In the Neck of Time

Neck / nɛk / noun

A biological tunnel on animated beings for time to birth emotions

-Imaginary definition from a non-existent dictionary

Can Neck Kenny told me yesterday that my index toe has the structural integrity to replace the neck.

 “From non-Euclidean anomalies perspective,” he said, adjusting the thermal ring around his clavicle, “Your index toe is unusually cylindrical. Longer than average. Pure. Time can spiral through it with minimal drag, and higher directional coherence.”

I was wearing sandals.

A few weeks ago, he can-necked himself – wrapped metal insulation around the cervical zone to obstruct the influx of time. Because he said that temporal invasion has been delaying his recovery from Apathy, a condition his wife gave to him, and now he’s stuck with it. Western medicine had no interest in treating it. “You’ll have to go east,” the doctor said blankly. So now, every morning, Kenny visits the pharmacy-fronted Chinese brothel on the corner, that specialises in herbaceous infusions. He collects his dosage in a thermos shaped like his ‘can neck’, then returns to the lab, confesses his sin for taking the infusion to a Lord he doesn’t recognise, and slurps the liquid in four precisely measured intervals. His face, afterwards, presents a difficult contradiction: contempt and relief, layered almost perfectly. It produces in me a strong moral vertigo that gives me a terrible disorientation.

To make it clear, he’s not a racist. That would imply selectivity. Kenny’s aversion is more consistent. He detests all externalities: food not fermented by his own microbiome. Air not filtered through his lung. At 19, he built a prototype that reprocessed his exhalations using the latent gas in his feces. It didn’t work. So now, he spends most of his time on his newly invented spherical, autopoietic chair that looks like it’s doing something to him.

Suddenly, I felt his stare at me; I turned around, he was moving uneasily, with his chair humming a low harmonic sound.

“Time is out of synch with Madness again,” he croaked.

 “Check Greed.”

Another groan. He got up effortfully from his chair, adjusted the brass dials of the panel - It’s surface covered with occult notations and biometric feedbacks.

 “Greed is stable. Tuning at 85% accuracy. Blood pressure - normal. Neck – flexible.”

“Ok. Drop Madness frequency to 300 kilowatts.”

He scrolled down the blue button on the central control panel, “Done.”

“Check again. Is madness still out of synch?”

A pause.

“No change. Still 21% synchronisation with time. Blood pressure low. Neck – stiff. “

“Bugger,” I sighed. “We have to report this. Volatility’s exceeding protocol.”

He nodded slowly. “It’s been erratic for months. What’s causing it?”

“I don’t know. Global pandemic?”

“No. Impossible. We’ve had the anti-tech revolution. Grandpas burning their iphones, remember?”

“Yeah…fun times. Thank god we got our brains back now,” I exhaled sharply. “Still, madness is coming back again. How many surreal novels and films released this quarter?”

“2540. “

“That’s not good.”

“Mad bugs?”

“Maybe.”

He looked pale, “Those brain feeders…What can we do?”

“We delay time. Increase its interval on madness by 200%. So it will become sluggish - mad thoughts incomprehensible. “

“But that’s manipulation.” Can Neck Kenny looked at me with an apathetic fear, “We will be sued if we get caught. Ethics board just hired a couple of mind-readers. They are good.”

“So what? You want to return to mass psychosis again? Those suicide squads gave me bad headaches…”

“No, that’s not what I meant, I mean…”

“Then, just do it. “

“But...”

“No but.”

A pause.

“Ok,” Can Neck Kenny swiftly scrolled up another red button on the central control panel. “My chair recorded what you said. If anyone finds out, you go down. Not me. Just so we are clear.“

I stood up; a distant sound of a tuning fork began to ring in both of my ears.

Outside, I smelled the synthetic breath of Rationality. People moved with evenly paced breathings, in perfect synch with thoughts; their shadows shifting on the asphalt ground. Their necks, supple and soft, where emotions moved in and out of them like liquid tides.

I looked at my wrist:

Yesterday:

19 mins: happiness.

51 mins: temporary identity adjustment.

1 hour: safety.

