American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  She doesn’t bother to start the Suburban up. She just jumps out and starts running across the parking lot, and she kicks off her heels before she starts down the ravine.

  It’s stupid, because she knows Bonnie’s pathetic, and she knows she’s essentially been sent to kill her, or maybe just to let her die, though Mal can’t really see the difference. But she still doesn’t want Bonnie to die. Or she doesn’t want her to be in pain, at least. And she sounds like she’s in terrible pain.

  To her relief, Mal sees that Bonnie is alive and whole, standing next to the entrance to the tunnel with her back to Mal. Beside her is the lantern and the little wooden box. Bonnie seems to be bowing over and over, like the way Orthodox Jews pray, just bowing quick little ducks forward while she screams her head off, though now that Mal’s closer she notices she can hear a little thuk thuk each time Bonnie bows.

  It isn’t until she’s about a dozen feet away that Mal sees the dark stain spreading on the edge of the tunnel.

  Bonnie is howling hysterically. Her hands grip the corner of the tunnel and she is ripping herself forward and smashing her face into the corner, over and over again, each time making a wet little thuk, each time little fragments and flecks of something whirling off her face.

  “It’s everything!” screams Bonnie. “It’s everything! It’s everything in there!”

  Mal watches, terrified. Gouts of blood are dripping off Bonnie’s face. There are spatters trailing down the white cement. Mal gags and steps away.

  And Bonnie hears her. She freezes, and whirls around drunkenly.

  Her entire face has been split open. Her right eye socket is almost entirely gone, and Mal can see the whole of the orb, white and luminous against the little pool of red around it. Her nose is missing and there is a crack in its bridge that is incredibly black, so black you wouldn’t believe it.

  “It’s everything, Mal!” shrieks Bonnie through ravaged lips and cracked teeth. “Everything in the world! In his eyes is everything in the world! I didn’t want to see! I didn’t want to see!” She howls again, clawing at her face, then turns around and grabs the corner of the tunnel again.

  Before she knows it, Mallory is sprinting away. Somehow she has that fucking little wooden box in her hand, but she isn’t sure why.

  But she can still hear it, somewhere behind her.

  Thuk thuk

  Thuk thuk

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Now, there are many odd situations that life has prepared Mona for. But she has no idea how to approach her current predicament, in which a man who seems to have stepped out of an old photo, or maybe an old filmstrip, is standing before her, addressing her as her mother. This is, to say the least, unexpected.

  So all she can manage to say is, “What?”

  The grainy, gray, washed-out image of Coburn cocks his head. “What?” he says.

  Mona keeps staring at him. She manages, “Uhh…”

  He grows a little frustrated, leaning forward eagerly. “Did you say something?”

  Mona just looks back at him, confused, helpless.

  “What are you doing here?” asks Coburn. “How did you get here? Were you caught in the storm as well?”

  She sits up a little at that. “No,” says Mona. “I wasn’t in the storm… I actually think you have me confused with someone else, uh—sir.”

  Coburn frowns and peers at her. His image flickers like it’s being received by mangled bunny ears on an old television, and Coburn shrinks, sputters, expands, before returning to his original state. Though the act is silent, Mona mentally accompanies it with the sound of hissing static.

  “Jesus Christ,” says Mona.

  “This is quite odd,” he says. “Your mouth is moving but… but no sound is coming out.”

  “Uh, I am afraid you’re wrong there, too, sir. I think I’m even making an ech—”

  “No, no,” says Coburn. “No, nothing at all. And you do seem to be talking.” He studies her. “Can you hear me, Laura?”

  “Well, yes,” says Mona. She is still too confused to broach the Laura topic.

  He sighs, exasperated, rubs his forehead. “I just said I cannot hear you, so if you just said yes—and it looks like you did—I didn’t hear it. Please nod or shake your head.”

  Mona, irritated, nods her head in an exaggerated fashion.

  “So you can hear me, but I cannot hear you,” says Coburn. “Interesting… I wonder why this is.”

  “Maybe you’re deaf.”

