American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  She sees…

  So much. Too much. Far, far too much.

  “No,” she whispers. “No. No, God…”

  But one thing she’s learned during her time here in Wink is how to control what she sees, and how she sees it. She must have been using this undiscovered eye of hers all along. So though her body is limp and her eyes stare blindly into the roof of the trunk, she focuses, and sees…

  Something. A light in the dark.

  A room.

  A rounded stone chamber, a bit like a crypt. There is a pile of tiny skulls in the center. And beside it, sitting Indian-style on the floor and staring into the ground, is a man in a filthy blue rabbit suit.

  Oh no, she thinks.

  He seems to feel her watching him: he sits up, and turns to look. His face is once again concealed by the wooden mask. This time he does not take it off. Yet she gets the impression that he is very surprised to see her watching him.

  He raises a hand to her. Then drops it.

  She is a bit confused by this. Mona says: Hello.

  The man nods slightly toward her. He stares at her a moment longer. (Where is she, anyway? How can he see her? It seems very hard, all of a sudden, to keep herself in one place.) Then he looks around at his chamber. The light is dull and dusky; here all things are yellow and crumbling, a world rendered in musty stone and fading parchment and rusting chains.

  He points at her. Then he points at the walls. Then back at her. Then he cocks his head a little.

  Mona is not sure what he means. Then she understands: You are imprisoned? Like me?

  Mona says to him: Yes. Like you.

  And immediately she understands that this is how she can see and speak to him, that this might be why he chose not to harm her when they first met: the two of them are alike. Not just in circumstances; not just because the two of them are currently captured. That’s just the start of it. The real reason is that Mona, like this ragged, filthy man, is a child left behind, neglected, and eventually forgotten, a sibling of a family she never got to know. They share the same story, the same nature: though he is much older than she, and she is the youngest, the two of them are connected. She understands this immediately, without words, without gestures: she understands this more than she has understood anything in her life.

  She says: You are my brother.

  He nods.

  She says: Can you help me? I am trapped.

  He looks at her. Then he shakes his head slowly.

  What can I do? How can I free myself?

  He lifts a hand and pats his chest, where his heart should be. Then he holds his hand out, and makes a fist. He clenches the fist so hard that his knuckles quiver, and trickles of blood begin to ooze down his palm. Then he relaxes it, reassuming his Indian-style position. His hand smears the canvas on his knee with dark blood. Then he hunches over, and resumes staring into the ground.

  The connection fades. The vision falls away from her. And she is back in the trunk again.

  She realizes she hasn’t breathed in quite a while, and takes a deep gasp that quickly turns to coughs. Apparently this astral-projection thing—or, rather, pandimensional thing—takes some getting used to.

  But though he did not speak, there was no mistaking his message:

  Rage makes your heart free.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  At some point in time she sleeps, because when the car starts she finds herself waking up. Then, to her concern, the car starts moving, cutting what feels like a very sharp U-turn before continuing in a direction that definitely feels upward.

  If she had to guess, it would be upward as in away from Wink, and away from civilization.

  Though it’s dark, Mona’s inner ear tells her the incline keeps getting sharper and sharper. They’re definitely going up somewhere high.

  There’s only one place Mona’s been to in Wink yet that was this high: the road to the mesa, when she first went to Coburn.

  “Shit,” she whispers.

  The ride gets incredibly bumpy, which confirms her theory. She feels around for a weapon, anything, but all she finds are frayed wires from the taillights. How did things get so incredibly fucked so fast?

  They drive for over an hour before the car slows to a stop. She hears footsteps around the trunk.

  Now, Mona decides, would be the time to think up a plan.

  She decides the plan is to jump out and punch someone somewhere soft, and she won’t be picky about who or where. She readies herself.

  There is whispering outside the trunk. Then a soft pop, and light pours in, blinding her. She tries to spring out, but her body is so cramped and weak that she only manages to roll forward, falling onto very hard, hot stones as she blinks and waves her arms about.