3 hours: nostalgia.

5 hours: curiosity.

10 hours: grief.

3 hours and 10 mins: sleep.

Grief. Still grief.

It’s been five years.

Five!

I pinched the skin on my forearm - hard – just to see if my grief was still stored beneath it. My face twisted into one big knot, muscles contracting so hard that they could kill themselves. Then, they returned my face to a faint normality like an elastic, plastic band.

I walked to the House of Lies.

It looked predictably disorienting. Like a haunting dream that loops in the back of your mind – edges of the room slightly blurred, signage written in a font that changed every time I blinked. The owner sat behind a chimera of utility: phantom projections of assorted objects, translucent to the touch.

He looked up when I came in, then back down at his newspaper – which appeared to be blank, except for the timestamp:

Version 7.6.2 – Updated Lies, Morning Edition.

“Looking for something?” he asked.

“I want to buy some lies.”

“White or black.”

“Grey.”

His eyebrows rose slightly. He stood and turned to the wall of drawers – hundreds of them. Each labelled with occult words. “That’s expensive. How much money do you have?”

“Not money.”

He stopped. Back still turned. “Are you…?”

“Yes.”

His body froze into a halt. For a moment, the silence in the room felt like asphyxiation. Then slowly, he turned toward me, eyes quivering: a small tear escaped his right eye, took a sharp turn midair, and reversed itself before landing.

 “Can you do regret?” his voice rasped.

I let out a groan. “Let me see…” I fumbled around in my bag reluctantly, “yeah I have it. You are in luck – its popular nowadays.” I scanned him up and down, “Five lies,” I said, “Five lies. Then, I’ll do it.”

“Deal.”

Hands shook.

He opened the drawers one by one, running a single finger along the edges like he was reading braille written by someone with no language.

The first lie came out in a velvet pouch. Inside: a memory of someone who hasn’t died but still mourning. It hovered in the air – a child’s shoe, a hospital bed, the smell of lemon. It spun once, like a planet losing its orbit, then settled into my palm. I swallowed it through my neck; effortful.

Second lie: a folded train ticket with a city name. “You went,” a voice said. “You spent a week there. You learned to play something called ‘the silent cello.’ You came back changed.” Another swallow.

My wrist buzzed. A new timestamp:

Thursday, 11:42 a.m. – temporary identity adjustment: 3%.

Third lie: an apology, delivered as a voicemail from my own voice. The message was short. “I’m sorry. The machine was not built right. There is a fault in the central language processing that caused interpretation issues. But nothing serious. We are working on it.” I pressed it to my neck – absorbed.

Fourth: a love letter annotated in an emotional dialect – pure affective syntax. Advanced linguistics. I forced it into the intake slot behind my neck. It fluttered like a moth trying to decode a lightbulb before disappearing.

The fifth lie happened in front of me. For a half-second, the walls around me turned transparent. I saw four people in parallel, each walking toward this same counter. Three were human-shaped voids: one laughed until it’s structure dissolved. One twitched with a neurologic ache too precise to be theatrical. One had no mouth. A simple mouthless puppet; standing still. The fourth person showed clearly: Can Neck Kenny, reclined in his chair, eyes tracking me across quantum partitions.

The owner cleared his throat, “There. That’s five.”

I let out another groan. Then, pulling the Regret Tuner from my bag. It looked like a child’s toy – cheap, plastic, cracked along the edge. Inside it: a cluster of glowing time filaments, knotted into a near-impossible density. I turned the dial on its surface slowly to the right:

Regret’s frequency delayed.

Then, opened it, took the filament chunks out, and put them into the palm of his hand. He ate it like it was nothing, and looked at me with eyes bloomed with artificial greed. Then, he slumped into a chair that looked different to the ones that I saw earlier.

He let out a breath that smelled like staled time. “Thank you.”

There, a sudden itch assaulted my neck. I tried to scratch it, but I couldn’t seem to find the spot. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh… I left with a series of uncontrollable groans.

