American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “Hm,” says the woman, and she slams the trunk shut.

  Mona hears footsteps, definitely going away. They keep going until she can’t hear them anymore.

  Then silence.

  Silence for a very, very long time.

  Mona says, “Well, fuck.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Mrs. Benjamin does not precisely understand first aid, but she thinks she gets the general principles: things that are within the body must stay within at all times. If they do not stay in, they must be forced in, and kept there via things like gauze and sticky tape.

  It seems simple, but it proves both complicated and painful. She would have preferred more help from Morty Kaufman, who runs the neighborhood drugstore, but when he arrived at seven thirty a.m. and found that not only had his shop been broken into but Mrs. Benjamin was sitting on the floor bleeding from over a dozen wounds and covered in copper-stained gauze, he chose instead to back away silently and sprint down the street without another word.

  Really, Mrs. Benjamin can’t blame him. She is not at her most presentable. And she hates not being presentable.

  So when she hears the footsteps on the walk out front, she feels both resigned and a little anxious about what the reaction will be. To her surprise, her visitor, who is a thin woman in a dress so short the original Mrs. Benjamin (the “real” one) would have positively died, simply looks at her with a curious, blank smile, and says, “Still alive, I see.”

  “What?” says Mrs. Benjamin. “Yes, I’m still alive. I’m trying my very hardest to stay that way, too. Who are you?”

  “Don’t you recognize me?”

  “No. No, I do not.”

  “Well, I recognize you,” says the woman. She walks inside the store. There is something self-satisfied and smug in the way she moves: she’s like a cat who’s cornered a mouse, and is taking the time to enjoy it. “And I recognize all those wounds. I should. I did them to you.”

  Mrs. Benjamin peers closely at the woman. “No…”

  “I told you I’d died before,” says the woman. “You should have listened. You can’t kill me. No one can. It’s not allowed.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Just a sibling. A concerned sibling who is willing to take up the matters of the family when its elders have fallen into lethargy.” She smiles coldly at Mrs. Benjamin. “And you’re going to help me.”

  “I certainly will not,” says Mrs. Benjamin. She wants to stand and thrash this stranger, except one of her arms isn’t working too well and she feels quite faint. How fragile these vessels are… perhaps that’s for the best since, if this stranger is to be believed, physical violence wouldn’t actually hurt the occupant of that body.

  Well, that’s not right—Mrs. Benjamin knows it would certainly hurt. It just wouldn’t accomplish anything.

  “You are,” says the woman. “I’m going to bring Mother back. And you’re going to help me. Did you know that?”

  “That’s… that’s ridiculous,” says Mrs. Benjamin. She coughs: one of her lungs is not working so well. “If Mother comes back—and She’s quite late to do so, if you ask me—it’ll be of Her own accord. Such a thing cannot be forced, especially not by us.”

  “I am doing Mother’s wishes,” says the woman softly. “I am part of Her great plan. And you will help me.”

  “I will not.”

  “You will. Because I have the woman.”

  Mrs. Benjamin’s steely glare softens. “You what? Which woman?”

  “The one you and Parson groomed and escorted and tested so thoroughly. She is safe, to a certain extent—she is trapped in the trunk of a car out in the wilderness. It is quite dry there, and it will get cold at night. Her situation will quickly become uncomfortable. So unless you wish her to perish—and I don’t think you do—you will help me.”

  “You wouldn’t kill her,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “You need her.”

  The woman stares back, smiling serenely. “Do you know,” she says, “how much I hate this flesh? How much I hate wearing this awful skin? Breathing this air? Needing to breathe this air? It is… incredibly frustrating, like itching, all over your body. I despise it. And I despise these people. Including her. I wouldn’t kill her, no, but I would have no qualms about relieving some of my frustrations on her. Do you understand?”

