American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,118

feels impossible to reconcile what she’s found here with the woman she knew. This was once a sleek, stylish place to work, even if it was out in the desert. It would have been a haven for thinkers and researchers, a magnet for the most ambitious professors and scientists and graduate students out there. People with beards and glasses and chalk—shit, Mona doesn’t know. This isn’t her scene, no matter what decade.

She tries to imagine what it was like when it was first built—hell, when Wink was first built. She imagines it bustling with intellectuals, each one trying to think up a way to make the nation stronger, to push the very limits of what humanity could do. It must have seemed like such a tremendous hope to everyone. For the first time, she can understand the compulsion of the men and women who first built the town in the valley. They thought they were making something. Maybe something like a utopia.

Yet what did they do here? What did the occupants of all these modish offices work to accomplish? And what did Laura Bright, née Alvarez, once do in this place? If she was ever here at all, that is.

The woman who worked here, thinks Mona, would have been such a wonderful mother. Smart, cultured… what happened to her? Why was she not the inspiring figure Mona now imagines her to have been?

And somewhere inside Mona is a tiny voice that says, Maybe one of us is always supposed to die, the mother or the daughter… maybe that’s just the way we’re made. We’re weak, breakable. Maybe it was right that I never had the chance…

“Shut up,” whispers Mona. “Shut up.”

The voice quiets, and she continues on.

Mona comes to the reception area. Somehow it remains untouched by the decay. The walls are rounded and white, the front desk shaped like a teardrop, done in pale wood paneling. On one of the flatter spots of the wall there’s a huge starburst clock that, to her concern, is still ticking.

It has been maintained, obviously, so someone’s been here. Someone might still be here. But she still isn’t sure what happened to the party she heard.

There’s a bright, happy mural painted on the wall behind the desk, depicting a mountain landscape. It does not take Mona long to recognize the splinter of piney green running through the feet of the striking red peaks. She can even see the pink balloon of Wink’s water tower situated on the far side of the valley. She eventually sees that Mesa Abertura—the mesa she’s currently inside of—is also shown in the mural. Yet she sees that its top is bedecked with immense white orbs and cups, like sculpted white icing on a red cake. They’re telescopes and satellite dishes, she realizes, but she sure as hell hasn’t seen any of those on the mesa in her time here. They must have been totally removed. But that would have taken a lot of work, even more than getting the damn things up here.

For a fleeting second, she remembers glimpsing something huge and dark perched on the mesa, swaying back and forth against a black sky bursting with lightning…

She shudders and moves on. She walks around the receptionist’s desk and starts down the main hall, which is where things start to look a little more like a lab.

The carpet turns to cement. Then the doors turn into huge slabs of metal with tiny, thick windows set in the exact centers, and they feature some fearfully complicated locks.

She takes out Weringer’s key again, and thinks. Then she tries fitting it into one of the locks.

The key fits, but she can’t turn it. So it’s not the key for this lock. But at least she’s in the right neighborhood now. This key must fit one of the lab doors.

She moves on.

She comes across one door that doesn’t lead to a lab at all, but to some kind of electrical closet. Circuits and panels crawl across the wall in a rusty tangle. Against one wall is a box of dictionaries. Yet up against the circuit wall is a huge electric generator that doesn’t look as if it had been made more than two years ago. It’s a new addition for sure.

Someone has definitely been in here. But somehow she doesn’t think they had anything to do with the party. Whoever was drinking and carousing didn’t sound like the generator-toting sort.

She squats and examines the generator. She pops the cap to the fuel