American Elsewhere (68 page)

Mona thinks,
Oh, shit
.

Kelly flashes that mirthless smile again. “What Mother had concluded, after examining these bruised portions, was that there were
other worlds
than our own. Realities we never knew about. And here She did not speak in a spatial sense—not merely civilizations on other—what do you call them here—
planets
, but contained, functioning worlds existing within dimensions lower and more rudimentary than our own. There was life there, intelligence, and that intelligence was pushing at the boundaries of its own little world into our own. And Mother thought, just maybe, we could push back. And go
through
.

“It was revolutionary to me. And also ludicrous. Why would we ever want to abandon what we had? I mean, at the time we were totally safe. And were we not happy here? I asked Her. What more could anyone want? But Mother was silent. I could tell She was troubled. Which, naturally, troubled me.

“I did not have much time to dwell on it, though. Because that was when everything began to burn, and fall apart. A holocaust on an unimaginable level. Whole aspects of our reality, shorn away like dead skin. Yet Mother had an answer. One I’d never have expected.” The camera slowly starts to pull in on Kelly’s face again. “She told me She had
already
made contact with the other side.”

“When was this?” asks Mona.

“Mm? Trying to arrange a mental time line?” He laughs. “I wouldn’t bother. Time over there is not time over here. It was just at the beginning of the Fall, though. Just when things began to turn. Mother told us we could not stop it. Nothing we could do. There was only one way to survive: we had to escape our world, and find sanctuary in this new one, this primitive, undeveloped place. We asked Her, How? How can we do this? How can we help? And Mother said She had to do this alone. She would go there, to whatever this place was, arrange things for us, and return to take us to safety.

“I, the First, was chosen to assist Her in this task. And what I found was quite surprising. Mother’s preparations did not have the look of something rushed, of an emergency solution—it looked like She’d been
ready for this for some time.” He smiles. “I bet you can guess what Her preparations looked like.”

Mona thinks. Then she says, “A mirror?”

“Bingo! Mother had constructed a mirror, or a
lens
of some kind that could look beyond our world and into those bordering it. She told me She had created it when She first learned of the place on the other side, this elsewhere alongside our own. She said this was how She had been communicating with her.”

Kelly pauses. He takes a slow breath, in, then out. “This confused me,” he says. “I asked—communicating with
who
, exactly?”

For some reason Mona’s skin erupts in gooseflesh. Her heart goes cold but it pumps faster and faster and faster.

“She did not answer,” says Kelly. “But I helped Her prepare Her exit. And Mother said, all we have to do now is wait, and She turned to look into the mirror. Wait for what? I asked. What is going to happen? Mother said, Wait for her to return to me. And She would say no more, no matter what I asked.

“We waited, and waited. I grew impatient. We did not have time for this, I said. But then, to my surprise, a face appeared in the mirror. It was a very small face, a face unlike any I’d ever seen before. And it stared at us, and when it saw Mother, it said, in a language I did not then understand, ‘Oh. There you are.’ ”

Kelly looks at Mona, smiles ruefully, and scratches the side of his head. “Enter one Laura Alvarez,” he says.

“No,” says Mona.

“I’m afraid so,” says Kelly.

“No. No, that can’t be…”

“It’s the truth,” says Kelly. “You asked for the truth, and here I give it to you.”

“You’re saying my mother… she….”

“What I am saying,” says Kelly, “is that Dr. Laura Alvarez, lauded physicist and dutiful Coburn National Laboratory and Observatory
employee, one day looked into the lens she’d spent a decade of her life building, and saw something looking back. This something was so remarkable, so astounding, that Dr. Alvarez stopped and stared. And then that something spoke to her, and whispered to her, and told her many things. And Dr. Alvarez listened.”

She remembers Eric Bintly’s words—
She would just stare into the lens plates. With her nose about an inch away. Like she was transfixed. I caught her several times.

And a phrase she now finds even worse:
I think she made a lot of changes to the lens before she left.

“My mother would never…” says Mona, but she cannot even complete the thought.

