An Excerpt from 'What On Earth Have We Done?'

Chapter 13

...When we reached home, Ida was still alert, her eyes barely moving—probably out of sheer shock. She fed the cats but barely touched them. She kept away from me too. Maybe she blamed me for not stopping the publisher. 

Maybe she got lost in the crowd and expected me to come find her earlier. When I asked her about the phone call she’d received, she said it was the publisher who had come looking for them. Amid the chaos, she had lost him on the way down. 

I fell asleep almost as soon as I got into bed. I woke up in the middle of the night to find her sitting in front of Steve’s mannequin, almost as if praying to it.

“What are you doing?” I asked. She didn’t respond. Her eyes were torn between the desire to sleep and the need to stay awake. A few dried tears might have been there too. As the days went by, she spoke less and less. It seemed like she was forgetting how to converse with me.
I watched her turn into this silent creature who had once been so lively and funny, always making a mess everywhere. 

She used to join me for morning showers, but now she didn’t. She was losing herself, and I was losing myself by keeping distant. I thought this was the better way to let her deal with what she had been through. But I failed to make sense of her sudden, unrecognizable behavior—so different from the patterns I knew of her, even in the wake of trauma. This wasn’t just her trauma—it had touched our entire group.

The following night, she came home with a bust she’d purchased downstairs. It was modeled after Nefertiti’s famous head bust, except this one was colorless, with the same absence of a left iris. She showered it and perfumed it. The bust had a hole underneath, large enough for a human head to fit inside. It had no openings in its eyes and remained rigid in design, no matter the wearer.

I asked if she wanted to eat.
“I had a snack downstairs,” she replied every time I mentioned food.
“Maybe if I get this, they’ll leave us alone. Don’t worry, it’s made of plastic. The voice won’t live here,” she said, running her fingers over the bust.
I lay helpless on our bed, reaching for the empty space she used to occupy. Where was her Tummy? What was he doing in her mind? How did she feel about Tummy? She hardly ever called me anymore. If I caught her looking at me, she pretended she wasn’t. Was I no longer her Tummy?

I tried to work on my writing—not that I got anything done. Most of what I called “work” involved attempting to contact the other team members, but I failed most of the time. It felt like I was prohibited from any outside connection. 

Meanwhile, Ida sat nearby, meticulously coloring her bust with an intensity that made me bitter with envy. I watched the Egyptian queen slowly resurrect from an eternal abyss into the tangibility of our living room. I remained quiet, sometimes in awe of how closely Ida replicated the original bust.

It must have been the next day when I decided to pretend to sleep and see what she would do with her newfound obsession. I refused to believe she was being indoctrinated into the system. Almost as soon as I stilled myself, she softly called my name—so softly I might have imagined it. I didn’t move. 

She stood up and went to the living room, taking the mannequin with her.
I tiptoed as quietly as I could. Fortunately, she had left the door slightly ajar. The mannequin stood lifeless while my girlfriend’s face was entirely covered by the so-called plastic bust, which I hadn’t inspected since the day she brought it home. She had worn it like a mask. The two cats sat beside her, unknowingly contributing to an unnerving tableau that reminded me of ancient Egyptian carvings in one of their temples.

I called her name once, then twice, before she realized I was there. Ida threw the bust at me and rushed toward the door. I grabbed her hand, but it slipped from my grasp. She slapped me so hard I lost my footing. 

Ida was trying to say something, but her mouth wouldn’t obey her will.
The bust emitted a hissing sound, followed by clicking and tapping. I realized part of its ear was fractured—it wasn’t made of plastic as she’d claimed.
I grabbed the bust, aiming to smash it against the wall, but Ida pulled my legs from behind. My chin scraped against the unkempt wall, peeling off skin and sprouting blood. Ida seized the bust and struck me on the back of the head with it.

In the blurred, deafening pain, I saw Steve’s cat jump onto the mannequin, toppling it. The crash was loud enough to disturb the downstairs neighbors. I was certain they’d soon come up to complain or investigate.

Ida placed the bust back on her head. It hissed again, differently this time. The left eye of Nefertiti’s bust, which Ida had left colorless, suddenly flipped open. Instead of a pupil, there was a void of pure darkness. Halfway through what looked like an attempted blink, it froze—like a failed wink, a victim of a seizure, or a face undergoing demonic possession.

Ida’s tears streamed down as she fetched a rope, avoiding my gaze. She obeyed whatever the bust told her to do.
“You’re not Ida,” I said.
“Not really,” she replied. “But some of me is still in here.”

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