American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,160

cannot. It would kill you.”

There is a rattling gasp in the room. Mona tenses up, but does not take her eyes off Mrs. Benjamin. Then she glances to the side and sees Parson’s eyes fluttering. He frowns, shifts on the bed, and opens his eyes. He does not look at the gun, but stares straight ahead.

“She is not like the others,” he says in a croaking voice.

Mrs. Benjamin and Mona do not move. The clocks keep ticking, on and on.

“That does not mean she can understand,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

“We can try to show her,” says Parson.

“What do you mean?” asks Mrs. Benjamin.

“The hell are you talking about?” asks Mona.

He does not answer either of them.

“Do you mean… take her there?” asks Mrs. Benjamin.

“Yes,” says Parson. “And see what she can see.”

“Take who where?” asks Mona.

“It would destroy her. She cannot go to such places mindfully. She is not like us.”

“Mm. No,” he says. He turns his head to look at Mona, totally ignoring the gun in his face. “She is not bound to this place, like we are. But neither is she truly free. She is drawn here against her will. She is different.”

“Different enough?” asks Mrs. Benjamin.

Parson does not answer. He just stares at Mona.

Mrs. Benjamin sighs. “Do you really want to see, dear?”

“See what?” asks Mona.

“What we are. What we are underneath it all.”

“What we are on the other side,” says Parson.

“What we were in the beginning,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

“Do you want to see?”

“Do you wish us to take you there?”

“To the halfway spot, not here, not there?”

“Where we reside?”

Mona is trembling. They speak so fast it is hard to keep up. “What the hell are you all talking about? If you’re gonna try something, hurry up and do it. But I am handy with a gun.”

“We have no reason to harm you,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

“But what I know—”

“You know what you know,” says Parson, “because I led you to it.”

Mona sees the truth in this, but she still is not comfortable with what they are suggesting. “I thought it wasn’t permitted,” she says.

“You know enough,” says Parson. “We would not be showing you something new.”

“Nothing you do not suspect,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

Mona pauses, uncertain. But she cannot turn away, not now.

“All right,” she says.

Mrs. Benjamin and Parson glance at one another, faces slack and dead, eyes watery and small.

“Please put down the gun,” says Parson. “Please.”

Mona hesitates, but lowers it.

“Good,” says Parson. “Now.”

For a moment nothing happens, and Mona thinks they have just tricked her. Yet the two do not pounce on her, but stay stock-still.

The clocks stop ticking in the hallway. Everything in the room is silent: all the background noise, the susurrus of sounds from the forest and streets, has died. Then the walls begin to tremble and shudder, like they are drum skins being fiercely beaten by hammers, and with each blow they become more and more transparent until finally Mona can see out of them, glimpsing red stars and a huge pink moon and a gray, lunar terrain…

And then she sees

(no no)

(please no)

(endless canyons)

(glittering flats)

(and there beside her, swaying)

(a column, a stalk)

(tall, tall, infinitely tall)

(rigid and chitinous and dripping)

(hollow, honey-chambered)

(countless sinews and polyps)

(and in each chamber)

(a tiny black eye)

(like a fungus, she thinks, a huge, dripping fungus)

(roots like the root of a tooth)

(worming down into the heart of the world)

(and there beside it she sees)

(bulky and broad, shoulders spanning miles)

(thousands of powerful limbs)

(clutch the ground)

(a tiny, malformed skull)

(hundreds of spider eyes)

(like black marbles, glittering)

(she feels herself shake)

(it is too much)

(too)

(much)

Mona awakes gripping the carpet so hard she feels certain she’s broken her left ring finger. She is facedown on the ground. Every muscle in her body is tense to the point of snapping. She can’t even remember how to breathe. Then she gasps and goes limp.

“She’s alive,” she hears Mrs. Benjamin say, with some amount of surprise.

“Did I not tell you?” asks Parson.

“But is she whole?”

Mona just lies there blinking for a moment, telling her body to remember how to draw air. She feels fluid running down her face and she realizes she is weeping.

In some sensible part of her malfunctioning brain, she is beginning to understand that all information, from numbers to colors to sensations to words, is really just a means of establishing perspective: we know what green is only because we have blue to compare it to, just as we can understand three because we can match it up with two and see there is one more. The approximate qualities,