American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  He wipes the sweat from his eyes when he slams the truck bed door shut. He cracks open a bottle of water and pounds about half of it. Then he glances north, to where the mesa is.

  He sighs and leans on the side of his truck. The lab is big. It’s always bigger than you think it is. And he’s covered in sweat, and—he checks very quickly—his boots are already dusty again.

  He checks the list again. “Not sure, huh?” he says. “This’ll take all day…”

  He might as well get started now. Bolan’s boss—that spook in the hat—hates waiting. Dee has never spoken to this man, or even seen him; he’s just heard reports about him. And apparently Dee’s cube-collecting project is one issue the spook has a lot of problems with. Dee is told that in certain communications with Bolan and Zimmerman, the spook describes one cube in particular that he’s been looking for for a long time, the mother of all of these damn things, one a couple feet high and a couple feet wide. Dee goes white at the idea of having to pick up such a thing, and is frankly quite happy that they have not found it yet.

  He hopes that’s not what’s waiting for him up on the mesa. He’d rather dig a hundred of the bastards out of a creek bed than deal with that.

  It’s a long drive up to the mesa. He enjoys it less than he thought he would. This part of the country always feels very peculiar, like it’s stretched. It’s so peculiar, in fact, that Dee almost swears he saw a red muscle car parked behind a pine somewhere out in the desert. But that’s stupid. Even for Dee, that’s stupid.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The door is made of dull metal and is striped like a yellow jacket. The neon-yellow bands run diagonally from its top right corner to its bottom left. There are old yellow block letters spray-painted at the top that read WARNING, but what they are supposed to be warning you about is not made clear. On the whole it is not a large door: it is about seven feet tall and three feet wide, and it’s set about a foot into the rock side of the mesa, by means of a construction method with which Mona is not familiar.

  (And she thinks—Coburn is in the mesa? Like inside of it? Is the entire mesa hollow? She remembers an article she read about that particle accelerator thing in Europe, CERN or whatever—wasn’t it completely underground? Perhaps Coburn isn’t all that different—underground, yet also raised into the air.)

  She is surprised by the size of the door. She expected it to be a loading door, but it’s obviously meant just for people. She wonders why.

  But what is most surprising is that the door stands open about an inch or two. It has a huge, clunky doorknob, one of those kinds you usually see in really old public restrooms, but it is not engaged: someone forced the door ajar, probably by kicking at it, judging by the way the metal frame has bent. From the pile of dust built up at the bottom, it seems it’s been this way for some time.

  The thing that Mona doesn’t like is the way the door was kicked open. Because, judging from the way the lock and frame are bent, whoever did it was kicking from the inside.

  She reaches into her pocket and takes out the key Parson sent her to get. Since the lock is broken, it would appear the key is unnecessary. But then, Parson never explicitly said the key was for this door. She just assumed that was what he meant.

  She examines the key and the lock. The lock is pretty basic; the key, however, remains an intimidating four-inch piece of industrial technology with about two dozen teeth.

  No. No, this key is meant for something else. Something much more important.

  “Shit,” says Mona.

  She rubs the back of her neck. She doesn’t like this at all. This is worse than Weringer’s house. Even Parson, who is often so dismissive of the oddities happening around town, holds Coburn in some kind of reverence.

  His words echo in her head until she feels she’s about to have a panic attack. She wishes now, more than anything, that she understood him more. She wishes she could grasp the meaning behind his little parable, which seems to have been so crucial that it drove him into a coma. And she is beginning to wish that she’d chosen to just beat it and leave town, leave this little clutch of shifting shadows and veiled words behind and find a new life somewhere else.

  But another part of Mona knows that a new life isn’t coming. She’s used up all her wishes, all her fresh starts, and this is the last place to find anything that could remake her. And when she remembers the film she watched back in her mother’s house—the smoke-filled room, the glamorous, cheery woman striding in from the patio—she knows that there are secrets behind this door she simply must understand. Because unless she’s wrong, somewhere behind this surreal, forbidding door is the history of her mother, or at least a part of it. But that’s more than Mona’s ever had in her life.