  “I could be deaf, of course,” he says, tapping his chin and looking away, “but I can still hear the wind… God, how I wish I could stop hearing the wind. I wish we had a pen and paper, but obviously there would be none in place like this.”

  He looks around, face baleful. She wonders if he’s crazy. It’s an odd thing for him to say (if this pale shadow of a person is a him, that is), because if he is really Dr. Richard Coburn, then he founded this laboratory, so he must have worked in it, and so he must know that there’s plenty of paper back in the hall there. And she can’t hear a damn bit of wind.

  “You want paper?” asks Mona. “I can get you paper. Wouldn’t be a minute.”

  But Coburn is not paying attention. He is grimly staring straight into the wall. “I wonder where you came from… everything is impassable, except the way I came. Perhaps through there?” He points at the wall. “Or perhaps up from that gully there?” He points down at the floor, where there is certainly no gully. He seems more and more like a maddened transient, albeit one rendered in flickering monochrome. “I doubt if you did,” he says, “because that way is quite treacherous, unless you had some sort of way to pass lakes of acid. And it doesn’t look like you do…”

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” says Mona. “There’s no such thing here.”

  “We don’t have much time here,” he says, glancing up at the ceiling. “The moon is out, but it won’t be for long. That’s when things get dangerous,” he says softly. Without warning, his image sputters and fades a little.

  “Hello?” says Mona.

  Coburn flickers back to existence in mid-sentence, as if he is totally unaware of the change. He is saying, “—ow are you here at all? I thought I was the only one who was transposed here. I haven’t seen anyone from the staff since. And it has been”—he turns to consult something on the ground—“my God, over half a year since the storm.”

  Mona gets an idea. She holds up her hands to get his attention.

  He glances up. “Mm? Yes?”

  “You,” she says, and points, “you stay,” she holds her hands palm out, and mimes pushing on him, “right here,” and she points down at the ground. She does it again, to make sure he catches on.

  He watches her, blinking. “Ah. You want me to stay here? Well, fine, fine, though I can’t imagine why. Where do you have to go?”

  “Well, let’s see,” says Mona, and she slowly backs out of the room.

  She’s about a dozen feet away from the crackling image of Coburn when his mouth drops open. “My goodness,” he says. He stares around himself. “Where… where did you go?” He turns completely around. “Laura? Laura? Are you still here?”

  “What the fuck is going on,” says Mona softly. She turns around and jogs down the hall to the administrative offices. She finds a yellowed, ancient notebook on one of the desks and a piece of colored chalk from one of the blackboards. Then she returns to the room with the mirror.

  “Oh!” says Coburn. “And there you are again.” He looks at what she’s brought. “Wh—where did you get those? Those are… I know that stationery. That’s from the lab. How did you get those?” He whirls around, staring at the walls. “Did some part of the building get transposed here, too? I’ve never seen any suggestion of it…”

  Mona writes: “where do u think u are?” and turns it around to show him.

  He reads it, and says, “Well, I’m right here. Why do you ask?”

  Mona writes: “cause right now Im in ur lab.”r />
  “What!” says Coburn. “What do you mean?”

  She pauses, frustrated, and points to the notebook—I mean this, what I wrote.

  “You’re in the lab?” he says. “You mean CNLO? Right now?”

  Mona nods.

  “Are you… you sure?”

  She nods again.

  He stares around her, his eyes taking in things totally invisible to Mona. “How?”

  She shrugs, as if to say—You’re the fucking scientist. Then she points to the first question: “where do u think u are?”

  Coburn is so shaken that it takes him a moment to answer. “I suppose I don’t know. It is a terrible place, where I am. The ground is glassy and black, there are lakes of bubbling fluid I dare not touch. I have lived off of terrible fruit that grows on strange trees in sodden fields. It is an abandoned place. But how can you be here if you are in the lab?”

  Mona glances around. Naturally, she doesn’t see anything that he describes: just the cold, dark metal walls of this room.

  Coburn thinks. “Unless, of course, you are not here. And I am not really there, in the lab, with you, which, I presume, is what you’re seeing. The lab, I mean.”

