie, and I tell her no, no I don’t think I am, and my next stop is human resources before I can take back the words that make me a solvable problem.
* * *
She’s right. I’m not getting the best out of being there, whatever the best means, but it’s not new. Still, the notion of the tangled hair upsets me more than I thought it could. Somebody was standing over my desk when I wasn’t there. Doing what? Looking at the photograph of my mother, maybe. Putting their face close to hers.
It’s good that I’m taking a break from that place. It’ll give me time to get used to the idea of sitting under that particular ceiling, with nothing above me to break up the space.
A team of scientists from the University of California have confirmed that their recent study shows ‘no human interference’ in the Rainbow Effect. That’s what the news tells me this morning as I sit on the sofa in my pyjamas. It’s strange to watch it with the sound on for a change.
“The team studied footage, visited locations, and interviewed over three hundred eyewitnesses—”
I don’t recall being asked. I’m sure I could have said some rational things about it in my calm, clear voice.
I realise I’m waiting for my father to turn up on-screen, but the time ticks on and he doesn’t make an appearance. Instead, a different witness has been chosen and invited to the studio. She’s an older woman, with long earrings and cropped hair, and hard-earned enthusiasm scored through her. She talks in strident terms of ‘miraculous events’ and ‘gifts of understanding’.
“Perhaps these spirits, these passed-over people, want to share a final message with us,” she says. “That’s what I like to believe. Many people report fear when they see the Effect, but I have to say I found it an uplifting experience. It showed me something real.”
“What’s that?” asks the interviewer.
“I couldn’t put it into words, exactly,” says the woman.
“Then let me ask you – why now?”
The woman smiles. “Would we have paid attention before?” she says. “Would we have needed to?”
But the faces did not speak. They looked calm to me, and although they were far above, I felt certain they were not trying to communicate with me. So many of them, close together, floating in colour, but they were not a group. Each one looked alone. As alone as it was possible to be.
I reached up and my father grabbed my arm and pinned it back down, underneath him.
The news keeps on going but there is only the report for them to talk about; there hasn’t been an actual event in over a week.
I phone my father for the first time in months. He doesn’t answer.
* * *
Her father gets to his feet and pulls her up. She risks a glance skywards, wondering if he’ll tell her off, but he says nothing and the faces are gone. The wave of fear is receding. People murmur. The sound is reassuring.
The players are still on the pitch, but there’s no sign of the game resuming.
“Was it a projection?” says the man in the row behind. “It scared the shit out of me,” and her father says, “I don’t know, mate,” in a tone that holds a note of disapproval. The man says, “Sorry, mate, just a bit shaken up. You all right, darling?”
Eliza realises the man is addressing her. She nods. She waits for everyone to get their act together and go on as adults should, but it’s taking longer and longer and that is when the fear hits her. Perhaps things will never go back to normal, not quite, and there never was a normal. Or this is normal, now that her mother is gone. Is that why everyone is afraid? She starts to tremble.
“You all right?” parrots her father. He puts his arms around her.
“I think it was a magic trick, or a stunt or something,” the woman in front is saying. “Optical illusion,” says the man next to her. People continue to murmur.
Eventually, the players leave the pitch and the fans file out, and a few days later there’s an article in the local paper about the cancelled match. It takes over a month before national news picks it up and traces down the faces via photographs taken, at Cardiff and at the two Effects that have followed.
* * *
I’ve booked a seat at every event happening at the Houston Astrodome for the next two weeks. That’s the length of my holiday. I’ve always wanted to see Texas, I tell myself. A concert. An American football game or two. And the dome is a magnificent sight, filled and thriving as the game begins.
I wish I could get caught up in the excitement, but instead I find myself wondering how many times the Rainbow Effect has happened without anyone being present to witness it; could it have already graced the long span of this roof? It’s a philosophical question in disguise – the tree that falls in the forest. The vision that appears in blackness without any living face turned up to meet it. No reflection or reaction taking place.
I think it needs an audience. That makes no sense, but I believe it.
Around me, the match is happening to the watchers, for the watchers. The clock ticks down. The man on my right has been chewing on an enormous hot dog, his elbow permanently bent to keep his ketchup and onions in place. The smell of it is incredible, mixed with the sheer noise, the size, the momentum of this game. The enthusiasm finally gets to me. I feel it. There’s so little time left. The ball is passed, then thrown; it arcs high and it is caught and carried far and fast to the end zone. Touchdown. The man next to me flings out his arms, losing his hot dog as it flies up, separating into roll, sausage, onions, sauce – he is cheering so hard he hasn’t even noticed and at that moment, at that moment, I have to look up further, past the sound, past the game, to the roof itself because it’s happening, it’s happening now.
No.
No, there’s nothing there. The sound rebounds. The crowd cheers. The game ends. The man next to me is apologising to the boy behind him who got sauce all over his baseball cap, but they’re both smiling. Their team won.
* * *
Eliza thinks of how to ask him why they’ve stopped going to the matches, but every time she starts to phrase it in her mind it becomes about something other than rugby. Since Mum died keeps slipping under her defences, and if it can disarm her then it’ll do worse to her father, so she stops trying.
It’s only when a new Rainbow Effect is reported on the television – the fifth, as far as she knows, if Cardiff was the first – that he starts to talk to her about it. For the first few minutes she is elated, waiting for her turn to speak and wondering what will come out of her mouth first, but then she realises that he’s not real
ly talking to her. She just happens to be the audience for the monologue in which he documents his own version of events. He goes back over a list of the faces he saw, describing each one in detail. He says, “Six thousand three hundred and sixteen people die every hour, on average. Six thousand two hundred and five faces appear in the average Rainbow Effect, so far. These people are all from the same hour. Dying in the same hour.”
She wants to tell him that an average of five examples is no average at all, but instead she listens, and listens, and eventually her brain switches off until she realises she’s thinking about something else entirely. When he draws breath she offers to make him a cup of tea, and leaves the room before he answers.
* * *
“Dad?”
The screen has a moment of blackness, and then his familiar face appears on Skype. “Hello,” he says. “Hello!”
“Hi Dad.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m good.” The circle of light thrown by the bedside lamp gives a soft intimacy to the hotel room. I am leaning back, propped up on pillows, with the laptop on my knees. He, in contrast, is in bright light, in his study. Exactly where he’d be sitting if this was an interview for a news channel, but at least he is unshaven and his hair is a mess, still sticking out over his ears. He’s not polished. “I just wanted to see how things are with you.”
“Fine. I’m—well, I’m tired, actually. I’ve been busy.”
“Me too,” I tell him. We smile at each other.
“You look well,” he says.
“I keep meaning to come see you.”
He shrugs. “You’re seeing me now. It’s a good start. Come for Christmas.”
“Yeah, I’ll come down around Christmas.”
It’s the end of my Texas holiday and there’s been no Effect anywhere in the world for the past three weeks now. If they’ve stopped happening, I don’t know what that means. None of us do. I want to tell him that I came here thinking I’d see his face. I’d look up and there would be the Rainbow Effect telling me that he was gone from me. That’s another thing I’ll never understand, but it didn’t happen and now I have to accept that it was all in my head and perhaps it’s time to grow up, just a little more.
From the Neck Up and Other Stories Page 11