American Elsewhere

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE




It’s easy, Mona thinks, to understand why so many prophets found gods while wandering out in the desert. Because there cannot be any place on earth as strange and empty as a desert. Merely passing through it warps your thoughts: your perceptions of how the world works are broken down with each empty mile until civilization feels like a dream. And though any barren wilderness falls well short of achieving anything close to infinity, the sight of so many leaning red cliffs and so much empty horizon manages to inch the mind closer to understanding what infinity is.

For as Mona powers the Charger up the road to the mesa, she realizes she has never felt so small in her life. It’s as if the world has been upended, and she is clinging to the point of a copper-red stalactite hanging from the roof of an endless cave, and below her are oceans and oceans of that cloudless, electric-blue sky, and were she to slip and drive off the road she would surely go plummeting into it, falling into that endless, flat blue, and though she might plead and beg for the fatal kiss of hard earth she would never, ever receive it. She would just keep falling.

She’s been eyeing the chain-link fence running alongside the road. She passes yet another sign about Wink, this one a half-ruined thing asking her why she would ever wish to leave, though Mona could think of a few million reasons. She slows down when the fence’s silver glimmer turn to snarls of black. She pulls over and sees that there is indeed a gap in the fence, and it’s quite large, nearly twenty feet across.

“This must be the place,” she says. Then she frowns, thinking of the doughnut tire. It can’t hold up on uneven terrain, and it’d be impossible to get a good tire for the Charger out here. And besides, she doesn’t trust a damn soul in this town anymore.

She decides this will have to be done on foot, as she feared. She’ll drive the Charger in just far enough for it to be hidden from the road, because while she hasn’t seen anyone else along the highway, she’s not willing to take the chance. So, wincing each time she hears a rock or branch snap under the tires, she slowly, slowly steers the Charger through the gap in the fence.

Mona parks it behind a fallen ponderosa pine, then gets out and scans the way ahead. She cannot see much of a road out here. She looks around, marking this spot, for though she’s brought plenty of water the desert is large and it can’t last forever if she gets lost.

She shoulders the pack she made for herself (using a pink child’s backpack from the Ponderosa Acres’s “lost and found” box, as her previous pack was too small for this expedition) and begins her trek to the mesa. It is not unbearably hot in such high deserts, but it is quite dry, and the wind seems to corrode her skin.

She crests one hill and stops. For a moment she thought she saw something in the landscape, but then it was gone…

She takes a step or two back and scans the countryside. Then things align just right, and she sees it.

There is a road, just as Parson said there would be. It is incredibly faint, like a whisper of a brushstroke on a painting, but it’s there. She can see it winding across the rocky terrain, running over hills and ridges until it disappears behind the shadow of the mesa. It’s like a seam in the skin of the earth itself, as if the desert was stitched together here.

It will be a long walk. But this, Mona has decided, is hostile territory. Parson can tell funny little riddles all day, but he doesn’t know jack shit about infiltrating what essentially is enemy ground.

And that’s what Mona’s going to be doing. There are secrets at the mesa no one wants her to know. So she hikes the pink backpack up high on her shoulders, bows down low, and starts to jog across the desert.


She stops in the shadow of every tree and rock to survey the territory around her. She sees no movement. There is no wildlife, not even any birds. She is utterly alone here. Still she does not let her guard down. Sometimes as she runs she touches the butt of the Glock, reminding herself how close it is, and what she will need to do if she encounters any—she searches for the right term—obstacles.

Things feel more and more unreal as she runs. The sun does not seem to move: it is forever stuck at just a half hour after dawn. Its slanted light turns the shadows into a staggered calligraphy that loops across the red ground. Enormous cliffs somehow keep creeping up from out of nowhere, slowly emerging from behind what looked like a simple knoll, like she’s being stalked by the mountains. And everything here is quiet, save for the wind. It is such a harsh change from the piney valley of Wink.

One peak rises, then slowly falls, as if she’s wading through a red sea. But as this peak falls, she thinks she sees something behind it—something thin and gleaming white…

“The hell?” she says. She reaches into her backpack and takes out her binoculars. She glasses the hilltop behind the cliff and scans for what she saw.

It’s hard to miss. There behind the cliff is a white column sticking straight up out of the ground. It contrasts brightly against the dull red of the terrain. And the column is too perfect, too unblemished, for her to think it’s there naturally.