  When her sight comes back to her, she sees someone is standing over her: a very pale, very bloody, very defeated-looking Mrs. Benjamin.

  Mona shields her eyes and squints at her. “Hey?” she says.

  Then there is a sharp pain in her shoulder. She barely has time to look and see the hand holding the syringe that’s buried in her flesh before things go—

  “Motherfu—”

  —dark.

  Mona sees light. It is a dull, flat, soulless light. Her eyes don’t work immediately—the general feeling she has is akin to what it was like directly after she had dental surgery in high school. Her body’s so numb it’s hard to tell, but it feels as if she’s sitting upright in a chair with her hands behind her. Then she feels someone massaging her left upper arm.

  “So she has to be alive for this?” says a voice.

  “Well… I can’t say.”

  “Then what can you say?”

  “I can say that there is no added risk to her being alive.”

  “And you feel there is added risk if she isn’t?”

  “I would say so. But I am just a doctor. I do not specialize in these matters. Please remember, this is your idea. But if this should fail, then we will need to attempt… with more material. Provided she’s secured…”

  Someone shakes her hands. There’s the dry gasp of rope, and she feels something around her wrists.

  “She’s secure,” says a man’s voice.

  “Then I do not see a problem.”

  “Go ahead, then.”

  So she’s tied to a chair, and since they didn’t check any other bonds, it must just be her hands. Before she can think more on this, something sharp bites at the inside of her elbow. She sits up sharply and shouts, “Fuck!”

  She blinks, and sees the blurry forms of many people standing around her in a dark room, but her eyes still aren’t working that well.

  “See?” says a voice. “I told you she was strong.”

  “Will it matter if her blood has sedatives in it?”

  “I do not believe so. We only need an amount of her matter to form a connection to one of the alternates. Same to same, if that makes sense.”

  “Like red to red and black to black when you’re jumping a car?” asks a voice. Mona recognizes this one: it’s Mrs. Benjamin, and she sounds like utter shit.

  “Shut up, you. I didn’t bring you here to talk.”

  Mona’s eyes manage to focus further. She’s surrounded by a dozen or so people, men and women: the men wear sweaters with collared shirts and ties, and several of them are either holding pipes or are actively smoking them; the women wear poofy-sleeved dresses and high-heeled shoes, and some of them even have aprons on. Their faces are white and bloodless below the overhead lights.

  “The fuck is this?” Mona asks in a slow, slurred voice. “Fucking… Leave It to Beaver casting call?”

  “What does she mean?” asks one of the men softly. His eyes flutter. Mona grows a little more alert, and realizes all their eyes are fluttering, of course. But there’s something huge and shining behind them, something hard to see…

  “She means nothing,” says a voice beside her. “She’s drugged.”

  Mona successfully makes her head loll to her left. She sees a man
attaching a tube to a catheter in her arm, right on the cubital vein. He’s definitely a doctor: not only is he wearing old-fashioned OR scrubs, but he also has a moustache, small glasses, and a black pipe. Every part of his appearance is meant to suggest I am a doctor! Yet when he looks up at her, just the briefest of glances, she sees his eyes fluttering too.

  “Motherfucker,” says Mona, “I hope you know something about human anatomy.”

  He averts his eyes. Standing behind him is the woman who looked in on her in the trunk of the car, but now she looks queerly androgynous in a powder-blue suit and a white panama hat.

  Something in Mona’s drugged brain sputters. Remove their bodies like clothes…

  “You’re that asshole I shot on the highway, aren’t you,” she slurs.

  The woman in the panama hat looks at her dispassionately, then turns to look down the room. “Is it ready?”

  “Ready enough,” says one man, who looks a lot like a Hardy Boy all grown up. He’s standing in front of that shining thing Mona had trouble making out… but now it’s a lot easier to see.

  It’s the lens. She’s in the lens room at Coburn. She can see their reflections in the lens’s surface, somehow cleaner and purer than they are in reality.

