American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  He is too stunned to think. Then a thought rises through all his numb terror: What the fuck have I gotten myself into?

  He is still in a stupor when the girl leads him out of the tunnel. She turns and begins speaking to him, but he is too horrified to hear. Then he realizes she has stopped speaking, and is staring at him curiously.

  There is an odd sound coming from his pocket: his cell phone is playing its blues-riff ringtone.

  “Your body is beeping,” says the girl.

  “Oh,” says Bolan. “Shit. Sorry.” He answers it, and, in the manner of cell phone users everywhere, steps a few paces away to take the call. But the girl in the panama hat apparently has no knowledge of phone etiquette, for she follows him step for step, staring at him curiously.

  Bolan listens to the call. He says “okay,” three times, with various inflections: there’s “Okay?” and “Okay…” and, finally, a soft, grim “Okay.”

  He hangs up. He turns to the girl, wondering how to put this.

  “Things at the canyon,” he says slowly, “have not gone well. That new girl was there. The girl in the red car? The one you had us investigating?”

  She gives no sign of understanding: she just waits for more.

  “And I guess she must be a fucking Green Beret or something because, uh… it seems she killed one of my men, and severely wounded another.” Ordinarily Bolan would be furious about this—because what the fuck was this girl doing there, and why weren’t they warned about this, and how did we not know she could outclass us that way, etc., etc.—but after what he saw in that cave, Bolan is going to try his goddamnedest to stay on the good side of the girl in the panama hat.

  She looks away, thinking. She turns 180 degrees and stares in the exact opposite direction as she considers it.

  She turns back around. “And the totem?”

  “The guy who got killed was the one carrying it.”

  “And your men did not recover it?”

  “He made it sound like he would have gotten shot dead if he tried. This lady is… serious business, it seems.”

  The girl in the panama hat looks away once more, and again turns 180 degrees as she thinks.

  Bolan feels something drip down the side of his face, and realizes he is sweating. No one has made him sweat for over fifteen years, but here he is, being grilled by a teenage girl dressed like a fucking zoot-suiter on vacation in the Caribbean.

  Finally she turns back around. If this information is troubling to her, she does not show it. “You brought a car,” she says.

  “Huh? Yeah. Yeah, I brought a car.”

  She nods. “I am going to need a ride.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  The canyon is narrow but long, a winding, intestinal gouge at the foot of the mesa. Mona and Gracie stump forward for what feels like hours, though Mona cannot tell if they are approaching anything, or even how far they’ve come. Whenever she asks Gracie if they’re going the right way, she always says, with infuriating serenity, “Oh, yes. This is the way.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  “There was no alternate path, was there?” says Gracie. “Did the canyon split or fork? Did you see some other way we could have gone?”

  Mona cannot help but feel that Gracie is navigating, somehow: though the canyon might appear to be one solid route, Mona suspects Gracie is carefully making choices, picking apart this tangle of a passageway by some invisible method. Though Gracie might not be one of them, she knows more than she’s letting on.

  This would all be a lot more tolerable if it weren’t so awkward. It’s like they’re trapped in an elevator together, forced to make conversation, yet how could they possibly bridge the gap between them, with one a recent killer and the other involved in some repulsive relationship with whatever is waiting at the end of this canyon?

  Eventually Mona cannot bear the silence, and tackles the subject head-on: “So how did it happen?”

  “How did what happen?” says Gracie.

  “You and”—she nods forward—“him.”

  “Mr. First,” corrects Gracie.

  “Yeah. Him.”

  “I don’t know. It just… did. He’s… always been there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he’s always been in my life. Ever since I was born.”

  “Since you were born? Like, since you were an infant?”

  “Yes. He didn’t make himself apparent, not then. It was like having a distant uncle send you gifts, or arranging things at school so you didn’t have any problems. Then one day… he approached me directly.”

  Mona does not speak.

  “You think that’s disturbing, don’t you?” asks Gracie.

  “I don’t think disturbing comes anywhere fucking close.”

  “You don’t understand. It’s different here.”

  “Everything’s different here.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “But come on. You can’t be totally used to it. I mean… it never creeps you out? Not ever?”

  Gracie sighs. “Well. Sometimes. I mean… you can’t just… never think about it.”

  She is silent for several steps. Mona realizes she has just made Gracie admit something she probably hasn’t spoken about to anyone, ever.

  “You do what you have to,” says Gracie. There’s a tremor in her voice. “Things aren’t perfect, but they are what they are. My parents live on the very edge of Wink. Do you know what that means? What you’re exposed to there?”

  Mona does not, but she has a guess.

  “We were never safe. But when he came to them, they realized…” She shakes her head. “You have to make arrangements. Everyone has their arrangement. I could have it a lot worse. He takes care of me.”

  Mona nods, but she’s heard this speech before. She’s actually heard it a lot, frequently in the wee hours of the morn in the emergency room of some hospital, with machines bleeping and fluorescent lights humming on and on while the skinny young girl seated on the exam table with two blooming black eyes and a busted lip says no, no, I don’t want to press charges, no ma’am, I know it ain’t perfect but I got what I got.

