American Elsewhere (65 page)

“My little sister broke that moon,” says Kelly thoughtfully. “She did it as a show of force. Hyuin Ta’al surrendered almost immediately. To think that it will never rain there again…”

“Do you remember the dancers in El-Abyheelth Ai’ain? With their legs like ribbons, their hair like stalks? They burned themselves alive, doing that dance. They did so for you, for you and your family to see.”

“We were worshipped there,” says Kelly.

“As you were nearly everywhere. So is it better?”

Mona looks back to the projection booth, expecting to see someone there. “What are you trying to say to me?” she asks softly.

“What’s the matter, sister?” she hears Kelly asking.

She can’t see anyone in the booth. Then she slowly becomes aware that no one on screen has talked for the past fifteen seconds.

She turns around. The camera has pulled in to just Kelly’s face. He’s just sitting there, grinning hugely at the camera, but when she makes eye contact (or whatever it is when the other person’s eyes are a projected image) his eyebrows rise a little, as if he is utterly delighted to be seen.

“Hi!” he says cheerily.

Mona stares at Gene Kelly’s face on the screen. “Oh,” she says. “Mr. First?”

“Well,” says Kelly’s face. His eyes shift theatrically, professing innocence in the guiltiest manner possible. “Kind of.”

Mona’s whole body feels numb with surprise. She has never been addressed by a celebrity
or
a fifteen-foot talking face before, yet here she is having both such things occur at once. She wonders—is this a dream? A vision induced by Mr. First? Or is Mr. First able to physically produce a theater, and cause it to show the things he wishes?

Gene Kelly (her mind refuses to register him as Mr. First) keeps beaming down at her, reveling in her surprise. Finally she manages to speak: “Kind of?”

“Why, sure,” he says.

“How are you ‘kind of’ Mr. First?”

“Is a puppet the puppeteer? Is a painting a facsimile of the artist?”

He actually waits for her to answer. “So… you’re not Mr. First?” she asks.

“No, of course not,” he says. “No doubt you’re wondering why on earth you came all this way if you’re not speaking to the real deal. But though a puppet and a painting are definitely
not
their makers, can’t they reflect and communicate the wishes and thoughts of their makers? Why, absolutely, yes. Viz,
moi
.” He grins and pokes himself in the chest.

Mona remains so shocked her mind can function only in the most literal way possible. “So… this is a puppet show?”

“Kind of, sure,” says Kelly.

Mona looks down the aisle on either side of her. “Is this theater really here?”

“Doesn’t it feel real?” He mimes knocking on the camera glass.

“How?”

Kelly sighs. “Well. Do you really want to know?”

“I’m not sure. Is it something I’d
like
to know?”

Kelly laughs. It’s a wonderful sound, a perfectly natural act. She wonders how Mr. First is able to reproduce Gene Kelly here with such astounding detail. “You’re catching on! This town abounds in questions best left unasked. Let’s just say that things like physical space are perfectly malleable, if you go at it the right way. Density, matter, radiation… it’s all just construction paper and pipe cleaners and glue, with the proper perspective. If I wanted to, sister, I could have put you in grand old
Italia
, approaching me via the Appian Way, and I’d speak to you through the mouths of those suffering on those ghastly crucifixes.” He pauses and cocks an eyebrow. “Would you prefer something like that?”

“No!” says Mona.

“Oh. Good. I much prefer this. It’s got so much more”—his eyes dart around the camera frame, taking in the theater—“class.”

“So all this was set up just to talk to me?”

“Sure!”

“Okay. But. Why?”

He sighs. “I’ll go ahead and give you the usual spiel, if you’re so intent on it,” he says, a touch wearily. “Talking to lesser beings—no offense—is often a lot harder than you’d think. It’d be like your little self talking to ants—not only are there the obstacles of communication, since ants prefer pheromones to the King’s English, but even if you managed to learn how to speak with them, how could you fit the most basic, stripped-down versions of your thoughts and feelings into a form they’d understand?”

Again, he waits for her to answer this ridiculous question. “I guess
you can’t,” says Mona, who is very aware she is the ant in this metaphor.

