American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  No, she wants to say. Don’t show me this. Don’t you show me this.

  The child in the crib moans. It lifts its head. There is the gleam of a tiny blue eye peering through the crib bars, and a mass of dark, moist hair.

  No, no, no.

  The child blinks in the sunlight, and wrinkles its nose.

  “Is that it?” asks one of the men in sweaters.

  “Yes,” snaps the woman in the panama hat. “Keep concentrating!”

  A tiny, frowning mouth opens, and allows out a reedy mewl.

  Then the child flickers, like an error in a filmstrip—the child is there, then it isn’t.

  A voice sings from somewhere: “Coming! Coming!” But it didn’t come from inside the lens chamber. It was in the room in the lens, the nursery on the other side…

  And Mona knows that voice. She’s heard it before.

  What is this? What is happening?

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

  The humming in the room grows louder. The child in the crib briefly grows faint, and when it does…

  Did Mona just see movement in the glass tub? Did the lake of blood there twitch?

  “Keep going,” whispers the woman in the panama hat. She speaks in the voice of someone on the verge of orgasm.

  The child in the crib flickers once more. It begins bawling loudly.

  “Coming! Almost done, little one! Just one more second!” shouts the voice in the lens.

  The child slips out of the world in the lens… and very briefly, Mona sees a tiny hand in the glass tub, floating up out of the sea of blood to paw at the walls…

  Oh, my God, no.

  “Almost there,” whispers the woman in the panama hat.

  The child in the lens, now crying hysterically, blinks out of existence once more…

  Mona remembers what Mr. First said: It could change the very nature of reality, like the finger of a god.

  And Coburn’s words: And in that moment, the thing it is examining is shoved—partially—into all those various other realities as well. So it could exist in a variety of states, places, et cetera. Even times, possibly, though of course that is quite hard to quantify…

  No, no, thinks Mona.

  The surface of the blood begins sloshing back and forth. Something in the tub is struggling, flailing…

  It’s like lubricant, thinks Mona. Easing transition from one place to another…

  Then someone steps into view in the lens. Though Mona is barely conscious, her eyes spring wide at the sight of this new person. At first she thinks it is her mother, for it looks so much like Laura Alvarez… even though this person is shorter and her skin is so much browner…

  This new woman looks in the crib, and sees the child is missing. She freezes.

  At the exact same time, the woman in the panama hat darts forward, reaches into the tub of blood, and pulls out something red and dripping and coughing…

  A child. A naked human child, which is hacking and coughing horribly.

  The woman in the lens turns around. Mona sees her face.

  “Is it alive?” asks one of the men.

  Mona barely hears them. She is staring into the mirror. Because this new person is not Laura Alvarez. It is her—Mona Bright herself. Slightly fatter, with slightly fewer wrinkles, and slightly longer hair. But it is most certainly Mona Bright, staring around the room, anxious, worried, wondering where her child could be…

  The bloody, dripping baby coughs again, then begins shrieking in fear.

  “It’s alive,” says the woman in the panama hat. Her hands and sleeves are soaked in blood, but she grins in manic triumph. “It’s alive. It’s a baby girl. It’s alive.”

  The humming in the room stops. And the other Mona—the mother Mona, in her nursery, staring about in fear—fades from view, swallowed in a sea of shining silver as the lens reverts to its reflective state.

  The woman in the panama hat begins laughing. “It’s here. She’s finally here. She’s coming!”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  In the south of Wink, just below the skin of the earth under the highway crossroads, many eyes open in the dark.

  The dark does not bother them. They were born in the dark. They have lived their whole lives in the dark. They were made for the dark and their hearts will always belong in the dark. So they open their eyes, and see:

  Movement. Their creation is hissing. Melting. The blocks of metal (of Her) bubble at all the seams and edges, swirling together like boiling lead.

  At first they are concerned: they chirp and tweet and grumble in the darkness, shifting in their roosts and rolling over one another in their shallow pools. They spent so much time on it, so many hours hunting through the ravines and empty homes of this place… they spent days bearing the stupendous, horrible weight of those blocks up and down mountainsides… and now, without warning, it is to melt?

  But then they feel it: the world here grows soft. The barrier, which is already quite permeable in Wink, begins to disappear entirely. All places—those distant and disparate, those Here and There, Elsewhere and Nowhere—converge into one.

  Their tone changes. They begin to flute and cry and sing in the darkness. This is not an ending, not a death in the dark. This is a new day, this is a beginning, a new world.

  She is coming.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  The child screams, and screams, and screams. She looks horrific, a tiny, shriveled person soaked in red with its face contorted and eyes streaming tears. The woman in the panama hat surveys the baby coldly. “Should it be so small?” she asks.

  The doctor looks at the baby as if he’s never seen one before. Which, Mona realizes, he probably hasn’t. “It appears to be the acceptable size…”

  “Well,” says the woman in the panama hat, “it won’t matter when Mother gets here.”

  “Is this as you expected?” asks the doctor. “We need it to be the woman’s progeny, to be Mother’s progeny. Like us, but of this place. Is this Her child?”