“Would never what?”

“She’d never help bring you all here,” says Mona. “She’d never work with your Mother.”

“You haven’t let me finish,” says Kelly. “My Mother had overcome many things more powerful than a thirty-five-year-old lab scientist. She was quite stronger than me, and I am quite strong in my own right.”

“So you’re… you’re saying my mother did this,” says Mona hopelessly. “She brought you here, and brought everything down on that little town.”

“Miss Mona,” says Kelly, “would you
please
let me finish? Allow me to say only this—Laura Alvarez never did anything of her own agency.”

“She didn’t?”

“No,” says Kelly gravely. “But, sister, to be honest… I wouldn’t take that as any consolation.”

“Why?”

Kelly begins to speak, but stops himself, troubled. Then he says, “Well. I told you that getting here is hard for us. It’s not easy to navigate across planes of reality. Especially as it was back then, when the boundaries were pretty firm. Wink wasn’t like it is now—there were no places that straddled the line, no thin parts. It was all solid.

“But Mother figured out a way. When that woman looked into the
mirror, Mother… reached out to her. She could control your lens, the one on your side, if She tried, and She used it to… change her. It was something She did over time, bit by bit, dissolving that mind behind the woman’s eyes and… replacing it with something else.”

He looks at Mona, anxious, sad, like a doctor bearing terrible news. “I’m afraid Mother replaced it,” he says, “with Herself.”

The ghost on that screen still watches her. Her heart still beats, her mind still flickers in its shell, her muscles tweak and twitch as they should. But she is gone.

She remembers:

It’s like there was someone else in there. In her head. Someone who wasn’t Laura at all.

And:

To be frank, the behavior of the lens can only lead me to think it was the result of external control.

But most of all Mona remembers how her mother held her on that July day back in 1981, with the sun so terribly bright and her mother’s skin so terribly soft, and how the poor woman, naked below her robe, held Mona tight and told her

I love you more than anything, but I can’t stay here, I am so sorry. I can’t stay because I am not from here, not really, I am from somewhere else, and I have to go back now.

But can I come with you? Can I visit you, Momma?

No, no, it is far, far away, but one day you will join me there, there in that happy place far away, far, far away. I will come for you. I will come and bring you with me. I will bring you with me, my love, I will come for you.

“You’re lying,” she says softly.

“Why would I lie?” says Kelly. “What would I ever have to gain?”

“Something, anything. Who knows what you fucking things do.”

“Oh, please,” says Kelly. “I already told you one of our oldest methods of communication—
mediums
, dear. Did you think I told you that for no reason?”

“Then you knew. You knew and you didn’t tell me.”

“Some things can’t just be told. They must be figured out. They must be understood. And you understand, and believe, don’t you?”

She wants to reach into her head and gouge out this awful revelation. She does not want to think of her mother as a hollowed-out puppet, a ghastly little doll led about by some inconceivable abomination.

But she cannot erase the image of her mother, standing at a window and staring out at the bleak Texas landscape, faintly confused as if she’d woken up expecting to see something quite different outside her door that day.

And she would have, wouldn’t she? Her mother woke up every day expecting to open the curtains and see endless black mountains, and blood-red stars, and a swollen, pink moon…

Her mother had always seemed like a woman out of place. Mona just didn’t know how
far
out of place.

Laura Alvarez had never been mad. She’d just had another mind grow within her own, a black, pulsing tumor of intelligence eating away at her very being until there was nothing but an empty shell, echoing with the voice and thoughts of something quite, quite different from far, far away.

Why is it that I am always losing things
, Mona thinks,
that were never really mine to begin with?

Kelly, who has been picking his teeth, looks up and waits. “Then I never… knew my mother,” says Mona.

He shrugs. “I would assume not. Not to any significant degree, at least. My Mother never did anything halfway. And Her designs rarely failed.”

“And whenever I looked into my mother’s eyes… and whenever my mother spoke to me… it was always…”

“Her,” says Kelly. “
My
Mother. Yes.”

