American Elsewhere

CHAPTER NINETEEN




Mona is driving so fast she’s about halfway across town before she realizes she has no idea where she’s going. Is she leaving Wink, she wonders? Though that would make sense, the thought never crossed her mind. She jumped in the car with no intention other than just to get away, to get the hell out of the house. And possibly just away from the crawling, nauseating feeling that she’s going as batshit crazy as her mother did. Because that would make sense, wouldn’t it? She remembers her mother staring out of windows, describing things that weren’t there: old buildings, thousands of caves, cities in the ice… the similarities are so exact it makes Mona feel physically ill.

She needs to talk to someone about what she saw, to articulate it aloud and pick it apart, and let them weigh in on whether or not she’s exactly as nuts as she feels. But she doesn’t have a single friend in this town. She only talked to Carmen for ten minutes, and this seems out of her league. And she certainly doesn’t trust Mrs. Benjamin, because somewhere in Mona’s furious thoughts is the suspicion that that crazy bitch’s mirror trick is the cause of all this: it opened something in her head, or maybe a lot of somethings, and now she feels like she’s seeing double all the time. There is the peaceful little town of Wink, but behind that is something much stranger, like one piece of wallpaper pasted over another, yet she can see both at once.

But evidently there is someone she can go to, for she looks up as if waking from a dream and finds that not only is the car stopped, but it’s parked before the manager’s office of the Ponderosa Acres.

A shadow splits the golden stream of light pouring through the door, and the form of Parson comes shuffling into view.

He looks at her. Her fingers are still clutching the wheel. He scratches his chin and gives a deep, amused “Hm.”

“Help,” says Mona softly.

He looks over his spectacles at her. “I beg your pardon?”

Mona manages to let go of the wheel, open the car door, and hobble out. “You’ve… you’ve got to help me.”

“Help you what?”

Mona wonders how she can possibly phrase this. “I really don’t know. I’m… I think something’s really wrong with me, Mr. Parson.”

“How so?”

She thinks for a long time, feeling ashamed of what she’s about to admit to. “I know it sounds crazy, but I’m… seeing things.”

He raises his eyebrows and waits for more.

“I’m seeing two things at once. Seeing people and places here, and something else. I… I saw the goddamn lightning storm from thirty years ago, through my own wall.”

“Did you?” He does not sound alarmed at all, but quite intrigued. “Well. I am unused to having so many people come to me for advice. But I admit, it is not unpleasant. Please come in,” he says, extending a hand to the door.

She enters, and his office is almost the same as before, though now “Only the Lonely” is playing on the radio. He turns to face his card table—a game of Chinese checkers is again in progress—and says, “Will you please excuse us?”

Mona looks at him, then the table. It is totally empty. She is not sure whom he could be addressing, but he shuts the door as if whoever it was has just left.

He gets her a cup of coffee and gestures to the card table. She sits at one chair, he at the other. Her chair is unpleasantly warm, as if someone was just sitting in it. And of course someone was, she reminds herself: Parson was just sitting here. Wasn’t he?

“Now,” he says, and he takes a long, messy slurp of coffee, “why don’t you tell me what happened?”

And she does. She tells him about the dreams she’s been having, and Mrs. Benjamin’s mirror trick, and the tea closet, and the horrifying glimpse of the lightning storm she’s heard so much about. “I mean, is it possible I imagined it?” she asks. “I got told about the storm so many times, maybe I just thought up what it’d look like and then… hallucinated it.”

“Hm,” Parson says slowly. “No. I doubt that.”

“You do?” she says, relieved. “Then what could it have been? How could I see something like that?”

Parson is still for a long, long time. He looks at Mona, and though she once suspected he was senile she now feels a terrible intelligence in that gaze, like he is trying to silently communicate many things to her. “You know by now that Wink is… different. Correct?”

She wonders what that means, but says, “I… think so.”

“There are some things I can discuss about it, Miss Bright, and some things I cannot. I am not permitted to, I should say. But, since you have experienced this firsthand… I do not feel I would be giving you information you are not already privy to.” He takes another contemplative sip of coffee. “You probably will not believe it, I expect.”

“I might.”

“We shall see,” he says, indifferent. “In my time here, I have found that there are places in Wink where things do not precisely work right. Not like pipes or plumbing or electricity. Specifically, time no longer works right.”

“Time?”

“Yes. Please forgive me, I am not familiar with all of the terminology, so… here. Imagine time as a clock, with many gears and wheels—an easy enough metaphor, I imagine—but some gears have some damage or imperfection in them that causes them to sometimes catch, and skip back several notches, and run again. Do you see?”

“I certainly f*cking don’t.”

“What I am saying,” he says, “is that what you experienced was not, I feel, a hallucination, or a symptom of some madness within your”—he thinks for a while, searching for the word—“ brain, but rather you were witness to this occasional skipping of the gears. The time where you were was damaged, so you saw something that had happened already. It is common enough, I expect, though understandably you were quite perturbed.”

