The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (43 page)

Ellen first
realized the world had changed at the same moment she realized she had fallen
asleep, an intrusion upon her serenity, upon the calm and the darkness and the
world of no-thought. The mind’s eye became a screen to an ever-brighter red as
if emerging from darkness into daylight, the world through closed eyelids.

Ellen opened her eyes suddenly, startled
…

… and realized that
the world was not as it had been.

The clouds were gone, the Dreamline having carried her into a
vast expanse of empty blue. Ahead, a single, uncompromising edge, a precipice
without bottom or end, a limitless world, the boundary of all reality.

And
there on the edge, a vision from half-remembered dreams: a building of
whitewashed cinderblock, chrome trim and neon lights, twisted metal and
junkyard wreckage emerging from a landscape as desolate as a forgotten bone
left behind in a desert from centuries before. And though she had never seen it
before outside of dreams, Ellen
Monroe knew this
place. How could she not?

The Edge of Madness
Café
.

Home
.

She eased the yoke
forward, squeezing the left handgrip to bank the Dreamline left and down like a
bird angling towards a telephone line. She had her eye on the road in front of
the Café, an unbroken stretch of blacktop disappearing into the distance,
running as far away as the eye could see across the uninterrupted flatness, the
desert exactly as she remembered, exactly as she dreamed, a wasteland epitomized
and taken to a degree to drive one mad.

Home
.

She tried to slow the
dream flyer, envisioning birds in her mind, remembering every time she ever
watched a crow drop to the ground beside a sack of curbside garbage, every
seagull as it fluttered to a stop amongst its cohorts fighting for dumpster
rights, pigeons on a roof’s edge, starlings on the line. She tried to see them
in her mind, see the shape of their wings as they landed and fathom how they
did it. The Dreamline would not stop by bumping along a runway while she
reversed engines it did not have, applied brakes that were not there. If she
wanted to land, she would either land like a bird, or crash.

Ellen brought the flyer
level with the ground, heart pounding as she prepared to skim the surface of
the roadway. She pulled back on the handlebars and stopped pedaling just as she
crossed from the infinite nothing to the solid world of the Wasteland, and the
flyer reared sharply, wings frozen in a downward curve, billowed scoops
catching the air.

And there it stalled like
a kite standing
upright
in the sky, robbed of its wind and unable to do anything else but fall.

It was the best landing
she could have imagined, and better than she deserved given her inexperience
with the stolen flyer.

But it was far from
perfect.

One wing clipped the
mailbox by the roadside; if she hadn’t been at a near dead-stop in the air, it
probably would have sheered off the left wing entirely, wrecking the Dreamline.
And considering there were no restraints or safety devices on the flyer—not
even a bike helmet—she might not have survived the collision that would likely
send the flyer cartwheeling across the pavement.

But while bone-jarring,
she was unhurt.

For a moment, she sat
where she was, adjusting to being motionless, a castaway too long at sea
suffering a kind of vertigo, the world no longer moving beneath her. To her
right, the café was dark; a metal and neon diner attached to a wind-scoured garage
of whitewashed cinderblocks devoid of life.

The silence was
overwhelming.

She climbed tentatively
from the Dreamline, the soles of her feet touching the unending ribbon of
blacktop, legs weary from pedaling.
How long had it been?
she wondered,
turning and stretching to loosen stiff muscles.

However long it takes
to travel the distance between reason and chaos, between sanity and dreams.

The dream flyer’s tail
sat inches from the edge, the road collapsing into nothingness, pavement
crumbled away as though washed out by a flood … a flood that carried away the
entire world! The sidewalk was similarly broken, unable to bridge the
emptiness, concrete ending just a little past the edge, a small fragment of
reason extending out where reason was unwelcome, a trespasser with no business
there but mischief. Pounded into the earth, a simple painted sign read
BEWARE!
The Sidewalk Ends!

There were things you
knew about a person, especially someone you cared about; details of no
importance that identified them like fingerprints. How they talked or stood,
how they smelled, how they tipped their heads when they listened, the way they
drank their coffee. And even how they thought, what struck them as funny or
absurd. A sign at the edge of all reality that warned no one in general—for
there was no one to warn—to be careful of a sidewalk that ended in oblivion as
though warning about a small spill of water.