  The woman in the panama hat shuts her eyes, as if to think. Then her eyes snap open. “Yes,” she says. “It will work. Mother is coming already. I can feel it.” She sighs deeply, as if she has just smelled a particularly alluring fragrance. “It is Her progeny, indirectly. It will work. It is working.”

  Mona stares at the bloody child. It’s difficult to really study its features, since it is so slick with blood… but she thinks she sees her brow line, and maybe Dale’s eyes, and could that be her mouth?

  This can’t be. I don’t believe it.

  The woman in the panama hat holds the child out to the doctor. “Take it. Take it to the highway crossroads just south of town.”

  He hesitates. “Do you not wish to do it?”

  “No. I have matters to attend to here. She should be there. You must meet Her when She arrives. And when She comes to see me, it will be me… and only me. No”—she glances sideways at Mrs. Benjamin—“distractions.”

  “We have not broken any of Mother’s edicts in bringing Her here, have we? We have kept to Her rules?”

  The woman in the panama hat gives him a flat stare. “Are you suggesting,” she asks, “that it is possible to defy Mother?”

  He bows his head, and takes the child. “Will I need protection?”

  “One of the children will assist you.”

  “But it’s daylight.”

  She rolls her eyes, exasperated. “And why do we need to keep to this town’s rules?”

  “You make a fair point.” He and about half of the men and women file out of the room with the screaming child. Mona can still see tiny feet with flexed toes, and struggling arms trying to pull out of his grasp…

  “No,” whispers Mona. “No, please…”

  One of the men in sweaters—this one a soft brown—turns and looks at her. His gaze is discomfortingly alien. “What do we do with her?” he asks in a quiet monotone.

  “Do you know how to use a knife?” asks the woman in the p
anama hat.

  He frowns, nods.

  “Do you know how to use one well?”

  “I understand the concept.”

  “Beside the door is a box. Within it are several knives. Cut her here”—she points to a specific point on her throat—“cut her deep, and make sure she dies.”

  “She can die like that?” asks the man, as if this is a foreign concept.

  “Oh, yes. Her kind die quite easily. They all do it, eventually.”

  “And that’s all it takes?”

  “That’s all.”

  He nods again, impressed.

  “You, and you.” The woman in the panama hat gestures to the remaining men. “Take her”—she points to Mrs. Benjamin—“and come with me. I want to have a discussion with her.”

  “Oh, goody,” says Mrs. Benjamin, as the two men grab her by the shoulders. “Am I to get another lecture?”

  The woman in the panama hat does not answer as she leads the men dragging Mrs. Benjamin from the room, leaving Mona with the man in the soft brown sweater, who is staring at her with a look of some anticipation, as if about to start a new and exciting experiment.

  First he practices the motion: he holds an imaginary knife, and swoops it down in a slash. But he shakes his head, dissatisfied. “Are we too near the wall?” he asks.

  Mona is too fatigued by the blood loss to answer, but of course even if she had the strength, she wouldn’t.

  “I think we are too near the wall,” says the man thoughtfully, “for the full range of motion.” He pushes her chair over to the center of the room. Mona’s eye registers movement to her right, but it’s only their reflection in the lens. In it, she sees her wrists are bound to the back of the chair by thick ropes. She can also see the doorway out to her left, and beside it there is indeed a small black box. Beside this box, she sees, are her rifle and her Glock.

  The man in the soft brown sweater walks to the box, opens it, and says, “Ah.” He scratches his head pensively. Then he takes out three different knives, examines them carefully, and selects the largest one. The other two he places on the ground beside the box.

  As he goes through this scrupulous procedure, Mona flexes her fingers. To her surprise, they can move, though she feels very weak. She paws at the seat of the chair, where Mrs. Benjamin wedged the mirrors. She can manage to grasp and retrieve only one, in her right hand; her left remains disturbingly dead, but then it was the one that got tapped.

  The man in the soft brown sweater holds up the big knife, and slashes it through the air. “Cut,” he says. “Cut! Or—perhaps like a surgeon?” He makes a small, dainty slice in the air, and says, with great delicacy: “Cut.”

  Jesus, thinks Mona. He must be one of the really young ones…

  But what is she going to do with just one lens? She’s only done this once before, and then she had to have two lenses to get anything to move…

  She realizes she’s staring at her reflection in the big lens.

  Oh, she thinks.

  “Cut,” says the man in the soft brown sweater. He wheels to look at her. “Cut!” he says, and swipes the blade through the air. “I’ve never killed one of you before. Is it messy?”

  Mona ignores him. She tries to concentrate on wriggling her right wrist around to rotate her little lens toward the big one…

  “I bet it is,” he says. “You’re all full of… fluid. Matter. Hm.” He looks down at his sweater. He plucks the front and stretches it out. “Hm,” he says again.

  Is it pointed in the right direction? She can see part of the face of the hand mirror (or hand lens) in the reflection of the big lens. Two little bubbles of space, floating free and unattached in the air…

  She remembers the nursery. The face of the woman who looked so much like her.

  Because it was you, she thinks.

  Stop. Don’t think about that.

