American Elsewhere (40 page)

She feels it in her brain first. Right in the middle of her forehead, the most terrible of migraines you could ever imagine. It’s like her brain is being slowly pulled forward to put pressure on the front inside of her skull, threatening to worm out her skull and down her face like a maggot bursting from its egg sac.

She takes a step forward. Then another, and another.

She is passing through something hollow, some cyst or cavity or bubble floating in the darkness. She feels it in her bones.

Then it is like she is being ripped through a three-inch hole in a wall, inexorably pulled forward until she is a boneless, pulverized tube, her arms and shoulders and ribs sloughed away, and nothing will make it through but a baseball-sized fragment of brain and a tangle of nerve and maybe one eye dangling by a thread of tissue, and the last thing it’d report to her, the last signal it’d send to the sputtering, mangled ball of brain, would be the sight of the corrugated walls of this dark tunnel, flickering in the light of the lantern, her long journey into night abruptly (perhaps thankfully) halted.

This does not really happen. It just
feels
like it does. But then it is over, and she is done, and through.

Yet through what, and where she has gotten through to, Bonnie does not know. It is not where she was. The tunnel before is
not
the tunnel after. It is… somewhere else. Where things are different.

She keeps walking.

She is under Wink. Probably about under the courthouse, or the
park. But just because she is underneath there does not mean she’s not also somewhere else. After all, thinks Bonnie, you can have a different thing under a different thing.

My God I am so high, she thinks.

But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

Sometimes there are cracks in the tunnel, and she can see light filtering in. Sometimes the light is gentle and pink. Other times it is harsh and silvery. Bonnie has never once put her eye to one of the cracks to see. She remembers the story about the flashlight—
POW
—and wonders what it’d look like if that happened to a human eye.

No. No, thanks.

She keeps walking. Just keep walking. Keep the lantern high and your eyes on the prize.

What lives down here, underneath Wink? What lives in Wink, above it, around it? Where is Wink, anyways? Where have we all gone? Which sky hangs over this town?

She is at the chamber. She stops at the doorway, small and round like that of a crypt, and looks in.

The chamber is big. It is bigger than big. So big she almost cannot conceive of it.
God
does not live in a place this big. Its gray, blank floor stretches for miles, oceans, hemispheres, and its black vaults stretch up and up and up and up until she thinks she can see

(a pink moon)

(many stars)

(a thousand twisting peaks)

She needs to stop.

Bonnie takes a breath. And focuses.

Or, she does
not
focus, because if she did she’d go fucking insane. To look at this place, to look upon it and perceive it, would be to destroy yourself. Bonnie secretly believes (and though she doesn’t know it, she’s absolutely right) that the heroin is her shield, that it inoculates her against the madness waiting here, puts an impenetrable film on her mind like a tarp protecting a boat against the rain. You cannot
make someone mad if there is no mind there to make mad. So maybe Bonnie is one of the only people in Wink who can go here, and only then when she’s absolutely fucking jazzing on H.

But while she is utterly dosed up when she comes here, she has come to understand two things about this place:

1. It is secretly a jail cell. (And Bonnie knows what is being jailed here.)
   
2. Though it is a jail cell, its occupant can be allowed out, though only briefly, and its exit (or invitation) must be arranged in a special way.
   

A very special way.

In the center of the vast gray floor is a pile of something. From this distance (though distance does not exist, not here) it looks like a pile of small stones, but Bonnie knows it is not.

She looks around, searching the edges of the room, at least what she can see of it.

It is empty. Or it appears that way. Bonnie knows better. And she knows she won’t see it unless it lets her.

She begins the walk across the chamber. It takes a long, long time.

(Am I still here, she wonders? Is some part of me forever trapped in this place? When I go back to my room, and I am followed by the night, by the man in the corner? Or am I still here, torn in half, split down the middle, stuck in this room and wandering Wink all at once? Do I live up above while still trapped in here with it, him, the night?)

