American Elsewhere (73 page)

And though Mona’s mother was never really happy in her life, she was always happiest when they moved. “It’s a fresh start,” she would say each time. “A
new chance. We can do it right this time.” And Earl, being Earl, would simply grunt.

Mona was never quite sure what her mother meant by this. What had they been doing wrong before? And what was it they had to do right?

She had only asked her mother this once. The answer was simple: “Everything.”

Yet these dizzying, anticipatory highs never lasted. When they would arrive at the new house, and actually walk through it—seeing, in almost every case, the awful carpet, the Pergo walls, the dim, dreary living room—her mother would go silent, and fall into a deep depression that would last for days.

Mona was never sure why this was, but it troubled her. She did not want her mother to feel so hurt, so injured, by something as simple as a house. Which, of course, would change eventually, when they moved again.

She tried to cheer her mother up, but it never worked. Her mother would simply say, “It’s not worth it. Not worth doing anything to it.”

And Mona would say—“Why not?”

“It’s supposed to be perfect. Everything’s supposed to be perfect. It can be, so it should be. But I can’t make this perfect. Not this house. It’s not even worth trying.”

Mona asked her mother to please forget that, to please try to be happy anyway.

“I can’t. Things must be arranged a certain way. Things must be beautiful, my dear.”

When they moved once more, just days before that afternoon with the shotgun and the bathtub, it seemed the same as all the other times: there was the ecstatic joy leading up to their arrival, a million plans dreamed up, a million possibilities; and, upon arriving, the crushing, complete disappointment, thorough and abysmal.

But this time it was a little different. Her mother, weeping, said, “I can’t stay here. Things can’t be perfect here, not like this. I have to go back. I have to go back and get everyone else. And then we’ll come and make a place where everyone can be perfect and happy, forever.” She looked up at Mona then, and there was something alien in the way her eyes looked out at the world: they seemed strangely glassy and shallow, like the eyes of a doll.

Her mother said, “And I will come back for you. I promise.”

And now Mona understands. Whoever said those words was not Laura Alvarez. And possibly that desire for newness, and perfection… perhaps that had no earthly origin, either.

Give up
, says a voice.
Just give up.

And she does. She is all too happy to give up.

But as she gives up something awakens inside her, unfolding with the gruesome delicacy of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis: it’s as if the release of all that energy has prodded open the third eye in her mind, that black, merciless shark eye she just discovered. And now that she knows that it’s there, it seems so much easier to use it.

She sees…

So much. Too much. Far, far too much.

“No,” she whispers. “No. No,
God
…”

But one thing she’s learned during her time here in Wink is how to control what she sees, and how she sees it. She must have been using this undiscovered eye of hers all along. So though her body is limp and her eyes stare blindly into the roof of the trunk, she focuses, and sees…

Something. A light in the dark.

A room.

A rounded stone chamber, a bit like a crypt. There is a pile of tiny skulls in the center. And beside it, sitting Indian-style on the floor and staring into the ground, is a man in a filthy blue rabbit suit.

Oh no
, she thinks.

He seems to feel her watching him: he sits up, and turns to look. His face is once again concealed by the wooden mask. This time he does not take it off. Yet she gets the impression that he is very surprised to see her watching him.

He raises a hand to her. Then drops it.

She is a bit confused by this. Mona says:
Hello.

The man nods slightly toward her. He stares at her a moment
longer. (Where is she, anyway? How can he see her? It seems very hard, all of a sudden, to keep herself in one place.) Then he looks around at his chamber. The light is dull and dusky; here all things are yellow and crumbling, a world rendered in musty stone and fading parchment and rusting chains.

He points at her. Then he points at the walls. Then back at her. Then he cocks his head a little.

Mona is not sure what he means. Then she understands:
You are imprisoned? Like me?

Mona says to him:
Yes. Like you.