  She thinks she has the angles right, so she tries to concentrate. But this time it’s not hard at all: she senses immediately that the big lens is a different animal altogether. Using the hand mirrors in Mrs. Benjamin’s house was like using tweezers to pick up pebbles, but this thing is a fucking bulldozer on and rumbling and ready to go, leaping at the slightest touch of the pedal. The challenge won’t be getting it to work, but controlling it.

  The man in the brown sweater is now carefully removing his sweater, but he hasn’t thought to put down the knife, which makes it pretty tough on him.

  Mona focuses on one of the little knives next to the black box. For a long time, nothing happens. But then it appears to grow just slightly, slightly transparent…

  She opens her left hand wide. I hope I get the right part in my fucking hand, she thinks, otherwise I’m going to cut my palm wide open.

  “Ah!” says the man. He’s finally gotten one arm and his head out of his sweater. “There we go!”

  Come on, come on.

  The knife flickers. Then she feels something hard and cold in her left hand. She begins to close her fingers around it…

  … but just as she does, she sees something in the big lens. The lens, she thinks, is a bit like a door, and this one’s been left slightly ajar, opening onto wherever it opened onto last. It’s like looking at something down a long, dark hallway (and Mona isn’t really looking at all, except possibly with the little dark eye inside of her), but she thinks she’s starting to understand.

  The lens opened onto a place ghostly and distant, something ephemeral and far away… something that didn’t happen, or at least it didn’t happen here.

  Was that me I saw? Or another version of me?

  She remembers her current situation when she hears a voice say, “Cut.”

  She releases the big lens. She’s still sitting in the chair with her wrists bound behind her, the hand lens in her right hand and the knife in her left. She begins sawing at the rope as fast as she can, trying to summon all her remaining strength. Her left hand and arm are so numb that it’s difficult to tell how far she’s getting.

  The man, now sweaterless, takes a breath. “All right,” he says softly. “All right.”

  He takes a step forward, still staring at her with that detached, blank gaze. Whatever swims in his eyes is wriggling madly.

  Mona feels the rope begin to give way. She frees the pinky and ring finger of her right hand and twists the rope, trying to stretch the fibers against the blade.

  “Just a cut,” whispers the man.

  He takes another step.

  The rope frays. Pops.

  Mona strains her left shoulder. More pops sound from the rope.

  “Hm?” says the man. He leans in, confused.

  The rope snaps.

  Mona clenches her teeth, and swings her left hand around.

  There is a soft thud. It is so soft that it is surprising, really. But then, the knife does bite into a very soft place, just behind the esophagus of the man in the brown sweater, piercing God knows how many tendons and muscles and veins.

  Blood sprays from the corners of the knife in tiny, furious geysers, like pinholes in a dike. The man stares at Mona, mouth open. She can already see blood welling up in his mouth. Mona, in disbelief, stares back.

  Then rage begins to bubble inside her. My fucking daughter, she thinks.

  She drops the hand lens, brings her right hand around, grasps the top of the man’s head with it, and rips the knife forward with her left.

  She is totally and utterly showered in a hot wave of blood, which shocks her, but she really should have expected that since she’s just partially decapitated this man. As he tumbles to the ground, all she can think is Man oh man am I happy I kept my mouth closed.

  He twitches for a moment, still just spewing blood (this does not surprise Mona—she’s seen a few murder scenes, which is when you realize the shocking amount of blood in the human body), and then he goes still.

  There is the soft sound of thunder from somewhere.

  “Shit,” she says. She hopes she didn’t just send this stupid bastard in
to someone else’s body. But that seems highly plausible right now.

  She looks at herself in the lens. She’s bloody from head to toe. But she’s alive. And she’s not quite as weak as she thought. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, since she’s just lost a shitload of blood.

  But maybe, she thinks as she stares at herself in the lens, it’s because you’re not completely human.

  She looks at the vat of blood before the lens. She almost wishes to touch it. She cannot conceive that a child was just there, and that that child might have been her daughter…

  Mona decides she doesn’t understand a goddamn bit of this. But she knows someone who does.

  She takes off her shoes before venturing out into the hall, and she moves silently and swiftly over the cracked concrete floor. She has her Glock, but she doesn’t want to use it (because fuck knows what that bitch in the blue suit would do if she heard her coming), so she’s got two of the knives stuffed into the belt loops of her shorts as backup.

  It isn’t very long until she hears voices echoing down the hall.

  “—if She’ll be happy to see us,” says a man’s voice.

  “Of course She’ll be happy to see us,” says another’s. “We’re Her children.”

  “But She’s been gone so long. Will She remember us?”

  Silence for a moment. “I had not thought about that. I had not thought that She could forget.”

  Mona creeps toward the voices. She comes to a hallway entrance on her left, and listens.

  “Do you forget Her?” asks the first voice. “I do, sometimes… it seems awfully hard to remember Her. I remember being happy. I think I remember being happy. But it seems very long ago.”

  “We were meant to be happy here. That was what we decided.”

  “I know.”

  “But I… I will admit that I found it… hard. It was not as easy as I had expected. Maybe Weringer was wrong.”

  There is a long pause. “I don’t know. Maybe we were all wrong. Maybe She will know.”