Outside, my index toe began to spiral inward. Not pain or movement. More like a soft draining, where the body had reversed its gravity-trained understanding of hierarchy to believe the toe to be the neck. Or perhaps it’s something else; a foreign organism found a way in through the digit once closest to the ground, now ascending; sucking time from my neck to my toe.

I shivered with nausea.

Either way, time flew through my toe unpleasantly; my neck became stiff – short of breath.

I panted, eyes looking down to check my wrist.

Today:

17mins: dissonance.

30 mins: temporary identity adjustment

42 mins: atmospheric unease.

7 hours: grief.

Still continuing…

I walked and stopped at a house. Through the window, a woman was rocking a wrapped doll with a maternal force; whispering, arms soothing. When I opened the door, the doll was gone. She was standing there with her hands empty; next to her, was a pile of clothing with one foot of the doll sticking out underneath.

“Kenny… you are back early today.” She sounded short of breath; pulling her tousled hair back into a neat bob.

“I haven’t got much to do at the lab,” I scanned around the house to check any anomalies. “Have you been up to much today?”

“No. Just some washings done.”

“Good. I’m going for a shower. Long day. You need the bathroom?”

“No, you go.”

“Thanks.”

Walking upstairs.

There, the steam gathered in the mirror; I stared at my own reflection, scrubbing the artificiality from my skin until the water ran neutral from timestamped emotions. My eyeballs dropped onto the floor, following the water current of dead skins. DO NOT BREAK THE GAZE. Never break the gaze.

Back downstairs.

She was sitting by the table, looking deep in thoughts. I made myself a cup of tea in the kitchen, then sat opposite of her. Her features became gauzy through the tea steam, soft edges mashing into probabilistic ambiguity.

“Hey you,” I spoke gently. “You know, you looked exactly like that when I first met you. A tat corrupted and precocious.”

She blushed - laughing. The sound was slightly asynchronous.

“You were a nerd,” she said.

I chuckled, “I doubt I got any better…”

“You do,” she said softly, putting her hand on my cheek. “You settled into yourself a bit more. Less anxious.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Before, you couldn’t even hold a conversation. Everything you said came in monologues – all tenses mashed together. Past, future, subjunctive, I never know whether you are speaking about now or the past or the future. But now. See? We are having a dialogue with the right present tense.”

“I like how you linguists speak.”

“That’s patronising. We are scientists as much as you are.”

“Yeah I don’t doubt it,” I suppressed a laughter. “hey…you still learning French?”

“Why?”

“I like sexy linguists.”

“This again!” she pinched my forearm with her fingers.

“Ouch!” I groaned. “I like to see you get angry sometimes. Its cute. You have a cute angry face.”

She blushed - eyes casting down, “we were so young, you and I. Do you remember what we said we were gonna do?”

“Fuck up the science. Make it into art. And turn the world upside down?”

“Yeah,” she chuckled. “Good times… but it’s never gonna happen with you, isn’t it? You just have to be right. That’s the most important thing to you.”

“No…the most important thing to me is morality.”

She laughed. “C’mon. Not this again. E-V-E-R-Y TIME you use that as your shield... do you really believe what you are saying?”

“But it’s true!”

“See? “she laughed uncontrollably, “You are still doing it… truth truth truth. You should really look at yourself when you speak. It’s too funny! Let me tell you a truth – you can’t be wrong. You can’t produce a wrong equation. Wrong math. Even if its intentional. Its borderline psychopathy.”

“I just don’t want to turn the world upside down for real,” I spoke faster than I intended, which came out as a mumble, “Science is a serious discipline. We are talking about lives...I mean the universe is…”

“No one kills the world with art,” she said flatly.

“You’d be surprised.”

“Drop it,” she interrupted. “I’m not in the mood for those. You know who you are. I don’t need to explain.”

I blushed. “If you want, we can still do it…thank god we haven’t ruined the reputation of science. People still believe in it.”

“Too late,” her smile turned into a sulk. “I’m too tired, Ken. Too tired.”

“I know…I was trying to cheer you up.”

“Shut up! Shut up! Just shut up!” suddenly, she turned one-eighty. Her apathy became a cry with high-emotion. “Its too late. Can’t you see Ken? Its too late! Maddy’s gone. She’s gone! We will never get her back now.”

