American Elsewhere

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR




Evening is falling by the time Mona returns to Wink. She feels as if she is seeing it for the first time. She looks at the quaint adobe homes and the little cottages with sky-blue siding, the old men at the drugstore and the children playing tag at the greenbelt. The streetlamps are pristine, the grass moist, the trees thick and tall. A place of quiet days and quieter evenings.

And yet.

A man stands on the sidewalk, perfectly still, with his hands at his sides. He wears a charmingly cheap suit that is a few sizes too large for him. He stares at the sky with his head cocked as if he is listening to something only he can hear, and when she passes him in the huge truck he looks at her and smiles wistfully. She keeps watching him in the rearview mirror: he returns to staring at the powder-blue sky, a wide smile on his face.

Is he one of them? Are any of the people she sees?

A young woman stands in a gravel alley between two homes. A frail thing with skinny wrists. She holds an empty tin can in her hands and she turns it over again and again, feeling its metal sides, and as she does she twirls about in a slow shuffle, as if dancing with it.

What does she feel when she touches this mundane little trinket? Mona wonders. What do they see when they look at the world?

An old man stands in the window of the hardware store, staring out with eyes rimmed blue-black. His hands are spattered with what looks like ink, maybe black paint. He holds a bowl and a fork, and he dips the fork down into the bowl and brings up a steaming pile of mashed potatoes. He opens his mouth hugely, far wider than he should, and paints his tongue with the forkful, unblinking, not swallowing. As his hands rise the black ink runs down his forearms in rivulets to stain his shirtsleeves.

He is one. There is no doubt.

How many are there? They seem to be everywhere, when you look: stragglers occupying drab little between-places in the town, ditches and empty parking lots and alleys behind shops. The interstitial parts of a city no one ever thinks about. These places, perhaps, are where these dazed wanderers go to collect their thoughts, to be themselves.

To be themselves, thinks Mona. Whatever they are, behind their eyes.

And when they are done, will they return home, cheery smiles on their faces, ready to put food on the table? To cut the grass or play a game of cards or share a pipe? To gossip and scratch off yet another day in their peaceful, small-town lives? Is that it?

What do they do? What do such people do? Why are they here?


She circles the block twice, easing through the alleys, counting all the cars and memorizing the license plates. She sees no one watching, no shift of a curtain or movement in any of the cars, and she certainly sees no one tailing her—road traffic here is so sparse it’d be almost impossible to stay hidden.

When she’s as satisfied as she can get, she parks down the street from Mrs. Benjamin’s house and watches it.

Once she had lunch there, only a few days ago. Yet now she wonders what lives in that house, or pretends to live there, and what it does when no one’s watching.

She takes out the Glock and wipes sweat from her brow. She does not want to do this. Yet she must know.

She gets out of the truck and walks to the front door, barely bothering to hide the gun in her hand. She goes to the window and peers in. The house is dark, but she is not sure that means anything.

She goes to the door, and is not surprised to find it is unlocked. After all—why would such a thing ever need to lock the doors?

She walks in. The dark color of the floor and walls makes the house even darker. It is still every inch an old woman’s house, stuffed with ticking clocks and piles of mail and forgettable trinkets. She hears nothing. It seems the owner is not at home.

Mona stalks through the house, gun drawn, eyes hunting for any movement. She turns left and follows a short hallway to the bedroom. And there she sees him.

He is lying on the bed with his fingers threaded together on his chest, peaceful as the dead. Yet she can see he is not dead, not quite: his chest rises and falls, slowly.

He looks the same, like your average old man. Perhaps a little caustic. Someone who has spent too much of his life indoors.

She sits down in the overstuffed chair beside Parson. She looks into his face and wonders what is behind it. It is not, she thinks, an eccentric old man who’s spent his waning years running a motel. Any more than the owner of this house is a doddering old bureaucrat.