  “He asked about you, you know,” says Gracie. “When you first came. Everyone did. Are you really here about your mother?”

  “Yeah. It’s not a cover story. I’m not from the CIA or anything. I’m just here to find stuff out about my mom.”

  “It’s just so strange… I can’t imagine how something so normal would bring you here.”

  “Well,” says Mona slowly, “I’m not sure how normal it is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think she was mixed up with all this, somehow. I don’t know why, or how, but… it’s just a feeling I get.” She’s unable to keep the disappointment out of her voice.

  “That’s not what you wanted to find, is it?” asks Gracie.

  “Fuck no, it isn’t. I thought I was just going to inherit a nice house and a little proof that my mom wasn’t so crazy after all. Just to get a little peace of mind, you know? To know that things could have been normal, or were once… that meant a lot when I came here. I just wanted things to be quiet for a minute or two.”

  “Quiet? What do you mean?”

  Mona sighs and rubs her eyes. She feels terribly tired. “Listen—you want some advice, Gracie?”

  She shrugs.

  Mona says, “Don’t get old.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean don’t get old. The older you get, the more voices you get in the back of your head.” She taps her temple as if to rattle the squatters inhabiting it. “More invisible people telling you what you can and can’t do. And I guess I thought coming here would make that go away. Because I figured, if my mom might have been normal, then maybe I could be normal too. And maybe I…” She trails off.

  “Maybe you what?” asks Gracie.

  “Maybe I could have been a normal mom,” says Mona quietly. “The way my momma wasn’t for me.”

&
nbsp; “What do you mean, could have been?” asks Gracie.

  Mona doesn’t answer. There is a long silence.

  “Oh,” says Gracie.

  They walk on for a moment without speaking.

  Gracie says, “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t need to be sorry. God knows you’ve got it rough as it is.” There’s a pause, and she asks: “You can’t get out, can you?”

  “No,” says Gracie. “No one ever comes to Wink, but no one ever leaves it, either. It’s protected, he says.”

  “It is. I’ve seen the”—Mona wonders what she should call it—“fence.”

  “Yes. We’re here. So we have to make do.”

  “You must wonder what it’s like outside it all the time.”

  “Outside it?”

  “Outside the fence. In the rest of the world. The real world, I guess.”

  Gracie frowns, confused. “I don’t understand.”

  “Like… outside of Wink. Where I’m from.”

  Gracie’s pace slows. Then she stops, staring at her feet. “I guess I never thought about it,” she says in a small voice.

  There is something frail and gleaming in her eyes, like her tear glands are just starting up. It takes Mona a while to understand. “You did know that there was something outside of Wink, right?” she asks.

  Gracie bows her head. Then, without looking at Mona, she resumes walking ahead.

  “You didn’t know?” asks Mona. She runs a bit to catch up with her. “You really didn’t know?”

  “I knew,” she says defensively.

  “Then why did you seem surprised?”

  “Because… I guess I never thought about what it was like.”

  “Are you serious?” says Mona, incredulous. “You never thought about it?”

  “Stop.”

  “Does anyone actually know? Or do you all think that Wink is just… it?”

  “Stop it. All right? Just stop.”

  “Christ!” Mona cannot believe it at first. But then she realizes she can, quite easily: the nature of geography, of direction in this place is so mixed up and bizarre that those who have lived in it for too long—or, in the case of Gracie, grown up in it—probably cannot conceive of the world as being another way. Mona’s seen their newspaper, which doesn’t report beyond the town’s boundaries, and their television stations show nothing but sitcom reruns from no later than 1985. These people have no idea what solid ground is like, what the twenty-first century is like, even. In a way, it is a perversion of the insularity of any small town: how many farm boys has Mona met who hadn’t ever spent a night away from home? Could they have conceived of metropolises and highways any better than poor Gracie could understand what the world is really like outside this tiny, warped bubble?

  “Do you want to know about it?” asks Mona.

  “No,” says Gracie angrily.

  Mona is surprised into silence. After a while she hazards, “Why?”

  “Because I’m not going to see it!” says Gracie. “I’m not going to get out of here, Mona! For me, for us in this town, this is it! This is what it is and it’s not going to change. Nothing in Wink really changes, not ever.”

  “It’s changing now,” says Mona. “It’s changed since I got here.”

  “Well, it won’t stick. You’ll leave too. And then it’ll be back to how it was.”

  Mona wonders how true this is.

  “I’m sorry, Gracie,” she says.

  “Forget it,” says Gracie. “Just forget it. It’s better that way.” She sniffs and wipes her eyes.

  Another twist of the canyon. Another precipitous decline. More gray walls and dusty gravel.

  “What’s he going to do to me?” asks Mona.

  “I don’t know,” says Gracie. “Maybe nothing.”

  “And you can’t tell me what he’s going to look like.”

  “No. I can’t really… translate what he looks like, what he can look like.”

  “Is he big?”

  “Big, or small. I know he could go into Wink without anyone ever knowing about it, if he was paying enough attention.”

