American Elsewhere (37 page)

She freezes where she stands. “What the
hell
?” she says aloud. She turns back and peers in one lab window.

This lab is empty like all the others. But for a moment she could have sworn that it was different. It’s like it
changed
when she turned away, just for an instant.

She thought she saw the lights were on, glowing much cleaner and whiter than the fluorescent ones out in the hall. But there was also something new in the room: a huge, cone-like device sitting in the middle of the floor with an unbelievable amount of wiring leading to it. And though her brain refuses to consider this suggestion, she is
sure
she caught a fleeting glimpse of two men standing around the cone-like device, dressed in gray suits and skinny black ties and horn-rimmed glasses, discussing something that seemed to be slightly irritating to them, as if it were just a casual workday.

But now the room is empty, just like the others: the lights are gray and weak, and there are no people inside. There are no men inside, and no cone-like device sitting on the floor, either, but she can definitely see where one
was
: there is a circular indentation in the blank concrete, like the device was sitting there for years and years, years and years ago.

Is it possible, she wonders, to see the imprint that lives have left on a place, just like how she sees the shapes of departed machines on the floors and walls of each tiny room?

As she wonders for the hundredth time what happened in this place, her toe catches something on the ground and it almost sends her sprawling. She curses, mentally thanks God her finger was nowhere near the Glock’s trigger, and looks back at what tripped her.

There is an enormous crack in the paved floor. It stretches across the hallway and crawls up the walls and even across the ceiling. The hallway beyond the crack is askew, in fact: the floor ahead is one to three inches higher on the left side and correspondingly lower on the right. It’s like a miniature tectonic rift. The crack she tripped on isn’t the only one, either: it appears to be the papa crack, with many baby spiderweb cracks radiating outward down the hallway, but only in one direction, away from her.

The sight gives Mona vertigo. Whatever caused this (and whatever
it was, it must have been
huge
) has also screwed with the electrical systems, because the fluorescent lights in the ceiling tend to flutter more the farther away they are from the crack. She gets that same queer unease as when she first found the lightning-struck bathroom in her mother’s house: it is as if some horrible accident has warped this place, like it no longer belongs in the building at all.

Wary, she continues down the hallway, staggering a little due to the uneven floor. She studies the cracks in the wall, worried that this whole place might cave in. As she does, she sees that there are immense cables running along the ceiling, some of them so heavy they have to be bolted directly into the concrete. Most of them branch off into the various lab rooms, but one of them, the biggest, goes straight ahead before passing through the wall above the largest, darkest door in the entire hallway.

Mona looks at the door, then down at the key in her hand. She’s about to try it when she hears footsteps coming down the hallway behind her.

She turns and points the gun toward the mouth of the hall. The footsteps, like those of the Native American in the panama hat, suggest wooden-soled shoes. She moves up against the wall and steadies her aim.

He followed me here
, she thinks.
I don’t know how he survived, but he followed me here.

Yet though the footsteps keep getting louder, no one comes. She can see no movement below the fluttering fluorescent lights at all. The footsteps get loud enough for her to think that the walker is only a dozen feet in front of her, but she sees nothing. Then she hears a few other sounds—the shuffling of papers, and a grunt—and the footsteps come to a stop.

Mona doesn’t move. Her ears are telling her that this person is just fifteen feet or fewer in front of her. But she can’t see a damn thing. Just feet and feet of blank gray concrete, lit by the strobing neon lights.

She hears more papers turning. Then a quiet “Hmm,” and the sound of a match being struck.

Mona feels sweat trickling down her temples. She can see no flame, nor any change in light, nor can she smell or see any smoke. Yet she can hear the faint crackling of a tiny fire in the hallway.

What the fuck is going on?
she wonders.

She hears a series of throaty clicks—like someone puffing at a pipe?—and then the footsteps resume, though they’re much slower, and they sound like they’re walking to the side of the hall rather than down it.

Then, though she sees absolutely no doors move at all, she hears one open, the lock clanking and the hinges making a slow screech. Her eyes jump from door to door, confirming that they are all still shut.