And immediately she understands that this is how she can see and speak to him, that this might be why he chose not to harm her when they first met: the two of them are alike. Not just in circumstances; not just because the two of them are currently captured. That’s just the start of it. The real reason is that Mona, like this ragged, filthy man, is a child left behind, neglected, and eventually forgotten, a sibling of a family she never got to know. They share the same story, the same nature: though he is much older than she, and she is the youngest, the two of them are connected. She understands this immediately, without words, without gestures: she understands this more than she has understood anything in her life.

She says:
You are my brother.

He nods.

She says:
Can you help me? I am trapped.

He looks at her. Then he shakes his head slowly.

What can I do? How can I free myself?

He lifts a hand and pats his chest, where his heart should be. Then he holds his hand out, and makes a fist. He clenches the fist so hard that his knuckles quiver, and trickles of blood begin to ooze down his palm. Then he relaxes it, reassuming his Indian-style position. His hand smears the canvas on his knee with dark blood. Then he hunches over, and resumes staring into the ground.

The connection fades. The vision falls away from her. And she is back in the trunk again.

She realizes she hasn’t breathed in quite a while, and takes a deep gasp that quickly turns to coughs. Apparently this astral-projection thing—or, rather, pandimensional thing—takes some getting used to.

But though he did not speak, there was no mistaking his message:

Rage makes your heart free.

At some point in time she sleeps, because when the car starts she finds herself waking up. Then, to her concern, the car starts moving, cutting what feels like a very sharp U-turn before continuing in a direction that definitely feels upward.

If she had to guess, it would be upward as in away from Wink, and away from civilization.

Though it’s dark, Mona’s inner ear tells her the incline keeps getting sharper and sharper. They’re definitely going up somewhere high.

There’s only one place Mona’s been to in Wink yet that was this high: the road to the mesa, when she first went to Coburn.

“Shit,” she whispers.

The ride gets incredibly bumpy, which confirms her theory. She feels around for a weapon, anything, but all she finds are frayed wires from the taillights. How did things get so incredibly fucked so fast?

They drive for over an hour before the car slows to a stop. She hears footsteps around the trunk.

Now, Mona decides, would be the time to think up a plan.

She decides the plan is to jump out and punch someone somewhere soft, and she won’t be picky about who or where. She readies herself.

There is whispering outside the trunk. Then a soft pop, and light
pours in, blinding her. She tries to spring out, but her body is so cramped and weak that she only manages to roll forward, falling onto very hard, hot stones as she blinks and waves her arms about.

When her sight comes back to her, she sees someone is standing over her: a very pale, very bloody, very defeated-looking Mrs. Benjamin.

Mona shields her eyes and squints at her. “Hey?” she says.

Then there is a sharp pain in her shoulder. She barely has time to look and see the hand holding the syringe that’s buried in her flesh before things go—

“Motherfu—”

—dark.

Mona sees light. It is a dull, flat, soulless light. Her eyes don’t work immediately—the general feeling she has is akin to what it was like directly after she had dental surgery in high school. Her body’s so numb it’s hard to tell, but it feels as if she’s sitting upright in a chair with her hands behind her. Then she feels someone massaging her left upper arm.

“So she
has
to be alive for this?” says a voice.

“Well… I can’t say.”

“Then what
can
you say?”

“I can say that there is no added risk to her being alive.”

“And you feel there is added risk if she isn’t?”

“I would say so. But I am just a doctor. I do not specialize in these matters. Please remember, this is your idea. But if this should fail, then we will need to attempt… with more material. Provided she’s secured…”

Someone shakes her hands. There’s the dry gasp of rope, and she feels something around her wrists.

“She’s secure,” says a man’s voice.

“Then I do not see a problem.”

“Go ahead, then.”

So she’s tied to a chair, and since they didn’t check any other bonds, it must just be her hands. Before she can think more on this, something sharp bites at the inside of her elbow. She sits up sharply and shouts, “
Fuck!
”

She blinks, and sees the blurry forms of many people standing around her in a dark room, but her eyes still aren’t working that well.

“See?” says a voice. “I told you she was strong.”

“Will it matter if her blood has sedatives in it?”

