American Elsewhere

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT




The natives of Wink—the real, human natives—have up until this point stayed inside their houses, eyes obediently averted from all windows. Because when Things Happen in Wink, you stay indoors, and you stay quiet. That’s the way it’s always been, and if they keep to this, they think, then they’ll be fine, just like always—though some do mutter that really, this is ridiculous, don’t they have their time at night for these sorts of goings-on?

But then the natives feel the earth shake, and the air turns beige with the crush of dust, and when they look out the window they notice the queerly pale red skies, and the thin shadows…

This is different. This is not supposed to be happening. This is not normal.

And then, one by one, they begin to See.

It starts happening at the southern end of Wink first. They, of course, are closest to the Arrival: they cannot avoid seeing the form rising up from the mountaintop, arms extended as if seeking to embrace the valley. Mark Huey of 124 Littleridge Lane is given the inauspicious honor of being first: he runs a fairly decent lawn mower repair shop, and when the earth begins to shake he looks up from his work. His wife bursts in and frantically asks what is going on, and Mark, being the man and all, takes the responsibility of peeping out his blinds.

And he Sees.

He looks for ten seconds. Then, without a word, without answering a single question from his wife, he walks to his workbench, opens a drawer, takes out a lawn mower blade he’s been working on, and jams it into his throat.

He dies almost instantly: all the blood in his skull simply falls out in a rush. His wife, shrieking in terror, runs out of the shop. When she hits the street, she looks back. And she Sees.

She stops screaming. Instead she walks back to the shop, rummages in its front flower bed, finds a good-sized rock, and begins to pound it against her temple with a very singular concentration. This proves less efficient than her husband’s method: it takes nearly a minute before her right eye socket caves in, followed by the coronal suture of her skull, which causes her brain to begin madly swelling. She drops to the ground, shivering and dying, but thankfully blind.

Slightly more effective is Angela Clurry’s approach: she walks out to her back patio to try to see the source of the dust; and when she does, she walks back in, goes to her sink, turns on the Dispose-All, and, with calm, Buddhist-like focus, slowly inserts one arm all the way up to the elbow, and then the other.

It takes her a little over three minutes to bleed out. But this, of course, is better than Seeing.

Ashley and David Crompton, married for three years, happen to See together. Without any discussion they walk upstairs, wake their children from their naps, and usher them into the garage. The two parents buckle them into their seat belts, give them their preferred comfort toys (for Michael, a blanket; for Dana, a bear), turn on both cars, and patiently sit back and wait for the fumes to do their work.

It takes a lot less time for the children, small as they are. But this is so much better than allowing their children to See.

Seven-year-old Megan Twohey is quite fortunate: she has chosen to stay hidden down in Lady Fish’s home. She does not want to come out—she never wants to come out, ever again—but when she hears the rumbling and feels the earth shaking around her, she tries to burrow ever deeper (for Lady Fish’s home is quite extensive). Though she does not know it, her father has drunk a pint of bleach upon Seeing, and collapsed on the kitchen floor in spasms; and her mother does not See at all, having drunk herself to death in the night.

As the Arrival becomes harder and harder to ignore, the natives of Wink all take the same action: some choose blades, others poisons, the calmer ones choose automobiles, and those who have access to firearms use them both clinically and carefully: if you could listen over the buzz, you would hear a series of little pops all throughout town, as if someone’s wine cellar were overheating. Of course, there is the odd boom of a shotgun: for example, Julie Hutchins uses her shotgun on her husband, who has not yet Seen, but she finds him in an odd state: he is standing in the garage, but the floor and walls are black and smoking, as if the garage has just been struck by lightning. Her husband is staring at his hands with a very confused look on his face, and when she enters he looks up and says, “Who are you? Ah. I know… I seem to be a man this time. Tell me, where is the center of town from—Is that a gun? Wait, no!”

The shot catches him in the belly. He falls to the floor with a disappointed look on his face, and just before Julie puts the gun against her jaw, she hears him say, “Oh, bother.”

Joseph Gradling, hopeful paramour to Gracie Zuela, is called into the living room by his father. Joseph expects his father to explain what’s happening—his father always understands these things—but as he enters the living room his father, who is standing just beside the entryway, lifts his .22 revolver and shoots his son twice in the head. Joseph dies immediately, which is actually quite good, for he never quite sees the sight waiting for him: his mother and baby sister lying on the couch with pillows stuffed over their faces, each pillow smoking and bloody from muffled gunfire.

Unhappy Margaret Baugh is one of the few who manages to resist for some time (her husband, on the other hand, did not: he lies dead on their porch with a nail gun in his hand and a clutch of nails in his right temple), and she staggers out the front door and over to the neighbors’ house, seeking Helena. When she enters the house, it is silent and seemingly empty. She stalks through the rooms, wondering if (and maybe hoping) they have left; but then she sees Helena’s husband, Frank, or at least what’s left of him, sitting on the floor and propped up against the pump-action shotgun.

Margaret sees the back door is open. She slowly, slowly walks out.

Helena is there, as if she was waiting for her. She lies facedown in the grass, her body pointing in the direction of the fence. Her back and neck are perforated with buckshot—and Margaret wonders if Frank thought he was putting her out of her misery, or if desperation drove Helena to reveal her relationship with Margaret, and he retaliated…

It doesn’t matter. It’s over now. And Margaret knows where Helena—her Helena—was going.

She sits down beside the body in the grass, and picks her up so her head is in her lap. She strokes Helena’s hand, and carefully coils her index finger around Helena’s. Then she looks up at the hole in the fence before them, and remembers what they had, which was always enough.

“It’s okay,” Margaret says. “I’m here. I’m here with you. We’ll see it together.”

And they do.


One by one, all the natives of the town, who have bartered so carefully for their little piece of property, who have agreed to willfully ignore what is outside their doorsteps so they can live in peace and harmony, begin to wink out like candle flames in the wind, starting at the southernmost tip and moving northward in a wave.

Because it is possible for something to enter your world that is so vast, so terrible, so foreign, that you cannot coexist with it: you must, in some way or another, vacate the premises, give up your seat. Merely knowing that this thing exists pulls the supports out from everything you know and trust: the established world falls around you like a circus tent whose center pole is cut.

And you must go with it. You must get out. You have to get out.