The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (42 page)

The tone of the
afternoon’s tea had reached a lull, passions giving way to boredom.

In the absence of Ellen
Monroe, no one spoke, only sitting quietly around the small table, eyes
shifting from object to object, lighting on each only long enough to take note
before moving on lest lingering be misinterpreted as interest, a thing which
might invite unwelcome conversation. It was a pregnant moment, a silence
following a farewell drawn out too long searching frantically for some
plausible means of escape, a way out of the deadness.

Serena disposed of the
spoiled cream, taking Arnold’s ruined tea with her as she left, and
wordlessly pouring both down the
drain. She returned a moment later with a fresh cup and saucer for the
Garbageman, who accepted it with a murmured thank you.

And the quiet returned.

And this time, it
remained.

Nicholas Dabble nibbled
halfheartedly at a finger sandwich while glancing uncomfortably around the room,
an animal pacing the perimeter of a cage it is only just realizing it will
never see the outside of. Arnold Prosser quietly finished an entire plate of
hors
d’oeuvres
, doing so with lavish attention before helping himself to more;
he dispensed with the small plate, instead eating off the serving tray, his own
personal platter.

Serena appeared unconcerned
with both the heavy silence and Arnold’s shocking transgression of etiquette.
Seated in her high-backed chair, she looked regally across the open rooms of
her home towards the large front window and the sky beyond, a steaming cup of
tea nested in the bowl of her hands. For one brief moment, her gaze tightened
as if upon something outside, something unusual but not unexpected.

Arnold
turned to follow her stare, saw nothing, and turned back. “Did you ‘ear
somethin’?”

She turned to him, hers
once again a simple open gaze out an
empty window at an empty sky. “No.”

Arnold Prosser nodded and
grunted something that might have been a simple acknowledgement of her answer,
or even a muffled burp.

More time passed, and still
Ellen Monroe did not return.

All of the
hors
d’oeuvres
were gone, Arnold Prosser having taken the last, a rye cracker
with cheese and sardine. What remained was a picked-over selection of foods the
Garbageman deigned not to his liking: didn’t care for vegetable
pâté
;
fish was too salty; cheese had a peculiar smell or was too squishy. Mostly, the
trays were empty.

And still Ellen Monroe
had not returned.

“Excuse me, Serena,” Arnold asked, still looking as if his suit were trying to inflict bodily harm upon him.
“But when do you s’pose that little girl’s gonna be back with the cream? She’s
been gone a awful long time, an’ we have things what ought ta be settled.”

“She could be back at any
moment, Arnold,” Serena said, looking out the front window as the first specks
of rain struck the glass. “Or she might not return at all. The matter is
entirely up to her. You know, I do believe we are in for some rain.”

Nicholas Dabble, still
methodically chewing the remains of his first finger sandwich, let out a small,
discomforting moan.

The sound was lost to
Arnold Prosser’s protestation. “Whadda ya mean she might not return?” The tray
of remnants like an artist’s palette upon which all the paint had dried up or
run out was momentarily forgotten. “‘Ow can she not return? It’s not like you
sent ‘er to Wisconsin; she lives down the fucking street. And since when does
she have a say in what goes on?”

“Arnold! Language. And in
answer to the point you raised, she has free will. Her choice to exercise it is
hers and hers alone. Ellen Monroe is a lost soul searching for a way home. What
she does is not for you, me, or anyone to dictate.”

“
Rubbish
!” Arnold declared, putting the tray down and standing up. “I’m certainly not going to just
sit around ‘ere all day waitin’ for ‘er to make up ‘er mind whether or not she
feels like comin’ back. I don’t need fucking half-n-half for my tea. That’s
right, Serena,
fucking half-n-half!
I don’t need any damn cream at all.
Dabble heard me say so himself.”

Arnold
looked to the bookstore owner for
support, but Dabble feigned interest in an etching on Serena’s wall and
pretended not to hear. The Garbageman dismissed him with a brisk thrust of his
hand as though roughly shooing a hornet. “Well I’m sorry, Serena, but I have to
leave. I have things to do, an’ if it looks like rain—”

“Arnold, you will sit and
wait like the rest of us,” Serena said, eyes stern, her skin gone pale and
bloodless with rage, the tone of her voice as inflexible as iron and as hard as
the core of a dwarf star. She would have her way: not often or mostly, but
always and without exception.

