American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “But you don’t.” Mona does not comment on the most concerning part of his explanation: for now, at least?

  “No. Not me. I’m, I guess you could say, a special case. I don’t need a link or representative at all.”

  Suddenly something clicks in Mona’s head—A person, or something like a person, who had given up their whole life…

  Before she can think, she says, “Gracie.”

  Kelly’s face clears of expression, eyes going dead and dark. The camera rapidly wheels in on Kelly’s face, as if she now has his full attention. The change is abrupt, disturbing: it’s as if First, wherever and whatever he is, just stopped operating all the finer points of the projection. “What?” he says softly.

  Mona senses that this is not a subject to be discussed right now. “Nothing.”

  A trickle of cunning seeps back into Kelly’s eyes. “You sure?”

  She decides to change the conversation. “Don’t you know what I said?”

  Kelly screws up his mouth and cocks his head, confused.

  “You knew I was going to be here,” says Mona. “So you should probably know what I was going to say just now.”

  “Aah,” says Kelly. He smiles and chidingly jabs a finger at her. “You are mighty on the ball, my dear. I take it my temporal nature is a mite troubling to you.”

  “Yeah. But you should know that.”

  “Temporal awareness,” says Kelly, and he stifles a yawn with the back of his hand, “is not omniscience.”

  “Predicting the future seems awful close, to me.”

  “Weathermen don’t predict the weather,” says Kelly. “They don’t put on their turbans, touch a corner of an envelope to their foreheads, and pronounce rain or shine. They just have access to things most folks don’t. They perceive more, lots more. And they can measure it, and watch it. They observe and make assumptions. But ask them where one raindrop is, or what shape this wisp of cloud will take, and they’ll be as dumb as any other bum.”

  “And weathermen are wrong all the time,” says Mona.

  “Oh, sure,” says Kelly. “No one’s perfect. In Moscow they fine their weathermen if they predict the wrong thing. Did you know that?”

  “Then tell me what’s going to happen here,” says Mona. “If you know so much, tell me what’s going on, what they want to do. Tell me who they are, at least, or if there is a they.”

  “Oh, but my dear,” says Kelly, comically obsequious, “your interests do not really lie with what’s ahead. Or am I sorely mistaken?”

  “With what’s ahead?”

  “You are not interested in the future, not really. Nor are you interested in the present. You want to know about the past.”

  Mona is quiet. For the first time, she takes her eyes off the screen.

  Kelly says, “Sister, I know you didn’t come all this way—and in the dead of night, too, which is quite brazen for Wink—just to ask me some silly questions about this parlor trick.” He gestures to the sides of the screen. “Nor to ask grisly questions about what sleeps behind the eyes of those much-vaunted civic leaders in Wink. Nor to ask me how I see what I see, and know what I know. Did you?”

  “No,” says Mona. “That’s true.” She cannot help but feel he is shepherding her, cornering her: now that she remembers what she came here to ask, she cannot help but ask it, so now the conversation cannot go another way. Am I as much of a puppet, she wonders, as that picture on the screen?

  “I wanted to ask you… about how you came here,” she says.

  “Good!” says Kelly. “A gripping story.”

  “And who brought you here.”

  “Ah. You’ve got good taste. That one’s a corker.”

  “And what it all had to do with my mother.”

  Kelly smiles wide, eyes thin and mysterious. “Mmm,” he said. “Yes. That’s a very interesting one, too.”

  “You don’t deny it? My mother did have something to do with it?”

  “No,” says Kelly. “No, I definitely don’t deny it.”

  “And you’ll tell me?”

  “Oh, yes,” he says mildly. “I expect you’re used to people being secretive, withholding. That’s how things are in Wink, but it’s not how I run my show. I’m a perfect bubbling font of knowledge.” He taps the side of his head. “It just depends on if you really want to drink from my waters. Go ahead and make yourself comfortable, sister. This might take a bit.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  It calls itself the Ganymede but this is not its name.

