American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Jesus Christ. I hate talking to you when you’re high.

  I’m not high.

  You are. You fucking are. Look at you.

  Bonnie laughs. I’m higher than high, she says. She holds her hands out the window as if to embrace the sky. I’m higher than higher than higher than high, she says.

  Shut up, says Mal. Now you’re just being irritating.

  Maybe, says Bonnie. She looks into the sky and drops her arms. You want to hear something funny? she asks.

  I don’t want to hear a goddamn thing after all the talking you’ve done.

  I wonder whose sky that’s in, she says, and she points up.

  Mal ducks her head down to peer up through the windshield. What, she says, the moon?

  Yeah.

  What do you mean, whose sky it’s in?

  Bonnie stares at the moon. It is so huge, so pink, so smooth. She murmurs, I mean what I said. I just don’t think that it’s in ours. It must be in someone else’s. Maybe it’s their sky…

  Shut up, says Mal.

  Okay.

  The Suburban goes straight into the heart of Wink, around the park with the dome and past the shops to a small dirt road that leads to a concrete ravine. Mal pulls the Suburban forward so that the headlights are pointing down into the ravine. Then she throws it in park and the two of them just sit there for a while, looking at the blank concrete, all lit up white in the brights. The ravine tapers away, ending in a wide, black drainage tunnel in the side of the hill.

  They want two this time, says Mal.

  Two?

  Yes. Just put two in the box.

  Hm, says Bonnie.

  Silence.

  Well, says Mal. You know how it works.

  I know how it works.

  Mal waits. She gets impatient. She reaches over and opens the glove compartment. Inside is a small glass lantern, like the kind miners used back in the nineteenth century, a pair of gloves, and a wooden box with a brass clasp.

  She says, So are you going or are you going?

  Bonnie stares into the black hole at the end of the ravine. She bends forward and starts rubbing the side of her head and rocking back and forth.

  Jesus, Bonnie, says Mal.

  Bonnie whimpers and looks away.

  Get out of the goddamn car.

  No.

  Get out, damn you.

  I need to cook up, says Bonnie.

  What! Like hell you do. I let you cook again and you won’t even be fucking walking. You’ll fall asleep. You’ll be dead.

  I won’t. I’ll walk fine. I promise. Just let me cook up a little.

  No. Get fucking going.

  But it’s mine anyway, you gave it to me, says Bonnie. She reaches for the bag on the dashboard.

  Mal hits her so hard for a moment Bonnie thinks she’s about to pass out. Bonnie leans up against the window of the car, the side of her head contracting, expanding, contracting, crunching like eggshells with each contortion. She blinks hard and looks around, gaping.

  Mal says, Who the fuck do you think you are?

  You hit me!

  You’re goddamn right I did. That isn’t how this works, girl. You get what I need then you get what you need.

  I want to go home, cries Bonnie.

  You want to go back to that shit-ass apartment? Is that really what you want? Because you can rot in there if you like. I’m damn near tempted to drop you off back there.

  And Bonnie wants to say no, no, that’s not her home, not really. She almost tells her what she really wants, but she is so ashamed she can’t even speak of it.

  All right, she says.

  Good, says Mal. She leans over and throws open the door of the Suburban. Go on, she says. Get.

  Moving slowly like a beaten dog, Bonnie slides out of the passenger seat of the car and takes the lamp, the gloves, and the wooden box.

  Wait, you got to let me light it, stupid, says Mal.

  Bonnie holds the lantern out, and Mal strikes a match and sets its wick alight. Now go on, says Mal.

  Bonnie says, This is it, right?

  This is what?

  The last time.

  Mal looks at her for a while. Yeah, she says. Yeah, it’s the last time.

  Because I don’t want to do this again, Mal. You don’t know what it’s like in there.

  If you do it now, you won’t ever have to know again, either.

  No, says Bonnie. I’ll always know. I can’t go back. Not from that.