“Exactly,” he says. The camera pulls out a little. Kelly leans up against a bookcase, takes out a nail file, and proceeds to work on his thumbnails. “So this method—though even I admit it’s a bit much—is a lot more aesthetically pleasing than most of the alternates.”

“Like what?” asks Mona.

“Oh, curious, are you?”

Mona shrugs, but the answer is a definite yes. She wants to know what these things can and can’t do, so she’s not going to stop him from talking anytime soon.

“In the old days—well, they weren’t so much the Old Days as much as the Days on the Other Side, but you get the idea—the only way we could converse with our followers was through a medium.” He puffs on his nails: it’s like he’s discussing the latest news. “Now, this was a person, or something
like
a person, who had given up their whole life to serve as, well, the conduit for our proclamations. The reeds in our instruments. Mediums were hollowed out—sometimes literally—to become chambers in which our voices could echo, and thus be heard by our adoring congregations. Now, me personally, I don’t prefer this method. Do you?”

“I wouldn’t, no!” says Mona, though she has no experience with such a thing. But a thought strikes her: “Wait. Is that like… how everyone in Wink has those…
things
in their heads?”

“Aah,” says Kelly coyly. “Aren’t you clever? You’re kind of on the right track. Ugly little things, aren’t they? My brothers and sisters, who use those rather brutal devices to hide so efficiently throughout Wink, do operate similarly to a medium, it’s true. Yet the primary purpose of those devices is not communication, but preservation: we are not truly part of your world, so those who are too big to fit—for now, at least—must maintain a physical representation, or link. Though my family are not, in your terms, physical beings, they must have a physical portion of themselves
here
. Otherwise they’d blow away like runaway kites, and remain trapped over there, on the other side of things, which is in kind of a bad state right now.”

“But you don’t.” Mona does not comment on the most concerning part of his explanation:
for now, at least
?

“No. Not me. I’m, I guess you could say, a special case. I don’t need a link or representative at all.”

Suddenly something clicks in Mona’s head—
A person, or something
like
a person, who had given up their whole life
…

Before she can think, she says, “Gracie.”

Kelly’s face clears of expression, eyes going dead and dark. The camera rapidly wheels in on Kelly’s face, as if she now has his full attention. The change is abrupt, disturbing: it’s as if First, wherever and whatever he is, just stopped operating all the finer points of the projection. “What?” he says softly.

Mona senses that this is not a subject to be discussed right now. “Nothing.”

A trickle of cunning seeps back into Kelly’s eyes. “You sure?”

She decides to change the conversation. “Don’t you know what I said?”

Kelly screws up his mouth and cocks his head, confused.

“You knew I was going to be here,” says Mona. “So you should probably know what I was going to say just now.”

“Aah,” says Kelly. He smiles and chidingly jabs a finger at her. “You are mighty on the ball, my dear. I take it my temporal nature is a mite troubling to you.”

“Yeah. But you should know that.”

“Temporal awareness,” says Kelly, and he stifles a yawn with the back of his hand, “is not omniscience.”

“Predicting the future seems awful close, to me.”

“Weathermen don’t
predict
the weather,” says Kelly. “They don’t put on their turbans, touch a corner of an envelope to their foreheads, and pronounce rain or shine. They just have access to things most folks don’t. They
perceive
more, lots more. And they can measure it, and watch it. They observe and make assumptions. But ask them where one raindrop is, or what shape this wisp of cloud will take, and they’ll be as dumb as any other bum.”

“And weathermen are wrong all the time,” says Mona.

“Oh, sure,” says Kelly. “No one’s perfect. In Moscow they fine their weathermen if they predict the wrong thing. Did you know that?”

“Then tell me what’s going to happen here,” says Mona. “If you know so much, tell me what’s going on, what they want to do. Tell me who
they
are, at least, or if there is a
they
.”

“Oh, but my dear,” says Kelly, comically obsequious, “your interests do not really lie with what’s ahead. Or am I sorely mistaken?”

“With what’s ahead?”

“You are not interested in the future, not really. Nor are you interested in the present. You want to know about the
past
.”

Mona is quiet. For the first time, she takes her eyes off the screen.

Kelly says, “Sister, I know you didn’t come all this way—and in the dead of night, too, which is quite brazen for Wink—just to ask me some silly questions about this parlor trick.” He gestures to the sides of the screen. “Nor to ask grisly questions about what sleeps behind the eyes of those much-vaunted civic leaders in Wink. Nor to ask me how I see what I see, and know what I know. Did you?”

