“There’s something on the mesa!” she screamed, and she pointed.
“What?” said Macey, and he turned to look.
But as he did, Mrs. Benjamin smelled that awful ozone smell again. And then the whole world went bright.
She was aware of a wave of heat, followed by a blast of pressure that lifted her up off the ground and sent her tumbling back. When she came to a stop she thought she had her eyes closed and fought to open them, only to find she was actually blind. Everything around her was dark, and all she could see were bubbles of green and blue swelling and fading.
Then she began to see light. Images calcified around her. Everything nearby was on fire. There was a huge circle of absolute black on the sidewalk, scorched from the lightning. And there, in the center, was Mr. Macey, standing perfectly still as if struck by an odd thought.
She struggled to her feet, sure he would collapse at any moment. She could hear herself saying his name. Then she grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him around.
His eyes and his mouth were wide and he was trembling, arms stiff and neck stretched to its limit.
She cried out his name and shook him, telling him to please snap out of it.
Then fire spilled out into the street around them, and bright light filled his face. And she looked into his eyes, and saw.
It was as if his eyes were windows, and there behind them was something squirming, something with many tentacles and a long, flowing, flowery body, and his mouth opened wider and wider and she began to hear an awful, reedy whine…
It was like the sound from that shadow in the street. But it came not from his mouth, but from the base of his skull, near his neck…
And when he looked at her she saw nothing in his eyes that was Eustace Macey, nothing of the small-town shop owner she’d spoken to nearly every day of her life. The lightning had emptied him out, and filled him up with something else.
She turned and began to run down the street, shrieking. Everything was smoke and fire and deafening crashes. She saw neighbors she knew and loved screaming and running through the blazes—there, Mr. Cunningham, his daughter thrown over one shoulder, and there Mrs. Rochester, holding one black, wounded hand in her armpit…
The town was unrecognizable. She ran without knowing where she was going, just running in the hope that somewhere this would end, somewhere the devastation would stop.
Then the cloud of smoke parted before her again, and she saw the mesa once more.
She stopped. Choked. And fell to her knees.
She saw enormous shoulders bathed in lightning. Long, sinewy limbs, a faceless, slumping head wreathed in clouds. And the thing on the mesa pointed, and when it did another bolt of lightning fell shrieking to crash into the earth.
It shifted on the mesa, and pointed again. And she could have sworn it pointed at her.
She looked up. There was a bright, glimmering breach in the clouds above her. The clouds fluttered with light, and the breach glowed furiously bright, and then…
Light. Heat. And fire all around.
She stood totally frozen. There was something warm behind her eyes, something soft that tickled her sinuses.
Then all the world turned white.
Mona waits for Mrs. Benjamin to finish her story, yet nothing comes.
“I don’t get it,” she says. “So… are you saying you died?”
Mrs. Benjamin looks at her, and even though her face is slack Mona thinks she can see scorn in it. “Miss Bright,” she says, “to whom do you really think you are speaking?”
Mona thinks about it for a moment, confused. Then she realizes, and for a moment she stops breathing.
She stares into Mrs. Benjamin’s eyes. There’s a fluttering in her corneas, a squirming as if each of her eyes is the shell of a snail, inside of which is something flexing and undulating, feeling the boundaries of its casing.
She begins to understand. “You’re… you’re not Mrs. Benjamin, are you.”
Mrs. Benjamin smiles a little.
“And you’re not Parson,” says Mona. “But they were both people before, weren’t they? Real people with real lives, and you just… came and took them over.”
“In a way. As we said, we are here in only the slightest sense,” says Mrs. Benjamin.
“What are you… in there?” says Mona, horrified.
“It is not us,” says Parson, gesturing to his head. “You have seen us already.”
“And it very nearly killed you,” says Mrs. Benjamin, who sounds a little pleased by that.
“This thing inside this vessel is more like a device. Like a walkie-talkie, one could say.”
“It is our link to the other side,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “The story I just related to you is, I suppose, the last memory of whoever or whatever occupied this vessel before me.”