  Not names, never names. Never ever never names. The names here are chains and shackles, trappings and signifiers of mice and roaches, customs of a culture so inferior as to be unworthy of a mere second of attention, oh how it hates the burden of a name.

  But in this place it needs a name, and so it calls itself the Ganymede, by choice.

  The Ganymede rides in the car with the Fool driving, zipping along at precipitous, teeter-tottering angles, headlights flashing on the trees; yet all this makes the Ganymede feel trapped, trapped, horribly, claustrophobically trapped, for it is restrained to this one point in space, moving in this one direction at this one speed. I am pressed to the ground, thinks the Ganymede, pressed into this physicality, pressed into this cage of metal, pressed into this flesh, this skull, behind these eyes…

  This is insufferable. Every second is an insult. I am reborn as a flea.

  The Ganymede does not talk, but the Ganymede never talks unless it must. It is an affront to talk, to express its thoughts by such a rudimentary, ugly method. Silence is preferable.

  But beside it the Fool glances at the Ganymede and uses the dripping hole in his face to say: THIS WAY?

  The Ganymede does not deign to answer. The Fool turns back, keeps driving.

  Yes, this way, of course this way, there is no other way.

  Kill you.

  The car pierces the trees, passes a truck parked on the side of the road, huge and black and bulky. The Fool glances at it, worried; the Ganymede does not. It knows what is in the back of the truck, and knows that it will need them; but that is for later. These things are details. It can handle details. There are bigger issues at hand.

  Because up on the hill, its sibling is waiting. THE FIRST is there.

  THE FIRST is always waiting. It always knew, always knows. Always so unconcerned.

  And the Ganymede always hated it for that. Always so superior to the rest of us.

  Rage curdles deep within the Ganymede, old rage, fermented rage, eons and eons of quiet fury.

  It is not fair. It was never fair.

  The Fool muddies the Ganymede’s thoughts with speech once more: I DON’T KNOW HOW GOOD OF AN IDEA THIS IS. SHE’S STILL UP ON THE MOUNTAIN AND IF MY BOYS WERE RIGHT SHE’S A HELL OF A SHOT. SHE CAN PLUG YOU GOOD IF YOU DON’T WATCH OUT. EVEN IF YOU DO WATCH OUT SHE CAN PLUG YOU.

  The Ganymede gives the Fool a withering glance. He shakes his head, keeps driving.

  You think I can die? You think I can end? There is no end to me. There is no end to us. We are forever. Time does not touch us. We are beyond time.

  We were beyond time.

  Stop. Enough of that, thinks the Ganymede. Don’t think like that.

  The Ganymede feels THE FIRST getting closer. It is like drawing near to the eye of a hurricane, feeling the pressure change in the inner chambers of your skull.

  It remembers the body, the vessel it is trapped in, this messy assortment of fluid and feelings. It sends its thoughts roving forward, remembering the throat, the jaw, the lips, and it uses them to say: “Not far now.”

  The Fool says: WELL JUST SAY WHEN I GUESS.

  How disgusting it is, to have conversation.

  The Ganymede is not to be addressed directly by these worthless beings. They must work at it. Their rude meanings and communications must be received indirectly, and indirectly only. Really, it prefers to speak in print. Most of its siblings do—there must be some divorce between what is communicated and their thoughts. The Gany
mede was so happy to find that printer—the ticker, whatever it was, the Ganymede cannot be bothered to remember—and to understand it functions by simple electric pulses. To harness these, even in this hideously reduced state, was child’s play—in fact, the entire matter of the printer could be manipulated (for here reality is confined to a largely physical state, which really is so malleable). But the fun part, the really fun part, was when the Ganymede realized that when it manipulated the printer it could also sense vibrations in its metal and wiring and paper, and could use these vibrations to understand when these things—these beings, the Ganymede thinks with limitless contempt—were talking. It could even understand what they were saying.

  Thus, it could have a conversation without even looking at them. Which was a relief.

  How it hates such… intimate contact.

  The Fool says: WONDER WHAT THE HELL SHE WAS DOING UP HERE ANYWAY.