She turned to the café,
searching for signs of life, casting across the reflection of herself in the
glass, dim shadows on dulled metal, the neon promise of hot coffee. Hints of
the inside hid like ghosts behind the reflection of the endless Wasteland:
shadow tables, phantom booths, shades of a counter and red leather barstools
trimmed in polished steel. From somewhere inside, she heard music: Sarah
McLachlan’s
Possession
. A song from years before; one she liked; one
Jack liked. It entered his brain and stuck splinter-deep, an obsession he could
not get over, could not get enough of—like Ellen. Just one of the things she
knew about him without knowing why. He was close, maybe just inside: watching for
her, waiting for her return.

“Jack?”

No answer, only the soft refrains
of the music.

She scanned the garage, paint
scoured by sand and sun. How long had it been here? How long had Jack
imagined
it had been here? The front was guarded by a statue of a dog-headed man in
Egyptian attire, a pair of blackened scales gripped in one hand. Anubis, maybe,
guardian of the underworld or maybe just of the dead. She couldn’t remember;
seventh grade too long ago. On the other side, an antique gas pump, the clear
cylinder at the top filled with a glowing green liquid that could not be
gasoline.

“Jack?”

The garage was orderly
and clean, concrete as smooth as glass, no spilled oil stains or lingering rust
spots; a garage that had never been used as a garage. Against the outside wall,
a familiar-looking Pepsi machine glowed florescent, blue and red, an echo of
the Sanity’s Edge Saloon. And at its base, a laptop computer, a cloudscape
boiling across the surface of the screen.

And then he was there.

Jack.

He stepped from the Last
Stop not as she imagined, but as he
was
: a ragged reflection of
something out of a dream. Jack Lantirn, Caretaker of the Nexus. Not the man she
left behind forever ago, this amalgam of dream and madness, a haunted visage
that tore her up from nightmares, her screams barely contained. For as long as
she hid in that other world, that normal world, Jack remained here on the edge,
breaking himself apart one piece at a time. Maybe she had taken too long? Maybe
he had given too much? Maybe he had finally gone mad?

He wore Rebreather’s long
coat, the rest of his clothes faded and saturated with dust, hair grown long
and unkempt, days of stubble running wild on his face, eyes sunken, features
drawn. Haunted. Could he distinguish reality from the plague of phantasms
surrounding him? Did he even know she was here, that she was
really
here
and not just some dream come to torment him only to fade as he reached for her?

Jack stepped closer,
squinting in the glare of early morning, and revealing something layered beneath
weariness and caution and hope; something she recognized in her own reflection:
madness
.

“I’ve come back,” she
said, his book held protectively to her chest. Was she saving herself, or the
dreamworld of his book? She wasn’t sure. But Jack had saved her once: her life,
her sanity, maybe even her soul. It was her turn now to save him.

He stopped just within
reach, eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot, days of pushing himself to the edge until
he could no longer trust the truth of what he was seeing. He reached out
slowly, cautiously, as if he meant to stroke the neck of a dove seated beside
him on a park bench, or grasp a ray of sunlight. He touched her cheek, fingers
brushing impossibly light against her skin, serving no purpose other than to
confirm she was not a ghost.

“Jack?”

He fell before her, knees
striking the pavement like rifle shots, and embraced her, arms wrapped about
her legs, face pressed to her stomach, holding her to him, assuring himself she
was real. The book slipped from her fingers and fell to the road, her proof of
his existence now frivolous. “I knew you would come back,” he murmured. “I knew
you wouldn’t forget me.”

She shushed him softly,
running her fingers through his hair as she cradled him against her. She knew
this. She
knew
this. This was the face of love, her love, fingers
running through his hair. Jack Lantirn.
She knew this
. It was real. It
was
all
real. And it
always
had been. “I’m here, Jack. I’m here.”

He reached up her legs
and across the small of her back, hands tightening upon her, urgent in their
silent appeal. She shivered at his touch, a wave of relief and excitement both,
Jack’s hands pushing under her shirt to the bare skin beneath, making her
breath quicken, her pulse race. She held him even tighter; touch, so long denied,
now granted in full measure.

