American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  A bat flits into the stream of headlights, wings gleaming, then darts away.

  “There must be some way around them,” says Parson. “I do not know. I was not close with Her. She was very hard to relate to. She had many expectations. She was never very… content. I often wonder if She simply had us out of boredom.” He pauses, aware he’s said a bit too much on an awkward subject. “Anyway, that may be why I know nothing of your own mother. If she was somehow… manipulated into bringing us here.”

  In the sky west of town there is a flash of light, followed by a deep growl of thunder. Parson turns and peers at it, looking through the fluttering clouds like a soothsayer parsing tea leaves.

  “Then who was close with Her?” asks Mona. “They’d know, wouldn’t they?”

  Parson is silent.

  “Is there anyone?” she asks.

  Parson sniffs, rubs his nose with his knuckle.

  “There is,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “He is”—Parson looks out the window for inspiration—“best left alone.”

  “Best left alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Parson… shit, Mr. Parson, are you not aware that this is a goddamn fucking emergency? I honestly don’t care what’s best done! Tell me who it is, damn it!”

  He frowns into his lap. Unbuttons a shirt button, re-buttons it. “He is different,” he says.

  “Oh, I give a shit.”

  “You would care. He is very different.”

  “Different how?”

  Silence. Then: “Very, very different.”

  Mona drives on for a bit, not speaking. Finally she says, “He’s not… like you, is he?”

  “Like me?”

  “A person. Or… fuck, I don’t know. Inside of a person.”

  “No,” says Parson solemnly. “You are right. He is not. He is more like Mother than I am. Than any of us is.” He sighs and rubs his brow. Mona can’t help but notice how many human mannerisms have seeped into his behavior. “In my family, there were five who were eldest, as I once told you. I am the second eldest. My exact name… well. Many of our names are indecipherable to you. They cannot be translated to anything you would find logical. His name, however, is different. His is simple. Its meaning remains the same no matter how it is translated.”

  “What is his name?” asks Mona.

  Parson points out the window, directing her down a dirt road that heads west out of Wink, straggling through pines and under the shadowy thunderhead of the mesa, until it finally crosses a small, sloping canyon that, Mona eventually notices, has fewer and fewer trees the closer it gets to the mesa.

  “His name,” says Parson, “means ‘first.’ ”

  They park the truck in the trees below the canyon. Parson wants to start ahead immediately, but Mona holds up a hand and has him wait while she surveys the roads behind them. She sees no headlights, and driving without headlights in this country would be suicidal, so she’s reasonably sure they weren’t followed. But who knows what else is in these hills, she thinks.

  Mona stops at the edge of the road before the trees begin. Parson walks on a bit before looking back. Again he is reduced to a shadow, indistinct among the pines.

  “Are you coming?”

  “They said not to go into the woods. And I’m more inclined to listen to them after the crazy shit you just told me.”

  “They did say so,” he says. “But remember that I am one of this they. Now I say otherwise. Come.”

  He walks on. “Shit,” Mona says. She grabs the rifle, slings it over her back, and stuffs the pistol into the back of her shorts. Then she hotfoots it to catch up to him, and has to listen for his limping step (for he is still unsteady on his feet) to find him.

  The trees overhead shred the moonlight into pieces and cast them at their feet. Mona has been here so long she almost doesn’t notice its color—for the moonlight, as always, is pink. The mesa blooms just above them like a vast fungus, lit salmon-pink by the moon; though just above it, in a spindly stretch of clouds, blue lightning plays like otters in a stream. She cannot stop looking around, trying to spy any movement or watching eyes. Will Parson’s kin look as he and Mrs. Benjamin looked on the other side? Will she even be able to see them at all? Will they be invisible?

  “You appear worried,” says Parson.

  “How can you tell?” asks Mona, because under the trees it’s pitch-black.

  He does not answer.

  “Mr. Parson… can you see in the dark?” asks Mona.

