American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,218

you’re being alive, and that’s really all there is to it.

But that’s not really all there is to it.

Consciousness (like, some would eagerly point out, pandimensional space) has levels: your mind is not one whole, but a wild variety of systems layered on top of one another and, in some key places, blended together. A person, a consciousness, is many, many moving parts, all clamoring to eat up information or transport information, or, in some cases (such as Mona’s for the years before her arrival in Wink), angrily trying to block any information altogether.

And though Mona—or at least the overarching consciousness referred to as “Mona”—sees and experiences nothing but darkness as she is instantaneously transported through physical space (with mountain walls becoming permeable, like great walls of soft, rippling water), there are parts of her that are not only aware of themselves, but are also aware of their distant, separated parts, which are being transported alongside one another.

It is in this moment (which really isn’t a moment, of course, because all this is happening instantaneously) that Mona could, if she wished, experience blissful and total self-examination. For there is no better time to examine and understand one’s selfhood than when it is dissected and hurtling through darkness.

But Mona does not do this. Because there is one part of her that cannot be broken down into any smaller parts, and it occupies the whole of whatever attention she has left.

Mostly because it is a part of her she never knew was there.

It is a piece of awareness, a piece of perception, a piece of her that can observe and see and know; yet it is independent of all her normal faculties, independent of her eyes and conventional sight, capable of looking into and perceiving a world (or even worlds) unapproachable to her physical self.

She remembers, as Parson said, that light is mere radiation—there are other ways of seeing. It is as if she has a tiny lens of her own inside her.

Though Mona is in no way fully conscious, or even self-aware, she immediately imagines this ability as a black, cold, bead-like eye planted on the surface of her beating heart, buried deep within her but by no means limited or blind: this thing, this part of her, can peer through her ribs and sternum and flesh, past solid walls and the very earth to glimpse…

Elsewhere.

Home.

Where it—and she—belongs.

Her systems all begin crashing back together, reassembling themselves somewhere quite far away from where she started. Yet as her nervous system blends back into her musculature, and her self-awareness melds with her instincts, she wonders about that black eye, like the eye of a squid or some undersea horror, and wonders what it has seen inside her. Then she sleeps.

“No offense to anyone in the car,” says Dord, “but this is maybe the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever done, and I’ve done some pretty dumb shit in my day.”

“Shut the fuck up, Dord,” says Bolan.

But he silently agrees. Bolan has the distinction of never having done a dumb thing in his life, up until a few years ago, when he bought in with the spook in the hat. But at the time it didn’t seem that dumb. Yet this seems dumb, so very, very dumb: they are all piled into Bolan’s shit-ass Honda Civic, which is straining to carry their weight (especially Dord’s, which is ample) up the incline of one of Wink’s Picturesque New Mexican Mountains. They are here, as Bolan heroically phrased it, to complete a rescue mission: they are going to get this bitch with the rifle out of town, because, for whatever reason, the spook in the hat needs her to do something pretty fucking bad, and they don’t want him to do that.

Bolan had to keep asking them that on the way up here. Did they want the spook to do something pretty fucking bad? And Mallory and Dord would mumble no, of course not, of course we don’t want that. And Bolan would say, each time, “Well, all fucking right, then,” and they’d all drive on for several minutes in silence before Mallory or Dord would voice some reservations again.

Bolan isn’t sure where she’ll be. Just somewhere around that barren canyon next to the mesa (which seems to be the source of a hell of a lot of traffic tonight). His plan is 100 percent improvisation: if he’d actually sat down and planned this out, he would’ve realized how impossible it all was, and given up.

So he