The wind rises outside the motel. It sounds unusually sharp, and even Parson appears a bit disturbed by it.

“How can time be damaged?” asks Mona. “You can’t hurt time, like it’s some… like it’s a f*cking engine or something.”

Parson raises an eyebrow—And you would know this how?

“Wink is goddamn weird, but it can’t be… you can’t have something like that happen. Things like that aren’t real.”

“I said I did not think you would believe it,” he says mildly. “It is always possible for time to be nonlinear. Some perceive time to be in a straight line—others perceive it as having many different branches, like those of a tree, leading to could-have-beens and might-have-beens and should-have-beens and so on. The idea of seeing the past is not an extraordinary one.”

“Are you really saying I saw the past?”

“A few seconds of it. Unfortunately for you, the past in that place was quite troubled. I think if you saw the past of someplace else—say, some park or closet—you would have hardly noticed anything at all. You would have simply experienced some feeling of wrongness, like there was a change in light, before things reverted to normal. The past, for you people, is often not very different from the present, beyond some superficial differences.”

Mona remembers the way the town was lit up with flaming houses, and how the lightning slowly snaked down to brush the earth… “So that was the thunderstorm?”

Parson shrugs. “You saw it. I did not.”

Yet Mona knows she saw something worse than the burning town, and the charred girl in the tub. “Do you know… if, when the storm came, there was something on the mesa? Something standing there, like a person would? But… bigger? Much, much bigger?”

Parson gives her a very closed look and shrugs again.

“You don’t know?”

His face grows grave. “I cannot say.”

“You can’t say, or you don’t know?”

Parson frowns and sips his coffee, but does not look her in the eye.

“So how does something like time get damaged?”

Now Parson looks positively anxious. Outside the wind keeps rising, and there is a burst of static on the radio. “I am not permitted to say,” he says.

“What do you mean? Why not?”

“I am sorry. But it is not… allowed,” he says, and when he sees Mona’s irritated glare, he adds, “I cannot. There are rules.”

“What the hell do you mean? Whose f*cking rules?”

He blinks slowly and exhales, as if he is suffering from a tremendous migraine. Mona notices sweat beginning to shine on his forehead. “I am sorry, Miss Bright. But I am not permitted to say much more than what I have. It would be indecent for me to say more upon this matter.”

He gives her a pained look, and Mona begins to wonder if discussing this subject is physically hurting him, like every word he says wounds him in some hidden manner. Just telling her that he can’t tell her appears to be making him sick.

“Can you tell me about Benjamin’s mirror trick?” she asks. “Is that what did this to me?”

Parson looks relieved to have changed the subject. “Ah. Well. I doubt it,” he says. “The mirror trick was precisely that—a trick, or a small and largely meaningless show.”

“But it changed something in me.”

“It did not change anything, I believe. It simply made you aware of something that was already there.”

“And what is it that’s there?”

“You have spent several weeks here. Long enough to know that this place is not normal, by your standards. But do you ever feel, Miss Bright, a sense of kinship with this town? A sense of familiarity, like you have walked these streets before? Or, rather, have you felt throughout your life a quiet type of pain, a nostalgia for a place to which you’ve never been? I think I see such a thing in you. Am I wrong?”

Mona feels a warmth in her palm, and realizes she is trembling and has spilled coffee on her hand. She places the coffee cup on the card table. “Yes.”

“Yes. I feared it was that way when you first came. We do not have new arrivals in Wink, Miss Bright. Unless, that is, they are supposed to be here. And how you came to this place is extraordinarily troubling to me.”

“Why?”

Parson opens his mouth to answer, but then the motel is absolutely blasted by wind. Tree branches and whirling leaves strike the sides of the building, and the windows flex and quiver in their frames. There is another burst of static on the radio, long and loud, and it might be Mona’s imagination but it almost sounds like there is a voice trying to speak through all the white noise.

Parson looks around, stands up, and murmurs, “Oh, dear.”

“What is it?”

He walks outside, and as soon as he is beyond the doors his clothing balloons up and whips about from the gales. “Oh, dear, dear. They are quite upset.”

“Who?” asks Mona. “What’s going on?”

He looks up, appearing to consult the stars and the moon, and he cocks his head and listens. “There’s been another murder.”

“A what?”

She stands and joins him at the door, but he quickly says, “Do not come outside, Miss Bright. It is very dangerous out here right now.”

“What the hell are you talking about? What was that about a murder?”

“Someone else has been killed,” he says. He holds up a hand, asking for silence, and listens more. “It is Mr. Macey.”

“Macey? The old man from the store? You’re saying he’s been killed?”

“Yes,” says Parson.

“How do you know?”

He looks around as if he can read something in the quivering pines or hear it in the wind. “I know.” He gives a deeply disappointed sigh. “I am coming back inside.”

