American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “What kind of story?”

  “A fairy story. A parable.”

  She shrugs.

  “It is about many things. It’s about family. About travel. About home. I think you’ll find it very interesting. It’s one I think about a lot, every day.” He stares at her gimlet-eyed, and for the first time Mona thinks she can see genuine terror in that gaze; it is the sort of look given by people about to march to the scaffold, not old men about to relate fairy stories in broken-down motels.

  “Are you ready?” he asks.

  She shrugs again.

  He clears his throat, takes a deep breath, and begins to speak.

  Once upon a time, in a place far, far away from here, there was a big, leafy tree with many big, strong branches. The tree reached up very high in the sky. In the morning its leaves touched the bottom of the sun, and at night they touched the bottoms of the stars. And in between the two biggest branches at the very, very top of the tree was a big, happy bird making a nest.

  “Oh, how happy I shall be when I have children!” said the bird. She worked on the nest and worked on it, and when she thought it was ready she laid a single egg in its middle. It was a very large egg, and she sat on it, and sat on it, and when it finally hatched…

  Out came her first baby bird.

  But the mother bird was not happy with this baby bird. For though it was large—very, very large, in fact—it was not pretty, or intelligent, or graceful; it was an ugly, ungainly, cruel thing. This was because the mother bird was unused to making children, and she realized she needed practice. This was but the first sketch before the real work could begin.

  “I am sorry,” said the mother bird to the baby bird, “but I cannot keep you.” And one night as the baby bird slept she kicked it out of the nest, and it tumbled down through the branches of the tree, and out of sight.

  Such is nature.

  But the mother bird had learned a great deal in laying this egg, so she tried again. And this time she laid not one egg, but five of them. And these baby birds were far finer and more beautiful than the first one, and each had its own talent.

  The first baby bird to hatch was gifted with perception, and could see things far, far away, even things hidden to most eyes.

  The second baby bird possessed great wisdom, and could spot folly and truth where others could not.

  The third possessed great hope, and all who came near him felt sure their futures were bright and rosy.

  The fourth was shrewd and practical, and could think up cunning plans and clever plots while other birds were dumbfounded.

  And the fifth baby bird was incredibly strong and fearsome, and could overcome any foe or obstacle.

  The mother bird was so encouraged by this that she laid many eggs and hatched many baby birds besides these, but all of them were far younger than the first five, and did not know much of the wider world.

  Yet soon there were so many birds in the tree that it began to bow down with their weight. The bigger the little birds got, the more it bent, and someday—probably soon—the tree would break apart under their weight. The mother bird realized she would have to find somewhere else for them all to live.

  So one day she told her younglings, “Stay here, and wait for me. Each of you should obey the next eldest while I am gone, and you should never harm one another or anything else besides. If you do this, you shall not perish or come to any harm, and you will see me again.” And the baby birds all agreed, and they wept as their mother flew away.

  They waited and waited for her, worrying day and night. Then one evening a terrible storm broke open in the skies, and it seemed as if the tree would break in the wind. But then they saw a speck on the horizon: it was the mother bird, and though she was returning to them she looked weary and tired and faint.

  When she landed the trunk of the tree began to creak, and crack, and groan. They knew it would not be much longer.

  “Climb on my back, all of you,” the mother bird said to them. “Those that can, carry the unhatched eggs with you.”

  “But where are we going?” asked the baby birds.

  “To someplace safe and quiet, far away from here,” she said.

  All of them crowded upon the mother bird’s back, and with one great leap, she took off to the skies. This huge leap was the last straw for the tree: with a great snap! it fell apart, branch by branch.

  All the baby birds watched as their home was destroyed. Yet as the second-eldest bird watched, he noticed something. Was there another bird following them, winging its way through the rain? It could not be, for how could there ever be a bird so large, so ungainly, so ugly, and so cruel-looking?

  Yet then they entered the night sky, and all was dark, and the baby birds were fearful.

  “Will it be long, Mother?” they asked her as she carried them through the darkness.

