American Elsewhere Read online

  I-40 just keeps going. It has almost no intersections, and it passes through no towns. This is an empty country, untamed simply because there is nothing here to tame.

  Except, Mona learns, the wind. It is when she first enters the hills that she sees the wind turbines, and she’s so surprised she nearly drives the Charger off the road. They are so unexpected, these shining white machines standing on the ragged mountaintops. She knew they had built wind farms out here, but she hasn’t returned to West Texas in over fifteen years, so she has never seen one. The turbines seem limitless, dotting the farthest hilltops. It is an alien sight.

  Mona sees there is a gap in the fence beside one of the turbines, and she decides now is a pretty good time to take a break. She pulls over and grabs her maps and her lunch—a bean burrito that’s been warming in the sunlight on the passenger seat—and she hops out and starts up the hill to where the turbine stands. It is probably trespassing, but she doubts there is anyone around to object. She can’t remember the last time she saw another car.

  The turbine is farther away than she thought, for she underestimated its size. It seems like the biggest thing she’s ever seen, though it can’t be, she thinks. It is about five stories tall, and she’s seen buildings much larger than that, yet this seems bigger, somehow. When she gets close she finds it makes a hum so deep and loud it makes her sinuses vibrate. It is a terrifying and strange contraption, rotating so slowly under the blindingly blue sky. But it’s also the only source of shade around here, so Mona sits down in its shadow and unpacks her burrito and opens up her maps.

  She looks them over, and thinks.

  It took three days to figure out where, approximately, Wink is. Three wasted, frustrated, furious days, for as it turned out, Mona wasn’t the only person who’d never heard of it: no mapmaker, including Rand McNally and the goddamn Department of Transportation, had heard of it, either. The DOT kept referring her to the state level, which in turn referred her to national, and so on and so forth. She spent nearly a whole day finding every highway map she could and scouring it for the town, but her search was fruitless. She even called the tax appraisal district for the county, hoping to check the property tax rolls, but the county had no record of it.

  Mona then tried another route: she had several official documents saying she now owned the house, so presumably the offices and institutions that had issued them should be able to tell her where it was, right? But she was wrong: all anyone had was the address. The rest of the information about the house—like where it was—was conspicuously absent. Mona argued that clearly the house was real, so the town had to be real as well, and real things generally show up on maps, but the clerk on the phone responded that no, actually, they did not know if the house was real, they could only confirm that her inheriting the house was real; the rest, the clerk primly said, might be either an error or a fraud, and the way she told Mona this made it plain she now considered her suspect. Mona then said a lot of things she’d never say in church, and the clerk hung up on her.

  She was so angry that it took her a long while to calm down and figure out a solution. While Wink now seemed unfindable, there was something else she realized she could search for: Coburn National Laboratory and Observatory, whose logo was emblazoned on the corner of almost every paper of her mother’s. This idea came to her on the way to Amarillo, since she’d decided to start moving in the general direction of New Mexico to avoid wasting any more time. When she arrived she swung by the public library to see what she could find on it.

  Again, what she found was negligible, but it was at least more than what she’d found on Wink. Coburn National Laboratory and Observatory was referenced in seven places, all of them old scientific magazines from the sixties and seventies. The one with the most detail was the oldest, from 1968, a sort of profile on the lead scientist done by Lightfirst Magazine, which itself went out of business in 1973.

  The article featured a large picture of an elderly but robust man smiling and standing in front of a magnificent mountain panorama. Though it was rendered in black and white and the photo had turned a dull yellow from age, Mona could tell the region was astonishingly beautiful. The man was dressed a little like an explorer, with big boots and a vest with many pockets, one of those adventurer-intellectuals who seem inspired by the previous century. There was a lot of construction going on behind him at the foot of one of the biggest mountains. The caption read:

  Dr. Richard Coburn, standing before the future site of Coburn National Laboratory and Observatory at the base of the Abertura Mesa.

  Abertura Mesa, thought Mona. She wrote that down, then scanned the rest of the article for something usable. It was mostly an interview with Dr. Coburn (rendered, bizarrely, in transcript—she guessed this just appealed to those of the scientific persuasion), centering on physics stuff, which frankly bored her to tears, so she couldn’t make heads or tails of it. The interviewer mostly fawned over Dr. Coburn, who must have been some big-shot physicist back in the day, and though he was enthusiastic he didn’t seem eager to talk details. She zeroed in on one section in particular:

  LFM: So what expectations do you have for the project? If your recent publications are anything to go by, they must be very high.

  RICHARD COBURN: Well, really, I think it’s only healthy to enter into any new endeavor with the highest of expectations. I mean, you want to make yourself work, naturally, and you won’t work if you don’t think you can accomplish anything. I sort of become an enemy of myself, in a way. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit it, but I tend to assume I’m failing all the time. There is so much more I can be doing at any moment. Perhaps it’s unhealthy, I’m not sure.

  LFM: What more do you think you can be doing, then?

  RICHARD COBURN: I’m sorry, I don’t believe I understand the question.

