American Elsewhere

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE




Mona looks at the screen, but she does not see it: she looks through it, beyond it, ears ringing with the amplified words she’s just heard.

She hears herself say: “What?”

Kelly looks back at her, face kindly and anxious. “Oh, my dear. Don’t say what like that. It can’t be that much of a surprise to you. You knew. You felt it in your bones when you came here. Something resonated inside of you—something woke up, poked its head out of its dark hole, and recognized what it saw. You knew you’d come home. Didn’t you?”

“What are you… What are you saying that I…”

“Oh, I’m sure you passed all your physicals,” says Kelly. “Blood pressure, check. Cholesterol, check. Proper reflexes. Good eyesight. You are, no doubt, a person. Or at least you register as a person here, in this little place, and don’t set off any alarms. And I’m sure that, if someone were to take your blood, you’d register as Laura Alvarez’s progeny with absolutely no doubt.

“But Laura Alvarez wasn’t your real mother, Mona. She wasn’t what bore you, shaped you, made you. And you aren’t just a person. There’s more to you. Parts you didn’t know were there, and never used. But they’ve always been there, Mona.”

“You’re crazy,” says Mona. “That’s f*cking crazy.”

“Please think, Miss Bright,” says Kelly. “When you came to Wink, you sometimes looked at a thing and saw two things, two different objects or places somehow occupying the same physical space. Did you not?”

“That’s because of that f*cking mirror trick Mrs. Benjamin showed me.”

“No. If anything, that mirror trick activated something in you. How did you think you were able to do the trick itself? You made something in her house suddenly appear in two places at once, didn’t you? Isn’t that, well… quite an unusual talent?”

“That was her. She did that to me!”

“No,” says Kelly calmly. “It was a test. She realized there was something different about you. And she was right.

“The things that make us us, Mona—the characteristics that make my family so esteemed, so privileged—they don’t show up on any CAT scan, or any blood test. They have nothing to do with this shoddy, muddy, physical world. They transcend them. You transcend them. Less than most of my family—much less than me, of course—but it’s there. What’s that word Parson tried so hard to tell you? Ah, I remember it now—pandimensional.” He says it with relish, like an exotic, foreign term. “Miss Mona, you are, to a very slight degree, pandimensional. Not all of you is here. Some of you, some functioning part of your being, is elsewhere. Because you are Mother’s. Because you are my sister, my kin. And isn’t it so good, to finally find a place where you belong?”

Mona feels nothing—there is nothing she can feel, not anymore, especially at this insane suggestion. Is this thing really suggesting she is like the vague, shadowy monsters lurking in the mountains of this town? That she is connected to those horrific, fleshy, wheedling beasts occupying the skulls of Parson, and Mrs. Benjamin, and whoever else besides? Or, worse, the things that operate them, those beings and shapes she glimpsed in that place with the red stars and the barren earth?

It’s impossible. That can’t be right. It can’t. She’s just an unemployed drifter, for Christ’s sakes. She’s not a… a…

Then Mona remembers the dream she had the last night in her mother’s house: walking down the hallway and seeing the mirror-version of herself pluck the light from the bulb in the ceiling and shove it down her throat, its radiance filtering through all her tissues and membranes in a soft pink glow…

And she understands now: that dream made sense. It was a sense Mona could not articulate, could not even name, but the dream acknowledged a deep, sad feeling that has, over time, pervaded every part of her life:

She is empty. And that emptiness makes her monstrous.

She thought she felt this way because of her lost daughter, all the promise and hope of a new life and new love wiped away in a burst of chrome and glass. But perhaps not. Perhaps she had always been this way, always monstrous, always alien, always hollow, always gutted.

Kelly’s words feed a fear of Mona’s she has tried to ignore for so long: that she, in some sick, twisted way, was relieved to lose her child, because how could she, a cold, angry tomboy, whose own mother had been (as she once thought) suicidally schizophrenic, ever make a good mother in her own right? Was it not better that her child died, rather than living and being so thoroughly failed by her parent? She is a creature poorly made, half-made, a distorted, deformed thing created by distorted, deformed things. It is not too far a step to go from thinking of her mother as a maddened, sad schizophrenic to thinking of her as something very much… else.