My eyes glimpsed sideways to see the doll’s stuck-out foot again. It’s wearing a children’s shoe, slightly askew.

“It was severe Schizoaffective disorder. What can I do? I have to leave her there.”

“But that hospital,” she paused, breathing heavily. “It was so bad. She was treated like an animal.”

“Mad bugs. They ruin the brains. She was seeing things so much that she cut herself with a knife for fun. Please, you know I can’t manage that.”

“She didn’t know what she was doing. You should have patience…” she laughed dryly. “Right, who am I kidding? It’s another thing you are just incapable of.”

“I can’t. It’s too risky. “

She remained silent. Her eyes were filled with a surge of madness but she looked frozen, as if her brain shut down. I took out the happiness tuner from my bag, turned the dial to the far right. Then, opened the box, pinched the time filament with my fingers into light yellow powders, walked behind her, and smeared it on her neck.  

A smile returned to her face. “Yes, you are right. “

I looked at her happiness running in front of all her other emotions and felt a nausea in its artificiality, which I suppressed down with a swallow.

“Shall we go to bed now? It’s getting dark,” I asked flatly.

“Yeah… I feel dizzy.”

“Its alright. I’ll carry you.”

Ding. Ding. Ding.

A train approached in front of my eyes. I’m inside a station that felt generic – a syntactic void that looked like every station and none at once. There was no idiosyncratic signs as culture identifiers. The only identifier for me is that its foreign – I’ve never been here. I felt another knot in my stomach. My hand was holding a ticket with only one word on it: City.

I got on.

My brain now was leaving behind me; all my thoughts became lagging – incomprehensible. I sat on my seat with a grand confusion, blankly staring at the passing views from the window. The street was bustling with commotion, but I can’t hear anything inside the train: strong dissonance. A cello player, her dress of white nonchalantly followed the rhythm; her face stern, unreadable. From her arm movements, it seems that the song was high-tempo. My mind was conjuring the song, imagining it, to fill the unbearable dissonance from my lack of hearing.

“Please, get off the train,” a digital voice spoke from the speaker.

What?

“Please, get off the train.”

Can you hear me?

“Please, get off the train.”

I got off the train in the same confusion. Walking – aimlessly – till I saw a phone booth. I went in, put a coin in, and picked up the phone.

“You are reaching Xehovilia Psychiatric hospital. If you wish to continue, please hold…”

Short interval.

“Hello. Xehovilia hospital. Are you a patient or visitor?”

“Family of patient.”

“Who are you calling for?”

“Celia King.”

“One moment please.”

Another short interval.

“This is Celia speaking.”

“Its Kenny. Kenny Gagh.”

“Yes Mr. Gagh.”

“It’s done.”

“Is this regarding to Madeline Gagh?”

“Correct.”

“I’m sorry Mr. Gagh…”

“Kenny.”

“Kenny. We really wish we could have done more for your wife. But we are at over-capacity.”

“I know…”

“She was too complex. The mad bugs have adapted – begun nesting in the neck. Self-regulating thought distortions. There is nothing more we could do.”

An unscratchable itch assaulted my neck again. I scratched my neck in vain. At least, the movement itself brings some sort of ease.

“But you may be able to find a way,” she hesitated. “I know you work in time management.”

“It’s illegal Cecilia,” I responded coldly.

“It’s Celia,” she corrected; her voice grew faint and muddy. “Of course… I wasn’t suggesting anything. It’s just a way that might work.”

“I understand. Celia.“

I paused, “Anyway, I’ve got to go. I Just called to tell you that Maddy’s fine now. I’ve handled it.”

“Yes I’m sorry I’ve lost it for a moment,” Celia sneezed and calmed herself down. “It’s nice of you to call. We really do care about Maddy. Hope she is getting better so you can try babies again…”

“Yes I hope so too. Thanks for saying that. Take care.”

“You too. Thanks for calling.”

Another coin in.

“You are reaching the centre of time management. Just so I can best help you, which department should I direct you to?”

“Neckology synchronisation.”