  “Oh, shit,” says Mona. “What the hell are you going to do with th—” Mona’s arm goes cold. She hears fluid falling nearby, almost exactly the sound of someone pissing in a bucket. She lolls her head back, and sees that the tube snaking out of her arm is pouring her blood into what appears to be a gallon-size glass tub.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she says. “You’re taking my blood? What are you going to do with that?”

  The people in the circle do not move or speak. They just stare at her, pale and impassive.

  “If you’re going to bleed me to death, at least do me the favor of shooting me first,” says Mona. “Or, hell, cut my throat or something. There are better ways of killing someone than this.”

  “I don’t think talking with them will work, dear,” says Mrs. Benjamin’s voice. Mona lolls her head the other way, and sees Mrs. Benjamin slumped in a corner, bloody and ragged. “If I were you, I’d stay quiet.”

  “What happened to you?” asks Mona.

  But Mrs. Benjamin looks away, as if to avoid more punishment.

  Mona turns back to the woman in the panama hat. “You’re the bitch who shut me in the trunk, aren’t you? And the same one I shot in the road… I’m willing to bet you’re behind all this stupid shit, ain’t you? What are you trying to do? What’s the point of all this?”

  The woman does not answer. She just watches as more of Mona’s blood pours into the glass tub.

  More and more. A lot of blood. Mona strains at her bonds, but she’s growing weak, and when two men come and put their hands on her shoulders to hold her still she can hardly resist. She starts to grow faint. “Hey, now…” she says. “How much… how much are guys going to… take?”

  “You’re sure this will work?” asks the doctor.

  “Fairly,” says the woman in the panama hat. “Time for them is strictly linear. They don’t see all the alternates. All the way things could have gone, and are still going, moving away from them…”

  “We can’t see that, either, now that we’re here,” says one of the aproned women. “We’re limited. Blinkered. Blind.”

  “We are,” says the woman in the panama hat. She points toward the lens. “That isn’t.”

  “How?”

  “Because that was made by Mother.”

  They all glance sideways at one another. One of the women wrings her hands in her apron. “Perhaps we should ask First,” she says. “He has always been better with the nature of time… he always saw alternates so much clearer than we.”

  “No,” snarls the woman in the panama hat. “I will not have him involved in this. This is not his. This is mine.”

  Mona starts breathing hard. Everything begins to feel very woozy, yet the flow of blood continues. “Jesus,” she murmurs. “Jesus Christ, stop.” She knows a little bit about blood loss, from her cop days—more than 40 percent and it’s a Class IV hemorrhage. How much would that be for her? A liter? More? How much is a liter when you actually look at it, anyway?

  It’s awful. She starts to feel the blood flowing out of her, all the fuel leaving the necessary systems and running out the now-dark rubber tube and into the glass tub. Her head pounds, and she wants to sleep…

  Finally the doctor says, “I think that should be enough.”

  “You’re sure?” asks the woman in the panama hat.

  “Yes. I’ve read the statistics on children of that age—this should be sufficient for submersion. The tricky part will be getting it out before it drowns.”

  “Leave that to me.”

  “You’re sure? I believe that for your purposes, the child would have to be most definitely alive.”

  “I said, leave it to me.”

  Two men reach down and help lift the giant tub of blood and carry it to a small steel table before the lens. If those fuckers drop that thing, thinks Mona, I am going to shit a brick. She wants to say so, but her arms and head and legs are leaden. She cannot even summon the energy to move. Breathing alone is hard.

  “If this fails, we can always recreate the pregnancy,” says the woman in the panama hat.

  “I doubt it,” says the doctor. “I believe the child would die in the transfer. There are a lot of… systems involved in pregnancy.” He says this with the vagueness of someone who has scanned a lot of literature on the subject. “One would die, and then probably the other.”

  The woman in the panama hat pulls a face—Enough of this bullshit. “Fine.”