  “Light,” says Parson, “is mere radiation. There are other ways of seeing.”

  She chooses not to follow this line of discussion. “Should I be worried?”

  “I am not sure. Were you an ordinary citizen of Wink—a person born and bred here, I mean—I would say yes, definitely. There is a reason they do not go into the wilderness. It is not theirs.”

  “Is it yours?”

  “Not precisely,” says Parson. “Let us say it is a home to the less adaptable members of my family.”

  “And you don’t think I should be worried about that?” asks Mona. “Because I’m already kind of worried about that.”

  “Hm,” he says, thinking. “No. You are different. I have always believed so. But I am not sure how yet.”

  “That’s not comforting at all,” says Mona.

  “I did not really intend it to be,” he says. Then he stops, and listens.

  Mona immediately swivels and brings the rifle to her shoulder. She eyes the trees, looking for a swell of darkness among the tattered moonlight, or the gleam of a rifle barrel parting the branches.

  “There is no one there,” says Parson. “We are just on the… verge of something. Come along.” He stumps ahead, parts a tangle of pine branches with the blade of his hand, and walks into a copse of trees. Mona follows, saying, “If you could let me know why you’re stopping ahead of time, it might keep me from popping off a rou—”

  As the branches release her she immediately notices the air is different. It’s electrical, with that familiar scent of too many copiers running at once. But it is also terribly cold and clammy, and it stinks of stagnation and rot.

  As she puzzles over this, she realizes she is now in a place very different from where she was before.

  The starlight has turned a dull, jaundiced amber that seeps through the cloudy sky. They stand in an immense, muddy trench, with twisted, cancerous-looking trees clutching the embankment. Sickly white fruit the size of cantaloupes hangs from their branches. The fruit is faintly luminous, like a predator from the ocean deeps.

  “Do I want to ask where we are?” she says.

  Parson shrugs. “Somewhere else.” He continues strolling along as if this otherworldly place is no stranger than your average municipal park.

  She gazes up. The sky is thick with mist, but she thinks she can see pink stars peeping through in places.

  She runs to catch up. “Are we… on the other side? Because if so, I notice I’m not… well. Almost dying, or whatever it was.”

  “Correct. We are not quite there, but we are not quite here,” says Parson. “Some places are in-between places. Many of them, in fact. Wink itself is riddled with places inside of places inside of places. It extends to many different places, like a continent submerged under many different seas.”

  “Then time isn’t the only thing broken here,” says Mona. “Or I guess I should say bruised.”

  “Possibly. Wink is filled with weak spots, where one world—one plane of reality—becomes indistinguishable from another. The town proper is mostly safe. It is—or was—maintained by Weringer, and his followers.”

  Much as a neighborhood association, thinks Mona, keeps the medians of its roads carefully weeded.

  They continue into the muddy trench. In the shallower parts she can see over the lip, and she thinks she can glimpse buildings or structures far out in the mist. Is it their city? Do such things have cities? Or is it something they
conquered, and took?

  “How far does this place go?” she asks.

  “It goes,” says Parson, “until it doesn’t.”

  She stops. There are markings on the ground, odd, swoopy ones that are strangely tentacular; something has raked the mud here, leaving small, circular patterns in the bottom of the trench, like those of coleoidal suckers…

  “Ah, shit. Does something live here?”

  “Oh, yes,” says Parson. “Or it did, at least.”

  Again, she brings the rifle up into her hands.

  “That won’t be necessary,” says Parson.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it is gone, like I said.”

  “How do you know?”

  He points to one side of the trench. There is another set of tracks there: these resemble small, dainty shoes with little heels.

  “Because Mrs. Benjamin came here to check,” says Parson. “She came to many of the hidden places around Wink. The residents are gone, all gone. To where, we don’t know. Just not here.” Then he points ahead. “Look.”

  She sees nothing. “What?”

  “Look,” he says again.