She raises the gun a little, but does not point it at him. The clocks seem to tick louder and louder. She wonders what it would be like to break their ponderous ticking and spill his skull across these yellowed sheets.

Would it be such a bad thing? Would it be wrong? Would it even do anything?

There is a voice from the door: “No. No, it would do nothing.”

Mona very nearly pulls the trigger. She looks up and sees Mrs. Benjamin is standing at the door, and though she watches Mona coolly, indifferently, her dress is muddy, torn, and tattered. Streaks of blood show through the rents in the blotchy purple fabric.

“You stay right there,” says Mona.

“I am,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “I would wish no violence on him.”

They stare at each other for a moment. In the hall the clocks tick and tock endlessly.

“Why wouldn’t it?” asks Mona.

Mrs. Benjamin cocks an eyebrow, uncomprehending.

“Why wouldn’t it hurt him?” she explains.

Mrs. Benjamin is silent.

“You aren’t permitted to say,” says Mona.

“No,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “We are not.”

“We,” says Mona. “How many?”

Mrs. Benjamin still does not answer. The clocks tick on and on.

“Tell me,” says Mona. “Tell me or I’ll pull this trigger and blow his f*cking brains out.”

“Did I not just say it would do nothing?”

“Are you telling me the bullet in the chamber of this gun wouldn’t punch through to his brain and turn it to soup? I’ve seen it before. Oh Lord, I’ve seen it before. It makes a mess, Mrs. Benjamin. You’d be doing laundry for days.”

Mrs. Benjamin purses her lips.

“Yeah,” says Mona. “I don’t quite know what you all are, but I know you aren’t bulletproof. How many?”

“If you know so much, why don’t you guess?”

Mona can feel sweat running down her arms. She glances at Parson, then back at Mrs. Benjamin. “Can’t be the whole town. Not everyone. Most of them are people, real people. But you all are… from somewhere else.”

Mrs. Benjamin raises her head and thins her eyes, an inscrutable gesture that neither affirms nor denies it.

“I’ve been up on the mesa,” says Mona.

“Have you,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “He sent you there, didn’t he?”

“Yeah. He wanted me to know. And now I do. I saw the records there. I know your mirror trick now.”

She expected that to get some reaction from her, but Mrs. Benjamin does nothing. Then Mona realizes—how could she have expected such a thing to react in any normal way?

“It makes things soft, doesn’t it?” asks Mona. “Bruised. It makes the boundaries of things… permeable. And when that happens, things can come through. Things like you, and him.”

Mrs. Benjamin is stone-faced, dead-eyed, totally dormant. Mona gets the feeling that certain muscles are going slack in her face that no normal person could relax. The hairs rise up on Mona’s arms as she begins to understand that Mrs. Benjamin’s physical form is but a puppet in a very real way, and she’s no longer bothering to maintain her appearance.

“What are you?” asks Mona softly. “Don’t tell me you can’t say.”

“I cannot,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

“Don’t tell me you’re not f*cking permitted.”

“The issue is not so much that,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

“Then what is it?”

“Such things cannot be explained.”

“Why not?”

“How does one tell a fish it swims in an ocean? How would one tell it of currents, of skies, of mountains? How could you make it understand?”

“Tell me anyway. I’m a quick study.”

“I cannot.”

“Do it.”

“I cannot. It would kill you.”

There is a rattling gasp in the room. Mona tenses up, but does not take her eyes off Mrs. Benjamin. Then she glances to the side and sees Parson’s eyes fluttering. He frowns, shifts on the bed, and opens his eyes. He does not look at the gun, but stares straight ahead.

“She is not like the others,” he says in a croaking voice.

Mrs. Benjamin and Mona do not move. The clocks keep ticking, on and on.

“That does not mean she can understand,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

“We can try to show her,” says Parson.

“What do you mean?” asks Mrs. Benjamin.

“The hell are you talking about?” asks Mona.

He does not answer either of them.

“Do you mean… take her there?” asks Mrs. Benjamin.