The pile gets closer. The closer it gets, the more she can make out the tiny, pebble-like teeth, and the long, desiccated snouts, and the gaping eye sockets…

They are not skulls, not really. They are a part of
it
, the thing that is jailed here. And if you take a piece of it out, and get someone to touch it…

(you must not touch it)

Gloves. Must remember gloves.

She sets the lantern down. She opens the wooden box. Then she
carefully, carefully bends down, scoops up two tiny little skulls in a gloved hand, and lays them in the wooden box. She shuts it, clasps it, and sighs.

Done. Done, done. She grabs the lantern and begins to walk out.

It’s always as she’s leaving that it comes to her. She is not sure why. And she never
really
sees it. Like right now, she smells it first, an awful scent, decay and rot unknown, as if it is a noxious thunderhead bubbling down out of the sky.

And then it’s
there
.

It looks like a man. A man in a blue canvas suit, standing off to the side of her, always in the corner of her vision no matter how she tries to directly look at it. But she cannot see much of it, or him, or whatever it is. Words fail to describe it. In this place it is always trembling, always quaking, a blue-gray ghost of a man standing in the shadows of this enormous room. There is no edge or line or section of its form that is not blurred. Yet she thinks she can see tall, thin ears on its head, and fists balled in rage.

It is the night, because before it all things are eclipsed.

It hates her coming here. It hates everything in the world. And it hates that it cannot hurt her.

Bonnie is weeping, tears running down her cheeks, but she keeps walking. It follows her like a hornet, dodging, buzzing, swooping through the corner of her vision.

She can make it. She’s done this twice before.

You can’t touch me. I’m not really here. I’m actually back at home, aren’t I, sleeping cause I just cooked up, and…

And.

And.

Bonnie stops. Because the room just changed a little. And that’s never happened before.

She notices a couple of things then. First is that she doesn’t really feel that high anymore, which she can’t understand. She dosed herself up goddamn good not more than an hour before Mal picked her up. And yet, and yet…

She remembers thinking when she dosed up that this shit was not all that good. It was, in fact, quite watery, just good old-fashioned aitch-two-fucking-oh, and she remembers thinking oh well goddamn it I got screwed now didn’t I, I should have known better than to buy through anyone but Bolan.

Yet then she did get high. Maybe it was just gonna be for a little while.

But not long enough.

Because Bonnie is becoming aware that she is
becoming aware
. Usually when she’s here she cannot see or understand anything. And that’s good. You don’t
want
to understand these things. You can’t look at them. It’s like looking at the sun.

But now she’s coming down.

The room is changing. She is
seeing
it. It is showing itself to her. It is

(an immense black plain)

(stars red and white)

(surrounded by)

(so many)

(are they mountains)

(and then)

(a dead tree with rotting fruit)

(a city in the dark)

(and in the city is a lone wanderer)

(been waiting for so long)

(waiting)

(for me)

And then Bonnie sees it again, out of the corner of her eye.

Before—when the room looked like a room, and not (
this place
)—the thing that is jailed here looked like a man in a blue canvas suit with a
strange head or skull or helmet. Yet now she understands she was seeing only a
part
of it. It is like a diamond with many facets, and she was seeing only one.

Yet now she sees more. Maybe all of them. All at once.

She feels it behind her, just over her shoulder. And she thinks she sees something incredibly tall and incredibly thin, with long, thin ears, covered in coarse brown fur, standing under the red moonlight, and it is

Oh oh

Oh my god, my god, she thinks.

It has eyes, eyes like people

It can see me

Mallory never waits for Bonnie at the ravine because, quite frankly, the ravine creeps the ever-living shit out of her. She tried once, tried waiting on that poor girl all night, but she got the weird sensation that the tunnel at the end of that concrete river was an eye, and it was looking straight at her, and it gave her the heebie-jeebies. So instead she always pulls away and parks the ’Burban up the slope on an old gravel parking lot, where she sips from a hip flask and watches the stars and sometimes feels a little romantic, despite herself.