  If Mrs. Benjamin were not sitting here, her body reporting terrible pain in nearly every limb, she probably would not have had much of a reaction to the idea of the woman’s being tortured. Yet now that she knows what physical pain is, she finds herself holding the curious belief that it should never be willfully visited upon anybody.

  Mrs. Benjamin nods glumly.

  “Yes, you do,” says the strange woman. “Isn’t it sad? How pathetic you’ve become. You care about her, just enough to spare her that misery. Imagine that, a little thing like her.”

  “I do not find it particularly pathetic,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “But you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Nor do I wish to. You’re going to help me now, aren’t you?”

  “What is it you need me to do?”

  “I need your strength.”

  Mrs. Benjamin spreads her arms. They crackle slightly: she is covered in dried blood. “I am in no condition to use it.”

  “Come now, Sister,” says the woman, “you wouldn’t be one of my elders if you were so easily defeated. Get up. Now.”

  She prods at Mrs. Benjamin with her toe, first gently, then harder. Mrs. Benjamin has half a mind to take her foot and tear it off at the ankle. But she sighs, grunts, and forces herself to her feet.

  “Where are we going?” she asks wearily.

  “To a motel,” says the woman.

  Mrs. Benjamin is not at all surprised to see the motel is Parson’s deserted Ponderosa Acres: it is not like there are many motels in Wink. The walk there is not half as torturous as the walk down the wooden staircase in the back, which was hidden behind a small, secret door. The existence of the door is news to Mrs. Benjamin: she would wonder why Parson hid it from her, and how this stranger managed to discover it, if she weren’t wearied and pained beyond articulation.

  At the bottom is a wide, large basement with a concrete floor. There is no light in the basement, and if the two of them saw the world with just their eyes, they would be blind; but as this is not the case, Mrs. Benjamin peers out and sees there is a large block of metal sitting in the center of the floor.

  And there is something both intangibly heavy, and also familiar, about that object…

  The stranger prods Mrs. Benjamin down the stairs. “Go on.”

  “Is that what I’m here to collect?”

  “It is.”

  “What is it?”

  A queer smile. “You will know it when you touch it.”

  Mrs. Benjamin descends to approach the block while the strange woman stands on the bottommost landing of the staircase, watching. With each step toward the object, which seems bigger and heavier the closer she gets to it, the more Mrs. Benjamin remembers…

  (broken worlds)

  (a shattered moon)

  (a figure standing)

  (over)

  (a dying city)

  Mrs. Benjamin stops. “Mother,” she says softly. “It’s… this is Mother, isn’t it?”

  “In a way,” says the woman from behind her.

  Mrs. Benjamin holds her hands out to the cube: the air around it is nothing short of frigid. She screws up her mouth, squats, and puts her hands on it, preparing to lift it….

  There is a hiss, and her hands scream with pain. She grunts and snaps them back.

  “I can’t touch it!” she says, and she turns back to the woman on the staircase.

  “No,” she says. “Only our kin can touch Her. And your hands do not truly belong to our family. But you will simply have to bear the pain. You can do that, can’t you? Are you not my mighty big sister?”

  If Mrs. Benjamin paid much attention to the woman, she would feel insulted; but her attention is not d
irected to the woman standing on the staircase landing, but to the person hiding just below it: a small boy of about ten, wearing rabbit pajamas and ugly glasses far too large for him. He appears to have been waiting for her to notice him, for the moment she does he raises a finger to his lips. Then he holds something out to her: a slim bag. With slow, obvious movements, he slips the bag onto one of the stairs below the woman standing on the landing, so she cannot see it. Then he stands perfectly still.

  “Well?” says the woman. “Are you so intimidated? Hurry up.”

  Mrs. Benjamin looks at him for one moment longer: there is something irritatingly familiar about the boy…

  She says, “Fine,” then turns back to the block, grasps it on either side, and lifts it.

