American Elsewhere (23 page)

She braces herself, turns the knob, and throws the door open.

At first she can see nothing but smoke, but then a great gust of wind blows through the room and clears it out, and Mona sees there is someone in her tub, a child-size person looking away from her with its head bowed. But it is not a child, not anymore, for its scalp is black and smoking and its fingers are withered and Mona can see bone where its flesh has been burned away from its jaw. It hears Mona open the door and it turns to her and she sees it is a little girl, or it was once, but she sees its eyes have been burned out of its skull, leaving just gaping, blackened sockets, and it opens its mouth (its tongue singed and scarred) and takes a rattling breath and shrieks again, a cry of horrific pain and fear.

Initially Mona is too terrified to see anything more than the girl. But the little cop voice in her brain asks—
Where did the wind come from?

And Mona lifts her eyes from the burned thing in the tub, and she sees that the wall is gone.

What is on the other side of the wall is the most awesome and horrifying sight she has ever witnessed.

It is a storm, but a storm like no other. Blue bashes of light erupt in the swirling dark clouds, and fires rage throughout Wink. One storm
cloud shudders with lightning, and then the lightning slowly—not quickly, but slowly and gracefully—descends to touch the ground, like a soundless, blue-white finger of pure energy. And where it touches, flames sprout up and a pillar of smoke comes barreling up to join the dark sky.

So many buildings burn. There is so much smoke and so many dark clouds. Yet Mona feels there’s something else wrong, something larger, yet more subtle.

It takes her a bit to realize there’s been a change in the landscape on the horizon: the mesa is wrong. It’s not a mesa at all anymore, but a mountain. It no longer ends in a wide, flat top, but keeps ascending to a towering point. She can see the silhouette of it even from here, through the smoke and the fire and the clouds. It’s as if someone sneaked in and delivered a mountaintop while no one was watching.

The mountaintop trembles. What new catastrophe is this, Mona wonders? Is it an earthquake? Or an avalanche? Yet then the entire top shifts to one side, and while any glancing familiarity with physics would make one think the whole thing should come tumbling down now, it doesn’t. The mountaintop shifts back, swaying slightly, almost like a tree…

Then Mona spots some protrusions on the edge of the mountaintop. They are familiar. From this angle they appear to rise out of the slope and withdraw in an almost organic, reactive motion. And when she sees them, Mona’s mouth falls open.

Her mind staggers to understand it. It can’t be. That
can’t
have happened. Yet she knows what she saw. There was no mistaking the silhouette that rose up from the mountainside, then fell.

Fingers. Fingers from an enormous hand.

Mona stares at the fires and the mountain, dumbfounded. Then the girl in the tub howls again, jarring her from her fixation. “Jesus Christ,” Mona says, and she turns and bounds back downstairs to the phone, because she knows the limits of her first aid skills and that charred child is well beyond them.

The aquamarine phone is in the corner, as always, and she snatches it up and dials 911 on the rotary. There’s popping on the line, like the
phone is trying to find a connection. Then it begins ringing, but no one answers.

“Come on,
come on
,” says Mona. She glances around fretfully.

Then she stops and lifts her head.

She listens.

There are no more screams, and the wind has died. Everything is silent.

The phone keeps ringing. She hangs up before anyone can answer. Then she walks to the window and looks out.

There are no fires, no blasts of lightning, no pillars of smoke. The night is calm and peaceful.

She stares out the window for a while, stupefied. Then she tilts her head, listening. She hasn’t heard a scream since she picked up the phone.

She walks to the foot of the stairs and looks up. She can see no lights on upstairs.

Her gun is still in her hand. She lifts it and places her finger just above the trigger. Then she begins silently moving upstairs.

The second floor is totally dark. She can hear no noise at all from any of the rooms. She slowly walks over to the bathroom. The door is shut, but didn’t she leave it open when she left? And there is no light on behind the door that she can see.

She puts her hand on the knob and, for the second time, thinks. Then she turns it and slowly pushes the door open.