His fingers worked her
clothes apart, leaving her naked, his face pressed to the exposed flesh, lips
caressing her skin. She surrendered herself to him, to herself, desperately
peeling away the coat, opening his shirt, hands running down the lean muscles
of his back, neck, shoulders, hardened with unrequited longing and desperation.
The morning sun burned against their naked skin, igniting shared passion;
shared madness.

Tumbling to the street, their
lips met, a love transcending words, flowing together as rivers,
indistinguishable as the seas, inseparable, one body, one soul, the storm uniting
into rain, streams into rivers, rivers into oceans. A bringing together of what
was never meant to be apart, two who could never be separated, never be whole
without the other. With each breath, she drew him in as air; with each kiss, he
drank from her as water, their love as desperate as lost children, as ferocious
as new lovers, as timeless as eternals walking the endless sands of a desert
without end where the rivers long ago retreated beneath the veil of dust.

They stayed entwined
within each other throughout the morning, making love on the roadway in front
of the Edge of Madness Café, each breath taken from and given to the other, Jack
repeating over and over, “I knew you would come back.” Ellen’s reply back
always, “I’m here.” Two bodies of water held together by need, a desperate,
splendid relief granted only to a select few who experience all of life’s
moments of peace and happiness drawn together into a single, timeless episode,
a moment of pure bliss and contentment.

Words fail.

Finally, they moved inside; even love is not immune to the burning
Wasteland sun.

Leading the way, clothes in hand, Ellen marveled at her surroundings
while Jack followed a few steps behind, tugging on his jeans as he went,
clothes draped awkwardly over his arm as he tried to walk and dress at the same
time.

Ellen did not share his concern for modesty, her clothes falling in a
heap on the floor.

One of the diner’s booths was littered with blueprints and schematics for
a flying machine, draftsman’s tools and a dozen pencils of varying lengths
scattered upon the tabletop of faux marble rimmed with chrome. Another booth
housed an array of papers, chicken-scratched drafts, a worn, three-ring binder,
notes like autumn leaves left on notepad scraps and Post-its. The only empty
booth was in the back corner. Ellen walked towards it then turned and went
behind the counter and into the kitchen, spellbound, lost as if in a dream,
every detail registering unerringly: the buttery smell of stale popcorn from
the small carnival popper on the counter, the small orange-light on the coffee
machine announcing that a pot was brewed and ready, the song playing over and
over on the jukebox, unable to mask the silence that permeated every surface,
every crevice, every corner of the diner. The walls were pasted with posters
and signs, fifties diner kitsch. One sign made it clear that neither smoking nor
karaoke would be tolerated. On another wall, a poster of a super-heroine, dark
and lithe and disproportionate, bristling with weapons and wings and a kind of
angelic sadness. Another poster showed a young, winsome girl in black leather, a
mischievous smirk on her lips and an Egyptian Ankh around her neck. B-movie
posters for
Reform School Girls
and
Reefer Madness
. A faded
recruitment sign from World War II, a sultry maiden wishing she could go off
and fight for her country, empty promises for young men who would never return
home.

Ellen turned, certain she was no longer dreaming, but moving without
knowing where or why, a sleepwalker in the daze of post-coital bliss. The Edge
of Madness Café felt so familiar. She had never set foot in it before, but in some
ways, she had been here her whole life. The wooden surfaces of the western
saloon were gone, replaced by polished tile, metal and glass. Even the jukebox was
transformed to match the hard countertops and metal surfaces, the gleaming
chrome, cherry red and electric blue. The diner had a machined quality
different from the saloon’s living veneer, the barely controlled chaos
graduating to a sense of order like a lunatic’s efforts at organization, a
categorization of the deranged thoughts kept safely locked away.

Ellen felt completely at home.

Jack settled in the empty
booth, leaning back against the window. He smiled at her, watching from under
heavy lids, exhausted. Sleep would not be put off much longer. The world would
just have to get by without its Caretaker for a time.

As would she.

“I thought I would get
some water,” she said. “Do you want some?”

“Yes,” he answered
vaguely. “Thank you.”

“It’s different from
before.”

“The only things left are
you and me.” His attention wavered, and he forced his eyes open. “Don’t worry
about anything you see. Nothing will hurt you here.” He fell silent for a
moment, thoughtful. “I might close my eyes; maybe fall asleep. Be here when I wake
up.”

“Of course,” she
answered.