  Her hands howl with pain again, as does the rest of her body: not only does its very touch harm her, but the block must weigh tons, as if its metal is impossibly dense. Yet Mrs. Benjamin does not scream or cry as she carries the block to the stairs; nor does she grunt or whimper when she dips down just a little with one free hand feeling along the stairs for the bag; and she definitely does not hiss when the cube brushes up against her cheek during the juggling act to tuck the bag within her dress, unbeknownst to the strange woman, who is already walking back up the stairs.

  For all Mrs. Benjamin can think throughout the beginning of this painful ordeal is, What is that old bastard up to?

  They walk.

  They walk for what feels like hours or days; Mrs. Benjamin, trapped in her leaking, broken body, staggers along with the enormous weight of the metal cube in her arms; and though her true nature has no small effect on the physical world, it fades as her body grows weaker and weaker.

  They walk south, straight south, to the side of Wink opposite the mesa. No one witnesses them. It is still far too early to be outdoors in Wink.

  Mrs. Benjamin is sure she can bear it no more when they come upon a small hole in the side of a cliff. And when they enter the tunnel, she immediately feels that she is being brought to something…

  Big.

  The walls of the tunnel fall away as they enter a vast space. Mrs. Benjamin can hear noises from the sides and the ceiling, chitterings and chirps, and she looks up and sees…

  “The children,” she says softly. “The young ones. They’re all here.”

  “Yes,” says the woman.

  “You brought them here? Why?”

  “For that,” says the woman, and she points ahead.

  Something takes form in the darkness—something colossal and primitive, as if the pieces of Stonehenge had been disassembled and piled together into some sort of organic shape…

  Like a person, Mrs. Benjamin thinks. Like a huge person lying there in the darkness, each curve and bulge composed in increments of sharp, ninety-degree angles. And as Mrs. Benjamin comes closer, she sees that the massive stones are actually made of small metal blocks of varying sizes, but all in the same proportions as the one she now holds in her arms…

  Yet she sees none as big as the one she holds. The rest are all tiny, tiny things…

  “It must have taken years,” she murmurs.

  “More,” says the woman. “Decades. Once I knew the pieces of Her were here, in Wink, it was just a matter of finding them. It ruined the bodies I used—the hosts. Burned their hands, burned right through their bones. So I had to talk a few of the young ones into helping me—the ones small enough to have come here in their original forms. The pieces did not burn them.

  “The young ones gladly helped me. They hate it here as much as I do, did you know that? They hate being told they have to hide in the woods. They aren’t allowed to playact like you and Weringer and Macey and all the rest. So we all labored, in the dark, at the fringes of the town, building the thing you all had given up on so long ago.”

  The shapes of the children stream down from the walls and the ceiling. They crawl across the cavern floor to her, and in one mass reach forward with claws and limbs unlike any on Earth, take her monstrous burden, and carry it to the giant lying in the dark. Mrs. Benjamin, relieved of the weight, falls to her knees. She watches as her youngest siblings hoist the huge block of metal up, over the giant’s shoulder, towards its chest.

  “I’d been looking for that piece for so long,” says the woman. “I knew it had to be somewhere. I could feel it. But it was hidden from me. By Parson, of course—the reluctant bastard. I don’t know how he found it, and I don’t know how he managed to move it, but he must have known what he’d found. Otherwise, why hide it at all? He must have known it was Mother’s heart. Yet when he ‘died,’ it was an easy thing to find it.”

  The children lower the huge block down, and slide it into some shaft in the giant’s chest. There is the hiss of escaping air as the block glides down, and finally a soft thunk as it falls into place. And then things… change.

  Just slightly. The giant does not come to life. But it seems to soften, its edges and curves becoming distinctly more organic. It is, Mrs. Benjamin understands, almost whole.

  “Now what will you do?” she asks, panting.

  “Oh, now you are a willing helper? After all these years?”

  Mrs. Benjamin lifts and drops her arms—What else is there for me to do? “Wasn’t it the last piece?”

  The woman stares off into the darkness. Her face is hidden in shadow. She says, “No. Second.”