As she watches, a violet light on the top of the column blinks on, then off.

“No,” she says. “Not naturally.” She purses her lips and studies the area around the white column. She sees no one. She thinks for a moment, then takes out the Glock. Then she starts off toward the column. She’s uneasy, because one thing Parson said has been bothering her:

It winds around the mesa, through rocks and trees and gullies, and… and some things I cannot describe.

It’s the “things he cannot describe” part that gets to her. It was as if he thought she’d see things that were beyond his conception. And while she doesn’t know Parson that well (and isn’t sure she’ll ever get the chance, now) she doesn’t think there’s much beyond him. Parson seems to be very good at knowing things, so if the things out here confound even him…

She emerges from the shadow of the cliff and sees she is at the base of the hill with the white column. It’s about twelve feet tall, standing perfectly perpendicular to the top of the hill. It looks like it’s made of metal, yet she can’t tell if it’s painted white or if the metal just is white. She’s not sure how long it’s been out here—if it was part of the Coburn operation then the damn thing must be older than she is—but it shows no signs of wear and tear.

For some reason the sight of that tall, white column makes her hair stand on end. It is just too perfect. It’s like the wind turbines she saw in West Texas, so strange and beautiful in an alien way, but even worse: the thing has no business being there, and yet there it is, blinking that violet light.

She considers what to do. She cannot say why she thinks it is dangerous, but she is sure of it. It is doing something in some intangible way, just as the wind turbines were turning and turning.

Against her better judgment, Mona decides to check it out. There is something strangely fascinating about the column, something hypnotic in the way its light keeps blinking on and off. So she starts off toward it, trying to ignore the sick sensation in her gut that suggests this is a damn stupid idea.

Though the column is not that tall it seems to tower over her as she approaches it. She feels a little sick; it’s like the proportions of everything in this country are all thrown off. And there’s something else wrong… something about the shadows on the ground…

Once she’s about twenty feet away from it, she stops. There’s an electrical taste in her mouth that she doesn’t care for, like she’s been sucking on a battery. She squats and studies the column. Its top is smooth and rounded, like it’s a big white bullet sitting on the top of the hill. And though the light keeps blinking, she can see no bulb, not even a hole in its white casing. If it is a casing, that is.

She cocks her head so one ear is toward it. The column is humming, very softly, an electrical sound that seems to pulse a little bit. She smacks her lips. Maybe she’s wrong, but she thinks the electrical taste in her mouth ebbs and flows with the pulse of the hum.

Mona brushes her hair out of her eyes and keeps studying it. She walks around it in a half-circle, trying to see if she can spot a seam or a bolt or a screw in its smooth white surface. She can’t see any, but it’s hard because her hair keeps getting in her face. The wind just doesn’t let up out here.

Then the wind finally drops a bit, a lull in the breeze. Yet Mona’s hair stays right where it is, right in front of her eyes.

She pushes it down and watches, confused, as it slowly rises back up.

She looks down at her arms and sees that every hair there is pointing straight at the column. Then she thinks, pinches a lock of her hair, and holds it taut in front of her face. She watches in amazement as the very tip of the lock slowly lifts to point toward the white column…

It’s static electricity, she realizes. The damn thing must be giving off a crazy-strong static field for it to pull at her from here.

She looks around to see if the field is pulling on anything else, and as she does she sees what’s wrong with the shadows on the ground: though the sun is in the east, behind her, all the shadows on the ground are pointed toward her. She walks a few feet back from the column, and sees that’s not quite right: the shadows are actually all facing away from the column. It’s like it’s projecting a bright light, one her eyes can’t see, but one that still casts shadows.

She’s not getting anywhere near that f*cking thing, she decides. If she does she’s sure to die of cancer in a week or something. It was stupid of her to even get this close.

Mona decides she needs to forget about it. She turns around and starts back to the road. The mesa isn’t too far ahead now. Less than an hour’s walk, probably, and the more distance she puts between her and that thing—whatever it is, and whatever it does—the better.

She walks at a brisk pace, eager to get away from the white column, but when she’s about thirty feet past it her nose and eyes start watering. She pauses to sneeze, then continues, but it gets even worse. It’s as if she’s having an allergic reaction: every lining and every tissue in her skull has just swollen up like a balloon. Coughing, she staggers back down the hill and sits down on a stone to recover.