“One moment, please.”

A short interval.

“Sorry, sir. The department is closed for an off-site gathering. Would you like to leave a message?”

“Sure.”

“Please leave it after the tone.”

Beep.

“This is Kenedy Gagh. I’m sorry. The machine wasn’t built right. There is a fault in the central language processing that caused interpretation issues. But nothing serious. We are working on it. This is to report per protocol. Please let us know what else we need to do. Thanks.”

I hang up the phone and walked out.

My brain was still lagging behind my thoughts, and the city looked as unrecognisable as before. Everything was almost something: a café with no register, a shopping arcade with no products, signage that hovered just outside of readable languages – shapes that implied communication but failed to deliver to the right wire of my brain. Everything was almost something but utterly incomprehensible. I don’t seem to speak the syntax of their language.

There, I saw the cello player again. She was still playing. Her white dress flew with her body movement; one minute a wing, one minute a shield. But still nothing. I can’t hear any sound from the Cello. In fact, I can’t hear any sound from this strange city.

I walked to the woman. She registered me coming, and stopped. Putting the Cello on me, holding my hands to teach me to play. I let her. Then, suddenly, she turned into Maddy. A young Maddy, when she was only starting to study language at university. There, it stuck me that she used to play Cello too. A fact that escaped me, it seems. It’s funny when memories leave with the dead cells of time on my neck like that…leaving like a dripping tap.

My fingers moved, onto her thigh to tap:

Ta.

Ta-ta.

Te-ta-ta-ta-ta.

It seems my mind remembered a rhythm, and now using my fingers to tell her.

She responded, her fingers layered on mine:

Ta-ta-ta.

Ta-ta.

Te-ta-te-ta-ta.

I do not recall the song for this rhythm. Only, that I knew it’s a song I heard before and it has an importance to me. Because my eyes were watering, and my heart recoiled itself into a knot. We seemed to be speaking at emotion-level, post-language.

After several back and forth, her fingers wrapped mine and lifted me up. Scenes changed behind me, fazed into a room that I finally recognise: my old university dorm; except older and newer than I remembered. We sat next to each other. Her features – aged forward. Her curly hair now became straight and white, as if bending to the weight of time.

“You breathed too hard," she said.

“Sorry… I didn’t realise. I don’t think I’m functioning really…cause… I delayed madness. I know. Stupid,” I spoke with regret. “How many years have passed?”

“60. But I held my breath. So now we are in dissonance.”

“Past-future fusion.” My voice cracked with fear. I scanned around, the room shimmered with old-new textures. Posters of bands that hadn’t formed – dusty on the wall. Table that smelled like antique – with a design that has not been invented.

“Vertigo,” I whispered.

“It’s not real,” she said. “Its only a metaphor – we are now speaking Time.”

“What?”

 “Shh -  just feel it.”

“But I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

She chuckled. “You really need to make sense of it, don’t you?”

“Yes. I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to,” she stared at me, eyes sparkling and clear. “What’s important is we are here together, isn’t it?”

“Yes…but…” I tried to let it go but I can’t. My eyes looked at her body existing in multiple frames per second – old and young, luminous and skeletal – the vertigo became too strong to resolve.

“You are not supposed to do this,” I continued. “You are a linguist. This is… this is quantum territory.”

She chuckled again. “You only see time in two dimensions. Physics and biology. But time is a language. I tried to tell you this, but you never listen to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at here. This is my world.”

“You created this?”

“I translated it,” she paused to look at me. “It’s always been there.”

My eyes welled up with tears, “But…But you said we are going to do it together. It’s our art project.”

My voice came out childish, nagging; I felt embarrassed.

“You know you will never do it. You are too attached to the idea of control,” she looked at me blankly. “Isn’t this beautiful?”

“It is…but…”

“No but. Just…appreciate it. Please Kenny. ”

I took a deep breath to collect myself, “sorry. You are right. It’s very pretty, Maddy. I like this world… a lot… You know, I thought you are mad.”

“I am,” she looked at me pointedly. “But you are in here now.”

“What do you mean?”