  Then she turns and walks down the ravine and into the tunnel.

  At first it is the same. A tunnel like any other, filled with the echoes of her footsteps and the wind being dragged across its mouth. It goes on and on and on, underneath the town and maybe even farther. The lantern’s light is weak, turning the corrugated metal sides of the tunnel into a flexing, pulsing accordion with each step. They have to use naked flame because flashlights don’t work where Bonnie’s going. She’s never been sure why but she’s heard she is not the first person to try running the tunnels for Bolan and his people (whoever they are). Apparently there was someone they used before and he went in with a huge flashlight in his hand, like one of those mini-spotlights or something, but when he came to that one place (the threshold, the door, the hollow place) it went POP and just fucking exploded, exploded in his hand like it was a claymore mine, and he came running out screaming with blood pouring out of where his hand had been, and his side, even his face, and they tried to take care of him but then oops, so sorry, he up and died right there in the ravine, whimpering like a stuck pig.

  He doesn’t know it, but he got lucky. He never saw what was at the end of the tunnel.

  Bonnie keeps walking. She wishes she were high right now. Well, she is high right now. But she wishes she were that special kind of high, which, sadly, is getting harder and harder to attain these days.

  Bonnie’s heard the phrase “chasing the dragon” before, but Bonnie’s not chasing anything so exotic. What Bonnie wishes to see when she lays the needle to her bare skin, what she hopes to smell and hear and taste when the heroin floods her arm and comes rushing into that vast space behind her eyes, is, in this order:

  The light from a flashlight filtering through yellow blankets, used to make a fort.

  The sound of fish frying in an iron skillet.

  Ankles, slender, bony, with feet in battered red heels.

  A box of old batteries and buttons and chess pieces.

  Sunset peeking through the limbs of the Arizona ash outside (its bottom half covered in truncated limbs, the result of serious pruning).

  A hint of a teal flannel shirt, streaked in oil, perhaps glimpsed as a man working on the undercarriage of his truck in his garage wipes his brow (and the scent of sawdust, and gasoline, and old cigarettes, and the pleasant musk of cheap cologne, and everything is lit by old yellowed lightbulbs, which have not been changed in years). And, last but not least,

  Bedtime stories.

  Once she smelled him. Once when she was floating in fumes and all the world was wiped away she caught a stray whiff of his cologne, as if he’d just passed through her room and she’d only just missed him, and she wanted to run after him and say no, no, stop and pick me up and put me on your shoulders as you used to, but her arms and legs were leaden and she could not move, only moan and roll her eyes back and whimper in her sleep.

  Even that misery was sweeter than never smelling him again. For more than anything in the world, Bonnie wants to go home. But she cannot. It is gone. It has amputated something from her, the incision reaching deep and dark. She now spends her days chasing ghosts, not dragons, and wandering down dark passageways, going places no one should ever want to go.

  Weep for poor Bonnie.

  Weep, weep.

  I bet that’s why they bring the heroin in here in the first place. So that they can get some of us hooked, get us to break the rules for them. Do things no one should ever want to do. Then you can get high again.

  They tricked me.


  I let myself be tricked.

  I am dying. I am dying, dying.

  It is then, at her most abysmal point of despair, that Bonnie comes to the changing place, the threshold, and she stops.

  The changing place is never exactly in the same spot. Like most things in Wink (and Bonnie is only slightly aware that this is a terrible, terrible secret) it is not really where it is, or where it says it is. When she first made this run, when she first entered this dark maze to find their silly treasure, she had to walk for nearly three hours. But on the second it was only ten feet in. Like it was waiting for her.

  She feels it in her brain first. Right in the middle of her forehead, the most terrible of migraines you could ever imagine. It’s like her brain is being slowly pulled forward to put pressure on the front inside of her skull, threatening to worm out her skull and down her face like a maggot bursting from its egg sac.

  She takes a step forward. Then another, and another.