He nodded, the back of
his head rocking slowly against the glass like a person aboard a ship at sea,
or maybe just keeping time to the music.

Ellen walked to the
kitchen on slivers of light falling through the gaps around the backdoor. As her
eyes adjusted, she found a long sink on the back wall, a tray of clean glasses
air-drying in a prefabricated tray of sea-foam plastic. An enormous stove
dominated one wall, a range hood leading to a ventilation shaft that was
instantly lost in a complicated maze of pipes and vents that concealed the
entire wall. Next to the stove was a small deep-fryer that smelled like cold French
fries. And in the corner, a garbage can, the faint odor of coffee grounds and
old fruit saturating the plastic. Everything was turned off, dark, cold.

She took two glasses and
filled them from the tap, marveling at the soft, airy sound the water made, the
subtle clink of glass on glass. More reminders of the pressing silence. Below
the pass-thru window was a small prep table, a butcher’s block scattered with
utensils, a thick-bladed knife. Opposite the stove was a walk-in freezer, the
door ajar, a smell like melting snow and Freon creeping out upon thin wisps of
fog.

And there on the floor, a
reminder that this was Jack’s kitchen: a long, crocodilian tail trailed from
the freezer, curled up against the door and out of the way. While she watched,
it twitched slightly like a dragon caught napping, dreaming whatever such creatures
dreamt before the world changed, and they vanished forever. The twitch of the
tail caused another flicker of movement from behind her, and she turned in time
to see a smaller tail—gleaming and fat like an enormous salamander—pulling
itself up into the dark confines of the half-opened oven, trying to escape
notice.

Don’t worry about
anything you see
,
Jack had said.
Nothing will hurt you here
.

Back in the diner, Jack was
asleep in the corner booth.

Setting the water down on
the counter, Ellen quietly dressed lest she confuse an abandoned roadside diner
on the edge of nowhere with Eden—even if it was her idea of paradise.

She stepped out on the
sidewalk into the glare of the sun, allowing herself to be consumed by it,
embraced as she was embraced by the world of clouds, the endless sea, the
landscape of dreams. She was a part of this world, the once-terrifying expanse
of sun-blistered emptiness now her home, the place where all journeys begin and
end. It almost overwhelmed the senses, the blinding brightness, the deafening
silence, feeling nothing but the warmth of the ground beneath the soles of her
feet, the heat against the bare skin of her arms and face, the wind moving her
hair. She was back in that world of first moments, back in those first few
seconds after she arrived, the sensory overload of the Edge of Madness Café,
images invoking dreams, memories. Not a place of brick and mortar, tile and
plumbing, metal and wires, this unassuming real estate was imagination realized;
dreams infused into the dust and brought to life.

Ellen breathed in the
sun-warmed air, and saw it all again for the first time. Worn sidewalk, sun-baked
asphalt ribbon, endless sea of sand the color of bleached bones. Wind-scraped
cinderblocks. Road signs worn and faded to ashen letters on silvery driftwood
planks, nailed-up beach
wreckage,
lost ships from forgotten times. Three posts, Golgotha at sunset, markers of
nonsense:
YOU ARE HERE
nailed at the top of a list of
destinations:
DREAMS. MADNESS. REALITY.
STREET OF BROKEN DREAMS. THE WASTELANDS. MERCY STREET. NOWHERE. THE TWILIGHT
ZONE.
Notched edges of
wood offered only direction, no indication of distance or what turns one would
encounter along the
way.
No roadmaps in the Edge of Madness Café; life did not come with a manual.

Ellen
turned in the road, arms held out
like a child spinning in an open field, making herself dizzy. Her eyes were
adjusting to the brightness, the glare burned against her retinas, the shadows
behind her magnified.

More first moments. The
diner of post-war chrome, metal and neon dulled with time until it lost the
look of carhops and saddle shoes and ‘57 Chevies, rebel without a cause. Jack
was from a later time, the building taking on a lonelier aspect, abandoned and
tired, a whispered sound like old guitars, country-rock ballads from Bob Seger
and the Eagles and Bruce Springstein.
Born to run. Already gone
.

She stood in the middle
of the road, one end running off into the expanse of desert until it
disappeared beneath a mirage of shimmering liquid air. The other direction
ended abruptly just a few yards away, a place where all rules finally and
absolutely failed, and proved irrelevant.