In spite of his boasts to
the contrary, Arnold was not immune to Serena, her commanding eyes, her icy
tone, the implication she placed upon any who challenged her. He took a step
back as though she were transformed into something dangerous: a wave of
scorpions, a burning whirlwind, the capricious hand of fate. But daunted was
not deterred. “Why the ‘ell should I? That girl’s dangerous and you bloody know
it. She’s got no business runnin’ around. And don’t pretend to me like you got
everything under control, Serena, ‘cause you ain’t. That little strip could
unbind all the fabric of the universe, whatever her intentions, and I can’t
allow that to happen, Serena. I won’t let you destroy the order o’ things.”

“The order of things,”
Serena repeated as though Arnold’s words were blasphemous. “Don’t presume to
lecture me on the order of things, Mr. Prosser. You stand before me and propose
abandoning tea though it is not over; where is your order then, if not broken
at your feet like the remnants of a thousand china cups after a whirlwind?”

Arnold
stared back, incredulous. “Not over?
What are you talking about? It never
began
!”

“No, it did not,” Serena
agreed. “You cannot leave tea because tea is not over, and it is not over
because it never began. And it never will begin until Ellen Monroe returns with
the cream for our tea. You simply cannot have tea without cream for your tea,
and you cannot end tea until it begins. There is an order to all things like
there is an order to the universe; a time and a place, as I’m sure you will
agree.” Arnold’s gaze shifted, as if willing to concede her point, but the
coffee shop owner continued before he could say so. “You simply cannot end a
thing that has not begun, just as you cannot kill a thing that never lived.
Ellen Monroe is a lost soul, Arnold. All matters regarding her fate are hers to
decide.”

“I agree, but on
principle only,” Arnold said peevishly. “And with respect to the case at hand,
your conclusion is ridiculous.”

Serena looked dismayed.
“You accepted my invitation, Arnold; that is beyond dispute. You came
willingly—eagerly as I remember. Is that not correct, Nicky?”

Nicholas Dabble had
distanced himself from the proceedings, standing by the bay windows and staring
out at the world that continued turning without him. Rain spattered the
sidewalk, indiscriminate specks linking together until they were
indistinguishable. It was all coming together, that precious order that Serena
and Prosser both idolized—and that he
abhorred
. He pressed his fingers
to the glass, the bars that caged him, and watched the rain wash the world
away.

“The rules to tea, like
the rules to the universe, are clear. The most basic rule so simple as to defy
further explanation: you cannot end what has not begun. There is nothing you or
I can do about it, Arnold. I’m sorry. We should talk of other things. If
nothing else, it will help pass the time.” Serena smiled, her argument both
reasonable and incontrovertible.

Arnold
sat back down on the loveseat,
looking lost.

By the window, Nicholas
Dabble uttered some remark about rules being rules, a phrase he grumbled over
and over, end to end with peevish zeal until it sounded like so much gibberish.
His eyes searched the storm-dark sky, taking solace that somewhere far away, a
bit of chaos was winging across the sky in a contraption built by a lunatic, a
small and necessary piece of the eternal random set free in a world descending
rapidly towards a hideous state of overrated certainty. And he had tasted that
piece of chaos. He had touched her skin and held her for a time within his
world. And he would cherish that taste for a very, very long time.

His lost soul.

His little bird.

His Ellen Monroe.

Arnold Prosser let go a
puff of air, resigning himself to the inevitable. “I still think you tricked
me, Serena, but I can’t fault your reasoning. Are you sure you never saw this
coming?”

She smiled, her eyes
enigmatic. “I only create a path, Arnold; whether they follow it or not is up
to them.”

“But you had an idea
which way she was gonna go,” he suggested.

Serena tipped her head
from side to side a bit coquettishly. “I may have had my suspicions.”

Arnold
shook a finger at her, a smile
growing upon his face. “I thought so. You can’t fool me, Serena—not for long,
anyway.”

Serena smiled back
politely and changed the subject. “Look, it’s raining.”

Arnold Prosser looked
back at the empty window, the colorless sky, the spattering of rain upon the
glass. “So it is. Well, that’s all right, I s’pose. I actually like the rain.
Cleans everything away. Makes everything seem to start new.”