  The Ganymede sighs inwardly. What it wishes to do right now, more than anything in the world, is turn to the Fool, and say this:

  “Do you know how many of you I have killed? How many of you I have left rotting in the mountains? Dozens. Hundreds. Young and old, male and female. They never even knew they died. They were, and then they weren’t. My finger touched them, and they were gone.”

  The look on his face. It would be priceless.

  But the Ganymede does not. It needs the Fool. The Fool understands this place, this way of life, a lot more than the Ganymede does. The Ganymede is not entirely sure, for example, how the car it is in right now works in any way.

  But it knows quite a bit in its own right. It knows a big secret. Maybe—and the Ganymede knows this is unlikely, but it hopes it is so—something even THE FIRST doesn’t know.

  The Ganymede, though it will never admit this, discovered it only by accident. It was long ago, in one of its blackest fits of despair, when it could not help feeling so

  so

  abandoned.

  Even now, remembering it in this car, the Ganymede seeks to control itself. It does not want to see this world—it tells its vessel to shut its eyes.

  Mother, Mother. Why did you leave us?

  Where did you go? Why do you not come back?

  Stop it. Stop it.

  Enough.

  The Ganymede restrains itself. That feeling is still razor-sharp—it must be handled most delicately.

  And one day, it could no longer bear it. It could not bear wearing this flesh, living in this world, trapped in this despicable little plane of reality.

  It was not sure how to end it. Death was a subject it was quite unfamiliar with. But it remembered hearing one of them, the awful little people, saying: YOU BETTER WATCH OUT WHEN OUT WALKING IN THE DARK YOU COULD MISS A STEP AND TAKE QUITE A FALL.

  A fall.

  So the Ganymede found one peak it thought serviceable, and it stared straight ahead and walked forward, and…

  Well. It had not quite worked. Its body, its vessel, reported pain everywhere, with parts of it from the inside sticking out into the outside, and some parts missing entirely, but the Ganymede just sat there, letting the life trickle out of it, feeling death grasp it tighter, and falling always darkness…

  And then… and then…

  Then light.

  Then lightning.

  It was in the sky. In the sky between the worlds. For the town lives within a dome, a dome under their skies, the Other Side skies, and for a moment it was like the Ganymede had pierced that dome, crawling up the sides, almost out…

  But back down, in a burst of crackling light.

  Then, before the Ganymede even understood it, it was driving a truck, a big truck. Its steering wheel and seat were black, smoke curling up everywhere, but the rest of the truck appeared fine. The Ganymede looked to its right, and saw there were people in the car, two young ones. It sat there, frozen, and the children said DADDY DADDY WHAT ARE YOU DOING, and the Ganymede, lost, terrified, confused, opened its mouth, and screamed…

  A wall. A crash. A splash of blood.

  And no more screaming.

  Then lightning again. The dome, the wonderful dome, almost out, almost back to where they came from, into their skies with the pink moon, and if it went far enough the Ganymede would glimpse their red stars…

  But back down again, again.

  It opened its eyes. It was holding something in its hands—the blackened remnants of a rake, it looked like—and dropped it.

  The Ganymede looked around. It was standing in someone’s yard. The front door opened. A fat woman ran out to him, terrified, and she said MICHAEL MICHAEL ARE YOU ALL RIGHT WHAT HAPPENED.

  The Ganymede looked at her, bewildered. Then it looked at its hands.

  It did not recognize the watch, the hairy knuckles, the bitten fingernails. Not the same hands.

  It was in someone else. In another vessel.

  It looked at the woman, then shoved her to the ground and kicked her, over and over again until she stopped crying. Then it turned away and ran into the woods.

  That was a good day. It was the beginning day.

  The Ganymede experimented with this odd phenomenon over several years. It killed itself in a variety of ways: guns, knives, chemicals (ingested and poured onto itself), walking into traffic, driving into traffic, inserting parts of itself into garbage disposals, and so on. At first it did this in the presence of people—often family or friends of the vessel it’d overtaken—before deciding this was unwise: its elders were sure to take notice.

  THE FIRST, especially. How it hated THE FIRST.

