American Elsewhere (74 page)

“We can’t see that, either, now that we’re here,” says one of the aproned women. “We’re limited. Blinkered. Blind.”

“We are,” says the woman in the panama hat. She points toward the lens. “
That
isn’t.”

“How?”

“Because
that
was made by Mother.”

They all glance sideways at one another. One of the women wrings her hands in her apron. “Perhaps we should ask First,” she says. “He has always been better with the nature of time… he always saw alternates so much clearer than we.”

“
No
,” snarls the woman in the panama hat. “I will
not
have him involved in this. This is not his. This is
mine
.”

Mona starts breathing hard. Everything begins to feel very woozy, yet the flow of blood continues. “Jesus,” she murmurs. “Jesus Christ,
stop
.” She knows a little bit about blood loss, from her cop days—more than 40 percent and it’s a Class IV hemorrhage. How much would that be for her? A liter? More? How much is a liter when you actually look at it, anyway?

It’s awful. She starts to
feel
the blood flowing out of her, all the fuel leaving the necessary systems and running out the now-dark rubber
tube and into the glass tub. Her head pounds, and she wants to sleep…

Finally the doctor says, “I think that should be enough.”

“You’re sure?” asks the woman in the panama hat.

“Yes. I’ve read the statistics on children of that age—this should be sufficient for submersion. The tricky part will be getting it out before it drowns.”

“Leave that to me.”

“You’re sure? I believe that for your purposes, the child would have to be most definitely alive.”

“I said, leave it to me.”

Two men reach down and help lift the giant tub of blood and carry it to a small steel table before the lens.
If those fuckers drop that thing
, thinks Mona,
I am going to shit a brick
. She wants to say so, but her arms and head and legs are leaden. She cannot even summon the energy to move. Breathing alone is hard.

“If this fails, we can always recreate the pregnancy,” says the woman in the panama hat.

“I doubt it,” says the doctor. “I believe the child would die in the transfer. There are a lot of… systems involved in pregnancy.” He says this with the vagueness of someone who has scanned a lot of literature on the subject. “One would die, and then probably the other.”

The woman in the panama hat pulls a face—
Enough of this bullshit
. “Fine.”

Once the tub is before the lens, the men back away. All of them, except for Mona and Mrs. Benjamin, of course, form a circle around the blood and the silvery surface before it.

“I can still feel Mother on it,” says one softly. “In it. Around it.”

“I
told
you so,” says the woman in the panama hat. “She made this for us. She is here. She never left us. She is coming back.”

“We must concentrate,” says one man.

“Yes,” says the woman in the panama hat.

They stare at the lens. Their eyes grow wide. Then a soft sound begins to seep through the room. It is not quite a whine, and not quite
a hum, but it is of a frequency so strange, and so intense, that it makes Mona’s eyes water even though she can hardly lift her head. Though they are facing away, she is sure their eyes are fluttering like mad…

The surface of the lens ripples, as if it’s bending inward.

They’re singing to it
, she thinks.
Open sesame…

The humming intensifies. The tub of her blood appears to grow a little faint—as if it’s about to flicker, like the croquet ball in the film. But where could they be sending it?

Or
, she thinks,
are they bringing something here?

The lens continues to shift. Then it seems to grow transparent, and Mona thinks she can see bright, clean daylight filtering through its top…

“It’s working,” says one man.

“I know it’s working,” says the woman in the panama hat, irritated. “Quit talking and concentrate.”

Mona tries to watch as the lens seems to bring the image into focus, but something bumps into her from behind. “Hold on to these,” whispers Mrs. Benjamin’s voice. Something is shoved in between her buttocks and the chair, something flat and thin. With her tied hands, she feels something metallic and cold…

Mirrors? Maybe hand mirrors?

The people around the lens do not notice. Mona can see why—the mirror is changing, changing, until it’s as if there’s half of another room sitting at the end of the lens chamber.

Mona, whose breath feels very faint right now, squints as she tries to decipher what she’s seeing.