  “No,” she said. “It will not be long.” But her voice was no more than a whisper, and her breath rattled in her chest with each beat of her wings.

  Soon they saw their new home: it was not a tree, but a huge old mountain. She swooped down to its peak, yet her landing was not graceful: she struck the ground with a terrible force, and collapsed, yet all the baby birds were saved.

  They all climbed off and looked at their mother. She was gray and weak, falling apart just as the tree was. The flight had destroyed her.

  “She will die,” said the first baby bird, who could perceive much.

  “She is dying now,” said the second baby bird, who was wise.

  “It is true,” she whispered to them. “I am dying.”

  All the little birds wailed to hear this.

  And she told them, for the second time: “Stay here, and wait for me. Each of you should obey the next eldest while I am gone, and you should never harm one another or anything else besides. If you do this, you shall not perish or come to any harm, and you will see me again.”

  And then she died: her feathers were blown away by the wind until there was nothing left.

  “She will come back some day,” said the third baby bird, who had hope.

  “Why should you believe such a thing?” said the fourth, who was practical. “She is gone, gone forever.”

  “How dare you say such a thing after we have just lost her?” asked the fifth baby bird angrily. And she, who was hugely strong, picked up the fourth and threatened to throw him down and dash him apart on the mountain.

  “Do not do it!” said the third. “She forbade us from violence! And besides, we must find a home here.” And he led them down the mountain, except the eldest two stayed behind.

  “I wonder,” said the second-eldest bird, “what sort of place these children shall make. I doubt if it will be much good.”

  But the eldest bird was quiet, and looked to the sky. He could perceive many things, and what he saw in those moments no one could guess. Finally he said, “I know what kind of place.”

  “What kind?”

  “It does not matter.”

  “Why not?” asked his brother.

  And the eldest little bird said, “Because she will come back one day, regardless of what they do. And when she does, they will see she

  But there Parson stops. He looks around as if he’s just heard something disconcerting outside and is listening to see if he can hear it again.

  “What is it?” Mona asks.

  Parson opens his mouth, but he never answers. All the features of his face, which is usually so blank and reserved, suddenly snap open: his eyes shoot wide, his lips stretch back into a horrible grimace, and his eyebrows leap inches up his forehead. He shoves himself back in his chair, veins bulging, and a wet gagging sound comes from somewhere in his throat.

  “Mr. Parson?” says Mona.

  He begins shaking, his cheeks quivering and his hands clutched around the armrests of his chair. He sticks his legs out so hard and so straight that he shoves off the desk and knocks himself out of his seat.

  Mona jumps up and begins to rush around the d
esk. “Mr. Parson!”

  Parson lies on his back on the floor behind his desk, knees and wrists strangely bent. He rubs the knuckle of one hand against his breast; the fingers of the other mindlessly search the inside of his thigh, next to his crotch. His back and neck are almost completely bowed up: he is balancing on the very top of his head (his wide, oddly purplish mouth open to the ceiling) and the base of his buttocks. He coughs, and a dark cloud of urine blossoms across his khaki slacks.

  “Oh, Christ,” says Mona. She recognizes this as a seizure, and for a moment she considers sticking a pen in his mouth or something before recalling a snippet of a first aid class that said the whole swallowing-your-tongue thing was horseshit and the best thing to do is make sure people seizing can’t hurt themselves. So she grabs his chair and pushes it away, a well-timed move, as Parson soon starts thrashing from side to side.

  Finally he goes limp and falls to the floor, his eyes shut and his head on one side, facing the wall. Mona can see he’s breathing—just barely—and she stoops and feels his pulse. It’s regular, or at least regular enough.

  Mona gently takes him by the chin and moves his head so she can see his face. He appears uninjured, for the most part. “What the hell was that?” she murmurs. She wonders what to do. There’s no hospital for miles, and she isn’t aware of any doctor in Wink.

  She’s about to check his fingers to see if any are broken when, with absolutely no warning, an immense pain stabs through her shoulder. Then gravity stops working for her, and she starts flying over the desk.