  She is passing through something hollow, some cyst or cavity or bubble floating in the darkness. She feels it in her bones.

  Then it is like she is being ripped through a three-inch hole in a wall, inexorably pulled forward until she is a boneless, pulverized tube, her arms and shoulders and ribs sloughed away, and nothing will make it through but a baseball-sized fragment of brain and a tangle of nerve and maybe one eye dangling by a thread of tissue, and the last thing it’d report to her, the last signal it’d send to the sputtering, mangled ball of brain, would be the sight of the corrugated walls of this dark tunnel, flickering in the light of the lantern, her long journey into night abruptly (perhaps thankfully) halted.

  This does not really happen. It just feels like it does. But then it is over, and she is done, and through.

  Yet through what, and where she has gotten through to, Bonnie does not know. It is not where she was. The tunnel before is not the tunnel after. It is… somewhere else. Where things are different.

  She keeps walking.

  She is under Wink. Probably about under the courthouse, or the park. But just because she is underneath there does not mean she’s not also somewhere else. After all, thinks Bonnie, you can have a different thing under a different thing.

  My God I am so high, she thinks.

  But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

  Sometimes there are cracks in the tunnel, and she can see light filtering in. Sometimes the light is gentle and pink. Other times it is harsh and silvery. Bonnie has never once put her eye to one of the cracks to see. She remembers the story about the flashlight—POW—and wonders what it’d look like if that happened to a human eye.

  No. No, thanks.

  She keeps walking. Just keep walking. Keep the lantern high and your eyes on the prize.

  What lives down here, underneath Wink? What lives in Wink, above it, around it? Where is Wink, anyways? Where have we all gone? Which sky hangs over this town?

  She is at the chamber. She stops at the doorway, small and round like that of a crypt, and looks in.

  The chamber is big. It is bigger than big. So big she almost cannot conceive of it. God does not live in a place this big. Its gray, blank floor stretches for miles, oceans, hemispheres, and its black vaults stretch up and up and up and up until she thinks she can see

  (a pink moon)

  (many stars)

  (a thousand twisting peaks)

  She needs to stop.

  Bonnie takes a breath. And focuses.

  Or, she does not focus, because if she did she’d go fucking insane. To look at this place, to look upon it and perceive it, would be to destroy yourself. Bonnie secretly believes (and though she doesn’t know it, she’s absolutely right) that the heroin is her shield, that it inoculates her against the madness waiting here, puts an impenetrable film on her mind like a tarp protecting a boat against the rain. You cannot make someone mad if there is no mind there to make mad. So maybe Bonnie is one of the only people in Wink who can go here, and only then when she’s absolutely fucking jazzing on H.

  But while she is utterly dosed up when she comes here, she has come to understand two things about this place:

  It is secretly a jail cell. (And Bonnie knows what is being jailed here.)

  Though it is a jail cell, its occupant can be allowed out, though only briefly, and its exit (or invitation) must be arranged in a special way.

  A very special way.

  In the center of the vast gray floor is a pile of something. From this distance (though distance does not exist, not here) it looks like a pile of small stones, but Bonnie knows it is not.

  She looks around, searching the edges of the room, at least what she can see of it.

  It is empty. Or it appears that way. Bonnie knows better. And she knows she won’t see it unless it lets her.

  She begins the walk across the chamber. It takes a long, long time.

  (Am I still here, she wonders? Is some part of me forever trapped in this place? When I go back to my room, and I am followed by the night, by the man in the corner? Or am I still here, torn in half, split down the middle, stuck in this room and wandering Wink all at once? Do I live up above while still trapped in here with it, him, the night?)

  The pile gets closer. The closer it gets, the more she can make out the tiny, pebble-like teeth, and the long, desiccated snouts, and the gaping eye sockets…

  They are not skulls, not really. They are a part of it, the thing that is jailed here. And if you take a piece of it out, and get someone to touch it…

  (you must not touch it)

  Gloves. Must remember gloves.