It’s a nursery. Bright morning sunlight pours through a floor-to-ceiling window. The walls are a faint yellow, the curtains have orange polka-dots, and there is a white crib just beside the window with a mobile hanging above it. Horses of many shapes and colors dangle from the mobile; it looks quite old, actually, which is strange because the rest of the nursery looks terribly new.

She’s seen that mobile before. She knows she has.

Actually, Mona thinks, the rest of the items in the nursery also look familiar. She bought things just like them, once. She’s positive that years ago she bought almost the exact same tree decal to stick in the corner of the room—though she never took it out of the packaging. She never got the chance. Mona’s also sure she picked out a shade of yellow paint so similar to the color of the nursery in the lens that you almost couldn’t tell them apart, though her paint job wound up only half finished. And she ordered that same model of diaper pail on the internet, one of those space-age ones with expensive technology to keep the fecal reek contained (because during her pregnancy Mona became hypersensitive to the scent of shit), though Dale wound up returning it for a refund.

After everything. After the funeral.

And now she realizes where she’s seen that mobile. It was hers, once—more than thirty years ago, when she was a baby. One her own mother used for her crib—though now the idea makes her stomach squirm. But just a few years ago she looked at it with Dale, and said—
Maybe we don’t need a mobile for our nursery. Maybe we have a perfectly good one right here
. And Dale, who wasn’t an idiot, knew what Mona meant, and agreed, and kissed her on the forehead.

Something begins to contract inside Mona. Are they torturing her? Is this some form of psychological warfare? Why would they ever want to see this place, this place that should have been but never was?

Then something shifts in the crib ahead of them.

There is a grunt, tiny and irritated.

It looks like a lump of fabric is at the bottom of the crib. It shifts again, rising up.

Mona recognizes the pattern on the fabric. It’s a pair of baby pants she bought when she first became pregnant. She remembers the pattern, because she thought,
I wonder how well spit-up will come out of this
…

She is seeing a child lying on its stomach in the crib, scrunching its knees and shoulders together so its tiny butt rises higher. It is waking up, slowly scrunching and unfolding and remembering its muscles, shifting in discomfort…

No
, she wants to say.
Don’t show me this. Don’t you show me this.

The child in the crib moans. It lifts its head. There is the gleam of a
tiny blue eye peering through the crib bars, and a mass of dark, moist hair.

No, no, no.

The child blinks in the sunlight, and wrinkles its nose.

“Is that it?” asks one of the men in sweaters.

“Yes,” snaps the woman in the panama hat. “Keep concentrating!”

A tiny, frowning mouth opens, and allows out a reedy mewl.

Then the child flickers, like an error in a filmstrip—the child is there, then it isn’t.

A voice sings from somewhere: “Coming! Coming!” But it didn’t come from inside the lens chamber. It was in the room in the lens, the nursery on the other side…

And Mona knows that voice. She’s heard it before.

What is this? What is happening?

“Concentrate,” says the woman in the panama hat.

The humming in the room grows louder. The child in the crib briefly grows faint, and when it does…

Did Mona just see movement in the glass tub? Did the lake of blood there twitch?

“Keep going,” whispers the woman in the panama hat. She speaks in the voice of someone on the verge of orgasm.

The child in the crib flickers once more. It begins bawling loudly.

“Coming! Almost done, little one! Just one more second!” shouts the voice in the lens.

The child slips out of the world in the lens… and very briefly, Mona sees a tiny hand in the glass tub, floating up out of the sea of blood to paw at the walls…

Oh, my God, no.

“Almost there,” whispers the woman in the panama hat.

The child in the lens, now crying hysterically, blinks out of existence once more…

Mona remembers what Mr. First said:
It could change the very nature of reality, like the finger of a god.

And Coburn’s words:
And in that moment, the thing it is examining is shoved—partially—into all those various other realities as well. So it could exist in
a variety of states, places, et cetera. Even
times,
possibly, though of course that is quite hard to quantify…

No, no
, thinks Mona.