“Whoever occupied… so you killed her?” says Mona. “You killed the real Mrs. Benjamin when you… crawled into her skull?” She is horrified and disgusted by the idea, but also by the realization that all the times she has spoken to these people (and who knows who else in Wink) she has really been addressing the frothy, fleshy masses in their skulls that tweak their nerves like the strings of marionettes and report everything they see to those things in that gray, red-starred abyss…
“I did not have a choice,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “I agreed to come to this place. I chose to accept safety. I did not know what I was coming to, or how.”
“None of us did,” says Parson. “We did not come here. We were brought here.”
“Brought by who?” asks Mona.
The two of them do not speak, but turn to look at one another. Then there’s a series of sounds in the air a bit like someone blowing a dog whistle: while her ears cannot detect the noises, they can tell something is going on. And from the way Parson and Mrs. Benjamin are staring into each other’s eyes, Mona thinks that those things in their heads are choosing to discuss something at a frequency she can’t hear. It is a disturbing thought: has the air in Wink been full of silent, invisible communication this whole time, and she was simply unable to perceive it?
Parson clears his throat. “What we are about to tell you,” he says, “is the most dangerous secret we know.”
“It is the only secret, really,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “It is the secret of us. Of everything.”
“Were anyone to find out that we told you—”
“Any of our kin.”
“Yes,” says Parson, “then the consequences would be… unimaginable.”
Mona asks, “You won’t go into a coma this time?”
“No,” says Parson. “On that occasion, I broke a rule. But there is no rule made for this, because that which made the rules never believed we would ever do what we are about to do.”
“Which is what?”
“Tell you who brought us here.”
Parson blinks slowly. He looks back at Mrs. Benjamin, and she nods, urging him on.
“We were brought here, Miss Bright”—he shuts his eyes sadly—“by Mother.”
Mona stares at them. “Are you serious?” she says after a while. “By your mother? Then that part of your bird story was true?”
The two of them do not respond; they just stare at the ground, shocked, as if they have just committed an abominable betrayal.
Mona shakes her head. It is hard to believe that such things (she remembers the fungal stalk, and the bulky, heaving thing from before, and shivers) could even have a mother. Then she remembers her own vision of the storm, and how she glimpsed that huge, dark figure on the mesa top…
“She actually came here, didn’t she,” says Mona. “Your mother… your mother actually came here, and pulled you through. That was… her on the mountain.”
The two of them do not answer.
“Jesus… that thing was your mother?” asks Mona.
“Yes,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “She pulled us through, scattered us across the valley like seeds. And how we have grown…”
Parson says, �
�But when Mother brought us here, it was on Her terms. We were confined by Her rules. Rules about what we can and cannot do, what we can and cannot say. Some of us—the eldest, particularly—were too large to come here in whole, and were forced to live through devices housed within the people of this town, and thus be safe and hidden. Others, either because they were too young, or—in the case of one—too old, manifested fully.”
“These, naturally, stay concealed through their own designs,” says Mrs. Benjamin.
“Mother was powerful,” says Parson. “She made us. She was the architect of our lives. She wished us to be perfect. And we tried so hard to be…” A slightly angry note creeps into his voice. “It was through Her designs that we came here. She dwarfed us in all ways. She was vast, vast, incredibly vast… even we do not know Her reaches.”
“Then what happened to her?” asks Mona.
“The effort of bringing us here, of saving us, destroyed Her,” Mrs. Benjamin says. “She was here for one moment… and then She was gone.”
“But Mother is never truly gone,” says Parson. “She cannot die. Death cannot touch Her. Age cannot wound Her. She cannot die. She may sleep, or wait, but never die.”
“Then what happened to Her?” asks Mona.
“We do not know,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “We were told to wait here, and each should obey their elders, and we should never, ever harm one another… and that She would come back.”
“And we have been waiting ever since,” says Parson. “Waiting for Mother to come back.”