  She shakes her head.

  “Am I wrong?” asks Coburn.

  Mona writes: “no. u r right. agreeing. u look all black and white like an old tv show”

  Coburn squints to read her answers. “I do?” he says, astonished, and he looks at his arms and hands. “How marvelous. I see no effects here. What is wrong with your writing, though? It’s horrendous.”

  “Well, fucking forgive me,” mutters Mona.

  “Are you… let me guess.” He looks over his shoulder, but evidently he can’t see what he’s looking for. “Are you in the room with the lens, Laura? Right now?”

  Mona glances at the mirror. She supposes it could be a lens, though it’s not transparent—at least, not in any way she can see. But she hasn’t seen anything else that could be called a lens, so she nods.

  “You are? How fantastic!” Even though Coburn sounds like he’s in dire straits, he appears fairly delighted with what she’s told him. He licks his lips and glances around, thinking very quickly. “Then it’s true, I suppose. You know what this is, of course?”

  Mona shrugs.

  “You don’t? Why, this is bruising, my girl. Just like we always discussed! I expect it can’t be affecting a particularly wide area—not if you vanished only a few yards away. It must not extend that far past the lens. But I cannot imagine it’d be anything else. You and I would be quite pleased, my dear, if it hadn’t had such awful consequences, wouldn’t we?”

  “Huh?” says Mona out loud.

  “I wish I knew what I looked like right now. An image projected across realities… though it is projected poorly, if your suggestions are correct. I don’t know why, but I can see you plain as day, though you are a bit colorless… I guess the bruising must be more severe on your end. Have you witnessed any other effects? Any other symptoms?”

  “What?” asks Mona.

  Coburn looks at her, perturbed. “Why do you look so confused? Laura, have you been injured? Is something wrong with you?”

  Mona decides the jig is up, and writes: “not laura.”

  This just pisses him off. “What do you mean, you’re not Laura? That’s not… you look exactly like her. If you’re not Laura, then who the hell are you?”

  Mona glances at him warily, and writes: “her daughter.”

  When Coburn reads this it’s as if all the air gets knocked out of him. He staggers back a little, then sits down on the ground. “What?” he says softly. “Her daughter?”

  Mona nods.

  “You’re telling me the truth?”

  Mona nods again. She sits down on the floor opposite him.

  “You look a little different, I suppose… but I thought you’d—she—had changed. She vanished before it all happened, but… I thought she’d come back to help me. What happened to her?”

  Mona wonders how to put this. Her own experiences with death have blunted any sensitivity to grief, so she mentally rummages through some greeting card expressions before giving up. She pulls a face, sighs, writes, “died,” and shows it to him.

  Coburn slumps forward in shock. “She died? In the storm?”

  Mona shakes her head.

  “Then… she died of natural causes, I hope.” Mona diplomatically chooses not to correct him on this point. “But if you’re her daughter, how… how are you so old? How old are you?”

  Mona winces. This, she knows, is going to be a nasty surprise for this guy, who seems to have had quite a lot of those in the past couple of years, or months, or however time works for him. But she guesses these things have to be done like Band-Aid removal, quickly and ruthlessly.

  She writes down her age and shows it to him.

  He sits up, and his hands fly to his forehead. “What? You are thirty-seven?” There are pops of white at the edge of his image, and he briefly grows translucent. When he comes back, he is saying, “—irty-seven years old?”

  Mona nods.

  “But then… then how long ago was the storm? What year is it over there?”

  She sighs, writes down the answer, and shows it to him.

  He stares at it. His hands slowly drop. “No.”

  Mona nods.

  “No. No, it’s not possible.”

  She nods again, then shrugs with her palms up—My sympathies, but what can I do?

  “No. It can’t be, it just can’t. I can’t have been stuck over here for… for over thirty years! I just can’t! I remember everything like it was yesterday!”

  Mona watches him helplessly.

  “Is everyone else dead, too? Did we lose everyone, everything?”

  She shrugs.