“Yes,” says Parson. “And see what she can see.”

“Take who where?” asks Mona.

“It would destroy her. She cannot go to such places mindfully. She is not like us.”

“Mm. No,” he says. He turns his head to look at Mona, totally ignoring the gun in his face. “She is not bound to this place, like we are. But neither is she truly free. She is drawn here against her will. She is different.”

“Different enough?” asks Mrs. Benjamin.

Parson does not answer. He just stares at Mona.

Mrs. Benjamin sighs. “Do you really want to see, dear?”

“See what?” asks Mona.

“What we are. What we are underneath it all.”

“What we are on the other side,” says Parson.

“What we were in the beginning,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

“Do you want to see?”

“Do you wish us to take you there?”

“To the halfway spot, not here, not there?”

“Where we reside?”

Mona is trembling. They speak so fast it is hard to keep up. “What the hell are you all talking about? If you’re gonna try something, hurry up and do it. But I am handy with a gun.”

“We have no reason to harm you,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

“But what I know—”

“You know what you know,” says Parson, “because I led you to it.”

Mona sees the truth in this, but she still is not comfortable with what they are suggesting. “I thought it wasn’t permitted,” she says.

“You know enough,” says Parson. “We would not be showing you something new.”

“Nothing you do not suspect,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

Mona pauses, uncertain. But she cannot turn away, not now.

“All right,” she says.

Mrs. Benjamin and Parson glance at one another, faces slack and dead, eyes watery and small.

“Please put down the gun,” says Parson. “Please.”

Mona hesitates, but lowers it.

“Good,” says Parson. “Now.”

For a moment nothing happens, and Mona thinks they have just tricked her. Yet the two do not pounce on her, but stay stock-still.

The clocks stop ticking in the hallway. Everything in the room is silent: all the background noise, the susurrus of sounds from the forest and streets, has died. Then the walls begin to tremble and shudder, like they are drum skins being fiercely beaten by hammers, and with each blow they become more and more transparent until finally Mona can see out of them, glimpsing red stars and a huge pink moon and a gray, lunar terrain…

And then she sees

(no no)

(please no)

(endless canyons)

(glittering flats)

(and there beside her, swaying)

(a column, a stalk)

(tall, tall, infinitely tall)

(rigid and chitinous and dripping)

(hollow, honey-chambered)

(countless sinews and polyps)

(and in each chamber)

(a tiny black eye)

(like a fungus, she thinks, a huge, dripping fungus)

(roots like the root of a tooth)

(worming down into the heart of the world)

(and there beside it she sees)

(bulky and broad, shoulders spanning miles)

(thousands of powerful limbs)

(clutch the ground)

(a tiny, malformed skull)

(hundreds of spider eyes)

(like black marbles, glittering)

(she feels herself shake)

(it is too much)

(too)

(much)

Mona awakes gripping the carpet so hard she feels certain she’s broken her left ring finger. She is facedown on the ground. Every muscle in her body is tense to the point of snapping. She can’t even remember how to breathe. Then she gasps and goes limp.

“She’s alive,” she hears Mrs. Benjamin say, with some amount of surprise.

“Did I not tell you?” asks Parson.

“But is she whole?”

Mona just lies there blinking for a moment, telling her body to remember how to draw air. She feels fluid running down her face and she realizes she is weeping.

In some sensible part of her malfunctioning brain, she is beginning to understand that all information, from numbers to colors to sensations to words, is really just a means of establishing perspective: we know what green is only because we have blue to compare it to, just as we can understand three because we can match it up with two and see there is one more. The approximate qualities, behavior, and pattern of any witnessable occurrence are determined only by how it is like and unlike its neighbors; we know a thing only to the degree that we know what it is next to.

And what Mona just experienced for that one awful, endless, titubant moment neighbors nothing at all. She has nothing to compare it to. All of her many frames of reference, which were so carefully, thoughtlessly constructed during all of her life, and which she always assumed to be as solid and undeniable as the very earth, have been proven to be tottering, fragile little popsicle-stick structures, vulnerable to a breeze or a shift in the carpet.