All the slurred, half-intelligible nursery rhymes. All the quiet promises of love and care.

Mona feels herself shutting down. She is not sure if she is angry or sad or disgusted. Her body and mind, both wiser than she, know that nothing can be gained by contemplating this and have, essentially, tabled the issue.

“You seem,” says Kelly, with cautious cheer, “to be reconciling yourself to this.”

Mona looks at him. It is the sort of look condemned people give their executioners.

“Or possibly not,” says Kelly. “I do not know if I can help. I assume you have questions. Many questions.”

Mona just shrugs.

“No?” says Kelly. “None?”

She shrugs again.

“Not even about yourself?” he asks.

This rumbles something in Mona. What the hell is he implying?

“Ah, so you do have questions?” says Kelly.

“What… sort of questions should I have?”

“Well… you know now that your own mother was not really your mother. She was not really a person at all, but an…
extension
of my own Mother, operating from the other side.”

Mona shrugs helplessly. She cannot passively accept such a thing as true. She can only pick it up, drop it, and leave it alone: it is too heavy.

“If this is true—and I do know that it is—you must wonder, why did She choose to have a child?” Kelly asks. “Why did She drive east, straight east, and, as I now assume, find the first willing, fertile man who would ask no questions about Her history, and proceed to procreate with him?”

Mona understands she should be insulted by his clinical description, but she doesn’t have the energy.

“Miss Mona,” says Kelly, “have you never felt different from other people throughout your life? Detached, adrift? Have you never wondered why you appear to age at a much slower rate than anyone you know? Have you not found the fact that you, and you alone out of the
human race, have visited the other side—even if it was only for a moment—and come back whole and unharmed, to be slightly odd? Do you not find it queer that your arrival in this town—this bizarre, surreal, strange town, where nothing has ever happened for decades—coincides with every terrible event that has happened recently? And do you not somehow feel that you have been to this town before, that you know that it is, in some indefinable, intangible way, a home you never visited, but knew was waiting for you, all along, all throughout your life?”

Mona stares at him. First she wonders how he knows these things about her. But then she begins to understand his meaning.

“My girl,” says Kelly in a manner both kind and pitying, “haven’t you wondered even once why I’ve been calling you ‘sister’ since you came to talk to me?”

The municipal park in the center of Wink appears manicured and pristine even in the dead of night. There is never an errant leaf to be found, the sidewalk is cleaner than most dentists’ incisors, and the grass puts putting greens to shame.

It is always this way. It never changes, no matter the season.

The residents of Wink do not question this. For though the grass is begging for a blanket or a picnic or a game of catch, these things are strictly forbidden: no one ever goes on the grass, not ever. So they never experience the queer sensation that would wash over them if they did, as if they’ve passed through the wall of a bubble, moving from the real, vulnerable, changeable world into one that is perfectly preserved, a pleasant summer’s afternoon captured and suspended in Lucite.

What is at the center of Wink beyond the sidewalks is not truthfully a park, but a memory, a moment, unspoiled by the passing of time.

The people from Elsewhere have their ideas about how a town should look. Certain scenes must be maintained. You cannot walk there: to do so would be to soil perfection. They just are, forever.

Yet now, in the dead of night, someone approaches.

It is—or would appear to be, if there were a nearby onlooker—a small boy of about nine, wearing slippers and bunny pajamas and smelling just slightly of smoke. He wears a pair of spectacles that are much too large for him that also have no lenses, and he keeps pushing
them up his nose. The boy has a knapsack over one shoulder, and the contents clank softly with each step he takes.

The boy stops with a grunt, opens the knapsack, and takes out the contents: two razor-thin, beautifully silvered hand mirrors. He rummages a bit more, produces a large handkerchief, and wraps one of the mirrors in it. Then he replaces them in the knapsack.

He takes a few test steps, and now there is no clanking at all. The boy nods, satisfied.

He walks down the sidewalk to the very edge of the grass, and there he stops and stares in at the park. “Hmm,” he says, in a voice almost theatrically deep.