The attack fades. Mona rubs at her throat, wondering what the hell that was. She’s never had an allergic reaction to anything in her life. What could have caused it now?

She takes a sip of water, then stands and makes for the road again. But right at about the same spot on the hill, her eyes burn and she starts sneezing over and over again, awful, painful sneezes that make her throat burn.

“F*ck!” gasps Mona. She falls to her hands and knees and crawls back down the hillside. Again, once she’s moved several feet the attack fades.

She contemplates her situation as she catches her breath. She glances up at the white column, which is still implacably blinking its weird purple light. The more she looks at it, the more she doesn’t trust it.

“You’re doing this, aren’t you, you son of a bitch,” she says to it.

The column just keeps blinking. Mona glares at it, then looks back toward the mesa.

It doesn’t want me to get over there, she thinks. It’s a very stupid thing to think, she knows that, but she also feels certain that it’s right. Someone put this thing here as a deterrent. Maybe they didn’t want anyone getting to this side of the mesa. And if they were able to make a piece of machinery affect people in such a way… well. What else is around the mesa? It makes Mona wonder if she really wants to go farther.

“Hell yes, I do,” she says angrily. She stands, glances at the white column, and grasps the pink straps of her backpack so it’s pulled tight against her back. Then she bends low, flexes her knees, and breaks off at a dead sprint.

At first she thinks she’s made it. She’s going so damn fast that it feels like she’s already passed that invisible line. But then the attack hits her like a freight train, a lightning bolt, a ten-ton weight hurtling down out of the sky, and suddenly she’s stumbling forward like a drunk, sneezing uncontrollably, her vision blurring and her cheeks wet with tears.

Goddamn it, no, she thinks. No, I am not going to be beat by some f*cking white stick on a hill.

She digs in her heels and starts trotting forward again.

About six steps out there’s a loud, sharp pop, like a lightbulb burning out, and Mona collapses, sure the thing just fried her like a Tesla coil. But the attack immediately stops. The burning sensation recedes from her eyes, nose, and throat, and she sits up, taking deep, slow breaths. She sees that her skin is red and blotchy, like she’s just been swimming in bleach. Hopefully that will go away soon.

She must have pushed through whatever barrier the thing maintains. She looks back at the white column. “F*cker,” she says, and she’s about to get back up when she does a double take.

There’s a hill about two or three hundred yards past the column, and she could swear she just saw another violet light on that one, too.

She reaches into her backpack, takes out her binoculars, and looks.

She’s not wrong: there is a second column standing on that distant hill. And unless the binoculars are lying to her, there’s a third column, just barely a hair of white, standing on a hill far beyond that one. The three of them all form a line extending from just before the mesa and partway around the valley, silently blinking their purple lights in unison.

“Like a fence,” says Mona. She puts down her binoculars and looks at the column closest to her. “Like an electric fence, or a wall.”

This begs the question: what is it meant to be fencing out?

She turns this question over, and looks back down the slopes to the small green valley below. She can see a few roofs from here, and the black, charred memorial tree in the park.

Maybe the columns aren’t meant to fence anything out. Maybe they’re meant to fence something in.

Mona stands and starts walking back toward the mesa. Things no longer feel quite so distorted to her. Though the desert is still a striking place, it is not so surreal or disorienting. She wonders if the white columns project more than just an invisible barrier. Perhaps they are regulating something, like a water filter in an aquarium, and though she can’t see the effects of that regulation she can sense it somewhere in the back of her head.

She is almost sure of one thing, though: whoever put the columns there didn’t do it with people in mind. Otherwise she’s positive she wouldn’t have been able to get through. They must be meant for something else.

Maybe there’s a reason people never leave or come to Wink, she thinks. This troubles her deeply. Because she did not experience any barrier when she first entered this valley. That means that either there are no columns and no barrier on the other side—which she thinks unlikely—or she was allowed in. As if she’d been expected.

She absently glances up as she considers this disturbing thought, but stops dead in her tracks. She stares at the sky, then shields her eyes with her hand to better see.

“No way,” she says. “No f*cking way.”

Five minutes ago, the pale face of the morning moon was its usual dusky pink. That was on the other side of the white columns, she remembers, inside whatever field it is those machines are putting out.

On this side, sure, the moon is still in the same place, hanging just above the tip of the mesa. But it’s returned to its normal white color. There’s not a trace of pink in it.