“How beautifully
expressed, Arnold,” Serena remarked. “There is a side of you that is a poet.”

“Yeah?” The notion seemed
to please him. “Yeah. Say, Serena, ‘ave I ever mentioned that you ‘ave lovely
eyes.”

“As a matter of fact, I’m
sure you have,” Serena replied with a coy flick of her gaze. “But a woman never
tires of hearing some things.”

Outside of the apartment
over the coffee shop that Serena ran when not overseeing the fate of the world
and all of its inhabitants, its only window overlooking the bookstore where
Nicholas Dabble worked at perpetuating the chaos from which life’s spice drew
its greatest flavor while selling books on the side, down the street from
Arnold Prosser’s patient garbage hauler, the world turned.

The storm came, heralding
the end of summer and the beginning of the long, lazy slide towards autumn and
winter. It scoured the streets and the sidewalks and the buildings with rain,
scrubbing away the last few weeks as if they had never been.

And then the storm
passed.

Afternoon wore into
evening, and the day into night.

The sun set and the moon
rose. The moon set and the sun rose.

Summer turned into
autumn.

And autumn into winter.

Eventually, greenhouse
winds blew restless across an unlivable wasteland, a barren earth in which the
sea boiled into the sky, leaving behind a world obscured by clouds. In time,
the heat surrendered to mile-thick sheets of ice that slowly ground their way
across a deserted earth, crushing the last aspects of familiarity from the
landscape. As it was in the beginning, so it was again.

But still, through it
all, Ellen Monroe did not return. And without cream, tea could not begin. And
until tea began, tea could not end, its guests captive to the nuances of
structure. And inside the folded plane of reality where Serena’s second floor
apartment existed, Destiny patiently waited along with Death and the Devil for
Ellen Monroe to return with cream for their tea party.

Rules are rules.

“A compromise, perhaps?”

“I’m willing to listen.”

“What are the terms?”

When I am awake, I know that I am not dreaming. But when I am
dreaming, I do not know that I am not awake.

Ellen opened her eyes, the Dreamline ascending a landscape of clouds.

I’m not dead!

She pushed the handlebars forward as the Dreamline momentarily foundered
in its steep ascent, struggling in the air like so much junkyard wreckage
assembled by an idiot. Ellen quickly readjusted her grip and pulled back until
the Dreamline regained control, then eased it into a level glide. The handbrake
levers on the grips served only to shift the tail left or right, allowing for
directional control. Left to its own devices, the tail would straighten, and
the flyer would simply go forward.

Just as well; she had no idea where to go. The world was mist, an endless
sea of clouds that both obscured and tied every moment of her life together
like echoes from the past; voices in the fog.

Around her, the world
boiled with the turbulent thunderheads of a summer storm, misty clouds crashing
at the base of a waterfall, scenes from a life she had never lived. Rainforest
mists of aboriginal mountains. The warm wraith emerging from the underground of
the sewer grate on cold winter mornings outside the shooting galleries, vagrants
and junkies gathering to the heat. Wisps of vapor like ghosts rising from an
early morning pond in June, summers at her grandparent’s farm in Upstate New
York, fishing with the boy from down the road. Curls of steam rising from her
naked skin as she stepped from the shower into the cold morning. Steam from the
surface of the morning’s first cup of coffee. Billow of opium smoke, sweetly
cut with hashish and cinnamon bark. The steam from a teakettle on a Sunday in
September, or the mist of her breath from a morning in December.

Without realizing, she
nodded off, lost in the flood of daydreams. She was a child again, lying on her
back in the tall grass, picking out shapes in the clouds. But the shapes were
more complex than animals and faces; she had grown up, and her childhood games
had grown up as well.

To her left, the glow of
the sun obscured in the sky; to her right, deepening shades of fleeing night.
Elsewhere only clouds, pieces of herself: some memories, some imagined, some
fancifully decorated over time while others made frightening for their years of
repression. Momentarily forgotten was the question of where she should go.
There was only the wind in her face, the rhythm of the dream flyer as she sent
it winging forward, and the endless sea of clouds.

*     *     *

It was a strange thing,
imagining clouds.

Jack had not seen clouds
in he forgot how long. The sky over the Wasteland was an endless expanse of
empty blue. There was the sun and the moon, but nothing else. No birds. No
planes. No swarming gnats or twinkling stars. The wind blew softly from the
edge of reason and madness, but there were no clouds.