  It’s true that, in moments of extreme stress, things appear to slow down, like putting your finger on a revolving record or running a roll of film at the wrong speed. As Mona flies over Parson’s desk, everything slows down just enough for the cold, quiet cop part of her brain to contemplate what’s happening to her and dissect all her sensations one by one. Because as crazy as this night has been for her, it’s still not the sort of crazy where people suddenly start flying, especially not with such great speed and alarmingly terrible coordination.

  The first thing Mona thinks is: My shoulder sure does hurt. Why is that?

  The second thing she thinks is: Where’s my gun? After a moment of mental searching, she identifies the cold lump against her pelvic bone as the Glock. It doesn’t seem to be budging yet, which is surprising as right now Mona appears to be upside down.

  Which, naturally, makes her think a third thing: How the fuck did I get upside down?

  And as the world tumbles over and over again for Mona, she realizes that, among all the dusky honey colors and darkness of Parson’s office, there is a large splotch of purple fabric with white polka dots at his desk, something Mona definitely didn’t notice before. The pattern is familiar to her, she thinks…

  But she forgets all this when she collides with Parson’s sofa at such a high speed that the frame completely cracks underneath her. Mona’s world fills with dust and unwashed pillow covers and the smell of old coffee. She feels her arms and legs flailing around as she tries to get her bearings, which is extremely difficult as the blood in her head is still swirling around like a whirlpool. When things slowly begin to resolve themselves around her, she blinks hard and starts to make out the form of someone standing over Parson, shoulders heaving with deep, angry breaths…

  “What did you do to him?” demands Mrs. Benjamin. Her fists are clenched and her face is white with rage.

  Mona doesn’t bother to answer. She remembers the Glock was digging into her pelvis, realizes it’s now lodged up under her back, and without a second’s thought she’s already reaching for it. Her fingers find the mouth of the Glock, and she whips the gun around while twirling it up in the air like a baton until its handle neatly falls into her waiting palm. She doesn’t think she could do that trick again even if she practiced.

  Mona brings her other arm up to support the butt of the gun, but this is shockingly hard: not only is her head spinning and her neck aching with whiplash, her left shoulder is in incredible pain, and when she glances to see the cause of this she finds four red welts appearing on her upper arm.

  They sort of look like finger marks, but small ones.

  As Mona draws a bead on Mrs. Benjamin’s face, she tries to ignore the madly amused part of her mind that wonders if this quaint elderly woman just hurled her across the room with the speed and force of a driver being ejected from a rally car mid-lap.

  “Stop right there,” says Mona. Her words are slurred.

  “What have you done to him?” demands Mrs. Benjamin again.

  “Stay where you are, goddamn it,” says Mona.

  Mrs. Benjamin kneels to look at Parson.

  “And don’t you fucking touch him!” Mona yells.

  Mrs. Benjamin reaches out to touch Parson’s face. So Mona decides that now is a diplomatic moment to fire a warning shot.

  Every ounce of her training screams against this. Popping off a round is a last resort, for a pistol firing live ammunition is not exactly a surgical, precise tool: bullets have a nasty tendency to ricochet, burst, or punch through walls. But Mona’s done a lot of things for the first time tonight—commit armed robbery, shoot a guy, etc.—so she decides, shit, why not add to the list.

  She points the Glock at the handheld radio above both Mrs. Benjamin and Parson, takes a breath, and pulls the trigger.

  The gesture achieves its intended effect: the gunfire cracks through the office, and immediately the radio shatters and slams against the office wall. Little pieces of plastic go flying, and Mrs. Benjamin’s hand stops in midair. She slowly turns to look at Mona, face fixed in an expression of utter outrage, as if Mona has just spilled coffee all over her carpet or shown up in casual clothes to a formal-only affair.

  “What do you think you are doing?” she demands in a quiet voice.

  “Stand up,” Mona says. She puts the sights back on Mrs. Benjamin. “And get away from him.”