“It has been a long time,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “So long. It wears more on some than others. They get restless.”
“What would happen if that… that thing came back?” asks Mona.
Parson and Mrs. Benjamin are silent. Then they slowly turn to look at each other, and back.
“Then we would be brought through entirely,” says Parson.
“The lines between your world and ours,” says Mrs. Benjamin, “blur to almost nothing in this place. Wink is neither here nor there. Some parts are more your world—and others are more ours. It is in these parts that we are hidden. Our true beings, our true selves, are sealed up in little inaccessible pockets, floating on the borders of our world. We stay anchored,” she says, and brushes the side of her head, “through these, the sleepers in our skulls. We are safe, but we are trapped. We are trapped in this physical location, and we are trapped in these bodies, which we are forced to use to preserve us, just as sea turtles hide their eggs in the sand.”
“But if Mother returns, then we would no longer be stuck halfway,” says Parson. “And we would no longer be confined to this place.”
“Our world would be pulled through to yours,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “The very skies would change. We would be free.”
Mona’s head begins swimming as she realizes what they mean. (And how, she thinks stupidly, do they know about sea turtles?) She still does not really understand what she saw on the other side, with those red stars and glittering, volcanic fields, but to imagine such things coming through to here, able to do as they please…
“Why are you telling me this?” asks Mona.
They do not answer.
“You wanted me to understand,” says Mona. “You sent me up to the lab so I’d understand enough for you to tell me the rest, to get around your Mother’s rules. You want me to do something about this. But why? Isn’t that what you want to happen? Don’t you want to be freed?”
“Us?” says Parson. “No. No, we do not wish for that to happen.”
“Why, though?” asks Mona.
Mrs. Benjamin asks, “How well did you love your parents, Miss Bright?”
“I only had the one,” says Mona. “And I wasn’t too fond of him.”
“So why should we be any different?”
Mona stares at her as she realizes what she means. Of all the things she’s heard, somehow this is the most bewildering. “So… this is all some kind of… fucking teenage rebellion?”
“You make it sound so trite,” says Parson. “You went past the borders of this place to get to Coburn. So you must have seen the barrier.”
Mona thinks, and recalls. “I saw white columns that didn’t want to let me pass…”
“Yes. She put them there. We cannot pass them. We are trapped here, at Her choosing. We live by Her rules, and Her rules alone.”
“We did not know another way of living,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “Until we came here. But part of growing up is being forced to be on your own.”
“And we have been on our own these past thirty years,” says Mr. Parson. “And some of us have grown up.”
“What do you mean?” asks Mona.
The two of them hesitate. There is genuine insecurity in their faces (which Mona realizes is remarkable—do the things in their heads actually feel?), like they are about to divulge an embarrassing secret.
“When we came here to this place, and took on these lives… something happened that Mother did not expect, or intend,” says Parson. “We were not sure what to do with the people living here. We did not even know where we were. But then some of us began to examine our surroundings. And… adapt.”
“They watched your television,” said Mrs. Benjamin. “And read your books. They lived in your houses, looked at your pictures. They learned to talk like you. To look like you. To act like you. And they began to think that here they could have something they had never possessed before. They could find something here they’d never even dreamed of. In this small, quiet place, filled with so many small, quiet people, they could be something they had never been.”
“What?” says Mona.
Parson’s face contorts into one of utter disgust. He turns to Mona, and when he speaks his contempt is almost overwhelming: “They believed they could be happy.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Listen:
Down the street from Mrs. Benjamin’s house are Mr. and Mrs. Elm, who live in a very nice bungalow with an impeccably groomed garden of irises. Their grass is trim; their gutters are clean of leaves; and their drapes are of a subtle off-white that works wonderfully with the robin’s-egg blue of the window trim. But the indisputable pride and joy of the Elm household is hidden from the street, and hardly ever seen: for in their garage, almost concealed by a leaning stack of oil cans and dented old Dagmar bumpers, is a lime-green 1966 Cadillac Eldorado.
