American Elsewhere

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX




Gene Kelly leans his head back, staring up into the stage lights (Are there stage lights there? Where is there, anyway, Mona thinks?), and sighs. The gesture is meant to be contemplative, Mona thinks, but to her it is alienating: his face is bathed in such bright, cream-white illumination that it appears craggy, carven, a lump of calcite with two twinkling black eyes at the top. “Before we begin,” he says, “I think it’d be wise to know what you know, so I don’t repeat myself. Time’s short. So. You… know where we came from, don’t you, Mona?”

“I guess as much as anyone can,” says Mona, though she thinks—Why is time short?

“Yes. You’ve seen it, after all. You’ve been there, and you lived. Very impressive.”

“People keep saying that.”

Kelly laughs. “That’s not quite correct, is it? It’s not people who keep saying that, but my… closer siblings. You’ve met all four of them, haven’t you? All except one.”

“Weringer. Yeah. He died before I got here.”

“Just before you got here,” corrects Kelly. “Very odd, that.”

“Why?”

“Never mind. It’s just so curious that you’ve come to know my family so well, and so rapidly, within just several weeks. Though you haven’t met everyone.” He looks at her, and for the first time this picture of a person looks frightened. In fact, it looks more authentically frightened than Gene Kelly himself ever actually did, because then Kelly was acting frightened; yet this thing, this contrived image, is genuinely, seriously frightened.

He says, “You know about Mother. Don’t you?”

“Yes,” says Mona. She realizes this Mother of theirs came into the world only a few hundred feet away, on top of the mesa beside this canyon. It is a little creepy to realize Mona herself stood there just today. And if Parson and Mrs. Benjamin were telling the truth, Mother never got any farther than that.

“Yes… She kept us quite organized, on the other side. Segregated, you could even say. There were the five eldest, of which I was the… well. You get the idea. We were the favored ones, the cream of the crop. Then below us were the middle children, who were, let’s say, competent but not extraordinary. Limited. Middling. Nothing to talk about. And then below them were the babies, the wee ones who were little more than teeth, gullets, and however many appendages they chose to have. Formidable, sure, but not clever. Now. I bet you wonder why She chose to split us up like that.”

His eyes are shining strangely, and there is a bitter edge to his voice.

“To keep a tight hand on the wheel, I’d say,” says Mona.

“You are correct, sister,” says Kelly acidly. “It’s so much easier to control everyone when you have them all divided. A lesson Weringer—to use his colloquial name—learned well, and used in the making of Wink. You have to have everyone reined in if you want to keep what’s yours. And on the other side, Mona… we owned everything.”

It’s as he says this that Mona realizes something is bothering her about the screen. Well, not the screen itself, but something around the screen: there are the red curtains on the sides, sure, but behind the curtains, in the shadows, there should be just brick wall, right? And there was brick wall, just a minute ago. Yet now it looks like there’s a gap there: behind the curtains is some kind of backstage area, and something is moving in there, undulating slowly and smoothly, but she can’t really see it…

“The other side isn’t a where, really,” says Kelly. “Nor is it a when. If a world is a machine, with many wheels and belts, ours on that side had millions, even billions more than yours. Compare a pocket watch to a cathedral clock, and you’d be close. It might not have looked like it when you saw it, little sister, but that place was once”—he thins his eyes, and his whole face trembles with passion—“ marvelous. There was no and is no beauty like it, like the places over there. A dark and savage and monstrously wonderful place.” He pauses. “Or at least, I think it was. I think it was wonderful. Now that I am away from it, it seems far better than when I was actually there. It is so curious.” He shrugs, shakes his head. “But never mind. The most important thing about that place, of all the wonderful sights and lands over there, is that they were ours.

“Well. Mother’s, really. Everything was Mother’s. We were Mother’s. She made us. We belonged to Her. We were Her kin, Her spawn, Her children. With Her, we took these places, conquered them, made them our own. We installed ourselves as gods… and we were gods to them, of course we were, because what is a god besides a higher intelligence, and was there any intelligence higher than us? No.