  LFM: What I mean is, you say you’re going into this expecting great accomplishments. What would those accomplishments be?

  RICHARD COBURN: Well, unfortunately, since our funding is largely through government avenues, there’s not much I can say about our plans. You know, it’s the kind of thing that has all sorts of clearance levels and such. It’s all a bit irritating, honestly. There is so much I’d like to talk about, yet I can’t. But I will say that this just might be—and I do not think I am overestimating myself, here—the first really genuine American foray into the quantum realm. And with each new thing we learn, the possibilities become more and more amazing. We’ve assembled a great team here, and though we’re all pretty much camping in the desert for now, I expect that’ll change soon.

  LFM: They have you camping out there? In tents?

  RICHARD COBURN: Oh, no, they have temporary housing set up. It’s fairly comfortable. I believe there are some plans to make something more permanent, but I’m only peripherally involved in those. It should be very pleasant, I think. They’re allowing us some say in the aesthetics. But I honestly cannot wait to get started. We will be examining the way the world works at the smallest level possible, and I can’t overstate how important this research will be. Things we’ve assumed, things we’ve taken for granted for hundreds if not thousands of years are being brought into question. It really is quite startling. I’d be unnerved by the whole thing, really, if I didn’t love the research so much.

  Mona had expected government funding—it was a national lab, after all—but this sounded distinctly more… secret. As if whatever they’d been doing out there required housing and domesticities that were very much off the books, like a federal enclave.

  Which might explain why there was absolutely nothing to be found about Wink. Having once been a reservist, Mona was dimly aware of how the government operates in situations like this: first they build the facilities, then they construct the residential area for its staff. Maybe Wink was a federal town built to house the staff of CNLO, which would explain why it never showed up on any maps, and why so many state and federal institutions had no record of it.

  And this was what her mother
had been wrapped up in? She’d been a government research scientist? The more Mona learned about her mother’s past, the more bizarre it all seemed.

  As she copied the article, she realized it all put her in a hell of a spot: she’d been entrusted a house, but it just might be in a fucking federal enclave. How could that have happened? What would she have to do, climb a barbed-wire fence to get to it? Was any of this legal? Mona had no experience with federal law on this scale. And she still hadn’t found anything definite about the exact location of the town. All she had was the name of the mesa that might or might not be nearby.

  But after checking another map, she found that at least the mesa was real—the Abertura Mesa, just on the north tip of the Jemez Mountains, to the northwest of Santa Fe and Los Alamos. It looked fairly accessible, as well.

  That just left one question—was she willing to drive all the way out there to see if either Coburn National Laboratory and Observatory or Wink was around?

  She looked up and saw her reflection in the library window. Ever since finding the old photos of her mother, Mona had been reminded of how similar they looked: Mona was a little shorter, and her skin a little browner, but besides that they were almost the same.

  It had been so powerfully strange to see her mother happy. Not just happy: effervescently happy, incandescently happy. As Mona stared at her reflection in the library window, she tried to remember if she’d ever seen her mother in such a state. What had she possessed in Wink that made her so happy?

  Then Mona tried to remember the last time she herself had felt that way.

  She could. But it was a long time ago, and she’d never wanted to remember it. To forget, to shut down entirely, had always been the better option.

  Though Mona did want the house, she realized she would go to Wink even if she missed the deadline. It would be worth it if she could catch just a glimpse of that smiling woman in the photos.

  And maybe Mona could find what her mother had found in Wink, as well.

  She stacked up all the papers and stood up. Maybe it’s still there, she thought as she walked out. It’s got to still be there.

  So now here Mona is, squatting on a hilltop beside a huge, humming wind turbine on the Texas border with not a soul around for miles. She looks over her maps for the hundredth time. Most of them she’s notated by hand (Mona was far too poor for a GPS for a long while, and even though she now has the funds her practicality scoffs at the very idea), since many don’t acknowledge the Abertura Mesa at all, and none of them make any reference to Wink, of course. It is a queer thing to be traveling in such a manner. It’s like sailing without a rudder. Sometimes she thinks she is making her own maps so she can figure out how to get back from wherever she’s going.

  She sets the maps down, finishes her lunch, and stares off into the west. The sky is huge and bright, yet it is rent in a thousand places by the slowly swirling blades of the turbines. With the sun at the right angle they make a million dancing shadows on the barren hills. She takes a breath, lets it out, and wonders if she really wants to get back in the Charger.

  She doesn’t want to think of this as a second chance. Because Mona Bright has never really believed she ever got a first one. Not really.

  A powerful ache begins seeping into her stomach.

  Don’t think about that. Pick it up and put it away.

  She opens the door to the Charger, puts it in gear, and continues on her way west.

  Eight days. She can make it in eight days.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Slowly, the country changes.

  It happens in the distance, initially. The horizon begins to crumple; then shadows form on it like thunderstorms in a cloud line. Soon the shadows gain a red tint, and Mona sees that they are mountains. Beside her the earth changes from colorless gray barrens to orange steppes rendered fuzzy and indistinct by the clusters of chamisa. The little feathery plant clings to everything out here, making Mona feel like she has glaucoma: it is as if someone has painted pale green and yellow brushstrokes over a bright orange canvas.