It looks exactly as it did when it was driven off the lot, and this is solely due to the tireless efforts of Mr. Elm. At this moment he lies on the garage floor under the car, drizzled in oil and grease, working away on the beast’s marvelous undercarriage. Mrs. Elm stands at the garage door, smiling and holding a pitcher of lemonade.
The lemonade is quite watered down, for the ice has all melted. This is because Mrs. Elm has been standing at the garage door, smiling as she watches her husband work, for four straight days.
“It’s a beautiful car, Harry,” she says.
Harry does not answer. He is busy. He is always busy on the car. Sometimes he is busy only for a few hours—eight or nine at most. But sometimes it gets bad, and he needs to be busy, really quite very busy, and on those occasions he works underneath the car for so long his body develops bedsores and bruises and pooling blood, and when he emerges (or attempts to emerge) his joints are so atrophied and stiff they sound like machine guns going off, and it takes him the better part of an hour just to stand up.
And she waits on him. Of course she does. She is his wife, and this is what a wife does. She waits on her husband, helps him, serves him. She knows this. She’s seen it. She knows what she must be.
Mr. Elm eats nothing during these sessions: the only thing he consumes is can after can of warm Schlitz beer, which he drinks, every time, in one long, foamy draught. He does not move to urinate: his pants and shirt and entire back become soaked with cold urine, which he lies in for so long his crotch and back turn a raw, brilliant red.
There is a mound of empty beer cans just beside the car. Mrs. Elm
knows she should go to the store to get more, but this is such a busy time that she can’t get out of the house. She must be there to attend to her husband. So she stands in the doorway, smiling, proffering ignored lemonade, listening to her husband pound and twist and tinker with the guts of the Eldorado.
“It’s a beautiful car, Harry,” she says.
It is a beautiful car. It is a remarkably beautiful car. But at times Mrs. Elm feels a little troubled: she is fairly certain that sometimes—not all the time, but sometimes—they should drive it somewhere.
But they have never driven the Eldorado. It has never been out of the garage. This is because the car is undrivable.
Under the hood or in the undercarriage of the car, soldered or hammered or screwed or even taped into place, are:
A rotary phone.
Most of a ceiling fan’s motor.
Six curling irons.
Two waffle irons.
Thirteen hundred and seventy-four iron nails.
One television tube.
Nine feet of garden hose.
Two neon lights.
Two feet and seven inches of PVC pipe.
The majority of a lawn mower blade.
The door of an ancient microwave.
A combined thirty-eight feet of electrical tape.
One pint of roofing tar.
The tracks of a sliding glass door.
And, last but not least, one Scrabble piece. (An S.)
What you would not find underneath the hood of the Eldorado is anything resembling a functioning engine, transmission, radiator, alternator, air filter, or even battery. Mrs. Elm knows her husband needs to work on the car—a car like this requires maintenance, and the husband is the person who does that—but though she would never say it out loud, she secretly believes Mr. Elm does not know what he is maintaining, nor how to maintain it.
“It’s a beautiful car, Harry,” says Mrs. Elm.
And it is. She loves it. She loves the car. How could she not? It is beautiful.
But sometimes she gets tired of standing there and waiting on her husband and their car. Her kneecaps begin to itch, right around the tops where they connect to her muscles, and the itch just grows and grows until it’s an outright burn, like her patellae are floating in little pools of lava. Her bra, which is a brutal, industrial contraption, begins to eat into her skin, leaving a dense tangle of red welts over her back and shoulders. But this does not compare to her feet, which are pressed into three-inch, red patent-leather heels. Once, not that long ago, she glanced down to see that the color appeared to be leaking off the shoes, pooling on the tile floor and running down the grout lines like a curiously crimson irrigation network. It was blood, of course: she had stood there until her feet bled. The blood has hardened to become a flaky grid of brown, but she knows that since this fix-it session is so bad it’s likely she will bleed again, probably soon.
American Elsewhere Page 40