A voice rings out: “Paul, have you seen these numbers? They’re ridiculous!” Then the sound of a door slamming, and silence.

She stares at the empty hallway. It was always empty, of course—or at least it
looked
that way—but now her ears are also telling her it’s deserted. Still, she doesn’t dare move for the next five minutes. Her legs start to tremble, since they’re already exhausted from the climb up here, but she forces them to stay taut, keeping the Glock trained on the center of the hallway.

Nothing happens. The invisible mystery man must have found Paul, whoever he is, and must now be discussing his ridiculous numbers.

First the party, then the men standing around that machine in the lab, now this.

Is this place—her brain almost refuses to process such a ridiculous idea—
haunted
? Or maybe she’s just going insane again…

Then she remembers the last time she thought she was going insane, and seeing things that weren’t there. She hears Parson’s voice in her head:
The time where you were was damaged, so you saw something that had happened already.

Is this the same thing? she wonders. Is time broken here, and she’s catching stray seconds from long, long ago?

She lowers the gun. It would make sense, wouldn’t it? Perhaps a man did once actually walk down this hall, light his pipe, and enter a
room and ask a question. Maybe they did throw a New Year’s Eve party here, decades and decades ago; and at some point two engineers probably stood in one of the laboratories scratching their heads, teasing out the problem before them.

And perhaps, if time is indeed broken here, those events could echo down through the years to be witnessed by Mona herself. Maybe she is seeing ghosts, but they’re ghosts of moments and seconds rather than people. The past is still happening here in some unseen way. Her path just happens to convene with those taken by the people who worked here long, long ago.

She is not comforted by the idea, but she feels it’s the right one. The things she’s glimpsed and heard have not responded to her or acknowledged her in any way. They’re just doing what they did decades ago, over and over again. She finds the thought a little horrifying.

Something cold calcifies in her belly. What if one of the little moments that gets replayed before her happens to feature none other than Laura Alvarez herself? What if she catches some ghostly imprint of her mother, going about her daily duties? Mona is both disturbed by and attracted to this thought: it would be practically the same as seeing her on film, but it would feel a little more
real
, wouldn’t it? And she could finally see what she was like, here at work, before marrying Earl…

She returns to the door. It is substantially thicker than the others, and its metal is a bit darker. She wonders if it’s made of lead; the others appeared to be steel. She is not eager to walk into a room that’s still hot, and it would be, wouldn’t it, because doesn’t radioactivity take centuries to die out? That was what they taught her in school. They have to stick radioactive waste in some giant round canister, like a poisoned, malicious Easter Egg, and drop it down a mine shaft out in the desert. It suddenly feels as if all of America’s nasty secrets could be found out here among the rock and sand, buried in the wilderness, forgotten.

She grips Weringer’s key a little tighter. The dozens of little teeth bite into her fingers. She braces herself and slides the key in the lock.

The lock gives with the slightest amount of force, and the door,
though it must weigh hundreds of pounds, silently falls open, smoothly gliding through the air.

Mona walks to the threshold, and looks in.

It is a wide, low room with a ceiling, walls, and floor all made of the same metal as the door. The room is rounded, with no distinguishable corners. It is completely bare except for the large apparatus hanging in the center, lit by the beams from tiny spotlights in the ceiling.

It is a mirror. But it is a mirror unlike any Mona has ever seen before.

The mirror portion is a wide, gleaming, silvery circle with a diameter of about ten feet. It hangs from the ceiling by a long, triple-jointed arm that looks like it would allow for rotation in many directions. The mirror is mounted on a thick copperish-looking plate, which is fed by dozens of thick wires that wind down the arm. A variety of machinery and equipment hangs off the arm as well: wires and tubing and chambers and pressure plates. Surrounding the apparatus are numerous steel frames stacked with old analog devices (to Mona they look like VCRs), but she does not get the impression that they are part of it: they sport microphones, lenses, electronic readouts. No, these devices, whatever they are, were meant to monitor the mirror and record it.