  Mrs. Benjamin glowers at her. The radio is still trying to work: one speaker dangles from it by a rainbow of wires, and the Sons of the Pioneers are just finishing up their song in a sputtering, stuttering chorus.

  “Lady,” says Mona, “I don’t miss twice.”

  Mrs. Benjamin slowly stands and steps away from Parson. She glares at Mona before asking, “What are you doing here?”

  “I’d ask the same of you.”

  She sniffs. “I merely came to discuss a personal matter.”

  “So did I.”

  “And your discussion resulted in this?” scoffs Mrs. Benjamin. “I doubt it.”

  “I don’t have the damnedest idea what did that,” says Mona.

  Mrs. Benjamin appears a little troubled to hear this. “What did he say to you?”

  “If you think I’m going to tell you, you’re out of your damn mind.”

  “Why?” asks Mrs. Benjamin, affronted.

  “Well, for starters, you just”—she pauses, not wanting to give voice to the ridiculous idea that she was thrown—“attacked me.”

  “I did not attack you, my dear,” says Mrs. Benjamin, who appears very calm for someone who has a gun in their face. “I merely removed your person to a safer distance.”

  “Yeah,” says Mona. “At about forty miles an hour. How the hell you did that, I don’t know. But worse…”

  “Worse what?”

  “You did something to me,” Mona says quietly. “You did something to my head.”

  “Your head?” Then Mrs. Benjamin appears to realize, and she laughs, delighted. “Oh, do you mean the mirrors, my dear?”

  “Yeah,” says Mona. “And I don’t find it that goddamn funny.”

  “But the mirrors aren’t anything!” she says. “Or at least those ones aren’t. Are you really so troubled by them? The mirrors were, well… just sort of a test. And you passed. Doesn’t that make you feel good, my dear?”

  “It does not,” says Mona. “That did something to me. I’m sure of it. I keep… I keep seeing things I don’t want to see.”

 
; The humor drains out of Mrs. Benjamin’s face. The yellow light of Parson’s lamp catches every wrinkle in her face, and her eyes appear to glint from very far back in her head. Mona wonders, not for the first time, exactly how old this woman is supposed to be. “Then you are seeing things that are there,” she says. “Really there. And the mirrors couldn’t make you do that, Mona Bright. Whatever change allows you to see what you’re seeing happened long, long ago, I’d imagine.”

  Mona lowers the gun, but only slightly. “What the fuck are you people,” she asks softly.

  Mrs. Benjamin smiles and laughs a little. Her mouth is filled with mounds of pink gums topped with tiny dots of dirty brown teeth. She stops laughing, but does not stop smiling. “What happened to him?” she asks. “Tell me. Now.”

  “We were just talking.”

  “Talking about what?”

  “Crazy shit. I don’t know. Some story.”

  “A story? His or yours?”

  “His. He told me some story about a bird carrying its babies.”

  “What?” says Mrs. Benjamin. “Babies?” Mona is a little pleased to see she looks just about as confused as Mona felt.

  “He told me a story about a bird carrying its babies to safety,” she says, feeling ridiculous. “Then he just… wigged out.”

  Mrs. Benjamin turns this over. She gasps a little, and says, “Oh.” Then she sighs sadly, looks at Parson on the ground, and shakes her head. “Oh. Oh, I see now. You wanted to tell her,” she says to him. “But that isn’t meant to be told, old thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There are some things we are not allowed to discuss, dear,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

  “He told me that. Like, a million goddamn times.”

  “Well. He tried to bend the rules. But those rules aren’t the kind you bend. So he paid the price.”

  Now Mona lowers the gun all the way. “That happened to him… because of the story he told me?” It seems inconceivable—it’s like she’s saying he did the mental equivalent of crossing an invisible electric fence.

  Mrs. Benjamin stoops down, picks up Parson in both arms, and begins walking toward the couch. “Get off,” she snaps at Mona, and Mona is already moving before she realizes the weight of a grown man doesn’t appear to strain Mrs. Benjamin at all.