  She looks again. Suddenly there is a line of pinyon pines across the trench. She barely has time to think What are they doing there? when things click—just as they did at Coburn with the lens—and she is standing in the pine forest below the mesa again.

  “See?” says Parson. “Right as rain.”

  “That is not,” says Mona, “my definition of right as rain.”

  “Nearly there.” Parson waves her forward once more.

  They resume the hike up the slopes to the canyon. Mona notices there are no buzzes and chitterings here, as there were in the town. The woods are totally silent.

  “How many of them were out in the woods before?” asks Mona.

  Again, Parson shrugs. “My family is like the stars.”

  Mona suppresses a shiver. “And why did you stick them out here?”

  “I did not. That was not my choice. They were too young to reside within one of… well, you, I suppose. They were not wise, not mature. They could not control themselves. So they came to this place much as they are on the other side, only with a slight physical form. But when Weringer and his followers decided to maintain the town, and live as people, and have their fun, they could not allow the young ones to live among them openly. They did not fit in with their image of the town. So they were made to retire to the mountains and the woods and the valleys to conceal themselves by their own machinations.”

  “That almost sounds”—Mona hops over a gulch—“like they got fucked.”

  “It sounds that way because they did. We do so many silly things,” he says with a sigh, “in service of our vanity. It was then that I ended my support of Weringer, and much of Wink. I am opposed to my brethren. And they have ostracized me. I am alone. Mostly,” he adds.

  “Mostly?”

  “There is Mrs. Benjamin. She vaguely grants her support to them, yet she consults with me frequently, and they do not object—Mrs. Benjamin is much feared within my kin. Mother made her to be a… a weapon, I suppose. And Mother’s designs rarely fail.” Mona, who remembers the sight of that huge, hulking, many-legged thing on the other side all too well, can completely understand that. “But I am visited also by my brother, whom you are about to meet.” He pauses and purses his lips, suddenly awkward. “That is a… secret. No one knows about that. Not even Mrs. Benjamin. Please do not spread it around.”

  “I’ll make sure not to,” says Mona, who cannot imagine when she’d ever have the opportunity.

  “He comes to me, and we talk, and play games.”

  “That’s charming.”

  He ignores her. “We are the two eldest. We have always been alone, a little. Now more so than most. But just recently he stopped coming. Right after your arrival, in fact. He walled himself off in his home, and he does not come out, nor can anyone get in. I understand it is a cause of much concern.”

  “Why the change?”

  “Well… I think he is quite happy where he is. He does not want things to change. But things are changing. I think he is preparing for something. He will not share this information with me, but it is… how shall I put this… he has the air of a man filling out his will.”

  “Ouch,” says Mona. “Why doesn’t he just stay in hiding?”

  “Well,” says Parson, and he stops in his tracks, “I do not believe he is hiding. I believe he is waiting. For you.”

  Mona looks up. They are at the mouth of a small, treeless canyon. Mona realizes how far they’ve come, for the western side of the mesa surges up just ahead of them. Somewhere in the rock, she thinks, is that mirror, the little glinting hole in everything that started all of this…

  Mona stares down the canyon. It is gray and barren and winding. The wind makes a soft moan as it drags its invisible bulk over the canyon’s lips. She cannot imagine walking down it. She has never seen anything lonelier in her life.

  “I have told you,” Parson says softly, “that my brother is… not like me.”

  “Yeah. I got that.”

  “But you must know that… I do not know how he will choose to present himself. He has never been… orthodox.”

  “That’s if we get in to see him,” says Mona, who now finds herself extremely reluctant to proceed down the canyon.

  “Oh, that I feel we can do for certain,” says Parson. “Mostly because he told me we would.”

  “He what?”

  “He told me I would come here,” says Parson. “And he told me I would bring a guest. This was just before your arrival. I had no idea what he meant at the time.”

  “Well how the fuck did he know that?”