“But we weren’t… unstoppable.” The camera pulls back, and Kelly takes a seat on an empty chair—a chair that was occupied by that older woman just a little while ago. Mona wonders where she went. “It started with no warning, totally and completely out of the blue. Everything just began to… fall apart.”

“How do you mean?” asks Mona.

“Well, you saw what it’s like over there, now. Was it particularly pretty to you?”

“I don’t know what you all find pretty.”

“Touché,” says Kelly. “But no, that is not pretty to me, to us. Yet let me assure you, what you saw is surely the prettiest part of our world, now.”

“What happened? Like… a war?”

He purses his lips, and his eyes search offscreen. “You know… I don’t know.”

“You don’t?”

“No. I admit it. I really don’t. Mother was the only one who knew. She foresaw it. She was the only one who really understood its nature. She told me—and only me, because, well, Miss Mona, I am the favorite son, a bit—that it was because of how huge we were, how powerful, that the mere presence of our family was doing something destructive to the fabric of our world…” He sniffs. “Not very specific, is it?”

“I guess not.” Mona wishes he’d stop talking like she knows what the f*ck he means.

“No. But I, being the dutiful First, told the rest of the family. And we watched helplessly as, one by one, the worlds and places we had conquered… faded. Burned. And were lost. No. No, gods we were not.” He looks at her, his gaze sharp. “What I will tell you now, Miss Mona, is part of some very private conversations I had with Mother. No one, I do really mean no one, including—what does he call himself now—oh that’s right, Parson, knows anything about them.”

“If you think I’m going to tell anyone, don’t worry,” says Mona. “I’m not on friendly terms with much of your family.”

“Are you not, now,” says Kelly softly.

Mona sees another hint of movement in the backstage space behind the curtains. She tries not to let Kelly see her looking (Is Kelly even the way First looks at things? It’s not like his eyes on the screen really work, right?), but Mona finally catches a glimpse of what’s back there before it retreats into the dark.

She tenses up. The hairs along Mona’s arms slowly stand at attention. She tries very hard not to show that she noticed.

It looked like… tentacles. As if the wall behind the screen, and perhaps the wall on either side of the theater, and maybe even the ceiling and floor and every crawl space in this building, is packed with endless, endless tentacles, some the size of tree trunks, some like the finest, softest hair, all of them writhing and twisting in the dark…

That’s you, isn’t it? she thinks. The real you. What you really are, behind this illusion…

“Mother came to me,” continues Kelly, apparently unaware of any problem at all, “and told me She’d found something. Noticed something, rather. She said She’d discovered a place in our world… where everything was thin. Not just thin—bruised.” Kelly smiles, but it’s utterly humorless. “I don’t suppose I need to tell you that this occurred just before our own world began to fall apart.”

Mona thinks, Oh, shit.

Kelly flashes that mirthless smile again. “What Mother had concluded, after examining these bruised portions, was that there were other worlds than our own. Realities we never knew about. And here She did not speak in a spatial sense—not merely civilizations on other—what do you call them here—planets, but contained, functioning worlds existing within dimensions lower and more rudimentary than our own. There was life there, intelligence, and that intelligence was pushing at the boundaries of its own little world into our own. And Mother thought, just maybe, we could push back. And go through.

“It was revolutionary to me. And also ludicrous. Why would we ever want to abandon what we had? I mean, at the time we were totally safe. And were we not happy here? I asked Her. What more could anyone want? But Mother was silent. I could tell She was troubled. Which, naturally, troubled me.

“I did not have much time to dwell on it, though. Because that was when everything began to burn, and fall apart. A holocaust on an unimaginable level. Whole aspects of our reality, shorn away like dead skin. Yet Mother had an answer. One I’d never have expected.” The camera slowly starts to pull in on Kelly’s face again. “She told me She had already made contact with the other side.”

“When was this?” asks Mona.