  “What?”

  “The second-to-last,” she says softly. “It’s looking for the last piece now. Mother is. She’s alive now, blindly seeking Her host. It will just take one more thing.” She walks back toward the entrance to the cave. “Come,” she says. “I will show you.”

  Mrs. Benjamin limps after. But now she can feel it. Something is happening. Not here, but

  (otherside)

  (elsewhere)

  (the betweenplace)

  (where a single eye)

  (great and dark and gleaming)

  (slowly opens)

  (for the first time after)

  (a long sleep)

  (and begins roving, whirling)

  (spinning blindly)

  (feverishly seeking)

  (a way in)

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Time stretches on in the dark. On and on and on.

  More than once Mona goes into a fit of rage, kicking at everything in the car, breaking the wiring to the taillights, grinding the balls of her feet into the roof of the trunk, anything…

  Nothing gives. She is stuck here. And the trunk is getting fucking hot with the sun beating down right on it.

  She gives up. She decides conserving her energy is the wisest thing possible. Because she is going to go fucking wild when she gets out.

  If she ever gets out.

  So she waits. And there, in the dark, with all the world hot and close and still, the truth of what Mr. First told her becomes inescapable.

  Mother.

  Mother, Mother, what am I?

  And as she wonders this, she remembers something.

  All her life, Mona’s family was moving. Her father’s job required it: he had to keep up with the drills, with the oil, and move from place to place, always new homes and apartments, almost always rentals.

  And though Mona’s mother was never really happy in her life, she was always happiest when they moved. “It’s a fresh start,” she would say each time. “A new chance. We can do it right this time.” And Earl, being Earl, would simply grunt.

  Mona was never quite sure what her mother meant by this. What had they been doing wrong before? And what was it they had to do right?

  She had only asked her mother this once. The answer was simple: “Everything.”

  Yet these dizzying, anticipatory highs never lasted. When they would arrive at the new house, and actually walk through it—seeing, in almost every case, the awful carpet, the Pergo walls, the dim, dreary living room—her mother would go silent, and fall into a deep depression that would last for days.

  Mona was never sure why this was, but i
t troubled her. She did not want her mother to feel so hurt, so injured, by something as simple as a house. Which, of course, would change eventually, when they moved again.

  She tried to cheer her mother up, but it never worked. Her mother would simply say, “It’s not worth it. Not worth doing anything to it.”

  And Mona would say—“Why not?”

  “It’s supposed to be perfect. Everything’s supposed to be perfect. It can be, so it should be. But I can’t make this perfect. Not this house. It’s not even worth trying.”

  Mona asked her mother to please forget that, to please try to be happy anyway.

  “I can’t. Things must be arranged a certain way. Things must be beautiful, my dear.”

  When they moved once more, just days before that afternoon with the shotgun and the bathtub, it seemed the same as all the other times: there was the ecstatic joy leading up to their arrival, a million plans dreamed up, a million possibilities; and, upon arriving, the crushing, complete disappointment, thorough and abysmal.

  But this time it was a little different. Her mother, weeping, said, “I can’t stay here. Things can’t be perfect here, not like this. I have to go back. I have to go back and get everyone else. And then we’ll come and make a place where everyone can be perfect and happy, forever.” She looked up at Mona then, and there was something alien in the way her eyes looked out at the world: they seemed strangely glassy and shallow, like the eyes of a doll.

  Her mother said, “And I will come back for you. I promise.”

  And now Mona understands. Whoever said those words was not Laura Alvarez. And possibly that desire for newness, and perfection… perhaps that had no earthly origin, either.

  Give up, says a voice. Just give up.

  And she does. She is all too happy to give up.

  But as she gives up something awakens inside her, unfolding with the gruesome delicacy of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis: it’s as if the release of all that energy has prodded open the third eye in her mind, that black, merciless shark eye she just discovered. And now that she knows that it’s there, it seems so much easier to use it.