“Then why am I here?” she asks softly.

“Here in what manner?” asks Kelly. “Here in existence? Or here in Wink?”

Mona doesn’t answer, not just because she finds the question stupid: she just can’t find the will to speak.

“Well, I think I know one answer for sure,” says Kelly. “Let me ask you something, Mona—how did your mother die?”

Mona has no desire to slip down the slope into this topic any further. But she says, “She killed herself.”

“I see,” says Kelly. “And I’m willing to bet that her death coincided with a certain date—the day my family arrived here. Didn’t it?”

Mona blinks slowly. She is too tired, too worn out to process this.

“Yes,” says Kelly. “Mother, of course, had to return back to our world when She deemed it time to get things started. And there’s really only a couple of ways to do that, the death of the medium being the easiest, I’d imagine.” He rubs his chin, thinking. “I remember… when She projected herself into this world—into Dr. Alvarez—it was as if She fell into a deep, deep sleep. It seemed like She slept forever, dead to the world as it fell apart around us. But then, one day, without warning, when I had almost given up all hope, She awoke. She did not explain anything—which was typical—but made us promise two things: one was to wait for Her there, in the place we were going, because She would be gone for a bit—just a bit. And the second was to always obey the next eldest, and never hurt one another. We, terrified, confused, quickly agreed, and then there was lightning in our skies…

“Well, of course, the next thing we knew, we were here. Yet She destroyed herself in the effort. I had never seen a member of my family die before—we are, in so many ways, beyond death—but then, none of our family had ever done what Mother did. But perhaps She knew something more… perhaps She knew that, if She were to perish, it would release enough destructive energy to bridge the gap between our worlds. Like punching a hole in a wall, I suppose. Perhaps we would have never gotten here, if She had not died.

“She was gone far more than ‘a bit.’ I thought She was gone. Truly gone. Yet not too long ago I heard of three events that seemed highly coincidental. First, Weringer died, which did get everyone in a fluffle, but to me it seemed much less impossible, after Mother and all. But then I began to see lights on the mesa again… as if the laboratory—the one with the mirror that had, in essence, brought us here—was up and running once more.

“And then, finally, you came, Mona. Doesn’t that all seem quite odd to you?”

“I’m just here because my father died, and I inherited a goddamn house here.”

“Yes, yes. But it’s almost like—what is that quaint expression—the stars aligned to bring you here. Isn’t it?”

What now? thinks Mona. What else could there possibly be?

“I don’t contest the idea that the death of your father brought you here,” says Kelly. “But I do wonder if his death—like the death of your own mother—coincides with something that happened in Wink. In this case, Weringer’s death.”

“Are you really telling me,” says Mona, “that someone from Wink traveled all the way to a shithole in Texas just to give my father a stroke, which would get me to inherit the house, which would get me to Wink?”

“No,” says Kelly. “But what I am suggesting is that the death of one of my family members seems to release a terrible amount of energy, causing ripples in existence. Mother might have even used Her own death to bring us here. If Weringer were to die near a—a focal point for this sort of energy…”

“The lens,” says Mona.

“Yes. Then someone could have used it. It could change the very nature of reality, like the finger of a god. A death, an inheritance, an impetus to return… that would be easy. Probability itself could realign to ensure that what the focal point wanted to happen happened. I can see the way fortunes and potential futures fade, merge, emerge, broaden. It is much more shapable than you imagine, Miss Bright. The possibilities of such a focal point—and such an energy—are limitless.” Kelly stands, stiff and erect, hands clasped behind his back. “Personally, I think it was used as a beacon.”

“A beacon for what?” asks Mona.

“For all the pieces of Mother that were missing,” says Kelly. “To pull in all the missing bits beyond Wink. Or the one, really. You, of course.”


“What the f*ck do you mean?” asks Mona.