  “So what can’t he do?”

  “I’m not sure,” says Gracie. She thinks about it, and says, “Well, kill, for one.”

  “What?”

  “He can’t kill. He told me so. None of them can. They can’t kill their own kind, at least. I don’t think they’re allowed to die at all, but he never came out and said so. The way he talked about it, though—it’s like they’re forbidden from it. From dying, I mean.”

  “But Parson just died. We just saw it.”

  Gracie winces awkwardly.

  “What is it?” says Mona.

  “I can’t… I don’t think I can tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  Gracie scrunches up her mouth. “Well. I guess you’re not really from here. So it might not matter. But they’re not… people.”

  “Well, shit, I know that.”

  “No, I mean—they wear people like you and I do clothing. But if the person they’re in dies, then they can just… change them. Change bodies.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. But though I don’t think it’s ever happened, that’s how he told me it works.”

  Mona’s mind begins to race. She can hardly feel herself walking. They can change bodies? Is that what Gracie means? At first the idea seems ludicrous, before Mona remembers how they came to this place originally—the sky opened up, and they were touched with lightning…

  And if one of them dies, would there be lightning again?

  She remembers the way the sky lit bright right after Parson died, and the roll of thunder… and she remembers the way the same thing happened when the Native American in the white hat blew his brains out.

  Is that what he was doing? Just… changing clothes, taking off a ruined shirt and putting on a new one? It would almost make sense, wouldn’t it? After all, the body he was in was pretty fucked up. But which bodies do they go to?

  Mary Aldren nearly has a heart attack when she hears the thunder. It’s the loudest thing she’s ever heard in her life, abominably, unbelievably loud. It’s so loud it knocks her over where she’s standing in her living room. She remembers what it was like thirty years ago, and she thinks—It’s more of them, isn’t it? More of them have come here.

  But a second strike never comes. It’s just the one.

  She stands up. Maybe it was just lightning—real lightning. How odd it is that that’s the good alternative.

  Then she smells the smoke, and sees the wisps of white curling out of the hallway.

  Her stomach drops. “No, no!” she cries. “Michael? Michael!” She stands and plunges forward into the smoke.

  Michael Aldren has not been himself since he fell out of a tree seven months ago. If he had fallen just a little differently—maybe held on to the branch that loosed him just a millisecond more or less—then he would have simply broken an ankle, or an arm, or a collarbone. But Michael fell and hit the very crown of his head, and though he stayed conscious for the next two days, the swelling in his brain eventually became too much, and he lapsed into a coma, which the doctors in Wink—although quite friendly and wholesome—just aren’t able to treat.

  And God knows Mary isn’t willing to approach one of Them about helping her. Their arrangements often come with so many hidden strings.

  But it would be so abominably cruel, wouldn’t it, she thinks as she coughs and forges forward into the smoking room, for her little boy to have hung on for so long, with no sign of progress, and then to have it all end in a bolt of lightning? Could the world really be this unfeeling?

  Yet as the smoke begins to clear, she sees an amazing sight.

  Michael’s room is completely black—the walls, floor, desk, and picture frames have all been blacked out as if someone has come through and painstakingly given everything three or four layers of black spray paint. Yet Michael is completely untouched: his blanket, mattress, and pillows are
fried beyond recognition, but her little boy, still dressed in his rabbit pajamas, is lying there safe and sound.

  And more: he is awake, and sitting up.

  “Oh my God,” mutters Mary. “My God—Michael?”

  Michael is looking down at himself, probing his chest. He even unbuttons his shirt, and inspects the skin below it, as if surprised to find it’s whole. Then he looks up and stares around himself, and in a voice totally unlike the one he had before—like he’s trying to speak in a baritone register—he slowly says, “Well. This is very interesting.”

  She rushes to him and takes him by the shoulders. “You’re all right? You’re awake? You’re awake!” She feels his limbs and torso, checking for injuries, which he seems to find quite startling. “You’re here! You’ve come back to me! My God, it’s a miracle!”

  Michael clears his throat, and moves to push a pair of glasses up his nose, but the glasses are not there. “Madam,” he says, “I believe there has been a misunderstanding.” He gently takes her hands and pushes them away.

  “What is it?” she asks. “M-Michael?”

  “Not… quite,” he says. He looks at his hands, then looks around himself. He sighs. When he looks back at her, there is a fluttering at the edges and backs of his eyes. “It is possible I have landed myself in a very awkward situation,” he says to her.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Mona’s feet are beginning to hurt when the canyon curls around and she sees something different from more rock walls: the ground slopes down and widens a little until it disappears into a thick, cotton-white mist that is utterly impenetrable to the eye. It is completely unnatural, of course: this place doesn’t see enough moisture to make the ground damp, let alone produce a San Francisco–style fog. Its surface seems to catch the moonlight and glow, just slightly.

  Mona has never seen anything like it. She remembers what Parson said: He is more like Mother than I am. Than any of us is. Her heart begins beating a little faster. She finds it hard to believe that she’s here, that she’s doing this.