American Elsewhere

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT




The municipal park in the center of Wink appears manicured and pristine even in the dead of night. There is never an errant leaf to be found, the sidewalk is cleaner than most dentists’ incisors, and the grass puts putting greens to shame.

It is always this way. It never changes, no matter the season.

The residents of Wink do not question this. For though the grass is begging for a blanket or a picnic or a game of catch, these things are strictly forbidden: no one ever goes on the grass, not ever. So they never experience the queer sensation that would wash over them if they did, as if they’ve passed through the wall of a bubble, moving from the real, vulnerable, changeable world into one that is perfectly preserved, a pleasant summer’s afternoon captured and suspended in Lucite.

What is at the center of Wink beyond the sidewalks is not truthfully a park, but a memory, a moment, unspoiled by the passing of time.

The people from Elsewhere have their ideas about how a town should look. Certain scenes must be maintained. You cannot walk there: to do so would be to soil perfection. They just are, forever.

Yet now, in the dead of night, someone approaches.

It is—or would appear to be, if there were a nearby onlooker—a small boy of about nine, wearing slippers and bunny pajamas and smelling just slightly of smoke. He wears a pair of spectacles that are much too large for him that also have no lenses, and he keeps pushing them up his nose. The boy has a knapsack over one shoulder, and the contents clank softly with each step he takes.

The boy stops with a grunt, opens the knapsack, and takes out the contents: two razor-thin, beautifully silvered hand mirrors. He rummages a bit more, produces a large handkerchief, and wraps one of the mirrors in it. Then he replaces them in the knapsack.

He takes a few test steps, and now there is no clanking at all. The boy nods, satisfied.

He walks down the sidewalk to the very edge of the grass, and there he stops and stares in at the park. “Hmm,” he says, in a voice almost theatrically deep.

On the left side of him at one end of the park is Wink’s white stone courthouse. At the other, on his right, is the pristine white geodesic dome, along with the dark, gleaming memorial tree.

The boy scratches his chin, pushes up his glasses, and takes a step forward. His skin crawls as a tickling warmth passes over him: he has the uncanny feeling of having just passed into an old photograph. But it does not harm him in any way, or at least it does not seem to.

“This appears to have been successful,” says the boy, still in the deep voice. He continues looking around at the moonlit park. “Now. Where are you?”

He begins to slowly walk forward, peering around with his head slightly cocked, sometimes with one hand out like a dowser seeking water. “I know you’re here,” he says softly. “I saw you, when I was up in the sky. When I… died. Everything is so much clearer, outside of these vessels.”

He stalks across the park, feeling his way. The streetlights, cutting through the trees, carve strange insignias on the twilit grass. His path winds and bends and loops, until finally one thing in particular swells up before him.

The white, lunar form of the dome, speckled with shadow, blank yet somehow imposing. It is over thirty feet tall, at least.

“Ah,” says the boy softly. “There you are.”

He steps forward and lifts a hand to the surface of the dome. But he does not touch. He dares not touch.

“How long have you been in there…” whispers the boy.

The dome is silent. Yet somehow, it feels watchful, like the totem of some forgotten god that, perhaps, has left some vestige of itself behind.

The boy turns and marches away, across the street and down the sidewalk and into darkness.

Some places in Wink are more than one place. Some places take you places you never expected. Rooms within rooms, doors within doors, worlds hidden within a thimble or a teacup.

You just have to know where to look.