She can see nothing, for the room is utterly dark. She waits a bit, then reaches out with one hand and turns on the light.

The bathroom is empty, and though the tub is still scorched the wall is whole and there is no smoke. She feels faint at the sight, and she totters forward and feels the wall with one hand. It is solid and firm.

Mona looks at her hand and tries again. The wall is still solid. Then she squats and feels the bottom of the tub. The porcelain is cold: it has not been used in hours at least.

Mona’s squat turns into a sit as she falls backward onto the floor of the bathroom. She sets the gun down on the floor with a
clunk
. She just sits there, unsure what to do next.

Finally she stands, gun in her hand, and walks downstairs and out the front door. She walks to the middle of the street and stares north. The mesa is there, and it’s definitely a mesa again, ending in a plateau.

She shakes her head. “No, goddamn it,” she says. “No. I am not crazy,
no
.”

She sprints across the street, flings open the door of the Charger, leaps in, and starts her up. And then Mona, defying every bit of advice everyone in Wink has given her, goes speeding off into the night.

Comes he walking windy-ways, wandering under spruces and through canyons and across shadowy glens, hands in his pockets and head bowed as if all the weight of the world lies teetering on his slumped shoulders. Which it is, in a way, and this is a change of pace for Mr. Macey, he who is so often the delight of Cockler Street, always there sweeping off his store’s front steps and waiting to favor passersby with a wink or a smile or a piece of bawdy flattery. The very idea of merry old Macey ever falling into a gloomy spell is preposterous, inconceivable, for Macey is indomitable, unchanging. Were the town ever washed away in a freak flood Macey would remain, still ready with a snippet of gossip or an idle joke. Yet here he is, making a lonely crossing through the desolate countryside, the pink moon lazily swimming through the purple skies above him, and though Macey may tell himself his midnight perambulations serve some deeper, more secret purpose, he cannot deny that partially they serve to relieve his mind of its many burdens.

As he winds around a staggered cliff side he glimpses a flash of lightning over his shoulder. He stops and watches the blue luminescence bloom in the clouds above the mesa, strobing the mountains, the pines, the red rocky flats beyond that seem

(so much like home)

queerly threatening recently. The lightning is soundless, but his ears imagine quiet thunder rolling across the countryside. It will gather at the mesa (it always gathers at the mesa) and disperse, trailing north and east to fade to nothing.

Then he cocks his head. His eyes go searching, curious, tracing over every line of dark on the mountain. He saw something, he’s sure of it, not the brilliant blue of lightning, no, but a flat box of dull white light, like a window. But what could lie yonder on the mesa save the remains of the lab, with its twisted tunnels and blackened antennae (all sticking up from the ground like barbecue spits)? And he is sure there is nothing else there,

(except the door)

nothing at all, for they would know about it, wouldn’t they?

He looks. Waits. Sees nothing. Then continues home.

His manner of walking is counterclockwise and peripheral, approaching the town always from the side, crossing empty playgrounds and parks and isolated intersections. It is good to move through the forbidden places, the halfway patches. He’s spent too much time in the havens at the center of Wink, far too much time puttering around his store and among his neighbors. Here at the edges, in the cracks and at the crossroads, stepping from shadow to shadow in the river of darkness that runs through the heart of Wink, he feels much more at home.

As he walks under one tree a harsh buzz sounds out from above. He stops, peers up. Though the tree is dark he can see the form of a man standing at the top, balanced perfectly on a single branch. The buzz increases, wheedling and reedy, as if telling him to clear off. It is not a sound any human could ever make.

Macey watches for a moment, but grows impatient. He has no time for such mannered gestures. “Oh, shut up,” he snaps.

The thing in the tree falls silent. Mr. Macey glares at it a moment longer, then continues on.

Mr. Macey can go anywhere he likes in Wink, anytime,

(but not beyond it)

and no one knows more about the town than he does. Except, perhaps, for Mr. Weringer. But Mr. Weringer is dead, dead as a doornail, dead as dead can be. Whatever that means.