You were born of this
madness
, she told
herself.
And so was Jack. Kindred souls, a lifetime spent finding your way
back to one another
.

A small robot coaxed the
dream flyer away from the edge, its features somehow familiar, but not like
anything she knew.

Something from before
.

The robot stopped and
turned, its face of reflective glass vaguely resembling a rudely fashioned
space helmet, the dark hemispheres bisected, metal teeth-like devices running
the base of its head like a jaw trap. There was something.
Something
…

“Do you know where the
bathroom is?” she asked.

The robot tilted its head
in a strangely inquisitive gesture, and pointed towards the open garage door,
hand
over-large, the
digits tipped in sharpened metal claws.

“Thank you,” Ellen said,
but the robot had already turned away, now motionless, apparently waiting for
something … anything …
nothing
.

Ellen turned away
herself, unable to shake the impression of familiarity; just as there was
something familiar about the café. It was not the same, no, but there were
things,
familiar things.
It tapped her earlier elation, a sadness for something forgotten that was more
painful for not knowing the nature of the loss.

Or maybe you’re just
crazy.

The garage was brighter
than she expected, opening into the junkyard out back. She found an old sink
beside the Pepsi machine, the basin stained with hard water minerals. A small
alcove beside the opened garage door kept an out-of-place coat rack and a calendar
with a blonde playmate preening against a muscle car. Within the garage, a long
workbench littered with projects in various stages of completion: an abstract
clay sculpture, a sword missing its pommel, remnants of devices broken-down,
half-assembled, or simply discarded. A pegboard over the bench held so many
tools so tightly organized that it hurt her eyes to look at them. And the
shelves and floor below Jack’s workbench were packed with worn boxes and dozens
of mismatched cans of paints. Tucked under the tool bench—impossibly, she
thought—was another dragon’s tail, dull green scales and spines the color of nicotine-stained
teeth. It pulled in a little as she walked through the garage, scales scraping
lightly over the cement as whatever was attached to the other end struggled to
escape notice … and failed.

The back of the garage had a
second story; rudimentary storage space converted to base living quarters. A
steep metal stairway hugged the wall leading up to the industrial mezzanine,
Jack’s edge existence, a world clinging to the walls around an empty, useless
courtyard of concrete looking up at a sky of corrugated steel and an industrial
ventilation fan. She followed water pipes up from the ground to the bathroom
the robot alluded to. On the second level between a narrow bunk bolted to the
wall and a shower stall mounted in the corner was a toilet, a plank bridging
the gap to the adjacent wall where a bathroom sink and mirror were similarly
displaced. Light spilled in from a huge hole knocked through the corner of the
building near Jack’s computer desk, suspended on racks of machined steel in
front of a too-tall leather chair likely stolen from a coffeehouse. Jack’s
living conditions seemed perilously close to a prison cell: exposed,
impersonal, teetering on the edge.

But in a world without inhabitants, what did privacy really
matter?

Ellen used the toilet,
more concerned about its safety than its immodesty. Erected on a temporary
catwalk, plumbing holes crudely hacked through the mismatched two-by-eights
that served as a floor, Ellen found herself looking down through the gaps to
the lower garage; her toes curled over the edge.

She stepped carefully
towards the sink, some of the planks simply laid over short segments of I-beams
protruding from the wall, a temporary solution to an inconvenience and nothing
more. Looking in the mirror, she saw her hair in disarray, victim of her flight
from the other world and her morning’s tryst with Jack. She tried finger-combing
some order back into it, but finally gave up. She was a lost cause.

A door off the back opened
to a fire escape, aging varnish cracked and flaking from the dry wood, the
glass clouded with brown, oily grime. Opening the door, she stepped through into
the imagination of Jack Lantirn. Here was the madness the diligent structure,
the meticulous chrome, the tile and neon worked to conceal. Here was the artist,
not the façade, not the mask worn for normalcy’s sake, order prostituted to lend
form to the chaos of dreams. Behind the writer and the pages he yearned for
others to read lay the font from which those words sprung.

She stepped past a metal fire door, the words Scarlet Cinema
painted in garish, red lettering, ghoulish and carnival-kitsch, Saturday night
horror movie fodder. A sign taped to the door warned:
DO NOT ENTER — Reality in Progress
.