The surface of the blood begins sloshing back and forth. Something in the tub is struggling, flailing…

It’s like lubricant
, thinks Mona.
Easing transition from one place to another…

Then someone steps into view in the lens. Though Mona is barely conscious, her eyes spring wide at the sight of this new person. At first she thinks it is her mother, for it looks so much like Laura Alvarez… even though this person is shorter and her skin is so much browner…

This new woman looks in the crib, and sees the child is missing. She freezes.

At the exact same time, the woman in the panama hat darts forward, reaches into the tub of blood, and pulls out something red and dripping and coughing…

A child. A naked human child, which is hacking and coughing horribly.

The woman in the lens turns around. Mona sees her face.

“Is it alive?” asks one of the men.

Mona barely hears them. She is staring into the mirror. Because this new person is not Laura Alvarez. It is
her
—Mona Bright herself. Slightly fatter, with slightly fewer wrinkles, and slightly longer hair. But it is most certainly Mona Bright, staring around the room, anxious, worried, wondering where her child could be…

The bloody, dripping baby coughs again, then begins shrieking in fear.

“It’s alive,” says the woman in the panama hat. Her hands and sleeves are soaked in blood, but she grins in manic triumph. “It’s alive. It’s a baby girl. It’s alive.”

The humming in the room stops. And the other Mona—the mother Mona, in her nursery, staring about in fear—fades from view, swallowed in a sea of shining silver as the lens reverts to its reflective state.

The woman in the panama hat begins laughing. “It’s here. She’s finally here. She’s coming!”

In the south of Wink, just below the skin of the earth under the highway crossroads, many eyes open in the dark.

The dark does not bother them. They were born in the dark. They have lived their whole lives in the dark. They were made for the dark and their hearts will always belong in the dark. So they open their eyes, and see:

Movement. Their creation is hissing. Melting. The blocks of metal (of
Her
) bubble at all the seams and edges, swirling together like boiling lead.

At first they are concerned: they chirp and tweet and grumble in the darkness, shifting in their roosts and rolling over one another in their shallow pools. They spent so much time on it, so many hours hunting through the ravines and empty homes of this place… they spent days bearing the stupendous, horrible weight of those blocks up and down mountainsides… and now, without warning, it is to melt?

But then they feel it: the world here grows soft. The barrier, which is already quite permeable in Wink, begins to disappear entirely. All places—those distant and disparate, those Here and There, Elsewhere and Nowhere—converge into one.

Their tone changes. They begin to flute and cry and sing in the darkness. This is not an ending, not a death in the dark. This is a new day, this is a beginning, a new world.

She is coming.

The child screams, and screams, and screams. She looks horrific, a tiny, shriveled person soaked in red with its face contorted and eyes streaming tears. The woman in the panama hat surveys the baby coldly. “Should it be so small?” she asks.

The doctor looks at the baby as if he’s never seen one before. Which, Mona realizes, he probably hasn’t. “It appears to be the acceptable size…”

“Well,” says the woman in the panama hat, “it won’t matter when Mother gets here.”

“Is this as you expected?” asks the doctor. “We need it to be the woman’s progeny, to be
Mother’s
progeny. Like us, but of this place. Is this Her child?”

The woman in the panama hat shuts her eyes, as if to think. Then her eyes snap open. “Yes,” she says. “It will work. Mother is coming already. I can feel it.” She sighs deeply, as if she has just smelled a particularly alluring fragrance. “It is Her progeny, indirectly. It will work. It
is
working.”

Mona stares at the bloody child. It’s difficult to really study its features, since it is so slick with blood… but she thinks she sees her brow line, and maybe Dale’s eyes, and could that be her mouth?

This can’t be. I don’t believe it.

The woman in the panama hat holds the child out to the doctor. “Take it. Take it to the highway crossroads just south of town.”

He hesitates. “Do you not wish to do it?”

“No. I have matters to attend to here. She should be there. You must meet Her when She arrives. And when She comes to see me, it will be me… and only me. No”—she glances sideways at Mrs. Benjamin—“distractions.”