  It is much cooler in the high countries than anywhere else Mona has been recently. She rolls the windows down and lets the cool afternoon air come rushing in around her, and she smiles as she points the Charger up another slope. It is not hard to believe that this is the land that birthed the nuclear age: anything feels possible out here. There is even something electric in the air, though that may just be the sky: if God painted the sky piece by piece then He surely finished this country last, for here the sky is so fresh and new it almost hurts to look at it.

  Mona is enjoying herself so much that she almost forgets to start checking the road signs. When she finally does she sees that she is much closer to her general target than she expected. She begins to pull over at little stops to ask if the people there have ever heard of Wink.

  At first, not many have. They stare at her uncertainly, and after they say no they ask if she wants something else, as if she should buy a gallon of gas or a soda just out of politeness. But Mona has neither money nor politeness to spare, and she hops back in her car and speeds along to the next stop.

  Yet then the name produces a reaction: they stare at her, puzzled, but direct her down the road (this instruction is needless—there is only one road) and tell her to keep an eye out for a well-paved road leading north.

  One woman tells her, “Odd that you’re going there. Can’t remember the last time someone went there. Come to think of it, can’t remember the last time someone came from there, either.”

  If Mona’s lucky, she’ll make it before nightfall. Then she’ll have a whole week to try to get the house. She hopes that will be enough.

  Mona finds the paved road very easily. It is impossible to miss, so smooth and unbroken and black. It is easily the nicest road she’s seen in a while. It winds down the mountain slope into fuller and taller pines, away from the rocky heights of the plateaus. It becomes rather shocking how far the road keeps going down; she wonders if this town, if it’s still around, exists at the bottom of a hole in the ground. But then there is a break in the trees, and she sees it is not quite a hole but rather a steep, narrow valley.

  When the road reaches the bottom of the valley it curls around itself, toward the mesa. A large, painted sign stands on the right-hand side of the turn. Mona slows to a stop to look at it.

  The sign must mark the southern entrance to Wink, she thinks. It is large and colorful, and depicts two men and a woman standing at the mouth of a valley, staring at a sun-dappled mesa before them. All of them, Mona notes, are exceedingly white. The men have their hands on their hips (very authoritative), while the woman has her hands clasped together below her breasts. The men have smooth, parted hair, virtually the same except that one’s is blond and the other’s is brown, as if they’re different versions of the same doll. They wear khakis and plaid shirts with the sleeves rolled up, as if there’s work to do and darn it, they plan to do it. The woman has long, curly blond locks and a bright white-and-red sundress. They look like the kind of adults all children expect to be when they grow up.

  But it is what they are gazing at that Mona finds odd. There is something on top of the mesa at the end of the valley. It looks like a tiny bronze antenna, like the kind that used to sit on top of the world in the old RKO Pictures logo. It is such an antiquated addition to the picture, yet there is something else strange about it. Are there streaks in the sky all pointing to the antenna? They look almost like very faint bolts of lightning.

  At the bottom, the sign reads: WELCOME TO WINK—WHERE THE SKY TOUCHES THE EARTH! Below that, in much smaller writing: POP.: 1,243.

  Mona realizes that the valley looks familiar. She gets out of her car, steps back, and looks around.

  After a while she realizes it is this valley, and the mesa in the sign is the one just ahead of her, yet the trees have grown so tall that they obscure nearly everything below it. She can see no antenna on it. Perhaps there are buildings, but it is hard to see from so far away…


  She finds the sign puts a bad taste in her mouth. She climbs back into the Charger and starts off down the road again, happy to leave it behind.

  A twist of dark road, a leaning fence, the grasping brush of a soft pine branch. On and on and on the road goes… Mona feels sure she’s driven the length of the whole valley, but there’s always more, as if the landscape is unfolding as she travels.

  Then she spots something pink out of the corner of her eye, something bulbous and smooth gliding through the air. She can see it only through the gaps in the trees. There is writing on one side, though she can see just two letters: WI.

  She sees it is not flying, but standing on a tall, round post. A water tower, she thinks. But she didn’t see any tower before, and she definitely should have…

  As she ponders this a splash of red comes swooping out from between the pines: a stop sign. Startled, she comes to an abrupt stop, and discovers she has arrived.

  She’s at an intersection, but it’s completely different from those of the rough country roads she’s been traveling: on her left is a small white wooden house with green trim, and on her right is another house, this one of adobe, the walls and corners smooth and brown like a sculpted chocolate cake. Each one expands back into the uneven terrain, disappearing behind thick beds of flowers. The change is so sudden that for a moment Mona sits and stares around, confused.

  She realizes she has entered the street grid of Wink. She sees small shops ahead, and telephone wires, and tall pines in the parks. And yet there is no one on the streets that she can see, nor is there any sound at all besides the wind.

  This is the town on the federal enclave? she wonders. She saw no signs warding trespassers away, or border guards; the only thing that hindered her arrival was the downward incline of the road.