And if you record things
, Mona thinks,
then you have to keep your recordings somewhere…

She hesitates, again worrying that the room is radioactive. She holds a flat palm out, which she knows is stupid because you can’t feel radiation on your bare skin. As she expected, she feels nothing. Still, she is reluctant.

She notices that the mirror apparatus is not whole. A second arm branches off the main one, and it looks as if it held a mirror once, yet the mirror is gone, as if it’s been unscrewed or ripped off. She wonders where it went

(Would you like to see a magic trick?)

and who has it. From the look of things, the door to this room hadn’t been opened in a while.

Mona realizes she is breathing quite hard. She stuffs the Glock in the back of her pants (she no longer trusts her shaking hands), shuts her eyes, and steps into the room.

Though her eyes are shut, Mona is sure she can feel things change. It is the same as in Weringer’s house: though she cannot say why, she is positive that, though this room may appear to be connected to the rest of Coburn via that long, cracked hallway, she is now somewhere
else
. She is no longer on the mesa, she feels: she is no longer in New Mexico, no longer in America. Perhaps she is no longer on Earth.

She opens her eyes.

The room looks the same. And when she looks behind, she can still see the long, cracked hallway with the quaking lights. And yet she is sure this room is separate from everything, floating freely in… what? Nothing? Is it floating in nothing, like a space capsule?

She looks at the mirror. It seems far larger now that she is near it. She slowly walks around to get a better look. The arm is bent so the mirror’s face is pointed slightly upward, facing the ceiling, which Mona finds a bit curious for a mirror to be doing. But it is a beautiful thing, really. There is something about the way the light glances off its surface, as if when the spotlights’ rays touch it they turn to silver liquid and go skating around it in a shimmering orbit before sliding off the side.

She walks until she can see herself in the bottom half of the mirror. It does not distort her at all, but reflects her as any mirror would do. What was this thing meant for, she wonders? Is it really a mirror, or is its reflective surface just a byproduct of whatever alloy the plate is coated in? She leans in until her nose is almost touching its surface.

She stares into her eyes. For some reason she is suddenly sure that the woman in the mirror is staring back at her, not as a reflection but as a thing with its own agency. She keeps staring at herself, wondering if perhaps she is seeing a Mona that never was…

And then things
click
.

It happens purely in her head. And, just as when she first entered this room, she feels things change, almost imperceptibly. She looks around, but she sees no visible shift. The hallway is still outside, the lights are still fluttering, and the mirror…

She gasps and jumps back. Her own reflection does the same, of course. But for a moment, Mona was sure that her reflection was not there. What she saw was not the ceiling of this lead room, or any little spotlights, but a wide, endless black sky with many red and white stars.

And the woman standing in front of the mirror was not Mona. But she recognized her. Mona’s seen her only once before, projected onto an old white wall in fuzzy ochre tones, laughing as everyone at her party clapped for her.

Then she hears the footsteps again.

Mona looks out at the hallway. Unlike the last time, she can see movement at the end. She quietly steps to the side, hiding behind the huge door, and takes out the Glock.

The footsteps come closer, heading directly for the room. They slow a little bit, and she hears the walker stop just at the threshold of the door.

“Hello?” says a man’s voice. But it is a very curious voice, Mona thinks. Not only is it not very threatening, it is also faint and crackly, like it is coming out of an old radio catching a signal from a broadcast far, far away.

The person walks forward, toward the mirror. And when he clears the door, Mona sees it is not a man at all.

It
looks
like a man, just a little, but it is like a black-and-white image of a man from an old, broken television, one overlaid with fuzzy lines and bursts of static, and in some places he is even transparent. He is wearing a ragged tweed coat and a stained pair of slacks, and his shoes are scuffed and beaten and his collar is torn. His salt-and-pepper hair is curly and thick. Though she can see him only from behind, he looks very much like an absentminded professor who has been lost in the wilderness for a long, long time.