“No,” says Mona. “That’s true.” She cannot help but feel he is shepherding her, cornering her: now that she remembers what she came here to ask, she cannot help but ask it, so now the conversation cannot go another way.
Am I as much of a puppet
, she wonders,
as that picture on the screen?

“I wanted to ask you… about how you came here,” she says.

“Good!” says Kelly. “A gripping story.”

“And who brought you here.”

“Ah. You’ve got good taste. That one’s a corker.”

“And what it all had to do with my mother.”

Kelly smiles wide, eyes thin and mysterious. “Mmm,” he said. “Yes. That’s a very interesting one, too.”

“You don’t deny it? My mother did have something to do with it?”

“No,” says Kelly. “No, I definitely don’t deny it.”

“And you’ll tell me?”

“Oh, yes,” he says mildly. “I expect you’re used to people being
secretive, withholding. That’s how things are in Wink, but it’s not how I run my show. I’m a perfect bubbling font of knowledge.” He taps the side of his head. “It just depends on if you really want to drink from my waters. Go ahead and make yourself comfortable, sister. This might take a bit.”

It calls itself the Ganymede but this is not its name.

Not names, never names. Never ever never names. The names here are chains and shackles, trappings and signifiers of mice and roaches, customs of a culture so inferior as to be unworthy of a mere second of attention, oh how it hates the burden of a name.

But in this place it needs a name, and so it calls itself the Ganymede, by choice.

The Ganymede rides in the car with the Fool driving, zipping along at precipitous, teeter-tottering angles, headlights flashing on the trees; yet all this makes the Ganymede feel trapped, trapped, horribly, claustrophobically trapped, for it is restrained to this
one point
in space, moving in this
one
direction at this
one
speed. I am pressed to the ground, thinks the Ganymede, pressed into this physicality, pressed into this cage of metal, pressed into this flesh, this skull, behind these
eyes
…

This is insufferable. Every second is an insult. I am reborn as a flea.

The Ganymede does not talk, but the Ganymede never talks unless it must. It is an affront to talk, to express its thoughts by such a rudimentary, ugly method. Silence is preferable.

But beside it the Fool glances at the Ganymede and uses the dripping hole in his face to say: THIS WAY?

The Ganymede does not deign to answer. The Fool turns back, keeps driving.

Yes, this way,
of course
this way, there is no other way.

Kill you.

The car pierces the trees, passes a truck parked on the side of the road, huge and black and bulky. The Fool glances at it, worried; the Ganymede does not. It knows what is in the back of the truck, and knows that it will need them; but that is for later. These things are details. It can handle details. There are bigger issues at hand.

Because up on the hill, its sibling is waiting. THE FIRST is there.

THE FIRST is always waiting. It always knew, always knows. Always so unconcerned.

And the Ganymede always hated it for that. Always so superior to the rest of us.

Rage curdles deep within the Ganymede, old rage, fermented rage, eons and eons of quiet fury.

It is not fair. It was never fair.

The Fool muddies the Ganymede’s thoughts with speech once more: I DON’T KNOW HOW GOOD OF AN IDEA THIS IS. SHE’S STILL UP ON THE MOUNTAIN AND IF MY BOYS WERE RIGHT SHE’S A HELL OF A SHOT. SHE CAN PLUG YOU GOOD IF YOU DON’T WATCH OUT. EVEN IF YOU DO WATCH OUT SHE CAN PLUG YOU.

The Ganymede gives the Fool a withering glance. He shakes his head, keeps driving.

You think I can die? You think I can end? There is no end to me. There is no end to us. We are forever. Time does not touch us. We are beyond time.

We
were
beyond time.

Stop. Enough of that, thinks the Ganymede. Don’t think like that.

The Ganymede feels THE FIRST getting closer. It is like drawing near to the eye of a hurricane, feeling the pressure change in the inner chambers of your skull.

It remembers the body, the vessel it is trapped in, this messy assortment of fluid and feelings. It sends its thoughts roving forward, remembering the throat, the jaw, the lips, and it uses them to say: “Not far now.”