She handed me a piece of paper that showed incomprehensible language. But emotionally, I understood every word of it:

2540 ways to say I love you.

“Vertigo,” I whispered. This time, my tears ran down violently.

Her face faded. Now, I stood in a mirror room of people. Three human-shaped voids dropped their black gauzes, turning into Maddy. All – Maddy. Her uncontrollable laugher. Her mouthless puppet. Her neurological twitches. There, all the Maddies collapsed inward – like stage sets folding into their own fabrics. But in different ways: the laughing one dissolved mid-breath; the mouthless one bowed; the twitching one stabilised. Each performed their disappearance with a different grammar.

Game of language.

I looked at my own reflection in the fragmented glass – it returned out of order: first my shadow, then my gaze.

A screen blinked on the far wall. Blue text.

Madness synchronisation: delayed.

Grief: Active.

Index toe spiral: complete

I felt – the soft suction again - time exiting my body through the toe. My neck relaxed, unnaturally. Behind me, the floor retracted. The entire room folded inward. Then, the cello appeared in front of my eyes. I heard a note, at last, that sounded like a feeling that is foreign to me. Then: a knock. A door appeared in the mirror: ordinary, beige, bureaucratic. Office door, probably prefabricated.

Above the handle:

Neckology - backlog intake

 I opened it. Inside: Can Neck Kenny, seated like a bishop in his autopoietic chair. The light flickered in frequencies that I couldn’t process: fast. Slow. Fast. Slow. Fast. Slow. He was surrounded by filling cabinets labelled with impossible phrases: misremembered future, post-coherent past, lingual decay: formitity.

He didn’t look up.

“Is it done?” he asked flatly.

“I don’t know.”

He pointed at a screen, that showed a single handwritten line at the centre of a blank field:

Subject has entered a semantic loop.

Kenny shook his head - sighed, “language always ruins everything.”

I blinked, and now I sat on that autopoietic chair instead of him.

Looking at the world folding inward into itself – a conscious decomposition. The street became a line drawing. The air – an instructional diagram. Reality turned layered in pale transparency: each build labelled as version 3.2, 5.8. 6.0.

And there he was again.

Can Neck Kenny, sitting on the edge of the city’s loading dock, legs dangling into the void beneath the version control. His neck was gone now – replaced with a coiled spiral of undeclared time.

“Is it done?” he repeated, with the same flat tone like a stuck film roll.

I couldn’t speak; it seems that the tenses – past, present, future - were deleted from my own mind. Any linguistic indicators of time were gone.

I looked down at my chair, which had now grown legs and was walking slowly in a circle around a dead sun.

“They found us,” he said. “The ethics board.”

I nodded – don’t know why.

He pointed at another screen, with another single line of handwriting:

The toe was never the neck. The toe was the language.

“Yes, that’s it! The toe was the language! The toe was the language!” I shouted. My eyes opened to a piercing sunshine.

This awoke Maddy. She was startled with a shriek, “Kenny!”

“Sorry darling…” I looked embarrassed.” I had a weird dream.”

“It’s alright…” slowly, she stood up and walked out of the room. Her neck had a slight red rash. I followed her into the living room, and sat next to her on the sofa. There, she put her head on my shoulder in the backdrop of a summer garden – the smell of lemons, lavenders and daises mixed with a warm, morning sun filled the room with serenity. She started to hum a rhythm, with her hands tapping on my thighs:

Ta.

Ta-ta.

Te-ta-ta-ta-ta.

Ta-ta-ta.

Ta-ta.

Te-ta-te-ta-ta.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Yes, darling. It’s beautiful. So beautiful. So so beautiful,” my eyes welled with tears.

The gentle wind landed on my skin, asynchronous. I closed my eyes, feeling the weight of Maddy’s head being absorbed into the skin of my shoulder – organic, biological. Her hands melted with mine, as we both sank deeper and deeper, into the void that held us ever so softly.

And there, we fell.

Falling ever so softly.

Like the way my heart felt, when I looked at her the first time. At that dorm, slightly nervous, unease.

I fell ever so softly there…so softly…so so softly.