For her sake, though, Jack
imagined them. He saw them in his mind’s eye, that complex cinema show where
reality played out day after day while he moved with silent, inhuman patience,
fingers upon a keyboard, capturing what he saw as best he could, words into
sentences, sentences into pages.

What does she see in
me?

A life spent living
inside of his own mind, he was neither self-reliant nor self-absorbed, only
easily lost in the wonderland of his own thoughts: long, one-way conversations,
made-up worlds and make-believe people. Preoccupied, the world outside turned
in spite of him.

Except here. Here at the
edge of the known, the border between the real and the imagined, the sane and
the mad, the explicable and the dream, the world waited for him. It waited for
him, on him, with him. He was Jack Lantirn, the Caretaker of the Nexus, and the
world turned because he wished it so.

But sometimes the story
took on a life of its own, a reality unto itself he was powerless to affect.

Flying blind through an
ocean of clouds on little more than hope and ill-placed faith, Ellen was coming
back for him, trying to save him, spare him his lonely hermit’s existence. She was
risking everything for her lost dreamer, her king of fools, perpetually
wandering the distant lands of his own mind.

He typed in vigorous fits
and starts, sometimes at a loss for words, other times unable to keep up with
the flood. No middle ground; some things didn’t change. Feast or famine. Flood
or drought. A junkyard of debris or a vast and empty wasteland. No in-between,
no happy medium. A world clear and empty for as far as the eye could see, or a
world permanently obscured by clouds.

Caffeine kept off sleep,
but he still nodded in and out, brief slips into the dream world. Perhaps the
Café had brewed something else into his coffee—
have a nice trip
—or maybe
he brewed it himself, the Edge of Madness operating on a subconscious level
reflecting an exhausted, self-destructive urge, some requisite for penance.

Regardless, he kept
writing. And so long as he did, Ellen would not be lost. She would find her way
back to him. After that …

Turning his eyes to the
empty page, he dreamed of clouds, his fingers dancing across the keys.

*     *     *

Ellen’s eyes opened, head
jerking up as she teetered on sleep, mind adrift.

The Dreamline required little
direction, any way she chose as good as any other. She started pedaling to keep
herself awake, trying to focus on keeping the Dreamline pointed towards
whatever was out there.

But eventually her
concentration began to slip again, her eyes tired, unwilling to
focus, leaden. The morning’s coffee
had been forever ago, and the converted bicycle seat not nearly as
uncomfortable as she expected.

This was a world
conducive to dreaming.

Or was it a dream already?
Might she have always been dreaming, and only now just waking up from a sleep
begun more than twenty years ago, her life a mistaken sense of self conjured in
REM sleep between the waking life she could not remember and the dawn of a life
she did not yet know?

Or maybe she was just
crazy?

Regardless, Ellen fell
asleep.

*     *     *

First light changed the
sky above the Wasteland from infinite, starless black to the dark, dusty gray
of shadows, a burgeoning murkiness before the sunrise, the dead screen of a
blown picture tube. In the twilight, objects took on shapes not entirely their
own, and reality, in those brief moments before dawn, was in flux.

It was the world in its
truest form.

Jack left his laptop in
the garage by the Pepsi machine, the story unfinished. A screensaver of
billowing clouds rolling endlessly by, protecting the screen from image-burn;
it went without saying that no one would read the work in progress.

He stood at the backdoor
of the kitchen, a fresh cup of coffee in hand, the aroma steaming off the
surface, rich and addictive, hazelnuts and almonds and toffee. And below that,
something more subtle, almost sinister: the moldy spore-flavor of dried
mushrooms, the crypt-smell of Wasteland dust, the distant, no-taste of
mescaline and LSD. Jack stood in the darkness overlooking the boneyard, scraps
of metal that were a part of his own mind, blatant and strange: cars worn out
and left to rust, the abandoned rocket, the corroded robots, the skeleton of an
air whale. He had never seen one alive, wasn’t even sure if they existed except
that they did because the skeleton of one lay half-buried
in the dust of the boneyard, as if
instinctively trying to return to the world beyond the edge, that place in
dreams where it could still exist.

So close, but so far
away.

Hammerlock stood near the
cliff, face staring out over the quiet emptiness as though looking for
something … or maybe someone.