  She remembers Parson gave her one other clue, one she hasn’t had the time to look at yet. She sits down in the shadow of a large rock, reaches into her pocket, and pulls out his note cards.

  She looks at the “Cat” card to see if she’s missed any hidden code, but if so a closer look doesn’t help. It appears to just be an innocuous and rather vapid definition of the word, like one a grade-schooler would make for a project.

  She looks at the next card. She is not at all surprised to see that it is:

  DOG

  (noun)

  A small domesticated carnivore, Canis familiaris, noted for its loyalty and servitude. Its puppies are a lot of fun!

  “What the fuck,” says Mona, shaking her head. She starts flipping through them. They are all fairly insipid and utterly useless. There is a card for “Octopus” (the mother dies after laying her eggs, which is quite sad), for “Sunshine” (it’s what makes plants green!), and for “Home” (where your family and friends are, and where everything makes sense). She looks at the definition for “Home” for a while. Maybe he’s coding something into the first letter of each word? But when Mona actually takes the time to test this idea the letters spell nothing but gibberish.

  Frustrated, she starts flipping through the cards. There must be over thirty of the damn things. But then she comes across a card that is markedly different from all the others:

  PANDIMENSIONAL

  (adjective)

  1. The quality of existing in several different aspects of reality at once, rather than just one

  2. The ability to operate or move across the same

  Mona stares at the note card, and again says, “What the fuck?”

  She flips through the remainder of the stack, but finds no other card like it. She is certain that this card was the purpose of Parson’s entire charade. But what it means is beyond her.

  Yet then she remembers that moment back in Weringer’s house, when one room felt nested inside another, yet occupied the same place. And when she focused, she could stay in one room, and avoid that huge stone cavern with the enormous fires…

  Mona thinks for a moment, then stands and throws the door open.

  Behind it is a long set of cement stairs leading up. They are dark and she cannot see where they go. So she takes out her flashlight, flicks it on, and starts up.

  The staircase is completely black, and though she can see fluorescent lights hanging at each landing she can find no switch for them. Mona’s been climbing for about an hour, but the stairs seem to go on forever. She looks over the metal railing once and shines her light down and sees an endless blocked spiral of gray yawning below. She can’t even see the bottom anymore.

  She remembers that Coburn is supposedly located at the top of the mesa, and she started at the very, very bottom, and she groans. Her legs are already aching and she’s almost out of breath, but she’s willing to bet she’s not a quarter of the way up.

  She keeps climbing with nothing but her flashlight to guide her. The railings and the stair corners cast jigsaw-puzzle shadows on the walls. Occasionally she’ll shine it up the stairwell to see if she’s finally getting close to something, but there is always darkness and more stairs above.

  The only sounds Mona hears throughout all of th
is are the stomping of her feet and her labored breath. Her calf muscles feel as if they’re about to snap, like guitar strings stretched too tightly.

  Then she hears a third sound.

  She stops and listens, and realizes she’s right. But it’s one she never expected here:

  Someone is singing.

  It’s only because the stairwell is so quiet that Mona can hear it. But it’s definitely there. Someone very far above her, maybe a woman, is singing.

  She stares up at the darkness. She can see no lights up there, nor can she hear the sound of anyone moving. Yet as she listens, she hears saxophones and trumpets joining the singer. It’s like there’s a Big Band performance happening up there.

  Very, very slowly, Mona takes out the Glock. She points the flashlight down at the ground to lessen the chances that someone above will spot it. Then she starts climbing the stairs again, moving slowly and softly with her eyes trained on the next flight of stairs above her.

  The singing gets louder as Mona climbs. Eventually she recognizes the song: to her total confusion, it’s “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.”