So it takes her a minute to hear the screaming. On account of her being so far away and all.

She sits up, listens for a moment.

“Bonnie,” she says. “Aw, shit.”

She doesn’t bother to start the Suburban up. She just jumps out and starts running across the parking lot, and she kicks off her heels before she starts down the ravine.

It’s stupid, because she knows Bonnie’s pathetic, and she knows she’s essentially been sent to kill her, or maybe just to let her die, though Mal can’t really see the difference. But she still doesn’t want Bonnie to die. Or she doesn’t want her to be in pain, at least. And she sounds like she’s in terrible pain.

To her relief, Mal sees that Bonnie is alive and whole, standing next
to the entrance to the tunnel with her back to Mal. Beside her is the lantern and the little wooden box. Bonnie seems to be bowing over and over, like the way Orthodox Jews pray, just bowing quick little ducks forward while she screams her head off, though now that Mal’s closer she notices she can hear a little
thuk thuk
each time Bonnie bows.

It isn’t until she’s about a dozen feet away that Mal sees the dark stain spreading on the edge of the tunnel.

Bonnie is howling hysterically. Her hands grip the corner of the tunnel and she is ripping herself forward and smashing her face into the corner, over and over again, each time making a wet little
thuk
, each time little fragments and flecks of something whirling off her face.

“It’s everything!” screams Bonnie. “It’s everything! It’s everything in there!”

Mal watches, terrified. Gouts of blood are dripping off Bonnie’s face. There are spatters trailing down the white cement. Mal gags and steps away.

And Bonnie hears her. She freezes, and whirls around drunkenly.

Her entire face has been split open. Her right eye socket is almost entirely gone, and Mal can see the whole of the orb, white and luminous against the little pool of red around it. Her nose is missing and there is a crack in its bridge that is incredibly black, so black you wouldn’t believe it.

“It’s everything, Mal!” shrieks Bonnie through ravaged lips and cracked teeth. “Everything in the world! In his eyes is everything in the world! I didn’t want to see! I didn’t want to see!” She howls again, clawing at her face, then turns around and grabs the corner of the tunnel again.

Before she knows it, Mallory is sprinting away. Somehow she has that fucking little wooden box in her hand, but she isn’t sure why.

But she can still hear it, somewhere behind her.

Thuk thuk

Thuk thuk

Now, there are many odd situations that life has prepared Mona for. But she has no idea how to approach her current predicament, in which a man who seems to have stepped out of an old photo, or maybe an old filmstrip, is standing before her, addressing her as her mother. This is, to say the least, unexpected.

So all she can manage to say is, “What?”

The grainy, gray, washed-out image of Coburn cocks his head. “What?” he says.

Mona keeps staring at him. She manages, “Uhh…”

He grows a little frustrated, leaning forward eagerly. “Did you say something?”

Mona just looks back at him, confused, helpless.

“What are you doing here?” asks Coburn. “
How
did you get here? Were you caught in the storm as well?”

She sits up a little at that. “No,” says Mona. “I wasn’t in the storm… I actually think you have me confused with someone else, uh—sir.”

Coburn frowns and peers at her. His image flickers like it’s being received by mangled bunny ears on an old television, and Coburn shrinks, sputters, expands, before returning to his original state. Though the act is silent, Mona mentally accompanies it with the sound of hissing static.

“Jesus Christ,” says Mona.

“This is quite odd,” he says. “Your mouth is moving but… but no sound is coming out.”

“Uh, I am afraid you’re wrong there, too, sir. I think I’m even making an ech—”

“No, no,” says Coburn. “No, nothing at all. And you do seem to be talking.” He studies her. “Can you hear me, Laura?”

“Well, yes,” says Mona. She is still too confused to broach the Laura topic.

He sighs, exasperated, rubs his forehead. “I just said I cannot hear you, so if you just said yes—and it looks like you did—I didn’t hear it. Please nod or shake your head.”