“I do not believe so. We only need an amount of her matter to form a connection to one of the alternates. Same to same, if that makes sense.”

“Like red to red and black to black when you’re jumping a car?” asks a voice. Mona recognizes this one: it’s Mrs. Benjamin, and she sounds like utter shit.

“
Shut up
, you. I didn’t bring you here to talk.”

Mona’s eyes manage to focus further. She’s surrounded by a dozen or so people, men and women: the men wear sweaters with collared shirts and ties, and several of them are either holding pipes or are actively smoking them; the women wear poofy-sleeved dresses and high-heeled shoes, and some of them even have aprons on. Their faces are white and bloodless below the overhead lights.

“The fuck is this?” Mona asks in a slow, slurred voice. “Fucking…
Leave It to Beaver
casting call?”

“What does she mean?” asks one of the men softly. His eyes flutter. Mona grows a little more alert, and realizes all their eyes are fluttering, of course. But there’s something huge and shining behind them, something hard to see…

“She means nothing,” says a voice beside her. “She’s drugged.”

Mona successfully makes her head loll to her left. She sees a man attaching a tube to a catheter in her arm, right on the cubital vein. He’s definitely a doctor: not only is he wearing old-fashioned OR scrubs, but he also has a moustache, small glasses, and a black pipe. Every part of his appearance is meant to suggest
I am a doctor!
Yet when he looks up at her, just the briefest of glances, she sees his eyes fluttering too.

“Motherfucker,” says Mona, “I hope you know something about human anatomy.”

He averts his eyes. Standing behind him is the woman who looked in on her in the trunk of the car, but now she looks queerly androgynous in a powder-blue suit and a white panama hat.

Something in Mona’s drugged brain sputters.
Remove their bodies like clothes…

“You’re that asshole I shot on the highway, aren’t you,” she slurs.

The woman in the panama hat looks at her dispassionately, then turns to look down the room. “Is it ready?”

“Ready enough,” says one man, who looks a lot like a Hardy Boy all grown up. He’s standing in front of that shining thing Mona had trouble making out… but now it’s a lot easier to see.

It’s the lens. She’s in the lens room at Coburn. She can see their reflections in the lens’s surface, somehow cleaner and purer than they are in reality.

“Oh, shit,” says Mona. “What the hell are you going to do with th—” Mona’s arm goes cold. She hears fluid falling nearby, almost exactly the sound of someone pissing in a bucket. She lolls her head back, and sees that the tube snaking out of her arm is pouring her blood into what appears to be a gallon-size glass tub.

“What the hell are you doing?” she says. “You’re taking my
blood
? What are you going to do with
that
?”

The people in the circle do not move or speak. They just stare at her, pale and impassive.

“If you’re going to bleed me to death, at least do me the favor of shooting me first,” says Mona. “Or, hell, cut my throat or something. There are better ways of killing someone than this.”

“I don’t think talking with them will work, dear,” says Mrs. Benjamin’s voice. Mona lolls her head the other way, and sees Mrs. Benjamin slumped in a corner, bloody and ragged. “If I were you, I’d stay quiet.”

“What happened to you?” asks Mona.

But Mrs. Benjamin looks away, as if to avoid more punishment.

Mona turns back to the woman in the panama hat. “You’re the
bitch who shut me in the trunk, aren’t you? And the same one I shot in the road… I’m willing to bet you’re behind all this stupid shit, ain’t you? What are you trying to do? What’s the point of all this?”

The woman does not answer. She just watches as more of Mona’s blood pours into the glass tub.

More and more. A
lot
of blood. Mona strains at her bonds, but she’s growing weak, and when two men come and put their hands on her shoulders to hold her still she can hardly resist. She starts to grow faint. “Hey, now…” she says. “How much… how much are guys going to… take?”

“You’re sure this will work?” asks the doctor.

“Fairly,” says the woman in the panama hat. “Time for them is strictly linear. They don’t see all the alternates. All the way things could have gone, and are still going, moving away from them…”