  Then more sounds join it. There’s the sound of laughter, the mutter of conversation, glasses tinkling. But that shouldn’t be right at all… she thought Coburn was abandoned.

  Somewhere above a voice shouts, “Charlie? Charlie! Come on! Get in here!”

  It’s a party, she thinks. They’re throwing a fucking party up there. She can’t even begin to understand it.

  After a few more flights of stairs Mona thinks she can discern a very faint light cast on the wall at the top. She stops and turns off her flashlight and waits for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. She isn’t wrong: a very dim blade of light is cast across a wall on one of the topmost landings. She isn’t willing to shine her light up there and give away her position, but she’d bet now that she’s reached the very top of the staircase.

  She slows her ascent to a crawl. As she rounds the landing opposite the light, she sees there is a thin, glowing line at the top of the staircase, and it marches around the wall to form a rectangle.

  It’s a door. There’s a door at the top of the staircase, and someone is throwing a party just behind it.

  Mona stares at it, breathing hard. Every inch of her shirt is sticking to her skin. There are many, many voices now, so whatever party it is, it must be a big one. She starts to approach the door, but she brings the Glock up just a little, just in case.

  She hears shouting from the other side again. Someone cries, “Cheers, everyone! Look at me. Hey! Fucking look at me! All right, good. Finally. Now, come on, everyone, to the New Year, am I right?”

  “And on Uncle Sam’s dime, too,” says a second voice, a woman.

  “Fuck Sam’s dime,” says a third. “The DOD ain’t footing this bill. We paid for this out of our goddamn pockets.”

  “Then we better get our money’s worth!” shouts the first voice, and there’s a round of cheers and laughing.

  It’s a New Year’s Eve party, thinks Mona, but it’s July, isn’t it? What the hell could be going on?

  She’s right next to the door now. Barging in on a party with a gun drawn really isn’t her style, to say the least. But whatever her style is, it’s been woefully inadequate the last couple of days. She supposes it’s time to adapt.

  She decides she’s going to take a peek. She grasps the knob, and slowly applies pressure. It is not locked. She swallows and keeps turning the knob, tensing with each twitch of the bolt.

  Finally it will turn no farther. She positions herself at the opening and begins to ease the door open.

  “Say,” says a voice on the other side, and it sounds mere feet away, “what kind of gin is this, anyways?”

  The door is almost open a crack. Mona puts her eye to it, tries to steady her hand, and keeps easing the door open.

  Then, abruptly, the light on the other side of the door dies, and the music and voices cease entirely. The stairway fills with total, impenetrable darkness.

  Mona is so shocked she almost falls over. She stands in the dark, wondering what happened. Did the people on the other side know she was about to peep in on them? But surely they couldn’t have reacted that quickly? There is no light of any kind anymore, and no sound. It’s as if they simply stopped existing.

  She pushes the door open all the way, and though she can’t see it, she’s very aware that she might be standing in front of a hallway with a bunch of people staring right at her. She tries to remind herself that the people in the hallway can’t see her either… or at least they shouldn’t be able to.

  She raises her gun to point directly ahead. Then she lifts the flashlight, places it over the wrist holding the gun, and turns it on.

  What is before her is indeed a hallway, but it looks as if it hasn’t seen people in years. The ceiling panels have fallen in and the Pergo paneling is blooming with corrosion. She can see several doors to what look like offices—because this does not look like a lab hallway to her, but an ordinary office hallway—but they are all open and she can see no movement within them.

  She fights the urge to call, “Hello?” and begins to stalk down the hallway, gun wheeling to cover each angle of approach. It is an awkward and clumsy dance in this decrepit, musky hallway. Each office is littered with rotting yellow paper. Yet nothing appears to have been disturbed. No one has been here in decades.