Her faculties struggle under the weight of this revelation. It is too much. Her mind wishes to throw its hands up and quit.

But she will not let it: she rallies, coughs, and says, “What… what the f*ck?”

“Apparently so,” says Parson.

She rolls over and sees the two of them standing over her, their figures indistinct in the dark room. Immediately she shoves herself away and looks for the gun, but it is nowhere to be found. She crawls to the corner and grabs a lamp and threatens to throw it. She’s too shaken to realize how ridiculous she looks.

“Do you see now?” asks Mrs. Benjamin. “Do you see what we are?”

“What you are?” asks Mona. “Those… that… that’s what you are?”

They are silent, two shapeless shadows slouching in the center of the dark room. Slowly, the clocks in the hallway resume their ticking. The two of them shift a little bit, and evening light spills in, lighting a bit of their faces.

Mona can see their eyes. There is something behind them, something wriggling, squirming.

“Yes,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

“We are not from here, Mona Bright,” says Parson.

“Nor are we here, not entirely,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

“Just a bit of us is,” says Parson. “As the tip of an iceberg pokes past the ocean’s surface, yet the rest of it lies below.”

“Hidden.”

“You cannot grasp it, cannot comprehend its size, its breadth. Just as you—or most of your kind, at least—cannot see us.”

“Jesus,” says Mona. “What… what are you all? Monsters?”

“Monsters?” asks Mrs. Benjamin. “We have been thought such before.”

“And we have also been thought of as gods,” says Parson.

“In the places we took.”

“The worlds we conquered.”

“In the other place.”

“Elsewhere from this.”

“Our family is vast, Mona Bright,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “And we are most esteemed. You cannot imagine what we have conquered, what we have controlled, there in the aspects of reality you and your kind still have not touched.”

“Imagine a building, tall and narrow, many floors, many stairs,” says Parson. “Many, many tiny rooms, many places stacked on one another. In some spots they overlap, but in most they are whole, contained, hermetic. Walls stiff and unyielding. Most people in the building would only live on one floor, one level. One plane. Yet imagine if someone could live in several at the same time, occupying many places, many floors, rising up through the whole of the building and moving through it all at once, just as sea creatures move through many meters of the sea, vertically, horizontally.”

“Pandimensional,” Mona says.

“Yes,” says Parson.

“We are from a place underneath this one,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

“Behind it.”

“Beside it.”

“Above it, around it.”

“Everywhere,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

“Then why the hell are you here?” asks Mona.

They pause and glance at each other. Their eyes seem to move independently of their slack faces.

“We were forced to leave,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

“Yes. And come here,” says Parson.

“We are… emigrants.”

“Refugees, you could say.”

“And this place is our haven.”

“To an extent,” corrects Parson, sounding suddenly bitter.

“Christ,” says Mona. “This is what you were trying to tell me with your little fable, wasn’t it… your story about the birds in the trees.”

Parson nods.

She laughs madly. “But you don’t look like any f*cking birds I know. Not how you really are, I mean. In that… that place.” She stops laughing as she remembers a line from Parson’s story: Then one evening a terrible storm broke open in the skies…

And it all begins to make sense.

“And you didn’t just fly here, did you,” she says. “You didn’t crawl out of the mirror, or the lab. And you didn’t just pop into existence.”

“No,” says Parson.

“The change happened to the whole town,” says Mona. “To everyone. Everything. You came here in the storm. That was what it was. But it wasn’t really a storm, or just a storm.”

“No,” says Parson.

“It was bruising,” says Mona. “Bruising miles wide. It was just a bunch of doors opening everywhere, all at once. Wasn’t it?”

“In a way,” says Mrs. Benjamin. She stares at the ceiling. “The whole sky opened up,” she says. “And then we came.”

And she begins to speak.