Mona stands aside as he comes back in to sit at the card table. He looks quite shaken. “This will not be good,” he says. “Not at all. Another death…”

“Who was the first?” asks Mona, but she already knows the answer. “Mr. Weringer? It was him, wasn’t it? The guy whose funeral I interrupted?”

Parson nods.

“But I was told it wasn’t foul play.”

“You should know by now that what people say in Wink is often not very truthful,” Parson says.

She laughs bitterly. “No shit. So what’s going to happen now?”

Parson stares into his game of checkers, looking from bead to bead. Finally he raises his head and studies Mona, and she doesn’t care at all for the look in his eye. “You seem like someone used to death. Am I wrong?”

“I don’t know what the hell you mean by that.”

He picks up one of the beads and turns it over and over in his palm. “I mean, you have seen violent death before, and dealt with it.”

“I was a cop for a little while, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I suppose it is.” He smiles. It is not a pleasant sight, for his face seems unused to the expression. “Miss Bright, I am going to help you. You want answers, and I think I know how I can give them to you. But you, in turn, must also help me.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“It is simple,” Parson says. “All you have to do is solve a murder.”


Parson lets her sleep on the office couch that night, for it is too dangerous outside to return home. How it is dangerous, he does not tell her—he cannot.

He sits behind his desk as she sleeps, listening to the radio. He likes the radio. It is a very soothing experience, he finds, to hear the voices of the dead past in his ear like they’re still alive and fine. Two moments in time brushing against one another.

He looks at the woman asleep on his couch, rolled up in an old white blanket and face buried in the cushion, and he wonders what she truly is. For he knows she is more than just a rather pretty woman with a sad past, as she first seemed: he is beginning to suspect that what he is looking at is something like a bomb, waiting for the spark to set it off.

Parson stands and examines the board of keys on his wall again. He looks for a long, long time before finding the right one, which is last in line behind a long row of them in the corner. The key is unlike most of the others: it is long, its metal is dark, and it has one thick, awkward tooth at the end.

He walks to one section of the paneled wall in his office. He looks back at Mona and confirms she is asleep. Then he feels the wall, fingers probing its nooks and crannies, until he finds one hole whose existence would not appear coincidental to a casual glance.

He inserts the key in the hole and turns it. There is a clunk from somewhere in the wall, and one section of the paneling pops out a little. Parson works his fingers into its edge and pulls it open.

It is a small, narrow door, one that could not comfortably allow a taller person to pass. On the other side is a wooden staircase, and Parson peers down it, inspecting its wooden steps, for they have not been used in some time and he is not sure they’re still sound.

He begins down the staircase, which is dark and unlit. After the first turn he begins feeling the wall for a switch, and on finding it he hits it. A string of caged lights along the ceiling flicker on, leading him down the rickety passageway, and he continues until he finally comes to the motel basement.

The basement is lit by a single old halogen work lamp dangling from the ceiling. Besides this, the basement is almost entirely empty, its cracked cement floor totally bare.

But it is not completely empty. In the center of the basement, directly under the work lamp, is what appears to be a large, rough-hewn cube of dark, stained metal. It is nearly four feet tall and wide on all sides. Its edges are somewhat notched and its sides a little scratched, and it’s missing one corner, but besides that it is whole and unharmed. Yet despite its simplicity, one cannot help but get the feeling that there is something more to the metal cube; perhaps it is how it manages to attract the eye, no matter where you look: you could stare at your shoes as hard as you like, yet eventually you would find your gaze slowly, inexorably lifting to rest on the cube sitting in the light of the work lamp. Or maybe it’s the way the very air seems cooler the closer you get to the cube, eventually growing so cold that, if you were to approach it, you’d feel sure you were about to freeze over. Or maybe, if you were particularly observant, it would be the cracks in the cement floor that would disturb you, for a quick study would show that all the cracks radiate outward from the cube, as if it has been slowly pushing down on the slab of cement with greater and greater pressure.

Parson does not enter the basement. He stays on the stairway, on the very bottom step. He is not willing to venture any closer.

He looks at it for a long time, reflecting on how little it has changed since he first stored it here.

He says, “This is your doing, isn’t it.”

If he expects a response from the cube, it does not come.

“You brought her here,” he says. “I don’t know how you did it from so far away, but you pulled her here.”

Still the cube does nothing: it simply sits in the center of the room, gleaming darkly in the light of the lamp.

“Why?” he asks. “What are you doing? What do you need her for?”

No response. But is Parson mistaken, or is the work lamp moving a little bit, as if the cube is pulling it closer and closer?

“Answer me,” he says. “Answer me. I deserve that. I deserve one answer, at least.”

The work lamp keeps getting closer and closer, its cord stretched to the breaking point, until finally it can take it no longer and with a snap the lamp breaks free and flies to the cube like a bullet from a gun. The light goes out, and there is a clang and the sound of glass shattering from somewhere in the darkness. Then nothing.

Parson gazes into the darkness. “Fine,” he says bitterly. “Have it your way.” And he stomps back upstairs to his office.





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