  The place looks like it was built in the sixties and never updated: all the desks are streamlined, Mid-Century Modern affairs, and they’re surrounded by chairs resembling tulips and eggs. The lamps are skeletal, geometric contraptions, like things pried off Sputnik and plugged into the wall, yet the lamps in the ceiling are rounded, organic sculptures of glass and chrome (now rusted) that look inspired by undersea life. The sheer silence of the place is intimidating. This is not a place where a party was being thrown not more than five minutes ago.

  Finally Mona gives in to her worst instincts: “Anyone home?” she asks aloud, softly.

  There is no answer. She continues on with quiet footsteps.

  So this was where her mother worked, she thinks as she wanders the halls, even though no one in Wink can remember it. Again, it feels impossible to reconcile what she’s found here with the woman she knew. This was once a sleek, stylish place to work, even if it was out in the desert. It would have been a haven for thinkers and researchers, a magnet for the most ambitious professors and scientists and graduate students out there. People with beards and glasses and chalk—shit, Mona doesn’t know. This isn’t her scene, no matter what decade.

  She tries to imagine what it was like when it was first built—hell, when Wink was first built. She imagines it bustling with intellectuals, each one trying to think up a way to make the nation stronger, to push the very limits of what humanity could do. It must have seemed like such a tremendous hope to everyone. For the first time, she can understand the compulsion of the men and women who first built the town in the valley. They thought they were making something. Maybe something like a utopia.

  Yet what did they do here? What did the occupants of all these modish offices work to accomplish? And what did Laura Bright, née Alvarez, once do in this place? If she was ever here at all, that is.

  The woman who worked here, thinks Mona, would have been such a wonderful mother. Smart, cultured… what happened to her? Why was she not the inspiring figure Mona now imagines her to have been?

  And somewhere inside Mona is a tiny voice that says, Maybe one of us is always supposed to die, the mother or the daughter… maybe that’s just the way we’re made. We’re weak, breakable. Maybe it was right that I never had the chance…

  “Shut up,” whispers Mona. “Shut up.”

  The voice quiets, and she continues on.

  Mona comes to the reception area. Somehow it remains untouched by the decay. The walls are rounded and white, the front desk shaped like a teardrop, done in pale wood paneling. On one of the flatter spots of the wall there’s a huge starburst clock
that, to her concern, is still ticking.

  It has been maintained, obviously, so someone’s been here. Someone might still be here. But she still isn’t sure what happened to the party she heard.

  There’s a bright, happy mural painted on the wall behind the desk, depicting a mountain landscape. It does not take Mona long to recognize the splinter of piney green running through the feet of the striking red peaks. She can even see the pink balloon of Wink’s water tower situated on the far side of the valley. She eventually sees that Mesa Abertura—the mesa she’s currently inside of—is also shown in the mural. Yet she sees that its top is bedecked with immense white orbs and cups, like sculpted white icing on a red cake. They’re telescopes and satellite dishes, she realizes, but she sure as hell hasn’t seen any of those on the mesa in her time here. They must have been totally removed. But that would have taken a lot of work, even more than getting the damn things up here.

  For a fleeting second, she remembers glimpsing something huge and dark perched on the mesa, swaying back and forth against a black sky bursting with lightning…

  She shudders and moves on. She walks around the receptionist’s desk and starts down the main hall, which is where things start to look a little more like a lab.

  The carpet turns to cement. Then the doors turn into huge slabs of metal with tiny, thick windows set in the exact centers, and they feature some fearfully complicated locks.

  She takes out Weringer’s key again, and thinks. Then she tries fitting it into one of the locks.

  The key fits, but she can’t turn it. So it’s not the key for this lock. But at least she’s in the right neighborhood now. This key must fit one of the lab doors.

  She moves on.

  She comes across one door that doesn’t lead to a lab at all, but to some kind of electrical closet. Circuits and panels crawl across the wall in a rusty tangle. Against one wall is a box of dictionaries. Yet up against the circuit wall is a huge electric generator that doesn’t look as if it had been made more than two years ago. It’s a new addition for sure.