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  She writes, “dont know a damn thing sorry”

  “But surely some of them have to be around, if you’re at the lab?”

  She writes: “abandoned”

  “The lab? The lab is abandoned?”

  She nods.

  “Oh, my Lord,” says Coburn. He slouches forward, face in his hands. “Then I’ll… I’ll never get back. How could this have happened? How could things have possibly gotten worse for me?”

  To her discomfort, he begins sobbing. Mona is sure he’s in some pretty trying circumstances, since apparently he’s actually trapped somewhere horrific, but it still feels weird to see him, this shabby old man sitting on the floor, sobbing his eyes out. She wonders what to say, and decides grief counseling is not something that can be done via pen, paper, and a vocabulary that’s been adversely affected by texting and the internet. So she just sits, and waits.

  When his tears taper off, she writes: “what happened to u”

  It takes him a while longer to gather himself. He stares into his lap, hollow-eyed, and says, “There was a… storm. A storm during one of our tests. I am not sure if it coincided with our tests, or if our tests… if perhaps our tests were the cause. But it was… it was apocalyptic. I cannot even describe it.”

  Mona, remembering her vision at the house, doesn’t doubt it. She nods.

  “You were—” His image suddenly grows fuzzy and his words hiss, as if his signal, being projected from wherever he is, is losing its strength. When he returns he’s in a different pose, sitting up. It is an unnerving sight, changing abruptly from one position to the other. He finishes, “—at the time?”

  Though she missed the majority of that, Mona takes a wild guess and shakes her head.

  “Well,” he says. “I suppose you wouldn’t have been, would you. Did your mother ever”—a flicker of static—“—rk here, or do you have any, erm, theoretical physics background at all?”

  “Sure don’t,” she says, and she shakes her head.

  “I see. Well. I don’t know how best to explain this, which makes me a bad scientist. It is fairly complicated stuff. I wish your mother had told you a little about it. She was crucial t
o its development.” Another flutter of static.

  “Bruising is also called universal collision signatures,” he says. “It is, in layman’s terms, when one univ—”—his image stutters, shrinks, returns—“—shes into another, like bumper cars. Because there is not just one universe. Think of it like bubb—”—his face freezes, while the rest of his body moves, hands gesticulating excitedly—“—face of water around a waterfall, all rubbing, bumping, popping into one another.”

  “Uh-huh,” says Mona, who wishes he would stay still.

  “This is what we were meant to examine here. Because if we could understand bruising, we could understand how the world works—how all worlds work—at the most fundament—”

  He breaks up again, this time for a long, long time, more than a minute. Mona is sure he isn’t coming back, and, panicking, writes, “BREAKING UP BREAKING UP” on her notepad.

  When he comes back, he is saying, “—id you go again? Did you leave? It didn’t look like you walked aw—”

  He leans forward and reads her note card. Though he is black and white, she can see he pales a little. “Oh, no. Breaking up? Me? That must be why you faded out just then. Something’s wrong. Whatever connection allows this, I guess it’s”—his face blurs, solidifies—“—ill so much to explain, th—” His image begins strobing, one hand frozen, the other still in motion.

  When he comes back, he is standing, his eyes alight, face fixed in mid-shout. “—ongest hall, west side! Do you hear? On the w—” He fills with static, rivers of bursting gray and white. When he returns, he is panicked, yelling, “—ear me? Plank! Plank! Six six two six! Do you hear me? Six six tw—”

  Then he begins to fade out, a clearness starting in his center and moving to the edges until he is no more than a faint outline of a man in the air. Then he is gone, as if he had never been there.

  Mona sits there, staring around, wondering what just happened. Then she feels it again.

  Something clicks. It’s some indefinable change in the room, but it’s the same as when she was staring into the mirror (or the lens, as she reminds herself). But this time it’s like something clicks out of place rather than, as she now feels happened before, clicking into it. She is reminded of those old phone operators in the fifties, taking a cord and plugging it into one jack, then unplugging it and plugging it into another. It’s like the cord just got ripped out of here, the room, the lab, everything. But what could have caused that?