“Most everyone here of note has an anchor, don’t they, Mona?” says Kelly. “My kin in the town operate from afar, anchored to this place by those awful little creatures buzzing in people’s heads. Some physical part of ourselves must remain on this side, holding us down, acting as a window into this world, while their true selves remain sealed up in not-quite-heres and inaccessible facets of reality and… what have you. It’s all very complex, but the more I realized exactly how Mother had set up our existence in this world—and She had set it up, micromanaged it to the tiniest possible degree—I began to wonder why She hadn’t thought to do something similar for herself before She died.

“But when you showed up, I realized She had, of course. I mean, why else have a relationship with a man? Why else have a child? She had to leave some piece of Herself behind, some tiny, living part of Herself to anchor Her being to this world. Having a child, of course, would be the easiest possible way to do that.”

“What the f*ck are you saying?”

“It’s easy enough,” says Kelly. “You’ve seen those fleshy, reedy little creatures swimming in the backs of peoples’ eyes.”

“So?”

“Well, what do you think you are?”

“What? I’m me. Just me.”

“No. You know you’re much more than that. The question you asked remains quite valid, Miss Mona—why are you here? The answer, I think, is because Mother is bringing Herself back. Before She died, She designed a way for Her to reenter this world, to return from death. For though some of us—like Weringer, like Macey—are not quite as beyond death as we’d assumed, Mother, well… Mother remains a very different sto—”

Kelly stops. The screen flutters, like the film has just run off its track. Yet what lies behind the film is not a bright, white space, but what looks like a dark, shifting abyss…

It’s only for a moment, for Gene Kelly’s handsome, smiling face quickly returns, but Mona realizes she didn’t see an abyss, not really: she saw a face, long and dark and bereft of most conventional features—mouth, nose, ears, etc.—but one surrounded by coils and coils of writhing arms and feelers, as if the face of that thing in the screen was at the center of a monstrous tangle of tentacles… yet at the top of that long, narrow face had been two black, bulging eyes, like the eyes of a shark, facing outward.

Yet now there is only Kelly, who says, “Whoop! Looks like we had even less time than I thought.”

Mona, who is still shocked by what she glimpsed, tries to focus. “What? What do you mean?”

“We’re going to have to cut this short. Someone is about to try to kill me,” says Kelly cheerfully.

“What?”

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” says Kelly. “I’ll be fine. You already saved my life. And thank you, by the way.”

“I… I what?”

“I do wish we could have talked longer, little sister,” says Kelly sadly. “I am sure we have so much to discuss. And I wish I could prepare you for what’s about to happen. But don’t fret. It’s my experience that it’s best to sit back and allow the tides of fortune and fairness to take you where they wish. Though it can be a little confusing, sometimes.” He winces a little. “You may especially want to relax now, considering what I’m about to do to you.”

“Wait. Stop. You’re going to do what now? To me?”

“You do love the word what, don’t you?” asks Kelly. “It is a good word. It can mean so many things. You remember when I said that, to beings such as myself, physical existence is mere construction paper and pipe cleaners?”

“Yeah?”

“Well,” says Kelly, “I am about to break you down into paper and glue, and put you back together again somewhere much safer. So hold on.”

“Wait. Wait!” says Mona. “You’re going to do what to me?”

“There’s that word again!” says Kelly. “Relax, Miss Mona. Back in the old days, some found this experience very enlightening. It’s just a matter of…”

Things slow down. Then they stop.

Then Mona’s body begins to report many disparate sensations.

First her eyes freeze in her skull, which makes it impossible to confirm any of the other sensations: her skin begins to crackle, as if waves of static electricity are crawling along her arms and legs; her hair curls like slashed harp strings; her fingernails, like switchblades, recede into her flesh; some bones lengthen, others twirl into corkscrews, while still others dissolve into powder; her brain turns to water, which washes down the back of her throat, drips down her spine, and puddles on the floor; her teeth turn to fire in her head, and wither into ash; and so on, and so on, and so on, and she cannot even find the voice to scream.

But one thing stays constant: that wry, smug grin on the shimmering screen, and those dark, crinkled eyes…

Somewhere a voice says: “… place.”

Then everything is lost.