  “Did I not tell you that time does not work right in Wink?”

  “You kind of glossed over it, yeah.”

  “For many of my kind, who intrude into many other dimensions besides this one, time performs differently. But for him, it performs very, very differently. He has… perception. That is the best way to put it. In his hands, time is but a little dog, eager to perform tricks. He does not see time as linear—he sees many branches of it, the things that have happened, the ones that will happen, and even the things that might have or could have happened, if things had gone otherwise.”

  Mona rotates the rifle so it’s back in her hands. “You can understand,” she says as she tugs the strap, “that that makes me really fucking nervous.”

  “I suppose I do,” he says, indifferent.

  “Because I don’t like the idea of someone knowing what I’m going to do before I do. It would be really easy for them to hurt me, or you.”

  Parson stops walking. He looks down the canyon, and cocks his head.

  Mona looks as well. There is someone standing there, waiting for them, revealed by the bursts of lightning just above them.

  In an instant the rifle is at her shoulder. But in almost the same space of time, she realizes it’s unnecessary. Because this person, who is so skinny-shouldered and frail and anxious, is someone Mona’s pretty sure she’s met before in this town.

  “I do not think,” says Parson, “that that is the case.”

  Gracie nervously raises one hand, waves to them, and says, “Hey.”

  There are few situations more awkward than when one person has unnecessarily just pulled a gun on another. Mona’s rifle, which was originally pointed directly at Gracie’s face, now gently wanders south to circle her midsection as Mona considers exactly what the hell to do.

  Gracie coughs politely. Mona taps the stock with her fingers, wondering what to say.

  She finally decides on, “You’re the… girl from the diner, right? Gracie?”

  Gracie nods.

  “Okay,” says Mona. “Well. What the hell are you doing out here, girl?”

  “Um. I was waiting,” says Gracie. “On you. I’m… supposed to take you inside.” She points back down the canyon.

  Mona does not lower the gun. She peers at Gr
acie’s eyes, looking for that flutter…

  Parson clears his throat. “There is no worry about that. She is quite as human and normal as… you.” Though there is something in his tone Mona doesn’t like.

  Gracie nods, concerned.

  Mona does not fully lower the rifle. “Okay, then, again—what the hell is she doing out here?”

  “She attends to my brother,” says Parson.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m his…” She trails off.

  “What? Like, his secretary or handler or something?”

  Gracie blushes magnificently.

  “What did I say?” asks Mona.

  Gracie opens her mouth to speak, rethinks, closes it, then opens it again before wincing and shutting it again. “It’s personal.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I told you my brother was unorthodox,” says Parson, “and this is true. His interests are eccentric even for us. And… one of those interests is a common pursuit of yours. Not common to you, personally, I mean—common to your kind.”

  Gracie is now a bright pink. Mona begins to feel very uncomfortable with the direction this is taking. She lowers the rifle. “Which is what?”

  Parson licks his lips, and cringes as he says, “Romance.”

  “Romance? You mean… wait.” Mona almost drops the gun. She looks back and forth between Gracie, who is nervously rubbing her elbow and staring at the ground, and Parson, who appears to now be grimly waiting out this subject.

  “Are you fucking serious?” asks Mona. “She’s his girlfriend?”

  Parson reacts as if he has never heard the term. He thinks, bug-eyed, and says, “I… suppose that would be a fair approximation.”

  Mona incredulously looks to Gracie for corroboration. The young girl says, “It’s… complicated.”

  “I’ll fucking bet! He doesn’t even look like a, a… person. Right?”

  “He looks like many things,” says Gracie. “If he wants to. And he keeps me safe.” Again: “It’s complicated. We have arrangements here.”

  “Everyone does,” says Parson. “My kin have arrangements with the natives of Wink, just as my kin in the town have arrangements with those in the wilderness. It is quite complicated, being civilized. There are so many rules and restrictions involved in living”—he pauses condescendingly—“a good life.”