  She sets the lantern down. She opens the wooden box. Then she carefully, carefully bends down, scoops up two tiny little skulls in a gloved hand, and lays them in the wooden box. She shuts it, clasps it, and sighs.

  Done. Done, done. She grabs the lantern and begins to walk out.

  It’s always as she’s leaving that it comes to her. She is not sure why. And she never really sees it. Like right now, she smells it first, an awful scent, decay and rot unknown, as if it is a noxious thunderhead bubbling down out of the sky.

  And then it’s there.

  It looks like a man. A man in a blue canvas suit, standing off to the side of her, always in the corner of her vision no matter how she tries to directly look at it. But she cannot see much of it, or him, or whatever it is. Words fail to describe it. In this place it is always trembling, always quaking, a blue-gray ghost of a man standing in the shadows of this enormous room. There is no edge or line or section of its form that is not blurred. Yet she thinks she can see tall, thin ears on its head, and fists balled in rage.

  It is the night, because before it all things are eclipsed.

  It hates her coming here. It hates everything in the world. And it hates that it cannot hurt her.

  Bonnie is weeping, tears running down her cheeks, but she keeps walking. It follows her like a hornet, dodging, buzzing, swooping through the corner of her vision.

  She can make it. She’s done this twice before.

  You can’t touch me. I’m not really here. I’m actually back at home, aren’t I, sleeping cause I just cooked up, and…

  And.

  And.

  Bonnie stops. Because the room just changed a little. And that’s never happened before.

  She notices a couple of things then. First is that she doesn’t really feel that high anymore, which she can’t understand. She dosed herself up goddamn good not more than an hour before Mal picked her up. And yet, and yet…

  She remembers thinking when she dosed up that this shit was not all that good. It was, in fact, quite watery, just good old-fashioned aitch-two-fucking-oh, and she remembers thinking oh well goddamn it I got screwed now didn’t I, I should have known better than to buy through anyone but Bolan.

  Yet then she did get high. Maybe it was just gonna be for a little while.

  But not long enough.

  Because Bonnie is becoming aware that she is becoming aware. Usually when she’s he
re she cannot see or understand anything. And that’s good. You don’t want to understand these things. You can’t look at them. It’s like looking at the sun.

  But now she’s coming down.

  The room is changing. She is seeing it. It is showing itself to her. It is

  (an immense black plain)

  (stars red and white)

  (surrounded by)

  (so many)

  (are they mountains)

  (and then)

  (a dead tree with rotting fruit)

  (a city in the dark)

  (and in the city is a lone wanderer)

  (been waiting for so long)

  (waiting)

  (for me)

  And then Bonnie sees it again, out of the corner of her eye.

  Before—when the room looked like a room, and not (this place)—the thing that is jailed here looked like a man in a blue canvas suit with a strange head or skull or helmet. Yet now she understands she was seeing only a part of it. It is like a diamond with many facets, and she was seeing only one.

  Yet now she sees more. Maybe all of them. All at once.

  She feels it behind her, just over her shoulder. And she thinks she sees something incredibly tall and incredibly thin, with long, thin ears, covered in coarse brown fur, standing under the red moonlight, and it is

  Oh oh

  Oh my god, my god, she thinks.

  It has eyes, eyes like people

  It can see me

  Mallory never waits for Bonnie at the ravine because, quite frankly, the ravine creeps the ever-living shit out of her. She tried once, tried waiting on that poor girl all night, but she got the weird sensation that the tunnel at the end of that concrete river was an eye, and it was looking straight at her, and it gave her the heebie-jeebies. So instead she always pulls away and parks the ’Burban up the slope on an old gravel parking lot, where she sips from a hip flask and watches the stars and sometimes feels a little romantic, despite herself.

  So it takes her a minute to hear the screaming. On account of her being so far away and all.

  She sits up, listens for a moment.

  “Bonnie,” she says. “Aw, shit.”