“Mm? Trying to arrange a mental time line?” He laughs. “I wouldn’t bother. Time over there is not time over here. It was just at the beginning of the Fall, though. Just when things began to turn. Mother told us we could not stop it. Nothing we could do. There was only one way to survive: we had to escape our world, and find sanctuary in this new one, this primitive, undeveloped place. We asked Her, How? How can we do this? How can we help? And Mother said She had to do this alone. She would go there, to whatever this place was, arrange things for us, and return to take us to safety.

“I, the First, was chosen to assist Her in this task. And what I found was quite surprising. Mother’s preparations did not have the look of something rushed, of an emergency solution—it looked like She’d been ready for this for some time.” He smiles. “I bet you can guess what Her preparations looked like.”

Mona thinks. Then she says, “A mirror?”

“Bingo! Mother had constructed a mirror, or a lens of some kind that could look beyond our world and into those bordering it. She told me She had created it when She first learned of the place on the other side, this elsewhere alongside our own. She said this was how She had been communicating with her.”

Kelly pauses. He takes a slow breath, in, then out. “This confused me,” he says. “I asked—communicating with who, exactly?”

For some reason Mona’s skin erupts in gooseflesh. Her heart goes cold but it pumps faster and faster and faster.

“She did not answer,” says Kelly. “But I helped Her prepare Her exit. And Mother said, all we have to do now is wait, and She turned to look into the mirror. Wait for what? I asked. What is going to happen? Mother said, Wait for her to return to me. And She would say no more, no matter what I asked.

“We waited, and waited. I grew impatient. We did not have time for this, I said. But then, to my surprise, a face appeared in the mirror. It was a very small face, a face unlike any I’d ever seen before. And it stared at us, and when it saw Mother, it said, in a language I did not then understand, ‘Oh. There you are.’ ”

Kelly looks at Mona, smiles ruefully, and scratches the side of his head. “Enter one Laura Alvarez,” he says.


“No,” says Mona.

“I’m afraid so,” says Kelly.

“No. No, that can’t be…”

“It’s the truth,” says Kelly. “You asked for the truth, and here I give it to you.”

“You’re saying my mother… she….”

“What I am saying,” says Kelly, “is that Dr. Laura Alvarez, lauded physicist and dutiful Coburn National Laboratory and Observatory employee, one day looked into the lens she’d spent a decade of her life building, and saw something looking back. This something was so remarkable, so astounding, that Dr. Alvarez stopped and stared. And then that something spoke to her, and whispered to her, and told her many things. And Dr. Alvarez listened.”

She remembers Eric Bintly’s words—She would just stare into the lens plates. With her nose about an inch away. Like she was transfixed. I caught her several times.

And a phrase she now finds even worse: I think she made a lot of changes to the lens before she left.

“My mother would never…” says Mona, but she cannot even complete the thought.

“Would never what?”

“She’d never help bring you all here,” says Mona. “She’d never work with your Mother.”

“You haven’t let me finish,” says Kelly. “My Mother had overcome many things more powerful than a thirty-five-year-old lab scientist. She was quite stronger than me, and I am quite strong in my own right.”

“So you’re… you’re saying my mother did this,” says Mona hopelessly. “She brought you here, and brought everything down on that little town.”

“Miss Mona,” says Kelly, “would you please let me finish? Allow me to say only this—Laura Alvarez never did anything of her own agency.”

“She didn’t?”

“No,” says Kelly gravely. “But, sister, to be honest… I wouldn’t take that as any consolation.”

“Why?”

Kelly begins to speak, but stops himself, troubled. Then he says, “Well. I told you that getting here is hard for us. It’s not easy to navigate across planes of reality. Especially as it was back then, when the boundaries were pretty firm. Wink wasn’t like it is now—there were no places that straddled the line, no thin parts. It was all solid.

“But Mother figured out a way. When that woman looked into the mirror, Mother… reached out to her. She could control your lens, the one on your side, if She tried, and She used it to… change her. It was something She did over time, bit by bit, dissolving that mind behind the woman’s eyes and… replacing it with something else.”

He looks at Mona, anxious, sad, like a doctor bearing terrible news. “I’m afraid Mother replaced it,” he says, “with Herself.”