You should not have
tried to bring him back. Like it or not, some things cannot be changed.

He returned to the
garage, pulling his coat a little closer. Nights were cold, the days blazing;
there was no middle ground. He had worn the same overcoat for days on end now,
days without number, days since the first day he had found himself here,
beating a madman to death with a railroad spike, reducing him to the dust from
which he came. It was Rebreather’s coat. He did not know why he wore it, and
sometimes forgot where it came from. Perfect lucidity was infrequent and
plagued with doubt and self-loathing, the drawback of fending off sleep.

But the daydreams are
clear as crystal.

A long swallow of hot
coffee and he stepped into the garage, the tunnel connecting the boneyard to
the road that led in only two directions: one way, reality; the other, madness.

A silly part of your
psyche, Jack. What the hell do you know about a mechanic’s garage, tuning
engines, cleaning carburetors? In your whole life, you have never even changed
your own oil, and a car battery terrifies you.

Lucidity was overrated.

He made his way back to
the Pepsi machine, the laptop’s field of soaring clouds, an eagle’s eye view
glimpsed from the periphery.

She was coming back
.

He sat cross-legged on
the cement, laptop cradled on his legs. How soon, he didn’t know. It was up to
her now. The story had a life of its own, his only influence, the where and the
what; the how and the why still fell under the providence of free will. It
could all still wriggle free, escaping him, loose ends hanging like fringe upon
the undone tapestry of reality forever, no closure beyond simple, fatalistic
acceptance. Failure.

He had to push on; Ellen
was coming back.

It could be so easy
sometimes, visualizing himself beside her, with her, nested behind her eyes as
she piloted the Dreamline ever closer, winging through a world of clouds in
search of a way out, a way through, a way home. The wind made her eyes water, muscles
aching from the constant pumping of the flyer, the flapping of the wings, until
they went pleasantly numb when she stopped and allowed the arcing wings to
glide gently upon the air, ever forward, ever searching.

Sometimes it was so easy.

And other times…

He sat on the floor of
the garage as dawn broke the eastern sky, legs numb from the way he had been
sitting. He was cold. And lonely. An unfinished page on the screen stared back
at him: sad, smug, disappointed, knowing.

You’re insane. Ellen
Monroe isn’t coming back. She doesn’t exist, never did, a fabrication of your
own head, no more alive than words on a piece of paper.

Or maybe it was her
feelings for him that were the fabrication he kept alive in his mind. They’d
known each other a week; slept together only once. It was a relationship
founded upon the principles of a cruise ship, spring break. Did he really think
it was real?

Jack scooted back against
the wall, hiding the screen from the glare of the dawn, keeping the page
visible even as it mocked him. What did he really know about Ellen Monroe? Was
she just a character in his head? Was he trying to make her something she
wasn’t, force her into a role she could not fill? When he closed his eyes, he
saw her idealized within his brain, features he’d grown to love instantly
though he could not say exactly how or why. But sometimes when he closed his
eyes, he saw nothing. Not Ellen Monroe, or the view from the Dreamline, or even
the Edge of Madness Café. Nothing. Only emptiness and a stupid, stupid man who
probably should have paid more attention in school instead of daydreaming about
something that was not only out of reach, but was never even really within his
grasp.

What did she really see
in him anyway?

Jack shook his head
furiously, realizing he had nearly lost himself in the empty page, filling
space with hollow arguments, moot points of philosophic emptiness. There was
only one way to know for sure.
Eventually you have to step forward and throw
your life on the scales. Anubis is waiting. Judgement is at hand.

A part of him—cold and
alone, cast out and unworthy—worried that it was better to keep a small dream
alive, dwarfed and stunted by its cage, than set it free only to have it
perish.

At the edge of the known,
a solitary mailbox stood along the curb of the last few feet of blacktop. Out
there, the sidewalk ended, the ultimate destination, the place of dead roads.
Out there,
actual
fell away and
potential
began. Out there was a
mind-altering expanse of wide-open possibilities and an empty, cloudless sky.

There was only one way to
know for sure.

Whatever comes of this, I will never forget you. You are a
part of me now. Forgive me. I love you.

Fingers upon the keys, he started piecing together what he
saw in his mind, word by word, image by image, until it began to fall into
place. It was the only way to know for sure.