  Once the tub is before the lens, the men back away. All of them, except for Mona and Mrs. Benjamin, of course, form a circle around the blood and the silvery surface before it.

  “I can still feel Mother on it,” says one softly. “In it. Around it.”

  “I told you so,” says the woman in the panama hat. “She made this for us. She is here. She never left us. She is coming back.”

  “We must concentrate,” says one man.

  “Yes,” says the woman in the panama hat.

  They stare at the lens. Their eyes grow wide. Then a soft sound begins to seep through the room. It is not quite a whine, and not quite a hum, but it is of a frequency so strange, and so intense, that it makes Mona’s eyes water even though she can hardly lift her head. Though they are facing away, she is sure their eyes are fluttering like mad…

  The surface of the lens ripples, as if it’s bending inward.

  They’re singing to it, she thinks. Open sesame…

  The humming intensifies. The tub of her blood appears to grow a little faint—as if it’s about to flicker, like the croquet ball in the film. But where could they be sending it?

  Or, she thinks, are they bringing something here?

  The lens continues to shift. Then it seems to grow transparent, and Mona thinks she can see bright, clean daylight filtering through its top…

  “It’s working,” says one man.

  “I know it’s working,” says the woman in the panama hat, irritated. “Quit talking and concentrate.”

  Mona tries to watch as the lens seems to bring the image into focus, but something bumps into her from behind. “Hold on to these,” whispers Mrs. Benjamin’s voice. Something is shoved in between her buttocks and the chair, something flat and thin. With her tied hands, she feels something metallic and cold…

  Mirrors? Maybe hand mirrors?

  The people around the lens do not notice. Mona can see why—the mirror is changing, changing, until it’s as if there’s half of another room sitting at the end of the lens chamber.

  Mona, whose breath feels very faint right now, squints as she tries to decipher what she’s seeing.

  It’s a nursery. Bright morning sunlight pours through a floor-to-ceiling window. The walls are a faint yellow, the curtains have orange polka-dots, and there is a white crib
just beside the window with a mobile hanging above it. Horses of many shapes and colors dangle from the mobile; it looks quite old, actually, which is strange because the rest of the nursery looks terribly new.

  She’s seen that mobile before. She knows she has.

  Actually, Mona thinks, the rest of the items in the nursery also look familiar. She bought things just like them, once. She’s positive that years ago she bought almost the exact same tree decal to stick in the corner of the room—though she never took it out of the packaging. She never got the chance. Mona’s also sure she picked out a shade of yellow paint so similar to the color of the nursery in the lens that you almost couldn’t tell them apart, though her paint job wound up only half finished. And she ordered that same model of diaper pail on the internet, one of those space-age ones with expensive technology to keep the fecal reek contained (because during her pregnancy Mona became hypersensitive to the scent of shit), though Dale wound up returning it for a refund.

  After everything. After the funeral.

  And now she realizes where she’s seen that mobile. It was hers, once—more than thirty years ago, when she was a baby. One her own mother used for her crib—though now the idea makes her stomach squirm. But just a few years ago she looked at it with Dale, and said—Maybe we don’t need a mobile for our nursery. Maybe we have a perfectly good one right here. And Dale, who wasn’t an idiot, knew what Mona meant, and agreed, and kissed her on the forehead.

  Something begins to contract inside Mona. Are they torturing her? Is this some form of psychological warfare? Why would they ever want to see this place, this place that should have been but never was?

  Then something shifts in the crib ahead of them.

  There is a grunt, tiny and irritated.

  It looks like a lump of fabric is at the bottom of the crib. It shifts again, rising up.

  Mona recognizes the pattern on the fabric. It’s a pair of baby pants she bought when she first became pregnant. She remembers the pattern, because she thought, I wonder how well spit-up will come out of this…

  She is seeing a child lying on its stomach in the crib, scrunching its knees and shoulders together so its tiny butt rises higher. It is waking up, slowly scrunching and unfolding and remembering its muscles, shifting in discomfort…