And what does it mean, he wonders as he walks? What could it ever mean? Macey does not know. What a foreign concept it is: to die, to cough up what you are as if it is no more than mucus pooled at the back of your throat, and perish. Where is his friend now? What has happened to him? Where has he gone? Still he wonders.

It is this death—and the answers about it he so desperately desires—that has sent Macey on these midnight errands, visiting the hidden residents of Wink and telling them his news and thoughts: have you heard and what did you do, who knew before you and how and why, why? Why did they know, why did they not know, what has happened, what is happening? Do you know? Does anyone know?

No. They do not. They, like Macey, like the town, are now alone.

He misses Weringer as one would miss a limb. Weringer was always the stabilizing force in town, the rudder steering their little ship across dark, unsteady seas. It was his idea to use the names of the town’s residents. “And are we not residents of the town?” he said to them. “Are we not these people now? I feel that we are. We are part of a community. And so we should be named accordingly.”

Part of a community… Macey badly wishes this were the case.

For now the unthinkable has happened: one of them has
died
. No, more than that—he has been
murdered
. How can such a thing occur? Do the seas sometimes float away into the sky? Do the planets crash into one another in their orbits? Can one hold the stars in the palm of one’s hand?

No, no. And so they cannot die.

But Macey has a few ideas about how this happened. He knows those men at the truck stop had something to do with it, such weaselly little things with small eyes and cautious movements. He can smell it on them, a heady, reeking perfume of guilt and malice. It’s as if they
went rolling in it, like dogs. Macey’s scared a few out of town, and oh how he’s enjoyed doing that, especially the last one. He’s never toyed with the natives like some of the others do, but how fun it was to rouse one of the slumbering ones to join him in his little jest. And that was all he wanted

(kill them)

to do, really. Just a joke.

Yet how often has he said they should blockade the Roadhouse entirely, even detain its employees? It is a threat, a taint to their peaceful way of life. Especially since they started bringing in that drug, the heroin. But it was Weringer who always talked him out of it. “Let them be,” he would say. “They’re little people making little fortunes off of little vices. They’re no concern of ours. And were we to do anything about them, I’m certain it would attract attention, and that we do not need.” How ironic that those he defended should be the very ones who took his life.

And that is the crux of it, the howling, snarling, silly old crux of it. How could
men
—and poor, stupid, foolish ones at that—ever manage to kill one of
them
? Hasn’t it been said from the start, even decreed, that they are not to die? That they could never harm another or perish

(oh Mother where are you)

so long as they waited here?

Of course, the answer came from the very last person Macey wanted it to. Nearly all the hidden residents of Wink reacted the same way to the news: they trembled, quaked, asked many questions themselves, before finally admitting they knew nothing, and begging Macey to please let them know once an answer was found.

(Yet how troubling were those he visited who did not answer his call, those caves and canyons and old dry wells he came to and spoke into, and remained silent though he expected them to emerge—with the sound of rustling scales, or the burbling of deep waters underground—and turn
their attention to his being and join him in parley? He now wonders—were they gone? Had they fled? Or were they too terrified by what had happened to even poke their heads out of their makeshift domiciles?)

And Macey expected old Parson to cower like the rest or perhaps he
wanted
him to, for Macey has never liked old Parson, so contemptuous of everything they try to accomplish in Wink.

But to his chagrin, Parson did none of those things. Instead he went still, thought, and said,
It’s true that none of us is allowed to kill any other. Or, rather, we promised so before we came here. But did we all make that promise, Macey?

Macey said,
Of course we did. We wouldn’t have been allowed to come if we didn’t. We would have been left behind. So every one of us did.

And Parson said,
But what if there was someone in Wink who… what is the word… stowed away with us when we came? Someone who’s been living here in secret, or who’s unable to get out of wherever it is they are?

Macey said,
That can’t be. There’s no one else besides us. There’s always been us, only us, and no one else.