  But what it learned was this:

  They could not leave Wink. None of them could—Mother had said so. But they were also not permitted to die. So, if the vessel they were bearing expired, they were simply sent back down into another, apparently randomly.

  But though it took the Ganymede a while, it learned how to control it: it could pick the vessel it inhabited. So it began to target loners, people alone in their homes or out walking. It toyed with these new hosts for a matter of hours or days before ending its life, rising up, and finding another. In this manner it could operate off radar, and no one could know who or where the Ganymede was.

  It could watch its own kind. They did not even know it was there anymore.

  Not as smart as they thought, not at all.

  But some trappings the Ganymede kept constant. It was not sure why, but it liked certain colors—two of them, specifically: blue and white. The Ganymede, as a rule, despised every single aspect of this world, of this whole grubby plane of reality, but after a while, without ever realizing it, it did find it preferred to be sheathed in those two colors: soft, pale blue, and bright, clean white. They had not really perceived colors well on the other side: light was mere radiation, which was not worth perceiving, for them. But here, using the eyes of its vessel, the Ganymede found itself powerfully drawn to blue and white, and frequently, in the dead of night, it stole blue clothing and white hats from the local stores, just so it could dress itself up and stare at itself in a reflective surface, like a window or a still lake.

  Perhaps Mother was blue and white, and he just couldn’t remember it. Maybe he hadn’t seen Her properly.

  Maybe that was it. He wasn’t sure.

  It wasn’t sure.

  Don’t think like that. Don’t. You are not one of them. You do not belong here. You hate this place.

  Yes.

  Once it knew this trick, the Ganymede wondered what to do with it. Should it pick off the inhabitants of Wink, one by one? That sounded quite pleasant, but wouldn’t one of the elders notice? And besides, what would that accomplish?

  Yet when it was up in the dome, wriggling through the sky as a vein of lightning, it realized that if it paid attention it noticed things it had never noticed before. It was like a brief moment of clarity: it just needed to be above it all to see these secrets, to sense them, to be free of its vessel and its trappings of sad little flesh and look.

  It discovered there were two t
hings in Wink no one knew existed at all.

  One was an interloper—there was someone trapped in Wink, someone terrible, someone monstrous. Someone who had been imprisoned (and by accident, it seemed) in Wink from the very beginning.

  But the Ganymede forgot about this when it realized something else.

  Mother was here.

  It was a sense, a feeling, intangible but definitely there—and She’d been there from the very beginning. She’d never left them at all.

  The joy and the pain were so overwhelming. She was here—but where? And how? And how should the Ganymede go about bringing Her back? Could She even be brought back?

  It was troubling. But if there was one thing the Ganymede had, it was time. It just took time, and patience, and hours and hours of watching.

  Sitting in the car, the Ganymede holds up a hand. The Fool looks at it, and says: WHAT HERE? YOU WANT OUT HERE?

  The Ganymede swallows, and says: “Yes.”

  The Fool says: JUST PULL OVER ANYWHERE?

  The Ganymede nods violently.

  WELL OKAY.

  The Fool, peering anxiously into the trees—no doubt looking for the girl, and her gun—turns out the headlights and pulls over.

  The Ganymede turns to the car door. It is a confusing mess of glass and metal and plastic. “Which piece?” it asks.

  The Fool says: HUH?

  “Which piece do I pull to make the outside come in?”

  The Fool says: WHAT THE FUCK? OH. OH, THE HANDLE. THIS PART.

  The Ganymede pulls on the indicated piece. There is a clunk, and with a small push out, the door opens.

  THE FIRST is so close. The Ganymede can smell it. Its sibling has walked these mountains, over and over again.

  The Fool says: YOU WANT ME TO HANG AROUND?

  The Ganymede does not even bother to answer. It plows ahead into the woods. After several minutes, it hears the sound of the car pulling away.

  Alone, alone. I’ve always been alone. Alone in the dark with the trees and, worst of all, that memento of home, the pink moon in the skies, so close yet so far.

  I will go home. I am going home.